Humane Care For The Homeless Does Not Mean A $700K Condo
When government gets involved (surely with lobbyists behind the scenes jacking up prices), housing for the homeless turns into luxury-priced housing for the homeless.

Christian Britschgi writes at Reason about the cost of housing for the homeless in LA, which is just obscene:

A 2016 estimate of construction costs put the price of adding new units at between $350,000 to $414,000. But the median per-unit cost at Prop. HHH-funded projects now stands at $531,373. Over 1,000 units are expected to cost over $600,000, and one project has units going for over $700,000.

"The cost of building many of these units exceeds the median sale price of a market-rate condominium in the City of Los Angeles and a single-family home in Los Angeles County," noted the controller's audit.

A number of factors are blamed:

The controller's audit pinpoints many of these factors as helping to raise the costs of Prop HHH, especially the union wage mandates, city fees, and accessibility requirements for units serving disabled tenants.

Also driving up costs are city regulations that require developers receiving Prop HHH funding to have experience building supportive housing, and the need of these developers to piece together financing from multiple local, state, and federal sources.

Compounding all of these factors is Los Angeles' byzantine permitting process, which can delay projects for years at a time, while also giving neighborhood opponents ample opportunity to slow things up even more.

The city did try to address this problem by passing a 2018 ordinance streamlining approvals for Prop. HHH projects and lifting some zoning regulations, including parking requirements and density limits.

Yet, Venice locals managed to build housing for the homeless at a fraction of these costs. Notably, they did this by renovating existing housing -- the sort of thing you do if you are trying to house people humanely for as little money as possible, rather than if you are riding a secondary agenda: seeing that lobbyists and a bunch of LA swells get to line their pockets under cover of the law.