Government: Bureaucrats Wasting Other People's Money
If it's your money and your business you try to maximize savings and use smarts to come up with more.
Government bureaucrats are the laziest animals this side of a drunk, sunning hyena.
In LA, they built tiny homes for homeless people at a massive cost. Oh, the sewer line had to be run out to the property, blah, blah, blah.
If it's your business, you say, "Wait -- sewer line doesn't go out there? Let's find another location."
In the LA Times, the Editorial Board writes:
Villages of tiny homes in empty lots would appear to be a quick and inexpensive alternative to conventional shelters and scarce temporary housing.But it turns out, they're not so cheap -- at least not in Los Angeles, where a soon-to-open village of 39 tiny homes on an empty city lot in North Hollywood cost a stunning $5.2 million to set up. By contrast, the city of Riverside set up a village of 30 tiny homes last year for a total cost of about $514,000.
Why the order-of-magnitude difference? It's not the houses themselves. Both cities bought 64-square-foot shelters from Pallet, an Everett, Wash.-based company that constructs the prefabricated homes -- featuring built-in beds, shelving, heat and air conditioning -- for roughly $4,900 to $8,600 apiece.
L.A. city officials say their work was expensive because they started with less infrastructure. The Riverside site was already a parking lot (though it was repaved). The North Hollywood site -- shaped like a narrow sideways triangle -- was a weed-strewn dirt lot between the Orange Line busway and Chandler Boulevard. The city cleared, graded and paved it, while also putting in walkways and a 20-foot-wide access road through the property for emergency vehicles. It spent $651,000 to run a sewer line to the lot and $253,000 to build concrete pads for each unit. And it set up an administrative office for service providers, a booth for a security guard (requested by service providers), tables and chairs where residents can visit with each other or their case managers, and a small fenced-in area where dogs can play.
It's nice but pricey. Even city officials would agree that, in retrospect, they could have cut back. They insist that subsequent sites will be cheaper to build on because they won't need as much work as this one did. And we'd be hard-pressed to scold them for using the North Hollywood site, difficult as it was, when we have repeatedly berated them for not looking hard enough for city properties where they can build housing or shelter.
There are a fuckton of city-owned properties. I know, because I was looking into them because the LA City Attorney sucked away the resources from the mediation program I volunteer for (which I ended up saving by going radioactively annoying in all LA media. Forced the LA City Attorney to unkill it!). More space for the program than the cramped quarters we were evenually jammed into, more volunteers to work for free to solve LA residents' disputes -- keeping the courts less clogged and alleviating situations that might go violent.
There are countless buildings owned by the city that are empty all over LA and countless pieces of property. LA Curbed:
Of Los Angeles's 792,000 properties, about 14,000 properties are owned by those six agencies, including 7,508 properties owned by the City of Los Angeles.
In other words, there are many, many spaces they could either have built or repurposed into housing. City Purse Holder Ron Galperin should be all over this. Maybe he will be, maybe he won't be.
But just wondering: Cui bono? Who benefits from where the shelters were located or, at the very least, by applying as little brain power as possible to the issue?
In government, competence and industrious are not requirements for continuing to get a paycheck -- or being promoted up the ladder.
Volunteer at the City Hall near you -- you'll get that impression very rapidly.
I'm guessing it's NIMBY... a lot of the buildings must be in neighborhoods where people don't want the homeless moving in, they'd rather have an empty building.`
NicoleK at December 26, 2020 1:51 AM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2020/12/government-bure.html#comment-7581883">comment from NicoleKDoesn't stop them in the slightest. They built a nightmare place here in Venice right across from homes and near zero stores and services. Easy access to meth on the boardwalk, though!
Amy Alkon
at December 26, 2020 7:27 AM
People misunderstand why gov is so bad. It is not because they are dumb or lazy (though that doesn't help) but because they are not allowed to fail. If a burger king opens where no one wants burgers or without any parking or (etc), that BK eventually closes. Even big companies that don't keep up will fail. A gov office that does a terrible job just keeps on and never closes. There are entire gov agencies with no reason to exist anymore but they still are there, like zombies.
cc at December 26, 2020 8:46 AM
$131,000 each for tiny houses. Over $2,000 per square foot.
According to the Turner & Townsend's 2018 International Construction Market Survey, the average construction cost in NYC was $362 per square foot in 2017, considering all building categories."
Hmmm.
Of course this kind of waste is a national scandal. Seattle/King County spend about a billion per year on services for 12,000 homeless people, about $88,000 each. And they're still sleeping on sidewalks and digging through the trash for food.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of-homelessness-seattle-king-county-costs.html
There's even a documentary, "Seattle is Dying."
It's all over: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, etc. We oughta bring back the work farms. It would be more compassionate.
Spiderfall at December 26, 2020 9:06 AM
We oughta bring back the work farms.
And when the homeless you want to live/work there tell you to fuck off? you've spent the money, but gotten nothing for it.
but because they are not allowed to fail
Worse than that, if they're seen to be failing, someone will propose the genius solution of giving them more money to keep them from failing. What is that saying? you get more of what you subsidize.
I R A Darth Aggie at December 26, 2020 12:33 PM
In victorian England, choosing not to go to a work farm was not an option, it was that or a one way ticket to Tasmania.
I think a work farm is too generous an option for the homeless parasitic dregs of society, they should be provided free housing in unused container ships moored 3miles offshore and given string and fishing hooks so they can feed themselves and complete autonomy to form their own systems of governence, free of interference from the mainland Patriarchy.
Martin Lambert at December 26, 2020 12:53 PM
choosing not to go to a work farm was not an option
Thus the reason that citizen >>> subject. Also, that pesky thirteenth amendment.
And since it's shortly after Christmas:
I R A Darth Aggie at December 26, 2020 1:44 PM
Sorry for posting this a second time in a few hours,but I hadn't figured out that it was precisely the topic of Amy's main topic today.
It's an outcome not described above:
Crid at December 26, 2020 2:54 PM
You're right, work camp sounds too Soviet. And it should be voluntary, and count as a rehab option. If just 1,000 tried it and it ended up costing half as much, that'd be $80 million per year Seattle could put toward their $1.2 billion pension shortfall.
The real parasites are the slimy contractors, unionists, and bureautrash that spent over $5 million to put up 39 plywood shacks. It couldn't be done without no-bid contracts, wage inflation, phony billing, and great gobs paid out in consulting fees. And it's going to be horrible.
Spiderfall at December 26, 2020 10:43 PM
Geez, Martin, what are the homeless like where you go? The vast majority of the homeless I've run into in the US are mentally ill vets. The next highest group is mentally ill in general. Evil plotting moochers do not form a large percentage of the ones I've run into.
NicoleK at December 27, 2020 5:04 AM
The genius move in all this is that there used to be housing for such people: SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels. You got a room with bathrooms down the hall. That is all. No kitchen, no living room. But it was a place to sleep and the mentally ill and drunks would live there. Because they were full of drunks and crazies and hookers, "reformers" got them torn down. Such reformers imagine somehow the building is to blame. Now their incompetent asses are building expensive replacements as if this problem had never existed before. argh
cc at December 27, 2020 1:33 PM
When did they get torn down? There were still some around 15 years ago or so, my ex boyfriend worked in one...
NicoleK at December 28, 2020 12:40 PM
Leave a comment