“Homelessness” is a manufactured social welfare crisis in which the usual dysfunctions of drug addicts and the mentally ill were transformed into an abstraction ‘homelessness’ which was then blamed on the evils of capitalism.
Solving it then became an excuse for dumping money into an endless money hole at whose other end were the consultants, contractors and community organizers who make up the real base of the Democrats.
How much money vanished into that endless hole?
Proposition HHH was going to solve the homeless crisis by hiking property taxes to raise $1.2 billion. The money would be used to build housing for the homeless. $1.2 billion could house all the homeless.
Couldn’t it? If it couldn’t, it was part of a $4.6 billion package of homeless tax hikes. There was Proposition H which added to the already hefty sales tax. Los Angeles voters backed that one too.
But instead the number of homeless increased faster than the supply of homeless housing. By ’18, the number of homeless was up to 58,000 from 32,000 in 6 years. Increasing subsidies to the homeless only increased their number. As usual, government social welfare was generating more of the problem.
And, even more predictably, no amount of social services spending was ever enough. The annual shortfall was estimated this year at $270 million. The new projected cost hovers at $628 million.
The homeless housing being approved costs an average at $479,000 per unit. Two run at $650,000.
I wrote that back in 2018. Gov. Gavin Newsom used every trick to ram through another homeless initiative meanwhile the billions spent on homelessness are going, who knows where?
As the homelessness crisis has intensified, California under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership allocated an unprecedented $24 billion to address homelessness and housing during the last five fiscal years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Exactly how much is California spending to combat homelessness — and is it working?
It turns out, no one knows. That’s the result of a much-anticipated statewide audit released Tuesday, which calls into question the state’s ability to track and analyze its spending on homelessness services.
The state doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data — the California Interagency Council on Homelessness — has analyzed no spending past 2021, according to the report by State Auditor Grant Parks. Three of the five state programs the audit analyzed — including the state’s main homelessness funding source — didn’t even produce enough data for Parks to determine whether they were effective or not.
That’s what they call a feature, not a bug. The social welfare state is built to eat infinite amounts of money.
That’s how Mrs. Bill de Blasio’s $800 million for mental health vanished. It’s how Zuckerberg’s $100 million vanished. If you think of the liberal social welfare experiment as organized crime on a scale that dwarfs every cartel and mafia in the world, you won’t be far wrong.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
The post California Spent $24 Billion to Fix “Homelessness”. Who Knows Where It Went? appeared first on The Washington Standard.
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