Build housing for the homeless

The homeless encampment near the stadiums is gone. The homeless are somewhere else, repeating the NIMBY script. An elite hazardous cleanup crew will make the former camp clean and sanitary. Such cleanups, along with ambulance and police visits, have a stunning price tag. The cost, averaged from all our major cities, is a stunning $30,000 yearly per homeless person. Yet it gets not one person off the streets.
This isn’t a guess. President G. W. Bush’s “10 Year Plan to End Homelessness” did the line-by-line auditing across the United States. Today, many cities have bitten the bullet, building permanent supportive housing units that end the costly problem. These are tiny apartments or tiny homes, fully equipped, with a key for privacy. It has been done in other cities and also by Utah statewide. It brings the city’s yearly cost for each “tenant” down to $10,000, saving $20,000. And homeless people are gone.
But these special apartments or “tiny home” villages have to be built first. That requires funding, just as any other civic improvement. People need to know that this plan will save millions in city expenses and eliminate an ugly public nuisance.

Wayne Cooke
Graham