[lotsofpulp]

Imprisonment is to keep people moving along, or deter them from coming.

Housing is more expensive because of the opposite, it incentives everyone to come get it.

On a federal level, housing and healthcare might be cheaper than imprisonment. But what is even cheaper (in the short run) is ignoring it altogether.

>I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).

Because the problem is far more expensive than any single billionaire or even group of billionaires entire net worth. Even if they could handle just California's population. there are 290M people in the rest of the country, and a significant portion who would not mind coming to California for free housing.

[thebooktocome]

Here is SLC’s program, including all the community work they have to do to mollify the NIMBYs:

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/1134230388/village-salt-lake-...

Median rent in SLC: 1.8k/mo, 21.6k/yr

Federal prison: ~39k/yr

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/01/2021-18...

Median rent in CA: 2.9k/mo, 34.8k/yr (according to Zillow)

CA prison: 106k/yr (!)

https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

Incarcerating the homeless is not an economic decision, it’s an emotional one. Society doesn’t mind wasting endless amounts of money doing it, because the cruelty is the point.

[lotsofpulp]

I feel like the induced demand portion of my argument is being ignored.

CA prison might be 3x expensive per year, but would CA be looking to house 3x or more people if they offered free housing?

[pandaman]

All law enforcement is not economical in this approach, when you are pricing only immediate costs. E.g. prosecuting a murderer is a complete loss of hundreds of thousands dollars if not millions. And we are not even getting the victim back for all these money spent.

[thebooktocome]

Murderers aren’t really representative of the homeless.

Bear in mind mere homelessness is not unequivocally a crime in the states, see Martin v. Boise (2020 or so).

[pandaman]

>Murderers aren’t really representative of the homeless.

Nobody is arguing they are.

>Bear in mind mere homelessness is not unequivocally a crime in the states

Nobody is for prosecuting homelessness. Vagrancy, loitering, public consumption of drugs and alcohol, obstruction of public right of way, public nuisance, public defecation, trespassing etc, etc, are crimes though and we should be going after their perpetrators regardless of their having a home.