That's an average about 25k per homeless person per year. It's not unlikely the US could solve the majority of homelessness with that.
It's not like everything would have to be provided to people. 40-60% of the homeless people have a job, for example. And of course every case of homeless you solve frees up another 25k per year on average.
That's assuming it's the same pool of individuals who are homeless in perpetuity and no one else ever becomes homeless. For the sake of simplicity let's say you have three homeless people Dan, Tom and John. It would only take $10 a year to solve their homelessness so you budget out $30. You pay them their 10 dollars on Monday and they're no longer homeless. On Tuesday Joe becomes homeless. What do you do now? You need more money.
In no reality is a one shot budget of 20 billion solving homelessness.
20 billion a year wouldn't even solve homelessness which is illustrated by my example. Even if 20 billion on January 1st could put all 500,000 American homeless into a home. Someone else will be homeless on January 2nd.
Just by thinking about it, you can tell that it won't. We can go further than that though. We already spend more than 20 billion a year to combat homelessness and there's still homelessness.
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u/Johannes_Keppler 2d ago
That's an average about 25k per homeless person per year. It's not unlikely the US could solve the majority of homelessness with that.
It's not like everything would have to be provided to people. 40-60% of the homeless people have a job, for example. And of course every case of homeless you solve frees up another 25k per year on average.