People always say NASA is underfunded, and it is, but we could end homelessness in America for the cost of funding NASA for 11 years. We could also pay for it over 10 or 20 years and it’d increase the federal budget by around half a percent or less. And that’s at $400,000 per house which is probably a high estimate although there would be some overhead associated with locating housing in the right places and moving people around.
My point is that this is not an ambitious project. But then, who knows what happens if this eviction/foreclosure crisis is allowed to unfold.
What if there were a bunch of unused houses already in existence? That would be pretty crazy, huh?
so the F-35 could have paid for it many times over?
Or you could cut the US military budget back to 2003 levels to come up with $240 billion. But this housing project will never happen under capitalism, of course.
That would come up with $240 billion every year. There probably aren’t going to be 600,000 fresh homeless people every year. Assuming society doesn’t totally collapse anyway, which it probably will.
Alternatively we can spend 320 billion to give everyone $600 once. Yes, surely this is the way to save America.
Or you could use eminent domain to give unhoused people some of the many vacant homes for a fraction of their value. It can be even cheaper
Typically people are compensated at market rates when eminent domain is applied.
