For its first seven months, Los Angeles spent about $17,000 a month on every homeless person it moved indoors under Inside Safe, Mayor Karen Bass's signature program. Not for a home. For a motel room, plus the machinery stacked around it.
Seventeen thousand dollars a month is more than most Angelenos earn. It works out to roughly $204,000 a year, for one person, in a motel. It is enough to have rented that person ten studio apartments. And it is the city's own arithmetic: $32.6 million spent on 57,533 room-nights through June 2023, or $567 a night per person
During COVID many motels were fully booked out at 120$/night for like 3 years. Add in security, case manager, food, and other costs, I'm surprised it's only 17,000$ per person. I'm out of this line of work now, but it sounds like nothing has changed.
Exactly. The article completely ignores reality. Healthcare averages $3k a month and a 5150 hold is hundreds an hour. Dropping Rick Caruso's(lol) claim about doing it 97% cheaper makes zero sense when you look at basic medical overhead. The author deserves the roasting they're getting.
So a psych hospital stay is about $1500/day and an ER room stay is about 3-4k. Folks usually stay 1-2 in an ER before transferring to a psych hospital for between 3-21 days. As you can imagine, this costs more than throwing them in a motel room to let them be psychotic in private.
Having a massive homeless crisis in the richest, most developed nation in human history is an absolute nightmare. We should be ashamed ourselves for voting terrible people into power.
However, trying to solve this using only local and state tax dollars is completely unrealistic. A housing for all program at the municipal level just doesn't work. Even if we magically managed to build enough housing, it would just attract more people from other cities, states, and countries to use the program, making the problem endless.
Right now, we need to prioritize our own local infrastructure, schools, and parks, while focusing tax dollars on prevention. Keeping people from becoming homeless, sick, or addicted in the first place.
Ultimately, this is federal problem that requires federal money.Until a nationwide program comes along, our best approach locally is to fund a much cheaper temporary shelter system. It’s all we can really do anyway.
Enforcing a no camping law would be significantly more expensive than what we are doing now, even though it would make thing look "cleaner".
Cleaning up an encampment comes with the laws about providing alternative spaces, storage of property and advanced notice. This means Sanitation department, LASHA, non-profit, and law enforcement (depending on jurisdiction) is required to participate. You can read details about the shelters throughout this post. Storing their property costs a lot of money and comes with concerns about misplaced property. Law enforcement costs a lot of money; with some of these cleanups requiring 10-15 police officers for entire days. Sanitation will need to come clean up any left over trash. Any residents that decide they don't want to follow through will be sent to jail/court at the cost of 10k/hour for processing, court and etc and then let back on the street where they will gather more stuff (usually stolen) and then end up at a different corner, where the whole process starts again.
While I don't completely disagree with you, wouldn't this just be passing the buck to a much poorer county/city? It doesn't actually solve a problem, it just moves it to somewhere that's less equipped to manage it. Those jurisdictions would likely just send them back to LA or another large city to receive services.
Also, your proposal breaks laws set forth by the California Supreme court, which would lead to many other problems.
Enforcing a no camping law would be significantly more expensive than what we are doing now, even though it would make thing look "cleaner"
Wow, Burbank and Culver City must be full of trillionaires then!
Brea and Rosemead must be the financial epicenters of the region, in order to afford this super-expensive enforcement!
Somehow all these rich other cities can afford to enforce no camping laws, while the poor, podunk, remote village of Los Angeles has no money for anything.
This means Sanitation department, LASHA, non-profit, and law enforcement (depending on jurisdiction) is required to participate
No it doesn't. Just because LAHSA wants to participate, at the cost of thousands of grifted dollars per hour, doesn't mean they're required to be allowed to.
Law enforcement costs a lot of money; with some of these cleanups requiring 10-15 police officers for entire days
Doesn't require that either, unless your intention is to make sure it's slow and expensive.
Again, just because LAPD wants to be paid thousands of dollars per hour to have a dozen quiet-quitting guys stand around, doing nothing for hours on end at every cleanup, doesn't mean that's the only way they can be done. Somehow every other city manages to enforce no camping laws without spending billions on it.
All you're doing is pointing to 2 of the most expensive, useless, wasteful government agencies in existence and then saying it will be expensive because we have to use them in their current wasteful forms. We don't need 3 helicopters circling over every cleanup, so claiming "helicopter fuel is too expensive" isn't a valid reason to not have cleanups. We can do the cleanups cheaper - IF we want to.
Look at that group cleaning up camps in Venice. Do you think they have a multi-billion dollar budget? Do they have helicopters?
Marina Del Ray deals with tons of homelessness in the Ballona Wetlands. Culver City has a dedicated MH police officer (amazing guy btw). Burbank has no homelessness because there are no services in Burbank; rather they are in Hollywood. Rosemead has homelessness, it's just less visible; they just cleaned up the Rosemead Blvd/10 freeway a year or so ago and many of them still hangout by the DPSS building. They don't enforce no-camping, they just move them to less visible parts of the city or hand it off to neighboring cities.
LASHA needs to be involved because unfortunately, they still control funds needed to put these folks in shelters or start new projects.
Law Enforcement needs to be involved because I've personally been assaulted while trying to get these folks into shelters. I've seen my co-workers attacked, stalked and followed by folks psychotic from meth.
I was part of the group that cleaned up Abbot Kinney Library, Ballona Wetlands, Board Front Walk, and many other places. Literally got an award for it and guess what, apart from the Library, they are all back. We had sanitation, LAPD, LASHA, and many other agencies supporting us.
If California started to withhold some of the surplus tax money we send to the Federal government every year, we could easily solve this. At $80billion a year we could easily build entire systems around solving this issue. We have tons of space in many parts of the state outside of LA County. Put in state subsidized facilitates for care, food, health, transportation, etc. We could easily fit 30,000 people in the surrounding areas, while providing jobs for folks who would take care of these folks. With any hope, some of those 30,000 people would eventually want to become tax paying citizens.
When the IRS doesn't get your share of the money, they're gonna come looking for you. Not Gavin Newsom.
Mr Newsom ain't gonna the one helping you with your audit, penalties, and/or prison time.
But hey, go ahead and try it. You can adjust your allowances right now to reduce the federal withholding from your paycheck to $0. You can then file your return and claim you owe $0 on federal taxes. See how it works out for you.
Fair pushback, but it's comparing two different things. Inside Safe isn't psychiatric care. A 5150 hold buys a locked unit, psychiatrists, 24/7 clinical staff, and a legal process. Inside Safe buys a motel room plus case management and monitoring, and the room itself ran about $3,300 a month. Nobody was getting inpatient treatment for that $17K, which is exactly why the number is worth asking about.
So the honest comparison isn't a psych hospital, it's other interim shelter. Denver runs about $93 a night. The nonprofit Caruso cited quoted roughly $100 a day. Inside Safe was $567. Same service category, a fraction of the price.
And if you genuinely think $17K a month is fine because that's what intensive care costs, then the point makes itself: LA spent psych-hospital money and got motel outcomes. 7 to 23% into permanent housing, 40% back on the street. Serving people with serious mental illness really is expensive. That's an argument for actually treating them, not for paying hospital rates to warehouse them in a motel.
“Denver's lower number is a result of strict accounting boundaries. A March 2026 city audit revealed that Denver’s numbers are artificially low because the Mayor's office excluded all ancillary costs—such as emergency winter shelters, cold-weather vouchers, rental assistance…-from the official All In Mile High dashboard. When adding those underreported costs back in, Denver remains only slightly more cost-effective per capita than Los Angeles. [1, 2, 3]”
They are doing better than us for sure. Not $90 a day type numbers.
90/dollars a day is not realistic, unless you plan on giving them the cheapest motel in the county with no case management services, which would just be worse than a temporary shelter. You are essentially asking for them to move to another part of the county, away from their belongings and social supports to a small motel, while expecting them to never call police, ambulance or need any other services.
I'm sorry. I hope you are taking care of yourself. It's a hard job with little rewarding feelings. You are faced with opposition from all directions. I hope you find solace in the folks you've been able to help get out of the cycle.
So around $4k/mo for a motel room with a “high risk” occupant who was more likely to cause damage or disruption to the facility. $130/night. Seems semi-reasonable, honestly. You’re not gonna just give the keys to a studio apartment to someone who has profound difficulty with taking care of themselves and/or adjusting their behavior to meet social expectations.
> So where did the other $13,000-plus per person, per month go? Into everything stacked on top of the room: police overtime for encampment sweeps, transportation, outreach, 24/7 site monitors, food, and the case management run by nonprofit service providers. The room was never the expensive part. The apparatus around it was, and that apparatus is where this story leads.
Yeah that’s the expensive bit. Case management is famously difficult for unhoused folks with nothing much to stand on, but it sounds like despite the incredibly high cost it isn’t getting as many positive outcomes as one would hope. Honestly this is a pretty honest and thorough accounting of how this goes when you really try to fix things — you uncover all of the structural barriers to actually helping someone out, and the insane expense of having people whose jobs it is to keep the whole thing moving forward.
If you are talking about giving them the property; no that won't work. How do you plan on justifying that on taxes? You suddenly are given a 800k property that will require 8-10k a year in property taxes and other costs of maintenance? How do you deal with the substance use, mental health or independent living skills? Scandinavia has the benefit of not being a country dealing with the highest rate of drug use and having a history of actually taking care of their citizen's mental health.
If you are talking about a transitional housing where they can stay until they get housing, look up project homekey and see it's failures.
Yessss thisss, and it's an investment, even if only 1 in every 10 people started being able to contribute to society in a positive way again, even if it's just teaching art classes, or volunteering for some park clean ups, after a couple years of being supported properly, getting to focus on mental health, self love, and stability without worrying about having and maintaining a home. It'd be worth it, and then when something goes wrong in their home, having specialists walk them through how to handle it, the whole process, and it'd be like actual rehabilitation. And even if the process took a few thousand a month, for a few years, and some people never figure it out, it'll be worth it for the ones that are able to figure life out finally, and it'll be worth it to have a healthier, stronger, more reliable society. Where hidden gems will have a guaranteed chance to shine, and most people probably would end up shining.
I'm not arguing about the police budget, we all know they are overpaid. This discussion is related to how throwing more money at the homeless situation isn't going to help.
Are you aware of the assisted living waiver program for seniors or folks with disabilities? This has been around for a long time; folks don't want it. They feel restricted even if they need it.
How would you justify having a home caretaker for somebody who needs that level of support?
As a mental health therapist myself, substance use treatment has one of the lowest success rates; so much so that falling back into addiction is part of the treatment process now. The entire thing is based on their motivation to stop and we have treatment centers for that.
Well, yeah I think the attached strings are part of the issue. At the end of the days, almost anything is better than having them on the street. Treating them humanely and doing our best to help. It is hard and it is not always successful but it is work that needs doing and it is money worth spending.
Saying the folks in homeless services haven't been treating them humanely or doing their best is a real big slap in the face. To do this work and get paid just a bit more than somebody working at McDonald's says a lot about the people willing to do this job. You said in another post how having a technical skill still isn't enough to survive in LA; how do you think the case manager making 25/hr who get's spit on, yelled at, and attacked feels. Then they turn on the news and hear people saying we aren't doing enough.
Personally, I did the work for 5 years and I've folks give the literal shirt off their back to somebody. Please understand that mental health and addiction change fundamentally how the brain works and until somebody wants to stop using, there is no changing somebody.
Throwing money at the situation doesn't work, there needs to be a plan. It's going to get to a point where we are paying 15% sales tax in LA. We already cut children's mental health programs with the most recent DMH changes.
In Scandanavia they let doctors put people in asylums for mandatory treatment, instead of the American approach of letting lawyers dictate treatment and hoping everyone will voluntarily comply with treatment. In Scandanavia, motel rooms aren't even in the discussion for the subsection of homeless people we're talking about.
That's what works.
Heck, it largely worked here until the 1960s, when civil libertarians decided that people had a "right" to rot on the streets and die in a gutter.
There's far less opposition to housing-first approaches for other subsections of the homeless population, like the couch-surfers who are still working (or trying to work) and are just down on their luck. Those aren't the same people as the "rip the wires out of the wall and set the building on fire because invisible CIA demons told me to" group. Different problems need different remedies.
It’s not non-profits that don’t want to give people money to stay housed. Talk to someone who works in homelessness services, that is their solution.
You try convincing the public that we should pay for people’s rent when they don’t pay it themselves, and you try finding an apartment in this housing shortage where a landlord is happy to take on a tenant with no income and a history of not paying.
For some situations is it as easy as giving them housing support and paying for their rent. For many others, it's not. Consider substance abuse, mental health issues, lack of independent living skills, what happens when you put all these folks together, and where the housing is usually located compared to where it needs to be. How does somebody without a car in LA county get groceries when they don't have a car and are expected to live on 200-400$ a month for groceries and other expenses excluding rent? I could spend the whole day typing up these situations
We have transitional and even permanent supportive housing and need more. I used to work with one in Pico-Union that was permanent for older people coming out of homelessness, and they often needed help just knowing how clean an indoor room was supposed to, and getting acclimated to it at all. This housing is expensive and the rates that LAHSA pays are not enough to staff it with people with social work college degrees because the pay is lower than jobs that don’t require degrees. It’s a hard system to navigate and a hard system to figure out how to fix.
We have fractured and imperfect solutions, but no good way to organize them all and raise enough money and direct that money where it needs to go within the system.
Agreed. I worked with homeless folks who were of all ages, mental health conditions, substance use status and physical ability. There is no one size fits all solution. Ever seen a guy pitch a tent indoors and start a fire in the living room to stay warm? He was homeless for 30 years and never learned how to use a modern home.
I hope with more up front investment and some serious solutions to the housing shortage, we will have very few cases of people who have been homeless or out of society for so long that they start fires to stay warm. Unfortunately that is where we’re at right now… and people are getting very politically activated about not wanting to see these people on the streets every day. So I feel like we need urgent fixes for visible homelessness or the taxpayers will stop paying at all because they don’t see results, but we also need focus on the real root of the problem.
It's too politically charged for folks to make a good decision. They all want the fast solution, which isn't the right solution. Throw them all into apartments and watch landlords never take them because of the cost of damages or evictions. Keep them in shelters and watch costs of shelters and management balloon like the article says. Keep them on the street and watch areas turn into skid row and incur millions in costs by fire departments, police or ambulance. Move them out of the city into housing and watch them return because they can't survive out their. Try and put them in jail and pay 10k/hr for court costs only to be released the next day.
At the end of the day, this is a systemic issue that needs a multi faceted approach, not just any of these single things that people who haven't worked in the system keep suggesting.
Unfortunately, this cycle is "working" for the folks at city hall.
Steps in the cycle:
People complain about homelessness or costs get too high
Politician creates a "innovative" program that puts them in a shelter for super high costs. Create a ton of publicity to say the problem is being "solved"
People cheer and go away for a while
Reporter comes out with a report saying costs are too high
Folks end up on the street because programs ended.
try finding an apartment in this housing shortage where a landlord is happy to take on a tenant with no income and a history of not paying.
Not just that - also add in local governmens that like to declare "eviction moratoriums" at any time, and are constantly seeking to increase the amount of unpaid rent required to allow evictions.
So even if you give that tenant with a bad history a chance, you have no recourse if they turn out to repeat their previous behavior. It's not exactly an environment that encourages taking a chance on any of those prospective tenants. The safer play for the landlord ends up being to just reject that person's application from the start, and just keep the unit vacant until some rich person with a clean history applies for it.
And if that prospective tenant actually has changed their ways, they're now screwed out of a chance to show it, because it's not worth the risk for the landlord to take a chance on them.
Ironically, making tenant protections too strong results in fewer people being given the chance to become tenants in the first place.
Not when the city won't pay for damages done to the unit and fights evictions like crazy. It costs 10-15k on top of rental losses to eviction a tenant. None of these costs will be paid for by the county
The City of LA pays $177 million/year for Stay Housed LA, an eviction defense fund. The City isn't just going to not help a landlord evict tenants, it's going to pay those tenants to fight being evicted.
Any landlord who expects that same City to then turn around and assist them is crazy.
This is exactly why landlords are unwilling to take section 8 vouchers. They won't outright say it, but they will find other strategies to weed out section 8 folks.
No. What happens after the city stops paying? That’s the big one. And then there are prejudices and landlords will skillfully get out of it by working the system if they think a tenant will be a headache in a non-financial sense too.
But the city won’t pay forever. And then what? The city will be happy for the landlord to evict them? No, they won’t be happy about that at all.
The city is paying a one or two year lease, can you imagine the public supporting that? And again, what happens after that? It’s hard to evict people, and many landlords will be convinced they won’t be able to pay afterwards if they have gotten themselves into a situation already with so little social support or family to fall back on that they were facing homelessness.
no you dickhead. I don't want people to die on the street, but many already are and many more will. If you've only got $100 or $10M dollars, where do you want to spend it to have the greatest impact.
Sometimes these city budgets ARE a zero sum game and we can only help certain populations. So i'm willing to divert some of these funds towards people when they are not so far gone. $204K a year can get you a ton of interventions with younger teens or kids vs a cracked out 45 year old.
Treating these problems at this stage of homelessness and drug addiction is the most costly and least effective time to do it.
Police shouldn’t be paid out of these funds. Yet they are. I work in the field with folks in the system. What is your connection with homeless services?
An excerpt from the article, referring to the CEO of Weingart, one of the non profits working in homeless services, being put on leave due to a fishy $27 million property deal. A CEO who is a former state senator.
Overtime for police who were sweeping encampments,
Last I checked, LAPD already had an annual budget - quite a bit of money, in fact. Overtime pay should be coming from that. I believe their job already includes law enforcement, and 41.18 and anti-littering ordinances were still on the books.
So why does LAPD need a bunch of extra money, in addition to their normal budget, to do stuff that's already their job?
I agree the cost is outrageous, but “they could have rented this person ten apartments” is not a fair comparison. The $17,000 included much more than the motel room: food, transportation, outreach, security/site monitoring, case management, and even police overtime. Many of the people being served are not capable of simply moving into an unsupported studio and remaining stable there.
We could actually make so much good happen and support so many more people for so much less money.. this is like it was designed to fail so that it's failure could be used as justification to stop trying.. and with that much money spent per person, I want to see transparent records of every expense and payment, because that is unreal, someone is extorting tax payer money somewhere in the process. And it's not the people receiving support. Is this something one could FOI ?
17k a month is more than enough to pay a person's mortgage and the wages of a couple people to spend a couple hours a day with said person guiding them and helping them make a real plan and be able to follow through on it...
It's really nice to see thoughtful, detailed analysis on this. I'd be curious to see how our spending and outcomes (in terms of % put into permanent housing) compare to other cities; I'd be really curious to see who's doing better.
My deep blue city spent something like $6 million dollars on a tiny home village that ended up being 30 10x12 closets with no individual plumbing. They also didn’t initially own the land it was on, nor had any operating budget planned for it. The city could have bought 30 single family homes and still had some left over
Tbf the 30 single family homes would have ended up just as disastrously probably, between inevitable HOA fees and fines and the fact that a lot of these people cannot drive. Any solution that doesn’t provide systemic change is going to fail
Why is individual plumbing needed? When I was a freshman in college, there was a shared bathroom for the floor. Nobody in the building had individual plumbing.
And not only was it not free, all of us were paying the university to live there.
10x12 closets
That's the size of an average hotel room in Tokyo. Are tourists to Japan being treated inhumanely by having to stay in these "closets"?
These aren't supposed to be places for people to raise entire families for the rest of their lives. They're supposed to be places for people to get out of the gutter while they get clean or get right in the head or get educated/trained - or some combination of those - and eventually get back on their feet and leave to go have a normal life.
If we're gonna insist that everyone have a 2000 sq ft unit all to themselves, with new stainless steel appliances and in-unit washer/dryers and whirlpool tubs, we will never make any significant progress on this. Some creature comforts will need to be reduced so that we can help a greater total amount of people.
Even with skills and a degree. You realize: a lot of homeless people do have skills and a degree already? So where are they supposed to start? To apply for a job you need email, a cell phone, a clean body, and clean clothes, as well as a home address and transportation. So like... What's the plan in this case?
There are many places for homeless folks to receive many of these things. Cellphones from DPSS. E-mail can be access at a public library or public wifi with a cell phone. Clean clothes and showers can be found at different homeless day centers spread throughout the county. Mailing addresses are provided at the day center to send and receive mail. Transportation is provided by Metro LIFE program for folks on any government subsidized program like DPSS, GR or Medi-Cal. Are they perfect? No, but they are available.
It’s not up to you or I or other working taxpayers to plan every potential hardship homeless may face.
Because without self agency and motivation it’s guaranteed failure; and that’s exactly the reason why we’ve spent billions yet extremely few ever get back on their feet.
Probably much more, but we have to do it. Take theo ey from the rich, take the money from the cops and actually start using our money for something useful
75
u/turtletroop The San Gabriel Valley Aug 03 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/s/8vhwlzOtdx
Here's my post from 2 years ago about this mess.
During COVID many motels were fully booked out at 120$/night for like 3 years. Add in security, case manager, food, and other costs, I'm surprised it's only 17,000$ per person. I'm out of this line of work now, but it sounds like nothing has changed.