$4 Mil To House 12 Homeless People

In an example of how government at every level wastes tax dollars, one U.S. county is spending around $4 million in combined federal and local funds to house a dozen homeless people in an affluent community.

That translates into more than $330,000 per person, which means that Uncle Sam might as well buy them each their own, fully furnished house. After all, the median single-family home in the U.S. costs around $172,000 so the government could also throw in a few years worth of utility bills and even groceries.

Instead officials in Bethesda Maryland will spend the money to operate a three-story apartment building, operated by the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission, that will house 12 homeless adults. The facility will have six studio and six one-bedroom apartments as well as a gym and computer center, according to the local newspaper (Washington Examiner) that exposed the costly project this week.

A chunk of the money—$1 million—will come from President Obama’s fraud-infested stimulus, which has proven to be a disastrous waste of public funds. Judicial Watch has reported on the many scandals involving the president’s $787 billion plan to jumpstart the economy and put Americans back to work. Much of the money has gone to companies that have cheated the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and a series of wasteful projects.

Last summer a scathing U.S. Senate report revealed that tens of millions of stimulus dollars went to frivolous projects like international ant research, to study why monkeys react negatively to inequity and a “tunnel to nowhere” in Pennsylvania. The same probe discovered that recovery funds also bought state-of-the-art cell phones for low-income smokers trying to quit, fancy digital music players for high school students in one state and advertising to promote the stimulus.

What’s another million so homeless folks can live in an upscale neighborhood? Besides the stimulus cash, Montgomery County’s new homeless digs are being financed by an additional $944,829 in county housing funds and $2.1 million in state low-income housing tax credits.

I wish this story had a little more detail.

Bethesda is a wealthy suburb just over the DC line. It is chock full of liberal democratic voters who should be proud to shoulder a share of the burden of housing the homeless. The story makes a point of the cost of housing the poor in an affluent community. As a resident of a part of the city that for decades was overloaded with housing projects, halfway homes, and other government social service operations, I have become a firm believer that every part of the metro area needs to accept some of these facilities. The burden should be spread. Bethesda should step up.

Here in DC, and I suppose in many other places, the really crummy parts of town didn't get that way by accident. They are legacies of bad policy, and the head wrecker was LBJ. The Great Society liberals blew into town and massively expanded the public housing estate, centered on big, centralized projects. They institutionalized poverty, and fixed it into place. Government housing projects cut off the normal recycling of neighborhoods through gentrification and or redevelopment, and 50 years later (how time flies when we're having fun) people elsewhere start to think "that part of town" is inherently bad. It's not; it's just that government has fixed, concentrated, and institutionalized a problem.

Many upscale areas, including many of the suburban jurisdictions, compounded the problem by zoning low and moderate income people out. "In between" middle class neighborhoods, like Capitol Hill, were put under tremendous pressure from social services empire builders who recognized the need to deconcentrate the ghetto but who were blocked out of the suburbs, which is where the low skill, service sector job growth is.

As a result, we have for many years been warehousing poor people in terrible neighborhoods far from jobs, and then wondering why they sit and rot. This is stupidity on stilts. There is a crying need for much more low and moderate income housing in non-ghetto neighborhoods. I'm open as to how this is provided, but to the extent that assisted housing projects (as opposed to housing assistance/vouchers) are tried, they need to be low density and scattered site, so that they doesn't crush the surrounding neighborhoods. And they needs to be located within reasonable proximity to jobs.

I think Bethesda should take a share. There's not enough information in the article to really evaulate this particular apartment. I suspect the costs are high primarly because land acquisition costs in Bethesda are high. So be it; the wealthy burghers of Bethesda still need to help bear the burden, and there are major retail and service sector job centers there. This sounds like an apartment building, which I dislike (a little too concentrated), but if it includes on-site supervision/management, that would help account for the cost. The "computer center" is probably a room with a couple of computers and internet access, which is pretty basic nowadays if you want people to look for jobs and/or get training. Similarly, the gym is probably pretty basic, and anyone who knows anything about rehab 101 should not be surprised to find one here.

Bottom line, these are probably very simple apartments in a very plain building in a very expensive part of town. Whether the project works will depend on whether there is good supervision and adequate screening of tenants. There are plenty of successful halfway house programs that provide a bridge for people getting back on their feet. There are also plenty of disasters. Depends on the details.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.