Imagine If We Redirected Those Funds to Make People Not Homeless…
Homelessness is inhumane, but it’s also expensive, weighing heavily on our hearts and wallets at the same time.
Have you ever wondered how many of your tax dollars get allocated toward resolving homelessness? If so, you might be appalled to learn that most of that money is not being used to seek a resolution to the current housing crisis. Instead, there are billions of tax dollars being doled out to simply make people who are already homeless as uncomfortable as humanly possible.
Here’s a rundown of how many tax dollars go directly to that abhorrent cause.
The Hefty Cost of Criminalization
Imagine you lose everything – your home, your neighbors, your children, all of your personal belongings. All of these things are ripped away from you by a sudden transition into homelessness.
You swallow your pride and sleep on a staircase outside, eyeballing the sky, for at least it still has stars. You try to focus on the positive. At least you still have some freedom.
While your days are spent wandering for hours in the cold, you tell yourself that this night, you will allow yourself to dream. You close your eyes tightly and inhale. You tell yourself the pavement’s not as cold as it was last night. You focus on the rhythm of your heart. But then…
Just as you begin to reach a deep sleep, someone shakes you. This person is armed and beating you, tearing your tent down in the process. The person is a police officer armed to the teeth and surrounded by fellow officers.
You, on this stark night, appear as you feel – alone. You are arrested for the perceived “crime” of being homeless, a judgment that will follow you for years.
Once you are released from prison, you will have an arrest on your record, placing an even bigger burden on your ability to secure a home. The price of this for you could be a lifetime of homelessness, but let’s talk about how much your arrest will cost the taxpayers.
37 Chronically Homeless People + 1,250 Arrests = $6,417,905
A 2014 report released by Rethink Homelessness observed the arrests of just 37 chronically homeless people in Florida and found that these 37 individuals were arrested a jaw-dropping 1,250 times over ten years. Each year, those arrests cost taxpayers a whopping $641,791, for a grand total of $6,417,905 in ten years.
According to a rough analysis of independent estimates, nearly 7 million people endure homelessness each year. If we collectively arrested just 10% of them, or 700,000 people, we would spend 18,918x the number above, which comes out to roughly $13,242,600,000. That is per year. This number reflects what it would cost to arrest roughly 10% of the national homeless population and to pay for them to be:
- Booked
- Arrested
- Incarcerated at a rate of $80 per day. Please note that in many places, it is much more expensive than $80 per day to house prisoners.
This is only the beginning. Arresting and imprisoning homeless people for merely existing in a public space is just one of the ways that billions of tax dollars get spent making homeless people uncomfortable. Another expensive tactic used to distress homeless people rather than help them is the installation of hostile architecture.
The Astronomical Price of Hostile Architecture
The main reason we find unsheltered residents sleeping on the pavement and stairwells of our cities is because there is no other place for them to sleep comfortably. This is due, in large part, to the prevalence of anti-homeless architecture, otherwise referred to as hostile architecture. You might have seen it on the streets of your city, suburb, or town.
Hostile architecture usually consists of pointy objects poking out of public furniture. To an onlooker, it might even seem pretty or artistic, but for homeless people, it just means more discomfort. Examples of hostile architecture include:
- Separated seats on subway benches
- Standing slabs where sitting isn’t possible
- Spikes protruding from underground grates or sprouting out of the cement on street corners
- Large potted plants strategically positioned to deter loitering and much more
There’s no official tally confirming how much money each city spends on hostile architecture altogether. Public knowledge is that in 2021, the City of Portland alone spent approximately $500,000 installing anti-homeless benches around just one park.
Suppose each of America’s 795 major metropolitan cities spent half a million dollars installing anti-homeless furnishings (which is likely a low estimate given how common these installments are). That equates to $397,500,000 more spent making homeless people uncomfortable.
On the low end, we are spending roughly $13,639,500,600 making homeless people uncomfortable. Imagine the headway we could make if we spent that same amount of money making homeless people not homeless. Would homelessness even exist if that were the case?
Homelessness is Costing Lives, Futures, and Billions of Taxpayer Dollars. Shouldn’t It Be Costing Politicians Their Elections? Talk to Your Representatives Today.
Now that you see how expensive and ineffective these hostile tactics truly are, it’s time to talk to your local representatives about their spending habits. Ask them why the billions of dollars we spend making homeless people uncomfortable isn’t going toward constructing affordable housing.
These numbers do not even include the exorbitant amount of money being spent behind the scenes to push model templates of anti-homeless legislation and negative mainstream media campaigns. Our unhoused neighbors need housing, not handcuffs and hostile architecture.
