Like the one minute mile, they said it couldn’t be done. But if anyone can do it, Los Angeles can. The city that never stops spending taxpayer money on the social problems that it manufactures has been trying for a while to break the one million mark to create apartments for drug addicted mentally ill bums. Or, in wokespeak, the ‘homeless’ or better yet ‘unhoused’.
If only we spent more money on the homeless, they insist, we could fix the social problem.
Back in 2018, I noted that after billions in tax hikes and bond issues, “the homeless housing being approved costs an average at $479,000 per unit. Two run at $650,000.”
Of course it just kept rising. “Two years later, the cost of an average unit hit $531,000, with some apartments going up to $746,000. Unable to build apartments for less than the cost of a mansion, Los Angeles launched a pilot program to build 8×8 aluminum sheds for the homeless for only $130,000 each. The homeless had been setting up their own tent encampments for free. So the city launched a pilot program to have the government set up tents for the homeless for only $2,600 per tent.”
And rising some more. “By 2020, the average cost of apartments for the homeless was at $531,000 and by 2022, a city audit found that one project was running to $837,000 for each unit. An audit blamed “a lot of consultants”.
Now, Los Angeles has done it, just in time for the Olympics, it’s broken the million mark.
Los Angeles homeless people are being put up in brand new apartments in ritzy neighborhoods that cost taxpayers up to $1.5 million per room, the California Post can reveal. The records show that In West Hollywood, the 20-room Holloway Motel was bought and overhauled for roughly $22 million, or about $1.05 million per unit.
Congratulations to California which has spent billions of dollars on fixing ‘homelessness’ by giving junkies units for the cost of mansions in the rest of the country.
LA’s 2025 homeless count stood at 43,695. Its homeless count was at 41,980 in 2022.
(Note: LAHSA, the agency responsible for the homeless count, is being shuttered because no one can account where the money went.)
Let’s see if we can break the $2 million barrier next.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Daniel became CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2025.
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