Why get a job when the city will let you live like a king for free?
Yep.
Because this is California, the "solution" for homelessness is dropping a cool 600 grand per apartment in a fancy high-rise:
There are 278 units in the 19-story development known as the Weingart Tower. It's intended to help people currently without shelter on Skid Row and it will be L.A.'s largest permanent support housing project.
It's considered affordable housing, but the cost to build this type of project still adds up. Each unit costs nearly $600,000 and it's being funded by taxpayers.
When you hear that old line about "affordable housing," you're like:
And then someone says "$600,000 per unit" and you're like:
But it's true. This high-rise tower cost a cool $165,000,000 to build. This is being marketed as a homeless shelter, mind you, and it cost as much as a freakin' lottery jackpot to build.
The building will feature "an entire floor of offices for case workers, in addition to a list of impressive amenities: a gym, art room, music room, computer room and library. Residents will enjoy six common balconies and a café."
Man, I want to be homeless now! Do you know how expensive places with all those amenities cost??
The goal, the directors say, is to "keep the tenants engaged":
As many things that we can put inside the building so that you don't have the chaos that you sometimes see outside the building where people are moving to and from so, you can do just about anything you want within this building, and it's a regular apartment.
Here, per the L.A. Times, is what $600,000 gets you in a downtown Los Angeles homeless shelter:
It looks to me like a Marriott Residence Inn or something: Cheap, sterile, unlovely. It's got all the amenities, but no character.
But hey, at least residents can dine in comfort in one of the facility's post-dystopian concrete patios:
Great to see LA incentivizing homelessness. I'm sure this will solve the problem.
Anyone want to take bets on how fast this high-rise gets wrecked, like every other public-housing building in the world?
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