From what I’ve read, addressing homelessness effectively requires competence more than it requires vast sums of money. Here’s one article:

https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-t...

Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.

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gowld 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Houston has less homelessness than California because people at the edge of homelessness prefer to live in California than Houston.

	▲	amluto 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not a person on the edge of homelessness, but I did an extremely quick comparison. California cities near the coast have dramatically better weather, but Houston has rents that are so much lower than big California cities that it’s kind of absurd. If I had to live outdoors in one of these places, all other thing being equal, I would pick CA for the weather. But if I had trouble affording housing, I think Houston wins by a huge margin.

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mrguyorama 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wasn't houston's "approach" to buy bus tickets to California from a company that just resold commodity bus tickets and was owned by the governors friend and charged 10x market price?

The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process).

>in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State.

If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year?

The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population.

Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?