Study: Cheapest Way To End Homelessness Is Ridiculously Simple
By Drake Baer in Business Insider - The Economic Roundtable just came out with the largest study on homelessness in American history.
And it turns out the best way to combat homelessness is to provide homes.
The study's focus was on Santa Clara County, California, home to the extreme wealth of Silicon Valley and the highest percentage of homelessness in the entire US.
The methodology is enough to make a social scientist swoon: Researchers analyzed information about everyone in Santa Clara County who had been homeless between 2007 and 2012 — 104,206 people.
Homelessness, the report details, gets very expensive.
Between costs related to healthcare, social welfare, and the justice system, Santa Clara County as a whole spent $520 million on services for homeless residents.
Those costs didn't come from everybody who was homeless in that time period. As Gabrielle Canon at Mother Jones notes, much of those costs came from the roughly 2,800 people who were persistently homeless.