Last week I was trying to do the math on what it would take to get our homeless population in to housing . . . is there a better way the county could spend $24M.
The county is spending $24M having homeless people stay in hotels. While that is great, it seems like we’re missing an opportunity here.
HOW MANY PEOPLE?
I have asked a lot of questions and this is what I have come up with – I’m sure its not 100% accurate and definitely under-counted, as per usual.
ESTIMATES OF POPULATION
There are 300 people in hotels
- Sounds like 50-60 families
- 180+ singles (men and women) – this includes only “vulnerable population
- 50 – 60 on the waiting list
130 – 200+ Sleeping outside
- Sounds like there are about 25 people in the State St. area
- Probably at least another 25 in the rest of the downtown area
- 40 people camping in one larger section on the East side of Madison
- At least another 40 people camping in other areas of Madison
(one outreach worker says he has over 200 people on his list since the beginning of the year)
55-70 people using men’s shelter
40ish people using women’s shelter (I didn’t gather this info, its a guess)
Other unknowns
- families who are doubled up?
- singles who are doubled up?
- families who are self paying in hotels
- singles who are self paying in hotels
- singles in jail
SUMMARY
The minimum amount of homeless people in our community, not included people who are doubled up or self paying in hotels or in jail.
- 60 families
- 180 singles in hotels
- 130 and likely more people sleeping outside for singles and couples
- 100 singles still in shelter
Note: Thanks to Linette Rhodes from the city for fact checking my numbers about the estimates of homeless people in our community.
HOW MUCH HOUSING DO WE NEED?
To house just the minimum we can reasonable county we’d need
60 family units
410 singles units
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO HOUSE EVERYONE?
60 Families
- They have case managers with out 20 families per case load, which is double what they normally have, so we’d need 3 more case managers. ($200,000)
- 60 families – security deposit plus 2 months rent (2 bedroom apartment fair market rent = $1093 or 3 bedroom = $1,519 – I’ll use $1,250) = $225,177. That would be $3,752 per family.
- There would likely be additional costs, not everyone is going to be able to pay their rent in their 3rd month, studies have found it take $12,500 to house a family through rapid rehousing, so this is on the low end, however, some local Rapid Rehousing programs have been housing families for as little as $2,282 and up to $7,368 per family.
- Even if we spend the higher amount of $7,368 per family, it would cost us $442,080. Or if we spent the national average of $12,500 it would cost us $750,000.
- For less than $1M we could solve family homelessness.
410 individuals
- They don’t really have case managers – there’s one or two for the entire men’s population at the shelter, and there are outreach workers, but they don’t have case managers like the families and single women. If we wanted case managers to have a caseload of 20 people we need 20 case managers, and if we wanted people to have a case load of 10 like the families we’d need 40 case managers. ($2.4M) Plus there’s going to have to be supervisors and overhead ($500,000)
- If we use the $12,800 national average for rapid rehousing for 410 people, it would cost $5,248,000.
- For singles it would cost $7.6M to solve homelessness.
IF ONLY . . .
Can you believe it would take 500 apartments to solve our homelessness problem in Dane County?
And can you believe that it would be so much cheaper to spend less than $6M to house people instead of the $24M the county is spending to put people into hotels. Even if you hired 43 case managers to make it happen, for $9M we could have the entire current population housed. At a little more than 1/3 of the cost of putting people in hotels.
That would leave $15M for the wave of new homeless people that is sure to hit the community once the evictions start happening again next week and to help those who need a different housing solution than Rapid Rehousing.
THINK ABOUT THIS
What if we just took the $24M and gave it to the 470 households? That would be $51,000 per household. That’s a year of income (or two, or three). How would that change things? Would we have a better outcome?
Or what if we just bought several apartment buildings?
The problem is the lack of available units to house them, Brenda. Both subsidized and unsubsidized. I know you know that. You’d need to add millions of dollars in development assistance to make your numbers work, plus capacity of developers to add units in ground now, which just isn’t feasible.
It’s a larger problem than just the triage money spent, and why City and County housing development funds exist in the first place.
The vacancy rate is at 3% for the 65,087 units MG&E tracks, which is 1,952 units that are open. We need less than 500. https://www.mge.com/customer-service/for-multifamily/multifamily-rental-vacancy-rates