I was talking to William Wallis on his show about the state of things in L.A. and I quoted some of my old figures about the politically inflated cost of housing.

The first apartments cost an average of $479,000 a unit. Some went as high as $650,000 a unit. But that wasn’t good enough. Two years later, the cost of an average unit hit $531,000, with some apartments going up to $746,000. Building an apartment in Los Angeles for a crackhead was costing more than the price of a mansion in some parts of the country.

Despite all those high prices, only 228 apartments were actually built in four years.

City Controller Ron Galperin performed an audit on the $1.2 billion allocated for the homeless in 2016, and blamed the lack of progress on “red tape” and “a lot of consultants”.

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 average cost of a home in LA is $500 per square foot. The aluminum sheds with 64 square feet of space managed to completely blow that away. But the no-bid contract probably helped.

Old news. We’re now up to a whopping $837,000.

A $1.2 billion program intended to quickly build housing for Los Angeles’ sprawling homeless population is moving too slowly while costs are spiking, with one project under development expected to hit as much as $837,000 for each housing unit, a city audit disclosed Wednesday.

About 1,200 units have been completed since voters approved the spending in 2016, which was then a centerpiece in a strategy intended to get thousands of people off the streets. But the tally of units built so far is “wholly inadequate” in the context of the homeless crisis, said the audit issued by city Controller Ron Galperin.

In recent years, homeless encampments have spread into virtually every neighborhood, while the population has climbed to an estimated 41,000 people. Many are drug addicted or mentally ill, and violence is commonplace.

There are more homeless than ever and the politically connected who helped create this crisis are cashing in on the whole mess more than ever.