Los Angeles has poured an inconceivable fortune into the manufactured “homeless crisis”.

Proposition HHH was going to solve the homeless crisis by hiking property taxes to raise $1.2 billion. The money would be used to build housing for the homeless. $1.2 billion could house all the homeless.

Couldn’t it? If it couldn’t, it was part of a $4.6 billion package of homeless tax hikes. There was Proposition H which added to the already hefty sales tax. Los Angeles voters backed that one too.

And, even more predictably, no amount of social services spending was ever enough. The annual shortfall was estimated this year at $270 million. The new projected cost hovers at $628 million. 

Where did all that money go? There are the $500K homeless housing units.

The homeless housing being approved costs an average at $479,000 per unit. Two run at $650,000.

And the homeless-industrial complex, as former candidate Roxanne Beckford Hoge calls it, has employment opportunities for all.

In 2018, the online ticketing service Eventbrite carried a listing for a Homeless Service Professionals Job Fair of Los Angeles.

“Due to the significant increase in funding from Measure H to fund homelessness services, there are over 1,000 open positions across the homeless service delivery system in the L.A. area,” the listing announced. “We will have at the job fair over 40 employers from throughout the L.A. region who are hiring for these positions.”

Just like the time Mark Zuckerberg sank $100 million into Newark public schools, the money went to the expected places and vanished without a trace.

The money collected by L.A. County from the Measure H sales tax increase, about $355 million per year, funded the hiring of “senior management, executive directors, CEO/CFO/COO, and more,” according to the job fair listing. Also “professional level” employees “with advanced degrees” as well as “management/supervisory level” staff with titles such as “supervisors, coordinators, program managers and directors.”

All these people are in charge of managing “direct service/entry level” workers: “case managers, outreach workers, housing navigators, employment specialists, administration, finance, and more.”

This is where the money always goes.

Homeless funding doesn’t help the homeless. That would require mental health and drug treatment. It builds up a massive social services infrastructure benefiting a professional class and politically connected contractors.

There’s no limit to the amount of money California taxpayers will be asked to pay to fund non-solutions to this part of the homelessness crisis. In his State of the State address, Gov. Gavin Newsom called for new and ongoing revenue sources to pay for homeless services and housing.

“New and ongoing revenue sources” means new and higher taxes. 

And more laws and measures making the crisis worse, so more taxes can be raised, and the crisis can be made even worse.

And they say perpetual motion isn’t possible. Pshaw!