Money California wastes on the homeless could buy a first-class life in Missouri | Opinion

Even California has its limits to government spending. When San Diego’s bill to shower the homeless came in at $7 million, the city sued its provider for price gouging. If $1.7 million gets you a single toilet in San Francisco, how many showers do you get for $7 million?

None actually — you just get some people who are suffering from homelessness temporarily suffering from cleanliness. The showers, you see, were temporary rentals. Never mind that you could have purchased 150 shower trailers with six stalls each, enough to let every homeless person in San Diego take a two-hour shower daily with room left to spare.

The lesson? Every time a nutty story pops up about the Golden State, you think it must be the nuttiest, but you’re wrong. Whether it is spritzes, potties or houses, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s woke wonderland is spending money on the homeless like, well, water.

In some places, one unit of supportive housing for people who are homeless costs a cool million dollars. And, every month after it is built taxpayers fork over $17,000 for security, maintenance, social workers to help them get government assistance, utilities, cleaning and such.

To put that in perspective for people in normal America, you could buy each Californian suffering from homelessness two first-class tickets to Kansas City International Airport, get them a limo ride to their new home, which would be a new three-bedroom ranch, fully furnished (natch) with a new Tesla in the garage, and still save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every month, you could give them a salary for picking up cans and other debris along the highways that would be greater than half of what working Missourians make and still save $10,000 off that monthly bill.

If money and houses could solve homelessness, this is what California would do — and Missouri would be a winner, as all those formerly homeless people paid property and income taxes thanks to the taxpayers of the palm-festooned paradise on the Pacific.

But that’s not how homelessness works, either here in the Midwest or in California. The Golden State learned that recently when a government-funded watchdog audited the state’s spending. In two out of its three (!) billion-dollar-plus programs for the homeless, the state couldn’t tell whether its spending was doing any good because it didn’t keep track of the formerly unhoused after they got houses, or kept records so sloppily that the auditors couldn’t tell what happened.

Perhaps that is why after all the platinum-plated programs, the number of homeless people went up. It’s almost as if when you subsidize something, you get more of it. No one would ever think about that outside a freshman economics class.

The fact is that homelessness has more to do with substance abuse and/or mental and other health problems. I know because I’ve spent more time than you might think at a homeless shelter, and my mom used to live with one such person getting over an opioid addiction.

Saying this used to get conservatives roundly mocked by smarter people, but more and more the experts are coming around to this view, though you can still depend on universities to produce studies that show throwing money at the problem will fix it.

Eventually, this fact will get through some thick skulls, even in California, but don’t worry. California will always produce my favorite export — crazy tales of government spending run amok. Maybe my next column will be about how California’s solar subsidies are so generous and its solar mandates so onerous that the state has built enough solar power that utilities have to pay people to use it.

That’s almost as crazy as a $7 million shower.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com