New York Citys latest homelessness figures reveal a staggering level of taxpayer spending with remarkably little to show in terms of real progress.
According to Gateway Pundit, a new state report shows that New York City spent roughly $81,000 per person on homeless services last year amounting to a whopping $368 million in total bills, a shocking new state report found. The comptrollers office further noted that spending on the Department of Homeless Services Street Homeless Solutions division has more than tripled in just six years, jumping from $102 million in 2019 or about $28,000 per unsheltered homeless person, according to the report from the state comptrollers office.
The cost per person is now roughly equivalent to the citys median household income as of the 2024 US Census $81,228 annually, meaning the city is effectively spending what a typical family earns each year on each individual living on the streets. Yet despite this extraordinary outlay, the number of unsheltered homeless has risen, not fallen, under progressive leadership.
Unsheltered homeless people constitute those living regularly on the streets, compared to those who are in some kind of affordable housing or long-term shelter system, the report explains, underscoring that this is the most visible and vulnerable segment of the homeless population. The comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, found that The Big Apples unsheltered homeless population increased by 26% over the same timeframe, climbing from about 3,588 unsheltered homeless people in the 2019 fiscal year to 4,505 in the fiscal year 2025.
These numbers raise obvious questions for taxpayers: Why are there still homeless people in New York City? How does this city spend this kind of money and still have a homeless problem? Many conservatives would argue that a direct stipend would it not have been better to just give $81,000 to each homeless person on the condition that they get off the street? might have produced better outcomes than feeding an ever-expanding bureaucracy.
One of the problems with homelessness in American cities is that there are too many people making a lot of money solving the problem, which never gets solved and only seems to grow. Comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla recently highlighted this dynamic in Los Angeles, noting that when his friend Dr. Drew Pinsky offered his services as an addiction specialist -for free- to the city of Los Angeles, the woke members of the city council turned him down.
This problem will never be solved with leftists in charge of cities. They do not want it solved, the critique continues, pointing to a system where homelessness has effectively become an industry. As long as activist bureaucracies, consultants, and nonprofit contractors profit from managing rather than ending the crisis, there is no incentive to fix the problem, and taxpayers in Democrat-run cities like New York will keep paying more while getting less.
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