Mishalak's Alt Headline: Homeless Youth Beds Cost $30K Per Year in NYC!

[mishalak]

The bare headline stunned me, not because $7M dollars was being cut from Homeless Youth Services by Mayor Bloomberg, but because that only represented 160 beds. I quickly did some math and said, "Forty Three Grand a year for a bed in a shelter? That cannot be right." Doing a further search online I find in The Village Voice that the estimated cost is about 30 Grand per year. Better, but still, why is it so much? Is it the NIMBYism of people outside actual downtown areas that forces shelters to use expensive real estate? Is it costs like counselors that make it so high? Obviously just providing shelter is not enough, but gosh, that is a lot of money.

Or at lest it seems like a lot of money to someone who owns a house "in the wilds" of Colorado. It is also why I live here rather than elsewhere. Here I can have all the urban I want and actually own a piece of it rather than being paying more to rent a room in San Francisco. Which I did years ago and I am probably never going back.