I recently moved to Austin where homelessness is a serious problem despite the existence of several homelessness-dedicated nonprofits that have executives making $200k per year (more than twice the median Austin household income).

The current fad in the homelessness industrial complex is to have local governments raise taxes to pay nonprofits to build facilities to support homeless individuals. Sometimes those facilities are essentially tiny homes while other times they may simply provide meals, showers, and possibly other services. This approach has two main problems:

1. In almost all cases the facilities end up being wildly more expensive than comparable facilites bought or rented as part of the private market. For example, Portland taxpayers spent $40,000 - $64,000 per year per homeless person who stayed at the Safe Rest Villages temporary housing facility when the average cost to rent a one bedroom apartment in Portland was less than $18,000 per year.
2. These facilities are usually made available to ALL homeless individuals, including both law-abiding families with children who have fallen on hard times as well as violent drug addicts. As a result, women who are homeless in order to escape domestic violence as well as kids who are homeless end up more frequently as victims when using these sort of facilities.

Clearly we need a better model.

When I was a freshman in college, I lived in a dorm room with 3 other guys and less than 100 square feet per person (including bathroom square footage). It was unglamorous, but a similar shared bed arrangement would likely rent for less than $500 per person per month in Austin today. I lived off canned black beans and ramen at the time, so if you add the cost of utilities and food the monthly cost of such a living arrangement would probably be around $750/mo. That is what I propose we make available to homeless individuals: free shared freshman dorm style living arrangements for $9,000 per year. It will not be glamorous, but it will be safe.

The homeless dorms will be monitored by security cameras that are monitored 24/7 by AI. ANY drug dealing, criminal drug possession, or violence will be immediately prosecuted and that individual moved to jail while they await trial. That will protect the non-criminal homeless population. In 2024, the Federal Bureau of Prisons published data showing the average cost of housing a minimum security prisoner was $55,122.30 per year. That’s about the same cost of operation as the fancy tiny homes for homeless individuals that are currently in vogue with many cities in the U.S. However, all a minority of homeless individuals will ever end up in prison. Most (all of the noncriminal ones) will be housed in the dorms.

Spending $9k per year per homeless person is an actually bearable societal cost (unlike the current approach). There are less than 3,500 homeless individuals in Austin as of 2025. The cost of operating dorms for them would be about $31.5 million per year. That’s a lot of money, but it is less than a third of the roughly $100+ million that Austin currently spends trying to combat homelessness.

It would also likely pay for itself through higher sales and property tax revenue. With the dorms in place, we could humanely enforce no trespassing and no encampment laws because homeless individuals would have an alternative place to go (the dorm). With homeless individuals off the streets, property values would rise (increasing property tax revenue). Sales tax from restaurants and shops downtown would likely increase as well once customers could safely visit those establishments without fear of being assaulted by a violent homeless individual.

Unfortunately, this idea, which would make both homeless and homed individuals safer and reduce costs to taxpayers, will never be adopted as long as our laws continue to allow greedy, virtue-signalling nonprofit operators to extort citizens for tax money to fund their own salaries and benefits.