- At $100,000 per unit — again, a sanguine estimate — Newsom can buy 6,000 hotel rooms with the money he plans to use from the feds. Assuming local governments can shelter one person per room, that amounts to about 5.5% of California’s unsheltered homeless population.
No one in the Newsom administration believes their proposal will immediately and single-handedly solve California’s homelessness crisis, especially as a recession-induced eviction wave threatens to spill more low-income Californians into cars, shelters, and the streets.
But converting motels, as expensive and time-consuming as it can be, is still significantly cheaper than building supportive housing from scratch. Ramirez estimates that when all is said and done, the Econo Lodge conversion in Anaheim will cost about $363,000 per unit. In Los Angeles, an audit last year found homeless housing cost $600,000 to build, more than the average price of single-family-home outside California.
Democratic leaders in the state Legislature and Newsom are currently negotiating details of the Project Roomkey plan as part of broader negotiations over the state budget. The budget must be passed by June 15.