San Diego blasted for $157M plan to buy 3 hotels to house homeless

The San Diego Housing Commission is under fire over plans to purchase and convert three hotels into housing for homeless that comes with a price tag of $400,000 per room.

Critics of the plan argue its a waste of taxpayer money that fails to address the root causes of homelessness.

“California’s got about a third of the homeless of the entire country. And we keep just throwing more and more dollars at this problem without really getting to the root cause of mental health or alcohol abuse or drug abuse,” San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond said on “Fox & Friends” Friday.

“Spending all this $157 million on more rooms doing the same thing and it’s causing the same problem, that is fruitless,” he added.

The commission last week voted unanimously to move forward with the proposal to buy three Extended Stay America Hotels with 412 apartment-style units for $157.8 million, or roughly $383,192 per unit, according to local reports.

In San Diego County, there were an estimated 8,500 homeless people in 2022 — up an alarming 10% since 2022, according to data from the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.

While San Diego and other California cities attempt to grapple with the crisis, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last month that he plans to spend $30 million to build 1,200 tiny homes to shelter a tiny fraction of the roughly 170,000 people homeless in the Golden State.

San Diego is set to receive about 150 of the homes, Fox News reported.

Brian Jones, the Republican leader of the state Senate, called the plan a “band aid on a crisis that is out of control,” according to Fox.

Since taking office in 2019, Newsom has signed off on more than $22.3 billion in new spending on housing and homelessness programs — but critics like Desmond have yet to see any results for all the money the city and state keeps spending.

“We just keep getting more and more homeless people on our streets. Our numbers are going up. They’re not going down. In the past three years, the state of California has spent $10 billion on homeless and trying to fix the homeless problem, the homeless solution. We’re just caught in this never-ending cycle,” Desmond said.

He said he believes the money should instead be invested in mental health and drug addiction issues.

“That’s what people really need to get into, is treatment, not just the hotel room where they can continue to use and continue in the bad habits…that got them homeless in the first place,” Desmond told Fox hosts.

 Homeless advocate Michael McConnell told FOX 5 last week that there are already hundreds of people ready to fill the hotel units as soon as possible.

“If we did this in every area of the city, you can just imagine the just incredible difference it would make, certainly for the folks who need to unit, but for the whole community to have so many folks off of our streets doing so much better,” he added.

Residents would not be staying in the housing for free.

“The people who are going to be staying here, they’re going to have to pay 30% of any income that they get,” McConnell said.