According to the comptroller, New York City spent an eye-popping $81,000 per person on services for the homeless last year.
This leads to some obvious questions. 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?
Also, would it not have been better to just give $81,000 to each homeless person on the condition that they get off the street? Couldn’t that have worked better in the end?
The New York Post reports:
NYC spent roughly $81K per person on homeless services last year: comptroller
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.
Spending on the city’s Department of Homeless Services’ “Street Homeless Solutions” division more than tripled over the last six years, from $102 million in 2019 — or about $28,000 per “unsheltered homeless person,” according to the report from the state comptroller’s office.
The cost per person was roughly equivalent to the city’s median household income as of the 2024 US Census — $81,228 annually.
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 Big Apple’s unsheltered homeless population increased by 26% over the same timeframe, the report released by Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli found.
About 3,588 unsheltered homeless people were reported in the 2019 fiscal year, while 4,505 were reported in the fiscal year 2025.
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 talked about this problem and although he was referring to Los Angeles, the problem is exactly the same. He notes 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. Watch:
This is EXACTLY why Los Angeles doesn’t take its homeless crisis seriously. @adamcarolla 🎯🎯🎯 pic.twitter.com/ZbsSfHggTX
— The Adam Carolla Show (@AdamCarollaShow) March 16, 2026
This problem will never be solved with leftists in charge of cities. They do not want it solved. Too many people are making a living from it, because it has been turned into an industry. There is no incentive to fix the problem.
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