$4 Mil To House 12 Homeless People

Last Updated: Wed, 09/07/2011 - 5:04pm

In an example of how government at every level wastes tax dollars, one U.S. county is spending around $4 million in combined federal and local funds to house a dozen homeless people in an affluent community.

That translates into more than $330,000 per person, which means that Uncle Sam might as well buy them each their own, fully furnished house. After all, the median single-family home in the U.S. costs around $172,000 so the government could also throw in a few years worth of utility bills and even groceries.

Instead officials in Bethesda Maryland will spend the money to operate a three-story apartment building, operated by the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission, that will house 12 homeless adults. The facility will have six studio and six one-bedroom apartments as well as a gym and computer center, according to the local newspaper (Washington Examiner) that exposed the costly project this week.

A chunk of the money—$1 million—will come from President Obama’s fraud-infested stimulus, which has proven to be a disastrous waste of public funds. Judicial Watch has reported on the many scandals involving the president’s $787 billion plan to jumpstart the economy and put Americans back to work. Much of the money has gone to companies that have cheated the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and a series of wasteful projects.

Last summer a scathing U.S. Senate report revealed that tens of millions of stimulus dollars went to frivolous projects like international ant research, to study why monkeys react negatively to inequity and a “tunnel to nowhere” in Pennsylvania. The same probe discovered that recovery funds also bought state-of-the-art cell phones for low-income smokers trying to quit, fancy digital music players for high school students in one state and advertising to promote the stimulus.

What’s another million so homeless folks can live in an upscale neighborhood? Besides the stimulus cash, Montgomery County’s new homeless digs are being financed by an additional $944,829 in county housing funds and $2.1 million in state low-income housing tax credits.