massive spending on temporary housing

NOLA.com: Times-Picayune Breaking News Weblog

More than $1 billion has been approved for temporary housing assistance to residents whose homes were damaged in the storm since Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana three weeks ago, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the State of Louisiana. Assistance is in the form of grants for temporary housing for minor repairs to make a home safe and habitable.

To date, 818,253 Louisianans have applied for state and federal disaster assistance by calling the toll-free registration line…

Let’s see, at $200,000 each, $1 billion should be able to buy 5 x 10^4 or 50,000 permanent houses. And for our $1 billion spent so far we have received exactly how many permanent houses? Let’s say we are boing to wind up needing 500,000 new houses … that’s a sparkly $10 billion tab.

Or, turning it around, call it an even million persons in the gulf area in need of temporary housing assistance .. $1 billion is enough to buy one million people $1000 in rent for one month. Ouch.

It’s cheaper to build than to rent …

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