A Broken System That Spends Too Much and Solves Too Little

I’ve spent my career building businesses—companies where every dollar had to make sense. If it didn’t deliver value, we adjusted. If the model didn’t work, we rebuilt it. That’s just basic accountability. So it’s been incredibly frustrating to watch the public sector spend tens of billions on homelessness with almost nothing to show for it. You don’t need an MBA to realize something’s wrong when California spends $24 billion over five years on homelessness—and the numbers go up, not down.

The system is broken. Not because people don’t care. Not because we don’t have resources. But because we’re spending without a clear strategy, without measurable outcomes, and without holding anyone accountable for failure. We don’t have a money problem—we have a thinking problem.

If the same financial waste happened inside a private company, the board would call an emergency meeting and heads would roll. In the public space, too often, failure gets covered by another press release and another billion-dollar promise.

Costing More to Do Less

Let’s look at the numbers. It currently costs more than $35,000 per year to keep one person homeless in places like California. That number includes ER visits, temporary shelters, emergency detox programs, police intervention, court costs, and more. It’s a revolving door of short-term fixes and reactive services that treat symptoms but never the underlying problem.

Compare that to the approach we’re building at Joshua’s. Our full two-year program—which includes medical detox, addiction treatment, life skills training, job support, and affordable housing—comes in at just $17,528 per participant. That’s not per year. That’s the full cost for two years of real, lasting intervention.

Think about that. We can help someone go from sleeping in a tent and cycling through jail and the ER… to sober, employed, and housed—for less than half of what we currently pay to let them stay homeless. It’s not just smarter economics. It’s the kind of math that saves lives.

Why We Keep Missing the Mark

So why haven’t we changed the model? Because too many of our policies are built on ideology and optics, not results. We chase politically popular ideas—like “housing first”—without asking whether they actually work in complex cases. The reality is that most chronically homeless individuals are not just in need of shelter. They’re struggling with addiction, untreated mental illness, or both. And if you give someone housing but don’t address the core issue that put them on the street, you’ve bought time—not a solution.

We’ve designed a system that rewards activity, not outcomes. Agencies get funding because they exist, not because they succeed. Nonprofits receive grants for counting beds, not transforming lives. And in many cases, the very people tasked with managing the money have never spent time listening to those living on the street, let alone tried to help them out of it.

That’s where the business mindset matters. In business, results matter. Cost-efficiency matters. And human dignity can’t be an afterthought. That’s what drives our work at Joshua’s—an urgent desire to fix the model and do more with the dollars already in the system.

Investment, Not Charity

One of the things I talk about often is that this isn’t just a social issue—it’s an economic opportunity. Every time we help someone get off the street and back on their feet, we’re not just doing the right thing morally—we’re strengthening our communities, our workforce, and our economy.

It’s easy to see homeless individuals as burdens. But many of them were functioning members of society before they fell into crisis. Addiction doesn’t discriminate. Mental illness doesn’t check your résumé. If we can stabilize and restore people, we get back contributors—people who pay taxes, work jobs, and support their families. That’s a return worth investing in.

We have to stop seeing these programs as charity. This is economic recovery. This is rebuilding human capital. And it’s one of the smartest, most cost-effective things we can do with our public funds—if we do it right.

What Joshua’s Is Doing Differently

At Joshua’s, we took a different path. We reverse-engineered the system based on actual needs, not theory. We built in medical detox and psychiatric care from the start. We created paths to employment with businesses that are ready to hire people who’ve done the work to get clean. We structured affordable housing that doesn’t require $800,000 per unit to build. And we did it all with the mindset of running a high-impact, low-waste operation.

We’re proving that with the right structure, it’s possible to change lives without bankrupting cities or dragging programs through endless bureaucracy. And we’re doing it for less than what most cities spend just to study the problem.

The Road Ahead

Change is coming, slowly. I’m starting to see signs that some state and federal programs are shifting their focus toward more integrated solutions. There’s more talk about recovery, more interest in accountability, and more openness to working with private-sector partners. That’s a good thing—and it validates what we’re building.

But we can’t wait for systems to fix themselves. That’s why we’re moving forward with Joshua’s, starting in California and then expanding to New York and beyond. We’re showing that smart money, targeted well, can solve even the most entrenched problems.

People often ask me why I care so much about this issue. I didn’t grow up on the streets. I’ve been fortunate in business. But I believe deeply in the idea that everyone deserves a shot at redemption. And if we’re spending billions anyway, we owe it to every taxpayer—and every person sleeping outside tonight—to make sure we’re doing something that actually works.

The economics of homelessness are not hard to understand. What’s hard is having the courage to admit we’ve been doing it wrong, and the discipline to build something better.

That’s what we’re doing now. And I believe—with the right partners, the right model, and the right heart—we can change the future. One life, and one smart dollar, at a time.