The strange & dubious idea of “quality over quantity” in meeting housing needs

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On NPR, Pam Fessler & Nathan Rott report on new “high end” buildings for formerly homeless people, one a spectacular 14-story modernist composition near NPR’s Washington headquarters: “Sanctuary, Not Just Shelter: A New Type Of Housing For The Homeless.”

To me it’s a intriguing question, why this longstanding pattern of “quality over quantity,” as the reporters put it? that is, the common pattern in homeless rehousing projects around the country, of building very expensive, high-amenity housing for a small fraction of the needy, while often there is nothing but squalor & criminalization on the streets for the vast majority.

For the $16M spent on Los Angeles’ Palo Verdes project discussed in article, for 60 units ($265k/ea), many thousands of simple, safe dwellings could have been built for LA’s huge homeless population. It’s hard for me to imagine the latter wouldn’t be far more benefit to the homeless, or even for reducing costs of city services by giving that many people greater safety and stability.

I have theories but not conclusions about how this strange & appalling outcome occurs. For one, I believe it is about the conventional construction/real-estate sector operating as beneficiary of and lobby for such building projects, and also working hard to defend very high-cost norms/requirements of what is considered legitimate housing, and shunning or prohibiting alternatives. This, at great expense to many of us whose needs are not met or not met affordably; and at devastating expense to 100,000s of people (600,000 per night, article estimates), in a hugely wealthy nation, who are literally left out in the cold, excluded from by even minimal shelter or the right to shelter themselves.