Set aside $50 billion for homeless hotels | Letter to the editor

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Congress recently passed a bill to offer an additional $40 billion of military aid to Ukraine.

Our total “gift” to the country’s war effort is something like $54 billion. This is a noble and necessary act that distinguishes our country from many others: Where there is dire need and desperation, we are there. 

Or are we?

I fail to understand how our country has made so little progress on dealing with the homeless in our cities. 

Wherever Congress found $50-plus billion for Ukraine, couldn’t it find that money for the homeless? I’m thinking how far $50 billion would go in buying up hotels in cities and making them available for homeless tent dwellers. Besides proving safe, clean, comfortable housing, the hotels could be staffed on the ground floor with city service offices that offered job search and training opportunities, medical (physical and mental) evaluations and aid, used clothing shops, communal meals. Some of the homeless could even help run the hotels.

Not everyone would qualify for the rooms (drug dealers, criminals, etc.), but these hotels would make a real dent in the homeless population. Moreover, they would suggest that our country is there to solve problems anywhere, even at home.

John Delaney
PORT TOWNSENd