Los Angeles Spent $2.4 Billion on Homelessness and Couldn't Track a Cent of It
Are big problems more difficult to solve?
Big problems aren't unsolvable because of their size, argues Paul Taylor — they become unsolvable because of the scaffolding we build around them. Los Angeles's Skid Row is his case study: a 1975 urban management plan mutated into a permanent "homelessness industry," where a $1.2 billion housing bond produced units costing up to $837,000 and an agency that couldn't account for $2.4 billion in spending. Taylor's answer is to break problems into human-sized chunks, and he reports on Bromford's move to 121 semi-autonomous teams.
When a problem gets big enough, the ecosystem of providers, auditors, and bureaucracies becomes part of the problem. The crisis isn't solved—it just gets permanently institutionalised.