TimTalks: Ending Homelessness by 2030

So we're going to talk about homelessness today. There are about 600,000 people that are homeless in the US every day today. Most of those people end up living in tents. If you live in a tent, you have a less than 5% chance of ever getting housed. It's a one way trip. There's a new company called palletshelter.com but if you move into a pallet shelter community, these are hard sided tents, much more comfortable in a community. There's typically around 100 units per community. These guys have a 75 to 95% success rate at getting folks placed within one year. So less than 5% if you move into a tent, 75 to 95% if you move into a pallet shelter community. The business model for this is really great. So these communities sit on public land, same land that's typically used on an ad hoc basis for tent communities. So the land is effectively free. The local NonProfit, Catholic Charities, etc. Will do the management of the community. Other nonprofits bring food, shower, trucks, etc. So everything that the nonprofits already do to try to help people in tents, they can do in a pallet shelter community much more effectively and safer. So the only thing you need is the funding for a hundred of these units. They cost about 6k each is all. And the business model is awesome. Each pallet shelter generates about $1,500 in profit for the manufacturer, palletshelter.com and it only costs them about 750 for the sales and marketing to sell each unit. So they spend 750. Sell a unit makes 1,500 in profit on the 6k they charge. So then they can turn around and self fund selling the next two units. So it's a great business model. The company's growing really quickly. So they went from zero to now. There's 67 communities using pallet shelter. What's interesting is if you take 600,000 homeless at 100 units per community, you need 6,000 pallet shelter communities around the US and nobody will ever have to live in a tent again. Well, it's kind of interesting. If you take 6,000 pallet shelter communities times 6K, that's only $3.6 billion. This is far less than we spend in one year homelessness. But yet this number is going up dramatically today because people move into a tent and they never get out. And so life spirals down ever more desperately if you end up in a tent. If you end up in a pallet shelter community instead, you immediately get life back on track, you're permanently housed within a year. So all we need to do is ramp up the number of units, the number of communities, from 67 communities to keep going up this curve to 6,000 communities, and homelessness will be over in the U.S. what's fascinating is as soon as you hit 6,000 communities, you have a lot more people getting placed than coming into these communities. So you can actually start to ramp down the number of communities and the number of pallets you need per community. So it all peaks at 6000 when we get to 6000, when we grow from 67 to 6000. So it's just 100x growth pallet shelters already growing 2 to 3x a year as it is. But 6000 times 100 units is 600,000 that needs to be raised by the local communities. But one large funder could easily fund this entire amount and make it such that the local nonprofits, who have everything they need other than these pallet shelters, don't have to come up with 600k for each community. Now, it's interesting. 600k is about what you would spend to do one or two permanent housing units, and you can house 100 people a year, and then you house them for many, many, many years in that same unit. So the leverage on this is amazing. 6000 will handle one or more people a year. A family, indeed a whole family can live in them. So think about 6,000 funding four to five people a year times 10 years. It's almost zero per family helped by funding the 6K. So if you know a Lauren Powell Jobs or a Melinda Gates or a Mackenzie Bezos or anybody else that is in the Giving Pledge, this would be a very small amount of money for any of those folks, and it would permanently end homelessness in America.