Home California Citizens Again is Now Crowdfunding to Build a City for America’s Chronic Homeless

Citizens Again is Now Crowdfunding to Build a City for America’s Chronic Homeless

by ECT

After 2 1/2 years in development, Citizens Again announces its project to build a single, supportive living environment for America’s entire chronic homeless adult population. It will be a secure, all-inclusive, private city, built from the ground up, with all the amenities and services necessary for a 150,000 high-needs population.

Plans for the 300-acre City include high-density housing, hospital and full healthcare, food services, activities, entertainment, life skills enrichment, on-site jobs and training, and more. Early cost estimates to build the City to be approximately $3B (2019 dollars).

11 Years Instead of 200

“For decades, politicians have worked to ‘end homelessness’ by repeating the same efforts of creating small shelters in cities across America to house the chronic homeless,” said Duane Nason, founder of Citizens Again. “Based on the government’s placement rate from the last ten years, it will take close to 200 years to create enough shelters to house the 90,000 unsheltered chronic homeless adults. Nobody wants to wait that long. With Citizens Again, it will take about 11 years to build the city, with a target open date of 2031.”

“To solve the problems the chronic homeless cause society, we must first solve their problems,” said Nason. “But this can’t be done with today’s fractured efforts. It needs to be exponentially more. And the only way to build a complete solution is to build a complete city.”

Dorm Room Dorm rooms are similar concepts to college dorm rooms and sleeping rooms in long-distance passenger trains: they’re a safe, comfortable place to sleep and rest. To minimize sleep disruptions, rooms will have blackout shades, noise-proofing walls and doors, and white-noise makers to drown out other disturbances. Bunk beds are configurable for single, double, and triple occupancy. Communal bathroom facilities with private showers and fresh linens are available in every wing, on every floor, of every building.

How it Will Work
​Qualified citizens will choose to live in the City and are free to leave at any time. Some might want to stay forever. Others might just need a chance to get back on their feet to reenter society.

For those that wish to better themselves, or prepare to reenter society, the City will provide counseling and therapy, life skills training, educational services, job training, reentry support services, and more. Every effort will go into creating a place they’ll want to move to and enjoy living at.

93% Cost Savings
​In 2018, the federal government spent $6.1 billion on the homeless. About 78% of that was spent on the chronic homeless, even though they are only 18% of the entire homeless population. The total budget has increased an average of 7% each year, from 2009 to 2018.

Most of that spending goes towards addressing the symptoms of homelessness: cleaning up encampments, sterilization of public spaces, hazmat cleanups, salaries for emergency responders, visits to the ER and stays in hospitals, and more.

But with the City, billions of taxpayer dollars can be saved annually by removing those costs as well as the cost savings from economies of scale being reached by having a single, large-scale solution. For example:

•   Volume discounts (food, clothes, building materials, etc.)
•   Buying affordable land (1 lot vs. 4,000 lots across America)
•   Dedicated medical team (vs. costs from ambulances, ERs, and private hospitals)
•   Consolidated staff (1 central team vs. spread across America)
•   Utilize technology to increase efficiency (security, access, etc.)
•   And so much more

Calculations indicate economies of scale can achieve a 93% reduction of what is spent on each unsheltered chronic homeless adult. This results in annual expenditure totals of $455M (based on 100k population), and with cost offsets from manufacturing and service profits, this could drop to $296M per year. With offsets, this equates to per capita rates of $3,000 per year in the City vs. $80,000 with unsheltered chronic homeless.

Storage Lockers
On-site storage lockers managed by City staff will securely store all citizen possessions, making them available when/if citizens choose to leave the City. The City will clean and sterilize all items before placed into storage.

Funding
​Citizens Again has been self-funded by the founder, and will now turn to crowdfunding to raise funds to create the necessary items to obtain philanthropic and government financial support to continue this project to the future phases. The GoFundMe campaign is at https://www.gofundme.com/citizensagain.

“I know this journey won’t be easy; nothing worthwhile in life ever is,” said Nason. “But if those that can help choose to do so, then together, we can help the chronic homeless become citizens again.”

Please visit http://www.citizensagain.com to learn more about the crisis, solution, City amenities and facilities, cost estimates, project phases and timeline, conceptual renderings, the 20 Building Blocks of Humanity, and much more.

About Citizens Again
​Citizens Again is a project to build a single, supportive living environment for America’s entire chronic homeless population. Its mission is to provide monumental help to restore dignity for all those affected by chronic homelessness. Located in Folsom, CA, the company was founded by Duane Nason in May 2017, and publicly launched in December 2019.

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6 comments

Dr. Jellyfinger Dec 20, 2019 - 4:59 pm

Assuming they can be rounded up and forced to go there, how are you going to keep them in without a prison fence (barbed wire or razor wire) to prevent them from leaving to buy booze and dope?

Grace Wilson Dec 20, 2019 - 6:04 pm

One of the entities causing this affordable housing shortage and high cost of living is the tech industry located here. It is because of their highly paid employees that greedy landlords have raised the cost of housing so high that only those earning such sums can live here. Oakand has now surpassed high housing costs which existed in San José.

Also, raising entry level salaries has put a lot of companies out of business, has caused stores to raise their prices, landlords to raise the rents and the employees STILL do not make a living wage. They’re back to square one!

Another one which has contributed to this problem is AMAZON …. which has now destroyed the retail business where many people were employed!

It is time that those businesses ponied up to help solve the problems THEY created. I do not buy anything from AMAZON nor do many others.

Dr. Jellyfinger Dec 22, 2019 - 6:05 pm

You live where you can afford to live…. don’t blame businesses that employ people! That’s ridiculous. The homeless out here just stay because idiots give them money & handouts…… and you know what happens when you give a mouse a cookie!

Now this Citizens Again group wants to give them a whole friggin city? and who’s backyard will that be built in?

Dawn Dec 28, 2019 - 8:28 pm

Those cities will be built on government land some distance from major cities …….. they will not be close to any of us and they will be self-contained.

Lock up the criminals like they deserve! Dec 21, 2019 - 4:17 am

Dumbest shit ever!! Looks like Exactly like prison. If California wasnt such a liberal , left run piece of shit state,these homeless turds would be in prison.
Prop 47 and liberal policies have allowed these zombies to victimize the good people who work, pay taxes and dont commit crimes.
Just lock these criminals up !!

Lori Raider Dec 28, 2019 - 8:33 pm

If the authorities put the homeless in prison, then we the taxpayers will still have to pay for their keep. I say send those who were shipped here via Greyhound back to their own states and those states deal with their people. San Francisco has the HOMEWARD BOUND program which seems to be working.

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