For it or against it, the numbers speak for themselves.
ok first of all, I’m really bad at math… but i just spent an hour doing the math from the numbers that this article provided… I think it’s right but please feel free to correct it or check it. Math is NOT my strong point, i failed it really really badly through out school. But here are my findings….
A friend of mine who camped out at Occupy Vancouver from the begining posted an interested news article on his face book wall.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Occupy+Vancouver+disputes+cost+tent+city+figures/5893011/story.html
After I read that it was only costing the city $1000 a day to maintain the encampment and with the other numbers provided in the article I was like…. “hey wait a tic…. it seems to me that Occupy Vancouver was saving WAY more money then it was costing.”
I was curious to know exactly how much it was saving per day, and how much longer it would have taken to pay off the city’s price tag they say was $1,000,000. Even though I’m bad at math, I took a stab at it so here is what I found.
Taking all the numbers from the Vancouver Sun article:
In 38 days (the article says both 37 and 38 days so i went with 38)
Occupy Vancouver saved the city:
$672,000 in health care
$129,500 food
$92,130 in housing
Total Savings of: $893630 in 38 days
$893630 / 38 = Daily Savings
OR
You divide each of those numbers by 38 and here are your daily average savings for each.
Heath Care: $17684.21
Food: $3407.89
House: $2424.47
Add them all up and… Occupy Vancouver was saving the city $23516.57 per day
After the initial ‘over reaction’ cost in the first few days the city estimated that Occupy Vancouver was settling out at about $1000 per day to monitor.
So given the city estimated that Occupy Vancouver cost about 1 million dollars over all to the city by the time it ended, how much did it really cost the city after all the money Occupy Vancouver saved the city with it’s free and donated services?
$1,000,000 costs
- $ 893,630 savings
= $ 106,370 left over
So Seeing that Occupy Vancouver was saving $23516.57 per day the math would be something like:
$106,370 divided by $23516.57 = number of days to pay off debt. Also not forgetting the $1000 per day cost.
Which means it would take
5 more days to break even (rounded)
This is the part when you realize that the city made the decision to end the encampment only days before it would start saving the city money…
After that Occupy Vancouver would be saving the city $23516.57 per day minus $1000 per day city monitoring costs, equalling:
$22516.57 per day in city savings…
This is that part where you go “holy $%#@….”
Also if a dummy at math like me can figure this out why didn’t city hall?….. Or did they?
Why did they shut it down? Was it really because of a silly Christmas parade route? Or did the powers-that-be not like the message it was sending and the idea of people getting free stuff not provided by the city itself but instead by it’s people. Think about it…. this rag tag tent city was actually doing a better job taking care of the homeless in Vancouver in a month then the city itself has done in years (and with better results). also had the city not spent the ‘over reaction’ money in the first place, Occupy Vancouver would have saved the city even more money AND faster from the start.
Then finally imagine if the city had -helped- occupy Vancouver.
Wow… just wow.
