I think the other problem is that the more one city spends to "fix" its homeless problems, the more other areas ship their homeless to these cities with more resources. It's certainly the case in Texas, where many smaller cities and rural areas give homeless people a one-way bus ticket to Austin, Dallas or San Antonio.
Another issue is the level of government providing the solution. If one town gives all homeless people a place to live, that could act to attract homeless people from other towns. So the burden of fixing a whole region's homeless problem falls on one town.
Almost all the problems you've listed are implementation issues with bus routes. Adding more buses, stops, and/or express routes is a slam dunk compared to what you describe. I agree on your vision, but until it happens it seems unreasonable to dismiss attempts to help the homeless like the one Austin is taking.
And how exactly would you solve the root problem of _other cities_ sending their homeless populations to those areas? Make it more miserable to be homeless there so they are forced to go somewhere else?
The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area.
The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But that doesn't solve the actual problem.
Homelessness is a systemic problem that can only be meaningly addressed in a humane way by the federal government.
Your city (and country) does not need to have a massive homeless problem. This is something the city and state government can fix. Housing, mental health support, drug treatment support and better community policing are all possible, and proven to work.
How to get the city and state (and national) governments to fix this problem is another issue.
I think that's the bigger picture though... Any area that figures out homelessness doesn't just have to solve it for their community, but for every community on a 10 hour bus ride.
The city I live in has good policies regarding helping homelessness. The problem, is that every city around us, including Indianapolis, ships their homeless here. It is a classic tragedy of the commons. And any solution that doesn't account for the game theory applications is doomed to fail for those very reason.
homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city dwellers.
We have to break out of the stereotype that homelessness is a city problem. It isn't. Far from it.
Homelessness is more obvious in cities because there are fewer places for homeless people to be. But there are plenty of homeless people camped out in rural and suburban towns, if you know what to look for.
I recently lived in a snooty city suburb where most of the homes cost from $600,000 to $10 million, and guess what — the drainage tunnels beneath the Home Depot, the maintenance underpasses in the parks, the undeveloped wooded lots were all full of homeless people.
Promulgating the notion that homelessness is a city problem is what allows suburban and rural politicians to cut funding for homeless services because "it doesn't affect my constituents."
San Diego, for example, is reputed to keep itself free of homeless people by giving them a bus ticket out of town, and I've heard the same thing about other jurisdictions. And so they end up here.
Ah, yes, the time-tested principle of solving problems by pushing them off onto someone else. Didn't work so well for me as a kid when I tried to clean my room by piling all the crap in a different room, but I guess it's okay for cities to do it.
Of course, the problem isn't having poor or mentally ill people living on the streets, the problem is that middle-class people might have to see the homeless which is obviously unacceptable.
There are basically two types of homeless people. Those who are healthy enough to work but cannot keep up with expenses and those who have serious enough issues that they can't support themselves.
The first type can be helped by better job opportunities and cheaper housing. All the cheap housing in the world cannot help the latter group because they can't function in society even if you make it that much easier.
We do need a federal (or at least statewide) solution for the latter group, though, because with local control it's too easy to for the "solution" to be giving the homeless person a free bus ticket out of town.
There's a certain amount of self reinforcement in this. Once a person become homeless, it taxes them psychologically, leading to further issues with mental health and substance abuse. There are success stories of the chronic homeless being able to overcome their situation but for the most part the earlier an intervention happens, the greater the chance of success. The truly difficult part in all of this is that we are an individualistic nation that puts high value on freedom, including the freedom to enter into a downward spiral of self destruction.
Freedom of movement also complicates things as those jurisdictions that offer the most (productive or not) are often swamped by those who became homeless elsewhere. We hear a lot about cities dumping their homeless on each other but Megabus can be as cheap as $1.50. The freedom of movement and the low cost of it does more to move the homeless around than any "clean the streets" initiative a city engages in. Homelessness will never be solved at the local level. Though local services can help address the symptoms of homelessness, no local entity has the power to address the root causes nationally.
Homelessness isn't just a city-wide problem, but a national one. National policies regarding drugs, housing, economics, play a huge role in how homelessness in a city turns out. There are also homeless populations that move around to different cities. A city can do a lot to change their own situation, but it feels like there's only so much that can be done on a local level when there are huge higher-level pressures.
There’s nothing a city (or state) can do that will not result in higher and higher expenses from other cities (or states) sending you their homeless. It’s the same problem as providing healthcare (or even just mental healthcare).
In the absence of federal action, the solution thus far has been to use police to harass homeless and keep them moving along or sequestered in certain areas, or to live in suburbs that you need cars to survive in.
Freedom of movement between municipalities makes most attempts at solving homelessness difficult if not impossible. NY simply shipped them out; cities with nice climates and access to welfare see a large influx from elsewhere. The harder a city works to solve the problem, the bigger the problem becomes.
A friend's mother- a chronic drug user who lived off of welfare- moves from state to state as she uses up whatever benefits they offer.
Not all people are in that situation or abuse the system like that, of course, but small countries with tighter borders have a much easier time dealing with a less mobile population of homeless and indigent.
The Feds may not be “to blame”. But it’s hard to see how individual states can solve this problem.
Any program by any state that helps the homeless in a country where you legally cannot create state level borders (and with the homeless you can’t establish residency by definition) would immediately draw homeless people across the country, especially since the homeless strategy in many states is to pay for one way bus tickets to a different state, and quickly overwhelm and undermine what could otherwise have been a successful program.
Any successful program must be funded and implemented at the Federal level.
These cities create the homeless problem by enabling the lifestyle. It's a taboo thing to say but spend enough time in different locations and you learn very quickly that the homeless are shameless opportunists who go wherever they can most leech off society. My entire childhood growing up I never saw a single homeless person despite growing up in an impoverished rural area. It was viciously cold outside in the winter and people were very quick to take advantage of local services and get themselves back to a position where they could afford shelter.
These days I live in Ann Arbor and we have a fairly serious homeless problem (I get harassed on the street nearly every time I walk downtown). The city itself offers excellent resources for the homeless to both survive and "get back on their feet", a situation that has not gone unnoticed by surrounding districts which have literally loaded up vans with homeless people and driven them 40 miles to dump them in Ann Arbor.
The homeless are absolutely a problem, but you're naive if you think anything done to address the problem on a per city basis is going to fix anything. This is a national issue that calls for expanded mental services, more rehabilitation, and strict policing. Anything done on a smaller level will just encourage migration of homeless to take advantage.
EDIT: I'm fine with downvoting, but I do ask that you give me solid factual and evidence based arguments for why my point is wrong. Implying I lack compassion is neither accurate or a useful discussion of how to address this problem, and that's where my interest lies when I make a comment like this.
This is not to be insensitive to the problem, but I don't grasp why we only talk about dealing with homelessness at the city level? Cities are small and surrounded by other cities, it's a terrible level of government to provide any kind of safety net or benefit. These need to come from states (if not the federal government). E.g. why for example should Seattle bear the responsibility of housing 10,000 homeless while it's rich neighbors on the east side can just wipe there hands of it?
Yes, but you have to consider that the homeless aren't fixed to a certain place. A place that's more generous to the homeless will inevitably get more homeless people. Because why wouldn't you go to somewhere that treats you better, rather than the place that treats you like garbage?
This means there's a financial incentive for any given city to treat the homeless like shit. Classic free rider problem; why not let other cities deal with helping them?
If you look at the countries where they do a better job, what you largely see is not a handful of metros doing their part, while other cities and the national government completely shunt the responsibility. The whole country contributes, is at least sort of on the same page. At least, that's been my experience living in Germany and reading about other places.
So in my opinion, what we'd need to see is a federal mandate that doesn't let some cities mooch off of others' charity. But short of Bernie storming the white House and the Dems getting an overwhelming majority in both halves of Congress, it's hard to see that happening.
Anyway, I don't disagree that more liberal cities could do more, but at the same time I don't think the problem is solvable without national involvement.
this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing.
reply