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.
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.
Totally agree. I just like to point out that transit systems do have a relationship with homelessness, but of course they are not suited to completely handle that social problem and there needs to be a more comprehensive approach to address social inequality.
I am homeless and I am permanently disabled with bipolar disorder schizoaffective type.
I want to say first that housing first works. The stress of me being homeless is worse for my mental illness. And I applaud Austin for actually doing something.
Secondly, the biggest mistake they make is that they want to segregate low income people out of society. this is part of the problem. I don’t know if the solution to this, but I know it’s the problem. It makes us feel alienated and lesser. This is the most likely reason why these communities always seem to fail.
Also, putting these far outside of the city takes people away from resources like other people said. I’ll tell you when my depression is bad it’s much much harder for me to take a bus for 45 minutes than it is for me to walk for 10 minutes.
There is no fix for housing because the problem is not housing. It’s financial capitalism and individual greed. I lost my housing because I was kicked out of the studio. I was renting after my lease came up and they listed it as an Airbnb making twice as much then when I was living there. They did not have to do this, they chose to do it.
I'm having some trouble parsing your last sentence, but I think I agree. We need to have programs that tackle homelessness, but asking programs that have other mission statements to bear this burden is asking too much. Tackling homelessness itself is not the job of a transit department; their job is providing clean, safe, and effective transportation.
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.
Homeless is an outcome, not a thing that looks the same from every angle. It’s a feature not a bug and the steps that lead to it need to be addressed for a meaningful fix. Money and commitment needs a plan and a clue. The idea that you can just add more physical buildings and hey presto is bunk. I have spent two decades of my life volunteering to help and I too started thinking about buildings and homes, but that isn’t the real problem.
It's really multiple problems at once. In fact I'd argue the homeless problem is a symptom of a larger problem, which is the economic death of that area. The core problem is that it's too big to be solved effectively in the short term, by a single leader or law, so this will have to play out over the long term.
Still, one aspect of this does seem easily solved: in Westfield's case, having a bigger police presence. If they had to name a reason why they went out of business, it would be that, not enough police & too much crime. That seems like part of the problem: the police are not responsive, and since police performance is kind of a thing that straddles right/left divisions & powerful constituencies, it's not like one person can easily solve it. There are laws on the books to stop crime, and the DA can do something after suspects are caught, but if the police are missing in action at the places where crimes are happening, not investigating and not making arrests, they will continue.
The larger problem is the death of downtown due to: crime, falling tourism, and the rise of remote work. I personally don't think pushing on the 'crime' lever - especially not by just installing another DA - will be enough to stop it. The problem of remote work leading to falling vacancy rates, leading to an empty downtown, leading to a rising crime and homelessness problem, hasn't been addressed by any of the contemplated solutions, not seriously imho.
Long term, I think downtown will need to be rezoned to be more residential, and the combination of more foot traffic (mostly that) supporting more businesses, and the people & businesses softening the edges of the crime & homelessness problem, will eventually improve the situation. But turning office space into residential space is a huge ask, and even today many people will say it's impossible. It will be years until those downtown office space owners accept this, years more before City Hall can find acceptable ways to rezone that area, more years for the work to be completed, and still more years before people start moving in.
So we might see a turnaround starting in, say, a decade. I wouldn't hope for too much until then.
I'm saying that an approach that covers an area large enough that you cannot easily traverse it has a chance of working, and smaller programs will always have to contend with the "importing more homeless" problem. IMO, that would have to be the entire country - getting a greyhound from Las Vegas to Los Angeles isn't out of reach, for example. But a statewide approach would still be less affected by this than a citywide one, which itself would be better than something on the scale of a neighborhood.
And even then, that's to have a chance. I don't think that "give a ton of benefits to the homeless" is a surefire solution to reducing homelessness. The Utah approach (fix the "homeless" part by giving them a home, then fix everything else) might work, but it requires a bit more societal trust than a lot of the country has.
I can almost guarantee you that other people in or around your city will likely have the opposite opinion, especially if they live in an area of town that has homeless encampments. I've lived in Texas and that's been my general experience. Even deep blue Austin takes a more conservative approach to dealing with the homeless population and the end result is simply pushing their problem onto other people because said homeless population and their camps move further out of the city core.
The reality is that you see downtown being clean but don't see the other people you've pushed your problems onto. And that's a consistent trend of trying to solve the homeless issue in America through things like bussing initiatives, relocating homeless camps and so forth. No conservative or progressive city has solved this problem because it's a societal issue with the US in general.
The thrust of your argument seems to be "lots of homeless people don't belong here, and if we figure out who belongs here and who doesn't, and help them accordingly, we can improve the situation dramatically". Not a great opinion to have if you want to work with homeless people. They aren't bad people, and they aren't stupid people either, and will see the condescension from a mile away. So even if your solutions are pragmatic, I don't see how a city government could implement them without a backlash that would make their efforts ineffective.
Have spent 5+ years working professionally on homelessness, this is something I can agree with.
We all want to "fix" the problem of homeless people misusing public transportation, but at least 10-20% of the homeless people I have worked with wouldn't even agree that a problem exists.
I want to add resources to "fix" the problem, but first you have to get all parties to agree that their is a problem to fix. There is a ton of grey area, and we don't talk about Hobo's anymore like we did in the 60's. But many people choose homelessness.
So the argument against an interesting idea that has been implemented successfully in some localities is that there is an unrelated problem (homelessness) that has also been addressed successfully in other places.
I agree that potential problems should always be anticipated. But if the conclusion is "well we have homelessness so we can't offer a service that will be taken advantage of by homeless people in unintended ways" we can just as well agree that everyone with a six figure income move into a gated community and leave the rest of society to THE PURGE.
The obvious conclusion for a self-respecting society should be "let's try free public transit and also throw money and mental health support at the homeless population until they don't exist any more."
Alternatives/"solutions" aren't always better than that which they seek to replace or fix and may very well be noticeably worse.
Homeless people are an annoyance but so is extremely dense housing to the point that local resources and infrastructure are overloaded. In addition, I'm skeptical that the new housing developments will even resolve the homeless problem, as its not really targeting the root cause of the issue. Most of the homeless aren't keen on helping themselves, either. You'd have more luck shipping them off to coal mines to work than this, I reckon.
Feasibility is not the problem. It's the lack of political will. Most cities will just ban or make life more difficult for the homeless than try to help people not become homeless in the first place. Once someone is homeless for a while, it's hard to help them because they develop mental health and substance abuse issues if they didn't already.
It seems a bit like trying to fix the pigeon problem in the city by putting out pigeon food.
The harsh reality is that the more accommodating to the homeless the city is, the more homeless there will be.
I think there are solutions, and they can be compassionate, but simply making life easier for the homeless has long term drawbacks that are greater than the short term upsides.
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.
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?
I'm not suggesting solving the whole problem. London hasn't -- see, for example, the events that led to the fire and many deaths in Grenfell Tower last week. I'm out of touch, but I think that building was one step above Skid Row.
What I am suggesting is removing the homeless people from the public transportation network, so it's kept cleaner and feels safer for the users.
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