A week ago 60 Minutes did an interesting story on the homeless:
Please vote in the poll, located in the right sidebar
Giving apartments to homeless people who’ve been on the streets for years before they’ve received treatment for drug or alcohol problems or mental illness may not sound like a wise idea. But that’s what’s being done in cities across America in an approach that targets those who’ve been homeless the longest and are believed to be at greatest risk of dying, especially with all of this cold weather.
They’re people who once might have been viewed as unreachable. But cities and counties affiliated with a movement known as the 100,000 Homes Campaign have so far managed to get 80,000 of them off the streets. Local governments and non-profit groups do most of the work. The money comes mostly from existing federal programs and private donations, and there’s evidence that this approach saves taxpayers money. (100,000 Homes: Housing the homeless saves money?)
St. Louis has been setting up apartments for the chronically homeless for a while for a while now, I’ve been a skeptic but I’m slowly seeing the value. I’ll share more thoughts on Wednesday February 26th when I post the results from this week’s poll. Please vote in the right sidebar.
— Steve Patterson
Currently there are "48 comments" on this Article:
Okay, I’ll be specific. Basically, we have this situation already. It’s called squatting. Homeless people go into vacant buildings looking for shelter. And what happens? They catch on fire when the homeless people start warming fires inside the building that go out of control. That’s what they think happened to the Southern Funeral Home on S. Grand, the recent fires at Chouteau’s Landing, and in countless LRA buildings across the city. This just doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me.
How does this work? What apartments? Where? What condition? Who pays for repairs? Who pays for utilities? Who pays the taxes?
In the Section 8 program, HUD subsidizes rent payment to landlords for low income families. Who subsidizes this program? Seems like there are a lot of unanswered questions here.
Yes, I support it. As a society, we are wealthy. We have empty buildings, we have excess food, we have parks and art and music and hundreds of things to do. We also have people who have been shunted aside for a variety of reasons, and plenty of work that needs to be done. How we treat our people and our surroundings says much about who we are. If we take better care of our neighbors who have encountered bad times, we take better care of our neighborhoods and make our city a better place to be. Isn’t that what we all want: a good place to live?
It’ll be cheap compared to the cost of not doing it. There aren’t THAT many homeless people.
And we have these things called “taxes”.
The bigger problem is that many homeless people are so mentally ill or drug-addicted that no landlord will have them. Such people used to go into the publically-funded mental institutions until Reagan threw them out on the street. (The mental institutions were pretty cheap to run — peanuts compared to our TRILLION-dollar military which keeps losing wars.)
Most of the long term homeless have either mental health issues or substance abuse issues, or both, that prevent them from holding gainful employment. Many times this is combined with antisocial behaviors – irrational outbursts with mental issues, theft to support drug habits, a criminal record – that make it hard to keep “friends” – a small, family-level, social support network. Until these are successfully addressed, providing a free roof over their heads doesn’t really solve the core problems that are causing homelessness.
Putting all the human scaled challenges of the homeless aside (which as you note are huge challenges), I don’t see how this works financially. Putting a homeless person in an apartment does what? Whose apartment? Who covers the cost of operating the building? If ever something sounded like a tilting at windmills proposition, this is it. Here’s another idea: Let’s put the homeless in the old train tunnels under downtown. We know that works.
The compassionate answer is that we shouldn’t let our fellow human beings suffer and die. The real answer is that there is no answer – someone struggling with demons will continue to struggle with life until the demons are controlled . . . . and sometimes they can never be controlled.
Upon closer inspection, Steve’s article cites that government and nonprofit plus charities will pay for this. Again, I don’t see how this works. “Government” is out of money; nonprofits are struggling to survive, and everyone is going after the charitable dollar. So now all of a sudden the idea of housing the homeless in apartments leapfrogs to the top of the list of needs to be addressed? If only money wasn’t a problem, then we could do everything!
We are already spening the money dealing with homelessness, we just aren’t allocating it that way on purpose. Fire departments spend money to put out fires causes by the homeless squatting in vacant homes. Hospitals spend money treating the homeless who have health problems which are aggravated by being homeless. Police deal with nuisance crimes caused by the homeless. Homeless people get locked up for minor crimes. All of that costs money. It’s money we are already spending. How do we pay for it? That’s simply an budgeting issue.
Exactly, we spend money already, often with poor results. Rather than stick our heads in the sand perhaps we should rethink our approach. Besides the money issue, it appears this approach is better for those who end up on the street. Rather than forcing religious dogma on them so they can get a cot for the night, they get treated like the humans they are.
You guys are long on generalities and short on details. Let’s start talking about WHO is going to DO this? Who’s gonna reallocate the $$? Who’s gonna man the phones? You’re talking about re-wiring society like it’s as simple as loading an “app” on your phone. Be real!
I’m guessing you haven’t read the 60 Minutes articles or watched the videos. This is already being done in many cities, and to a lesser degree, in St. Louis.
Just watched the 60 Minutes piece. Still sort of raises the same questions. Yes, everyone knows that when a poor person goes to an ER, it’s a fortune subsidized by taxpayers. Our society is screwed up, and our healthcare system is a big part of the problem. The story says most of the cost of this program is covered by the federal government using existing housing assistance programs.
The 60 MInutes story was based in Nashville. In St. Louis, there are 10,000 names on the Housing Authority waiting list. The need for housing assistance far outweighs the supply. Housing issues are far more complex than merely focusing on the plight of the homeless and a serious discussion takes a much broader look at the issue. The difficulty I have with this sort of reporting and issue analysis is that it is very one dimensional – in this case, focusing our attention on the hard core homeless, rather than the fuller scope of the problem.
Worth trying and seeing if it saves taxpayers dollars in terms of these folks using the emergency rooms and police services less. Once they have a stable and safe place, at that point, maybe they can work on their other issues (mental health treatment, drug or alcohol abuse treatment, or whatever issues that ale them). Again, if it saves taxpayer dollars, I’m all for it.
I suggest we stop funding some of the incredibly wasteful military crap we are wasting money on. Currently the military is sucking up roughly a TRILLION dollars a year, and losing every war it’s gotten involved in since Kosovo.
Oh, I know! We could also stop funding the NSA, which is illegally and unconstitutionally spying on everyone in the world and despite this failed to stop any terrorist plots whatsover, including the Boston Bombing plot.
We’re going on faith that anyone will help pay for this, and given that Steve is an avowed atheist, that’s gonna be tough. As for me, I’m going to church.
Interesting response. I’m a member of Kiva and since the site started in 2008 aethiets have lent $14.2 million vs $9.7 million from christians. See http://www.kiva.org/teams.
Well, the $9.7 million from Christians counted here is a tiny fraction of a drop in the bucket of the charitable giving by god-fearing Americans. I’d wager that in total, religious out-donate atheists by probably a 10:1, if not 30:1, or 50:1 margin. Maybe even 100:1 margin. After all, isn’t an established fact that something like 70% of all American identify with some sort of faith community?
There’s a difference between identifying with and going, participating and donating regularly – reading between the lines, I see you implying that Christians donate more on a per capita basis than atheists do. Given the Law of Large Numbers, I’d wager that both groups are about equal. Plus the reasons for wanting to help / donate (religion, empathy, financial priorities, tax breaks) matter less than the fact that money is being directed to worthy causes, for whatever reasons.
No, all I’m suggesting is that there are more self-described faithful people than self-described atheists. If I needed to raise money for a charity, I’d rather draw on a group 8X larger than the other, even if individually they each only gave a small amount. Regardless, back to the point here, large or small, a program like this would cost $millions. Where the money for it? Citing “government and nonprofits” is a lazy answer.
Agree. And from what I remember from the 60 Minutes report, part of it relies on landlords “doing the right thing” and offering units for little or no rent: “The apartments are paid for mostly by the federal government which gives rental assistance subsidies for veterans and people with low income. The homeless are expected to contribute 30 percent of whatever income they get from things like part time work, social security, or disability. Some apartments – like Robert McMurtry’s – were provided by civic-minded landlords willing to accept very little rent. Kirby Davis donated one percent of his units and has encouraged other building owners to do the same.”
What you’re describing is the basic formula for HUD’s existing programs to assist low income households. Those programs are already underfunded. I don’t see where we are adding capacity to the system with the statement “give apartments to the homeless”. HUD funding to the STL area has been cut about 50% since the salad days of the late 80s and early 90s. What’s left is oversubscribed with long waiting lists. So forget government. Unless we raise taxes or shift priorities, there’s no more money coming from federal, state, or local government. So what about charities and nonprofits? Same story. Everyone’s starving these days. So let’s give them more work! Sounds like typical lazy, limousine liberal, “unfunded mandate” talk.
Well, raise taxes. Taxes on the extremely rich are much lower than they were in the 1970s.
And then cut military spending, which ranges from wasteful to actually counterproductive (when it creates new enemies, as it did in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq).
And yes, there’s no way to solve these problems without fixing the FEDERAL problem. Reagan defunded HUD and created the waiting lists. Reagan defunded mental hospitals and dumped people on the street. Reagan also doubled the military budget for no good reason, and slashed taxes on the rich for extremely bad reasons.
No subsequent President has had the guts to reverse the insane policies made by the President With Alzheimer’s Syndrome.
This wasn’t an issue until Reagan shut down the mental institutions and threw their occupants out on the street. Before that, a lot of the mental institutions basically… gave housing to the homeless mentally ill people. (Back then, they were often totally untreatable, since psychiatric drugs were not very good.)
Neroden: lots of good contributions to the discussion. You’ve highlighted the difficulty with this debate. We shouldn’t be talking about “giving apartments to the homeless”. That’s a symptom/outcome view of the broader societal challenges we face. You suggest defunding the NSA, the military, and the legacy of “Grandpa” president. Had this thread started with those premises, then we could be talking about all sorts of other opportunities we’d create, maybe without even raising taxes. For the cost of ONE B-1 bomber, how many LRA lots could be remediated for productive use? That would be a start.
Unfortunately, with the democrats struggling to hold their seats in Congress, and Obama having a really lousy second term, the idea of defunding the military and increasing spending on social services has about as much chance as the US in 2-man bobsled taking the gold in Sochi. But it would be fun to ask the question. How about getting Roy Blunt, Jim Talent, Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Wagner all in a room and ask them all these questions? See? It wouldn’t work. They all worship at the altar of the Reagan legacy.
One, the problem wasn’t that “Reagan shut down the mental institutions”, which were, in reality, many times, nasty, neglected, inhumane warehouses, akin to puppy mills, the problem is that alternate treatment was not and continues to not be adequately funded. The old mental institutions were “pretty cheap to run” simply because they were not very nice places!
Two, “just raise taxes” is waaaay easier to say than do, especially for social services, as is the concept of significantly scaling back ANY program, military or social, to reallocate resources. And while I agree with your basic sentiments (smaller military, less global intervention, better social services), throwing “bombs” (insults) in the same way a tea partier does is not an effective tactic for effecting real changes.
And three, the problem many of us have with the topic at hand is the concept of helping the worst first and helping them more than others who have lives that are less eff’ed up. You assert “that there aren’t THAT many homeless people” and I would disagree. Two kids were killed last week in a fire where the gas had been shut off. They weren’t homeless, but the family was certainly in need of financial help. Many people in north city and north county struggle, and many people are homeless but are crashing with friends. They “deserve” more help than the alcoholic ex-con in the 60 Minutes piece.
As a society, we can always do more, but we can never do enough. Mental illness is a bitch, especially severe cases, but I also have little sympathy for people who choose to destroy their lives with drugs, be they alcohol, meth or heroin. Odds are that many of them will end up homeless, and likely dying on the streets, but that’s their choice. You can’t fix stupid, and choices have consequences. I pay plenty in taxes already, and there will always be an endless supply of people with “needs” based on poor choices that I see no need to enable . . . .
I still would like to ask members of the conservative political persuasion what they think of cutting military spending to find money to remediate abandoned sites in urban areas. It would be like a mini-Marshall plan for American cities. Frankly, I’m surprised more “urbanists” aren’t all over this idea.
Herre’s what you do:
1) Go to a city like Memphis.
2) Live on the streets for several years
3) Become a burden on society, example: visit the ER monthly,
4) Convince social worker you’d be better off in a tiny free apartment than continuing life on the streets.
5) Enjoy your new apartment.
Yep, why bother working to get a place to live when all you have to do is be chronically homeless for years and be a burden on society and you might get a tiny spartan apartment for FREE!?! I’m sure people are ready to quit their jobs, give up their possessions, savings, etc so they too can get a FREE apartment…
You’re being cheeky, Steve, so LOL, but what you’re not doing is acknowledging the challenges associated with this idea being raised in the comments. A proposal like this requires a massive shift in priorities. How do you make that happen? Putting ideas out there isn’t enough. Unless people in authority are convinced to change things, we go nowhere.
That’s the same thing the liberal mecca, San Francisco does. They have a welcome committee at the local bus station, warning the homeless that SF may not be “for them”, and offer to provide them a free bus ticket back home. Not exactly a “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, Statue-of-Liberty welcome”!
Utah is already doing this, and is poised to end homeless by 2015. They chose to do this because they figured out that the average homeless person cost the state about $16,000 a year. By providing each homeless person a social worker and an apartment, it only cost $11000 a year. http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183
Over the past 40+ years I’ve heard the promises and the projections of ending homelessness many, many times. It seems like every time we manage to get some group off the streets, another group moves in to fill the void. And I have no problem using tax dollars to help move people off the streets who will actually be able to turn their lives around. My objection is in wasting tax dollars on people who will just end up back on the streets (and likely eventually dying on the streets) either because of untreated, severe mental illness or their personal choices to use addictive legal and/or illegal drugs. Crack, meth, heroin and booze are all choices, as is the collateral damage of addiction and choosing crime to support your habit (and getting a criminal record that renders you unemployable). Choosing to help the worst first deprives those with the best chance of succeeding of the same resources. I want to see positive results, not just giving chronic addicts a better place stay for a few weeks or months.
I completely disagree with giving homeless people apartments. There are people who work hard and have jobs that earn money to afford these apartments. Why should we give people who sit on the street smoking and drinking apartments? They do not deserve it. What do you mean this approach saves taxpayers money? Are they crazy? How about we give them help to find a JOB. A JOB where they can earn money and pay their own taxes and rent for apartments. Giving them free apartment? Just absurd, ludicrous.
Even though doing so is cheaper on the public in the long run? Even though it’s the best way to get them back into society? You’d rather continue ignoring the problem, costing millions more to taxpayers, and basically leaving then to rot in the gutter?
i like going to back to the mental hospital formula… drug em up, lobotomies, whatever.. just get them off the street. most have mental issues, drug/alcohol additions… a drain and menace to society. i am fine with spending my tax dollars to fund these places because it is cheaper in the long run. can you imagine what these people would do to an apartment?! i don’t know if some of these indigents even know how to use a toilet. when i see that these street urchin have better health care than some working people, it froths me. the ‘middle class’ loses once again. over and out, Sarge
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I’ve read that it has worked in other cities. With all the empty buildings around town it seems to be a waste not to use them wisely.
Okay, I’ll be specific. Basically, we have this situation already. It’s called squatting. Homeless people go into vacant buildings looking for shelter. And what happens? They catch on fire when the homeless people start warming fires inside the building that go out of control. That’s what they think happened to the Southern Funeral Home on S. Grand, the recent fires at Chouteau’s Landing, and in countless LRA buildings across the city. This just doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me.
Given actual heated apartments, they won’t start “warming fires”. So, an improvement.
How does this work? What apartments? Where? What condition? Who pays for repairs? Who pays for utilities? Who pays the taxes?
In the Section 8 program, HUD subsidizes rent payment to landlords for low income families. Who subsidizes this program? Seems like there are a lot of unanswered questions here.
Yes, I support it. As a society, we are wealthy. We have empty buildings, we have excess food, we have parks and art and music and hundreds of things to do. We also have people who have been shunted aside for a variety of reasons, and plenty of work that needs to be done. How we treat our people and our surroundings says much about who we are. If we take better care of our neighbors who have encountered bad times, we take better care of our neighborhoods and make our city a better place to be. Isn’t that what we all want: a good place to live?
Okay, so how does it work? This will cost a lot of money. How do you pay for it? Please try to be at least a little specific.
It’ll be cheap compared to the cost of not doing it. There aren’t THAT many homeless people.
And we have these things called “taxes”.
The bigger problem is that many homeless people are so mentally ill or drug-addicted that no landlord will have them. Such people used to go into the publically-funded mental institutions until Reagan threw them out on the street. (The mental institutions were pretty cheap to run — peanuts compared to our TRILLION-dollar military which keeps losing wars.)
Most of the long term homeless have either mental health issues or substance abuse issues, or both, that prevent them from holding gainful employment. Many times this is combined with antisocial behaviors – irrational outbursts with mental issues, theft to support drug habits, a criminal record – that make it hard to keep “friends” – a small, family-level, social support network. Until these are successfully addressed, providing a free roof over their heads doesn’t really solve the core problems that are causing homelessness.
Putting all the human scaled challenges of the homeless aside (which as you note are huge challenges), I don’t see how this works financially. Putting a homeless person in an apartment does what? Whose apartment? Who covers the cost of operating the building? If ever something sounded like a tilting at windmills proposition, this is it. Here’s another idea: Let’s put the homeless in the old train tunnels under downtown. We know that works.
The compassionate answer is that we shouldn’t let our fellow human beings suffer and die. The real answer is that there is no answer – someone struggling with demons will continue to struggle with life until the demons are controlled . . . . and sometimes they can never be controlled.
Upon closer inspection, Steve’s article cites that government and nonprofit plus charities will pay for this. Again, I don’t see how this works. “Government” is out of money; nonprofits are struggling to survive, and everyone is going after the charitable dollar. So now all of a sudden the idea of housing the homeless in apartments leapfrogs to the top of the list of needs to be addressed? If only money wasn’t a problem, then we could do everything!
We are already spening the money dealing with homelessness, we just aren’t allocating it that way on purpose. Fire departments spend money to put out fires causes by the homeless squatting in vacant homes. Hospitals spend money treating the homeless who have health problems which are aggravated by being homeless. Police deal with nuisance crimes caused by the homeless. Homeless people get locked up for minor crimes. All of that costs money. It’s money we are already spending. How do we pay for it? That’s simply an budgeting issue.
Exactly, we spend money already, often with poor results. Rather than stick our heads in the sand perhaps we should rethink our approach. Besides the money issue, it appears this approach is better for those who end up on the street. Rather than forcing religious dogma on them so they can get a cot for the night, they get treated like the humans they are.
You guys are long on generalities and short on details. Let’s start talking about WHO is going to DO this? Who’s gonna reallocate the $$? Who’s gonna man the phones? You’re talking about re-wiring society like it’s as simple as loading an “app” on your phone. Be real!
I’m guessing you haven’t read the 60 Minutes articles or watched the videos. This is already being done in many cities, and to a lesser degree, in St. Louis.
Just watched the 60 Minutes piece. Still sort of raises the same questions. Yes, everyone knows that when a poor person goes to an ER, it’s a fortune subsidized by taxpayers. Our society is screwed up, and our healthcare system is a big part of the problem. The story says most of the cost of this program is covered by the federal government using existing housing assistance programs.
The 60 MInutes story was based in Nashville. In St. Louis, there are 10,000 names on the Housing Authority waiting list. The need for housing assistance far outweighs the supply. Housing issues are far more complex than merely focusing on the plight of the homeless and a serious discussion takes a much broader look at the issue. The difficulty I have with this sort of reporting and issue analysis is that it is very one dimensional – in this case, focusing our attention on the hard core homeless, rather than the fuller scope of the problem.
Most of our homelessness problems arise from Reagan shutting the mental institutions and throwing all the residents out on the streets.
Worth trying and seeing if it saves taxpayers dollars in terms of these folks using the emergency rooms and police services less. Once they have a stable and safe place, at that point, maybe they can work on their other issues (mental health treatment, drug or alcohol abuse treatment, or whatever issues that ale them). Again, if it saves taxpayer dollars, I’m all for it.
Then what do we stop funding to add this new program?
I suggest we stop funding some of the incredibly wasteful military crap we are wasting money on. Currently the military is sucking up roughly a TRILLION dollars a year, and losing every war it’s gotten involved in since Kosovo.
Oh, I know! We could also stop funding the NSA, which is illegally and unconstitutionally spying on everyone in the world and despite this failed to stop any terrorist plots whatsover, including the Boston Bombing plot.
We’re going on faith that anyone will help pay for this, and given that Steve is an avowed atheist, that’s gonna be tough. As for me, I’m going to church.
Interesting response. I’m a member of Kiva and since the site started in 2008 aethiets have lent $14.2 million vs $9.7 million from christians. See http://www.kiva.org/teams.
Well, the $9.7 million from Christians counted here is a tiny fraction of a drop in the bucket of the charitable giving by god-fearing Americans. I’d wager that in total, religious out-donate atheists by probably a 10:1, if not 30:1, or 50:1 margin. Maybe even 100:1 margin. After all, isn’t an established fact that something like 70% of all American identify with some sort of faith community?
Actually, according to this recent UC Berkeley study, 80% of Americans identify with some organized religion. 80%: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/03/12/non-believers/
There’s a difference between identifying with and going, participating and donating regularly – reading between the lines, I see you implying that Christians donate more on a per capita basis than atheists do. Given the Law of Large Numbers, I’d wager that both groups are about equal. Plus the reasons for wanting to help / donate (religion, empathy, financial priorities, tax breaks) matter less than the fact that money is being directed to worthy causes, for whatever reasons.
No, all I’m suggesting is that there are more self-described faithful people than self-described atheists. If I needed to raise money for a charity, I’d rather draw on a group 8X larger than the other, even if individually they each only gave a small amount. Regardless, back to the point here, large or small, a program like this would cost $millions. Where the money for it? Citing “government and nonprofits” is a lazy answer.
Agree. And from what I remember from the 60 Minutes report, part of it relies on landlords “doing the right thing” and offering units for little or no rent: “The apartments are paid for mostly by the federal government which gives rental assistance subsidies for veterans and people with low income. The homeless are expected to contribute 30 percent of whatever income they get from things like part time work, social security, or disability. Some apartments – like Robert McMurtry’s – were provided by civic-minded landlords willing to accept very little rent. Kirby Davis donated one percent of his units and has encouraged other building owners to do the same.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-homes-housing-homeless-saves-money/
What you’re describing is the basic formula for HUD’s existing programs to assist low income households. Those programs are already underfunded. I don’t see where we are adding capacity to the system with the statement “give apartments to the homeless”. HUD funding to the STL area has been cut about 50% since the salad days of the late 80s and early 90s. What’s left is oversubscribed with long waiting lists. So forget government. Unless we raise taxes or shift priorities, there’s no more money coming from federal, state, or local government. So what about charities and nonprofits? Same story. Everyone’s starving these days. So let’s give them more work! Sounds like typical lazy, limousine liberal, “unfunded mandate” talk.
Well, raise taxes. Taxes on the extremely rich are much lower than they were in the 1970s.
And then cut military spending, which ranges from wasteful to actually counterproductive (when it creates new enemies, as it did in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq).
And yes, there’s no way to solve these problems without fixing the FEDERAL problem. Reagan defunded HUD and created the waiting lists. Reagan defunded mental hospitals and dumped people on the street. Reagan also doubled the military budget for no good reason, and slashed taxes on the rich for extremely bad reasons.
No subsequent President has had the guts to reverse the insane policies made by the President With Alzheimer’s Syndrome.
It’s obviously a good idea.
This wasn’t an issue until Reagan shut down the mental institutions and threw their occupants out on the street. Before that, a lot of the mental institutions basically… gave housing to the homeless mentally ill people. (Back then, they were often totally untreatable, since psychiatric drugs were not very good.)
Neroden: lots of good contributions to the discussion. You’ve highlighted the difficulty with this debate. We shouldn’t be talking about “giving apartments to the homeless”. That’s a symptom/outcome view of the broader societal challenges we face. You suggest defunding the NSA, the military, and the legacy of “Grandpa” president. Had this thread started with those premises, then we could be talking about all sorts of other opportunities we’d create, maybe without even raising taxes. For the cost of ONE B-1 bomber, how many LRA lots could be remediated for productive use? That would be a start.
Unfortunately, with the democrats struggling to hold their seats in Congress, and Obama having a really lousy second term, the idea of defunding the military and increasing spending on social services has about as much chance as the US in 2-man bobsled taking the gold in Sochi. But it would be fun to ask the question. How about getting Roy Blunt, Jim Talent, Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Wagner all in a room and ask them all these questions? See? It wouldn’t work. They all worship at the altar of the Reagan legacy.
One, the problem wasn’t that “Reagan shut down the mental institutions”, which were, in reality, many times, nasty, neglected, inhumane warehouses, akin to puppy mills, the problem is that alternate treatment was not and continues to not be adequately funded. The old mental institutions were “pretty cheap to run” simply because they were not very nice places!
Two, “just raise taxes” is waaaay easier to say than do, especially for social services, as is the concept of significantly scaling back ANY program, military or social, to reallocate resources. And while I agree with your basic sentiments (smaller military, less global intervention, better social services), throwing “bombs” (insults) in the same way a tea partier does is not an effective tactic for effecting real changes.
And three, the problem many of us have with the topic at hand is the concept of helping the worst first and helping them more than others who have lives that are less eff’ed up. You assert “that there aren’t THAT many homeless people” and I would disagree. Two kids were killed last week in a fire where the gas had been shut off. They weren’t homeless, but the family was certainly in need of financial help. Many people in north city and north county struggle, and many people are homeless but are crashing with friends. They “deserve” more help than the alcoholic ex-con in the 60 Minutes piece.
As a society, we can always do more, but we can never do enough. Mental illness is a bitch, especially severe cases, but I also have little sympathy for people who choose to destroy their lives with drugs, be they alcohol, meth or heroin. Odds are that many of them will end up homeless, and likely dying on the streets, but that’s their choice. You can’t fix stupid, and choices have consequences. I pay plenty in taxes already, and there will always be an endless supply of people with “needs” based on poor choices that I see no need to enable . . . .
I still would like to ask members of the conservative political persuasion what they think of cutting military spending to find money to remediate abandoned sites in urban areas. It would be like a mini-Marshall plan for American cities. Frankly, I’m surprised more “urbanists” aren’t all over this idea.
I want the gubmint to give me a free apartment too, where do I sign up?
Herre’s what you do:
1) Go to a city like Memphis.
2) Live on the streets for several years
3) Become a burden on society, example: visit the ER monthly,
4) Convince social worker you’d be better off in a tiny free apartment than continuing life on the streets.
5) Enjoy your new apartment.
Great formula, Steve!
Yep, why bother working to get a place to live when all you have to do is be chronically homeless for years and be a burden on society and you might get a tiny spartan apartment for FREE!?! I’m sure people are ready to quit their jobs, give up their possessions, savings, etc so they too can get a FREE apartment…
You’re being cheeky, Steve, so LOL, but what you’re not doing is acknowledging the challenges associated with this idea being raised in the comments. A proposal like this requires a massive shift in priorities. How do you make that happen? Putting ideas out there isn’t enough. Unless people in authority are convinced to change things, we go nowhere.
I hope to address these things next week on the post with the poll results.
Cool, why don’t we round up all the homeless and put them on a couple of buses to Memphis! Problem solved!!!
That’s the same thing the liberal mecca, San Francisco does. They have a welcome committee at the local bus station, warning the homeless that SF may not be “for them”, and offer to provide them a free bus ticket back home. Not exactly a “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, Statue-of-Liberty welcome”!
I support spending money on housing people.
How much of your money? How much of the next guy’s money? More of his or yours?
Utah is already doing this, and is poised to end homeless by 2015. They chose to do this because they figured out that the average homeless person cost the state about $16,000 a year. By providing each homeless person a social worker and an apartment, it only cost $11000 a year. http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183
Over the past 40+ years I’ve heard the promises and the projections of ending homelessness many, many times. It seems like every time we manage to get some group off the streets, another group moves in to fill the void. And I have no problem using tax dollars to help move people off the streets who will actually be able to turn their lives around. My objection is in wasting tax dollars on people who will just end up back on the streets (and likely eventually dying on the streets) either because of untreated, severe mental illness or their personal choices to use addictive legal and/or illegal drugs. Crack, meth, heroin and booze are all choices, as is the collateral damage of addiction and choosing crime to support your habit (and getting a criminal record that renders you unemployable). Choosing to help the worst first deprives those with the best chance of succeeding of the same resources. I want to see positive results, not just giving chronic addicts a better place stay for a few weeks or months.
I completely disagree with giving homeless people apartments. There are people who work hard and have jobs that earn money to afford these apartments. Why should we give people who sit on the street smoking and drinking apartments? They do not deserve it. What do you mean this approach saves taxpayers money? Are they crazy? How about we give them help to find a JOB. A JOB where they can earn money and pay their own taxes and rent for apartments. Giving them free apartment? Just absurd, ludicrous.
Even though doing so is cheaper on the public in the long run? Even though it’s the best way to get them back into society? You’d rather continue ignoring the problem, costing millions more to taxpayers, and basically leaving then to rot in the gutter?
i like going to back to the mental hospital formula… drug em up, lobotomies, whatever.. just get them off the street. most have mental issues, drug/alcohol additions… a drain and menace to society. i am fine with spending my tax dollars to fund these places because it is cheaper in the long run. can you imagine what these people would do to an apartment?! i don’t know if some of these indigents even know how to use a toilet. when i see that these street urchin have better health care than some working people, it froths me. the ‘middle class’ loses once again. over and out, Sarge