Except now you'll just attract homeless folks from outside of your region. The city with the best homeless program will attract the most homeless folks--all paid for by that city's taxpayers.
This is why I maintain the only way to address the problem is at the federal levelm. They should at least be the ones who bankroll the whole operation. It shouldn't be the city's responsibility to fund the fix--homeless people can move anywhere in the country and it isn't fair for local taxpayers to foot the bill. Citizens country-wide should pay for a solution.
Federal taxpayers might be willing to house homeless folks in cheap places like western Kansas or Oklahoma. They'd be less willing to pay for a nice place like San Francisco. They've been paying taxes for years, and no one ever offered them free digs in a swanky cosmopolitan city. How many of the San Francisco homeless would want to live in western Kansas, even in a free apartment? These "obvious" solutions hide lots of assumptions.
At the federal level the housing supply is excessive to the point of Detroit house prices being close to negative, some counties in Kansas and Oklahoma providing free land if only people move there, dying coal towns in Appalachians having an oversupply if available housing and Mississippi delta towns being relatively cheap to place people in manufactured housing?
Sure, that doesn’t solve the problem of everyone who’s homeless in LA or SF, but then where do you draw a line on people’s preferences vs reasonable availability?
If a million new homeless people decide they would rather move to LA and not Kansas, should the federal government accommodate accordingly? What if then they say they’d really prefer Santa Monica to East LA? What if within Santa Monica most express the preference for proximity to the ocean and walking distance to downtown amenities?
Where does the federal government then draw a line on providing essential services vs catering to someone’s lifestyle preferences?
Except now you'll just attract homeless folks from outside of your region. The city with the best homeless program will attract the most homeless folks--all paid for by that city's taxpayers.
This is why I maintain the only way to address the problem is at the federal levelm. They should at least be the ones who bankroll the whole operation. It shouldn't be the city's responsibility to fund the fix--homeless people can move anywhere in the country and it isn't fair for local taxpayers to foot the bill. Citizens country-wide should pay for a solution.