This pretty great, but it's also pretty anecdotal. How were these 13 chosen (probably not randomly)? What is the outcome going to be in 6 months? A year? Five years?
Based on the (admittedly not extensive) work I've done trying to help homeless folks get back on their feet, a lot of people do just need some money to get their life back in order. For instance, it's hard to apply for jobs when you don't have an address or a phone number for people to call you back at. Giving someone the ability to not have to worry about making their rent payment for a couple months can be huge.
But a significant portion of the cases I've seen can't be solved this simply. Despite what this article says substance abuse issues /are/ a big factor for a lot of the homeless people I've worked with. Providing cash money can alleviate some of their problems in the short term, but there are generally more fundamental obstacles that are holding people back. If you don't address these issues people can very easily fall back into the trap.
The best intervention I've ever seen for a homeless person is an employer who is willing to give them a steady job and be understanding about the difficulty of the situation they're going through. Anything that can get a homeless person to this point should be encouraged. Sometimes that can mean covering their expenses for a while to get back on their feet. But often it means providing substance abuse support; often it means teaching job skills; often it means connecting them with the right social service or civil society groups.
Or, for those who aren't quite ready to do a steady job, the legalization of interent or part time jobs. Let them work when they are sober and not when they are not.
Unfortunately the burden on businesses for "hiring someone" is so high due to regulations that it only makes sense to make positions that are full time, or part time with dedicated hours.
There are a lot of jobs that could exist where people worked some number of hours when they wanted to work, but where if they didn't show up for several weeks someone else could be doing it while they're gone.
Businesses would be willing to hire people on such terms (especially for some jobs like construction, or cleaning, etc) but they have to create positions that are focused on specific people due to the impact of regulations.
Hell, under Obamacare anyone who hires a kid to mow their lawn and pays them $400 over the course of a year has to file a 1099 on them!
Isn't this already possible? There are plenty of day laborers who wait in the morning at "The Corner", and people with jobs for the day come pick them up. They work when they are able, and when there is a job for them. Regardless of whether or not this is legal, the market for this already exists, and it frankly isn't that great for employees. The benefit of a steady job -- or more accurately, a steady stream of income -- is that you can plan around it.
Also, I fail to see how regulation has prevented this from happening. Do you have any evidence you could point to? Lots of businesses have a big payroll of part-timers who only work a few hours a week. Speaking from personal experience, when I used to work these kinds of jobs many of my coworkers (myself included) had extremely flexible "work when you can" schedules. Lots of transient employees, too. For some industries this works, but for most non-minimum wage jobs frankly I don't see what the incentive for an employer to do this would be.
Your jab at Obamacare is also wrong, it would be $600 and most likely this provision will be removed.
There are such things as day labor positions and in many cases these people are taken advantage of because there are no regulations in place to ensure they are getting at least minimum wage.
Most low end jobs are service sector jobs that require a certain number of staff be on hand at all times to service customers. It's not going to work if you have 10 employees show up one day of which only 3 you can use, while the next day you only have 1 employee show up & you're short staffed.
In a lot of cases many part-time jobs offer rubber banding hours. You may have 25 hours one week and then 10 hours the next week. It's very hard to work around & in many cases it can interfere with your schedule. Your work usually wants you to be there regardless of other obligations or else you're fired. This has to do with workplace policies and not regulations.
As far as the employer side goes, if you are going to invest time and money into a new employee, you want to make sure this employee is going to make a good return on your investment. If the person shows up smelling bad & reeking of alcohol or is high, this person probably has issues that a three-day on the job training course making sandwiches is not going to fix and may end up costing your business a lot more money than they would bring in. Training employees is not cheap. Training 100 people, when only 20 will show up on a regular basis is essentially asking business to throw money out the window.
I laugh at the idea that you would want to hire people who have drug abuse problems to work with dangerous construction equipment or allow them on your premises, possibly unsupervised, to clean.
Usually flex-hours make sense for higher end positions where there are obvious goals set & your product may not be entirely physical in nature. Rarely will you find flex-hours viable in low-end service sector or manufacturing.
Usually the homeless have a multitude of problems. They need drug-detox, healthcare, housing and education. All of which will cost money. Putting this burden on business is not viable, there is no incentive to do it.
I've actually tried to convince a couple of employers in the past to give me more flexible hours when it was obvious that the set hours were irrelevant (e.g. I wasn't greeting guests or waiting for phonecalls or anything). They were adamant that that is just not the way things are done.
Same thing as when you try to convince an employer to let you go home early when you work a little harder and manage to get 8 hours of work done in 6 hours. That's just not the way things are done, so slow down already!
> Hell, under Obamacare anyone who hires a kid to mow their lawn and pays them $400 over the course of a year has to file a 1099 on them!
Under the new health care legislation ? No. What you are describing has been an IRS requirement for many years. One that was mostly ignored. The congress wants to close the loophole (but the way they wrote it is rather brain damaged).
Unfortunately, the way the system is setup, things won't change anytime soon. The reality is: often cities' homelessness departments are prime locations for employing cronies and operatives.
For example: the City of San Francisco spends $70M per year (about $10K per homeless person, given that the population of the homeless is just under 7K). On top of that you have churches and other charities helping out. And yet I see homeless people all around, sleeping in doorways, on sidewalks, etc. Heck, in the shadow of City Hall you'll see dozens of homeless people.
But the department of homelessness (I don't recall the name of the department) was filled with people from (ex-mayor) Gavin Newsom's campaign staff (from his unsuccessful run for Governor). There is no accountability. There are no metrics on how many homeless people are in the City. All we have is a massive bureaucracy that is making a living off of claiming to help homeless people.
often cities' homelessness departments are prime locations for employing cronies and operatives
Yeah, that is kinda the dirty little secret of the homelessness "industry". Take Shelter, by far the most well known homelessness charity in the UK. Do they actually run hostels and soup kitchens? Well, actually, and this comes as a surprise to most people, they don't. They just transfer money from their donors to "think-tanks" and well-paid consultants. It's a huge racket, but since they have glommed onto a "worthy cause" they're untouchable.
That's just not true. As you can see from their independently audited annual report most of the money they raise is spend on giving housing advice to people in trouble:
Actual housing, or housing advice? If I'm reading this right, they spent 355,000 on direct housing aid and grants, versus 5,400,000 on "fundraising costs". They also combined legal and housing services on the pie chart to make it look better.
There is a line item for "housing services" which cost 21M and employs 441 people. But I can't find where they explain what all that money went to. It can't be housing aid because that's a separate line item. It's odd that they detail exactly where the 355K went to, but not the 21M.
It's reasonable to assume the 21M is salaries for 441 people. So to a first approximation, this organization doesn't actually give out anything except advice. Their second key goal is "To make monies available to housing associations", but I only see some token grants, dwarfed by their advertising budget.
That may all be well and good and necessary and proper for the situation in the UK, eg they lobby for govt funds that go direct to housing assocs. I don't know enough about it. But if their public image is of an organization that runs soup kitchens and provides housing, it's not supported by this report.
No, they don't claim to run soup kitchens or housing for the homeless. They are an organisation that gives out housing advice and lobby local and national government on housing issues for the poor. And, yes, they employ lawyers.
However the UK Government's 2009/10 social housing budget was £3.3bn. £50m is a drop in the ocean in this sector.
I suspected there was a wrinkle I was missing. So what might be the root of gaius's claim about their public image? Do they run a lot of adverts implying something different?
I'm not too concerned about their size relative to the whole "homeless budget", but how much of their income is spent on direct benefit to the people they are chartered to help. I'm also concerned about their "implied accomplishments" versus their actual accomplishments,ie image vs reality.
From what I can tell, about 60% of their income goes to the salaries of front-line people (legal and housing advice). 28% went to operational expenses (fundraising and "shelter shops"). The rest is advertising and paperwork.
I have a friend who is a lawyer that works largely giving in the housing-benefit sector, and I can tell you she is anything but well-paid.
For people struggling to get by, getting legal aid to prevent them losing their house is priceless. They cannot afford to pay a lawyer, so that kind of donation to pay for one is incredibly important to them.
"My taxes" != city taxes, but you probably already knew that and are trying to pivot the argument to be about me instead of about my point. That is usually a sign you can't argue my point.
I'm saying, $87 a year out of my taxes is a tiny amount when you consider what you pay for other things. How much do you spend a year on defense? Since the effective tax rate is around 30% (roughly) and the defense budget is around 20% of the federal budget (roughly), I pay around 52x more for defense than for helping homeless people in a given year. Is defense 52x more important than social services? And I say this being a defense contractor who entire livelyhood depends on taxes and the military industrial complex.
Do you really think that the city budget is self-funded? I don't live in SF but in NYC a huge portion of the budget comes from state and federal grants. That is true even on the local town level. Almost all of the money sent to the federal and state governments is handed back down the chain with strings and stipulations attached.
Otherwise, what would the state be doing? If the state spends a bunch of money on roads, it spends it on roads in towns. You might be driving down the street in your town seeing construction, but that money came from state taxes not town taxes.
The same goes for programs big and samll. Medicaid is money collected on the federal level, but paid out on the state level.
Milton Friedman's idea for alleviating poverty was a variation of this idea. It's called the negative income tax and the basic idea is that people below a certain threshold get cash from the government each year. The further below the threshold you are, the more cash you get.
This isn't actually too far from what we have now and is a terrible idea.
Below a certain income level in the Australia and parts of Europe (in all probability) you not only pay no taxes but you get low income credits. This is a negative income tax as you describe it.
The problem? Let me give you an example (and this is purely fictional):
Joe earns $5,000 a year in part-time work. He pays no tax. He gets $2,000 a year in government assistance.
Marginal rate of tax: -40%.
Net income: $7,000
Total tax rate: -40%
Joe finds a better paying job and now earns $15,000 a year. Now he's paying $3,000 a year in tax and his low income tax credit is gone.
Marginal rate of tax: 30%
Net income: $12,000
Total tax rate: 20%
Seems reasonable right? Now consider the difference:
Extra gross income: $10,000
Extra net income: $5,000
Marginal rate of tax: 50%
You see this with government benefits (that taper off and then cut out at certain income levels). The marginal tax rate low income earners end up paying can be well beyond 50%. Add in child support and this can go over 90%.
> Income over these amounts reduces your rate of pension by 50 cents in the dollar (single), or 25 cents in the dollar each (for couples). For transitional or saved cases, income over these amounts reduces your rate of pension by 40 cents in the dollar (single), or 20 cents in the dollar each (for couples).
Bear in mind that you're losing 50 cents of tax free income for every $1 of taxable income that you gain.
TA idea is a bit different, the homeless guys are asked what they want. If you just handed them the cash, they'd probably blow it, but giving them a choice makes them think about the future, and how they can improve it.
I have a theory that “welfare” and “charity” for the poor, at least as practiced in the US, is frequently an exchange: impoverished people abase themselves in front of a representative of the government or some charitable organization, and they get benefits in exchange for portraying themselves as suitable members of The Deserving Poor. A program that merely gave money to people who don’t have any money, even if it was more efficient (because of lower overhead), would be politically unsustainable.
A local paper here just ran an article¹ about how a state rep was indignant because, out of about $50 million the state gave out in welfare-benefit debit cards last year, about $200,000 was spent on “non-essentials” (principally, at liquor stores²). $827 at Victoria’s Secret outlets! $664 at pet supply stores! For shame!
My unsupported speculation is that the public see the homeless as people that tumbled downwards because of mental issues and addictions. What's not often considered is the community that they live in - they still have social interactions; they still feel pride and depression and snark and remorse. Mommying them by giving them a bed and curfew isn't just demeaning to a homeless man, it's demeaning to anyone. I'm not sure if this is the right solution but I'm glad to see they're trying new things.
I've worked with the homeless off and on over the years. Social workers are nice people and well intentioned do-gooders, and they tend to want to infantilize and control homeless people "for their own good". They develop a symbiotic relationship with some hopeless cases.
But there are a lot of homeless that find participation in a system that is designed to control them demeaning and won't participate. Among these are many skilled people who became homeless during a rough patch and simply can't get back into society because they have no place to take a shower with their own phone and a bed where they can get rest and then go on a job interview or go out and round up clients for work even. Being in the shelter system often means you have to get in line hours in advance for a spot, and have to follow various rules that prevent you from having time to get a job.
Some friends and I had created a small unlicensed shelter one year for homeless people that didn't want to participate in the normal system. We had a bouncer who screened for drugs and other than that there were no requirements. Homeless people responded well to this and began policing themselves and reporting on troublemakers (sneaking in drugs.) We did have people come in to volunteer. Talking afresh to the guests, people found out their history and skills and a network of impromptu referrals was set up which managed to get the 50% of them that wanted a new start into jobs and houses. There were no relapses or problems with these as they were men who had fallen on hard times but who were clean and wanting to work and had skills. Simply finding them a stable place enabled them to fix their own lives without guidance or control from others, neither of which they wanted. That left another 50% that was truly transient or didn't want to work.
Once you institutionalize the system it becomes a method of controlling people. A lot of people don't want to be controlled.
Now that's my experience. In cities, there's a problem with the long term chronically homeless. People who never made it back and who have given up. The issue with this minority of homeless is that they cost a fortune in medical, police and other services each year. For example, if it gets very cold and you can't find a bed then you commit some petty crime to get arrested. Or they might injure themselves when desperate just to get a place to stay at the hospital. Or maybe they are just very ill. There are some homeless people in cold cities who have medical problems who are costing more than $1 million a year in public services.
There's a homeless advocate Philip F. Mangano who was "homeless czar" under Bush who has promoted the idea of finding no-questions-asked housing for the chronically homeless. This is not the people who can find a job with a stable place who just need first month's rent and a deposit, but people who are not going to be able to work long term and who are costing a fortune. Placing them in public studio apartment housing at a cost of perhaps $8,000 a year in rent saves money over all. One key is no restrictions. They can bring in alcohol and drink in their room. They can come and go at all hours. It is their own apartment. When presented like this, they are more likely to take the deal and get off the street.
Does it cost money to do this? Yes. But the idea is that it costs less than providing ad hoc services. Having a stable place makes them more likely to make doctor's appointments. No longer are they coming to the hospital with costly to treat hypothermia or frostbite.
You make some really good points. Having been homeless myself, I have experienced the different types of homeless people. There are those who are simply in a difficult situation and are intent to drive themselves back to, or become part of the middle class.
There are those, which I wish were given a more logical and critical eye, who will never attain employment. There are also those (many) homeless who are mentally ill. These people are often categorized as the unfortunate, but more often than not are simply disenfranchised with the society we've created. For the homeless who are mentally ill, disabled or otherwise unable to hold employment it is critical that we take a different approach. A long term, critical-thinking approach. Present the numbers to the population. The math is remarkably simple if you take the time to understand the people and their relationships with commonplace society.
The right-leaning tend to worry about conversations like this, fearing it will stir up laziness and cause mass exodus of labor force. While there may likely be a percentage of that, the overall outcome would certainly be less homelessness, less crime, less strain on the public system and in the end a better economy for all.
How does a system that hands out free apartments deal with moral hazard? I'd also like a no-questions-asked $700/month apartment for free to work on my startup, and I can imagine many other people would as well.
The idea with these programs is that it's for the chronic long term homeless. So to qualify for a free apartment to work on your startup, you'd need to first spend 10 years on the streets, get diabetes or aids, and have a foot amputated. This is a big hurdle for most people looking for a free apartment.
There's many different categories of homeless. One of the most difficult to resolve is the long term chronic ones. Pretty much nothing tried has worked. However, pilot programs offering apartments have worked, at least it has reduced the cost of handling them and increased their quality of life. We are talking a small number of people, perhaps a few dozen in a big city like Chicago or New York or London. These are the guys that the police and social workers and hospitals all know by name because they are dealing with them every year for more than 10 years.
Given these constraints, do you agree that there is not a risk with moral hazard as implemented?
Of course there is the risk that such a program would be expanded to the point where it would become either a moral hazard, or become a substitute for welfare programs that deal with long term structural issues of unemployment caused by globalization and other factors. As a theoretical outcome in the future that would require many hypotheticals to happen first. It would be something of a slippery slope to consider it as a criticism of a program that seems to work to help long term chronic homeless get off the street while costing society less.
Its been a problem. I seem to recall some people in NYC actually moving into homeless shelter to get on waiting lists for free housing.
I think helping homeless people by giving them housing is a good idea, but it should be very limited housing with a lot of incentive to want to get your own place. It should not be a three bedroom apartment, especially when other people have to wait.
Many people I know, including myself, have suffered through a cramped studio or similar situation in order to save money and I see no reason why others cannot. Its a billion times better than living on the street.
For those engaging in charitable efforts, such a gift can be given to 5 times as many people as a more comfortable, "I'll just stay here forever" situation.
What if the "apartment" was in a Japanese-style capsule hotel? You might prefer to upgrade to your own apartment soon. OTOH, maybe providing no-questions-asked housing would help promote entrepeneurism?
personally i'd have no problems with you getting $700/month for an apartment to work on a startup. That might encourage more long term "job creation" then many other policy that is being set in place.
So does giving the homeless small amounts of money perpetuate the problem since they don't save it? Would larger amounts be able to help them achieve some sort of first step? Like enough money to rent a apartment for 3 months which gives them a chance to get a job vs. enough money to just buy a meal?
11 of the 13 got off the street, but how did they do it? Maybe a new TV was the motivation but did they get a job, their own home, and are they self sustaining? Or did they just move off the street into welfare housing, living off the state, which offsets the costs savings the article mentions...
Actually, living in welfare housing may be cheaper for the state than living on the street. Welfare housing costs a few hundred Pound a month. The healthier living conditions, and thus reduced costs to the NHS, alone may be worth it.
(And in the USA that would be even more pronounced, because people without medical coverage often wait until their conditions become an emergency.)
There was an article a few years ago about some homeless people in L.A. or so cost the state so much, that just paying for their housing is cheaper.
San Francisco used to spend generously on direct payments to homeless individuals, until Proposition N was passed in 2002, redirecting the money to services for the homeless. This measure was championed by Supervisor Gavin Newsom who, as we know, was elected as Mayor the next year.
The arguments summarized here on Wikipedia are a good introduction to some of the issues in play here.
Interesting, just yesterday I read this critique of patronizing behaviour of the elite towards those whom they do charity for http://retributions.nationalinterest.in/trust-the-poor/ (In context to some welfare schemes in the Indian state of Bihar)
That's about $1,300. Or about $7.50 an hour for one month. This is about minimum wage. If they could get minimum wage jobs, they would, and they'd quickly not be homeless.
But they can't because students and recent graduates and stay at home moms, etc, get the minimum wage jobs.
If we eliminated the minimum wage, then all the jobs that need doing, but whose economic value is $2.75 an hour would come into being. This means that the homeless person would be able to earn that $1,300 in two months. If low cost housing were legalized, they'd be able to live cheaply while getting on their feet and saving for getting a better job.
Minimum wage is the idea that we'd rather have someone homeless and not working at $0 an hour than have them have a home and be digging themselves out working for $2.50 an hour.
And if we removed all the oppressive health and safety rules from the heads of the poor landlords, we'd have apartments that someone could afford to live in when they make $1300 a month!
You start with $1000 and need to survive the month while trying to get a job, live, eat, etc. A few frustrating choices along the way that might not seem realistic, but may prove insightful for some.
This would be more a more convincing exercise if it didn't force me to make a choice between paying either the gas or electric bill when I could afford to pay both (and then forcing me to incur an even larger fee to get it turned back on), and made me pay to fix the leak in my rental apartment's sink. It would also have been nice to know that I've got a sick mom, a kid, and a pet at the beginning of the month, rather than springing them on me at seemingly random points. I found out on day 17 that I had a dog -- that's one hungry dog. I also held a yardsale with the explicit purpose of getting rid of stuff since I didn't have enough room for it all in my rental, and rather than feel good about that, it made me feel bad for only making $150 from the yard sale.
I mean, it was rough, and I had to tell my kid no a bunch of times and we aren't eating all that great (and I had to avoid playing the lottery and miss a friend's wedding). It was interesting, and reminded me of Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" show.
I hear you. I feel like they could've avoided some of those situations and still conveyed the situations poorer people might find themselves in regardless of which choices they made in life.
Sounds good in theory, but the devil is in the details: what's essential, what's aggression, is in the eyes of the beholder. The reality of politics will bring it all back to about what it is now.
A nice idea, but in the end I suspect the tricky part is the definition of "essential government services" and the criteria for determining whether a person or corporation is "hurting anyone or the environment".
But what are you trying for? The definition of the statement in your mind is clear but it doesn't mean a damn thing.
I think we should aim for the government only providing essential services. But one of those services is making sure everyone has healthcare insurance available to them at a rate that they can afford.
You and I know probably agree on very little about the size of the government, even though we both agree that the government should aim to provide only the minimum essential services.
I know, I'm just saying it would be a whole lot better to have this debate and take whatever comes out of it than the current situation, which is mostly cynical and corrupt sociopaths on both sides who aren't in any way interested in bettering the country.
In other words, I'm just as happy to see someone like Dennis Kucinich do well as I am Ron Paul, even though ideologically I agree more with Paul. I think we should be more concerned with replacing evil people with good people than the particulars of one platform or another. The common grounds (stop the wars, stop corporate welfare) are vastly more important than the differences like health care or welfare for people who actually need help.
1-Stop contributing to society.
2-Start living as parasites from more hard working, efficient people.
3-Eliminate freedom to choose what to do with your salary money, so nobody wants to work, everybody wants to parasite.
Totally brilliant, what could go wrong about that?
Libertarians always seem to assume that if people didn't have to fear starving to death, naked on the street, they wouldn't go to work any more; and that curtailing to any degree the ability of the wealthiest to add to their wealth will stop the most productive members of society from wanting to contribute.
Yet today, countries with better social safety nets have stronger economies, and Warren Buffett has consistently argued for higher effective taxes on the ultra-rich.
I consider myself libertarian, but welfare is the last thing I'd cut. It's true that the notion of welfare strengthening the overall economy is rooted in fallacy (ignoring unseen costs--read Hazlitt or Bastiat), but if we could do things like cut military spending drastically, let banks fail, get real currency, eliminate the income tax, the drug war, etc., it would have such a huge positive impact that very few would even need welfare once things got straightened out, and it would be a much easier pill for people to swallow politically--less destabilizing and divisive. Imo, it's stupid for libertarians to even talk about welfare. Just focus on getting rid of the things that have the biggest impact, and that almost everyone hates anyway, then go from there.
I'm not sure how cutting military spending (meaning laying off engineers designing weapon systems, welders putting together weapons systems, and cutting back on the number in the armed forces), letting banks fail (laying off people), ending the drug war (which means saving money by laying off policemen) will lead to reducing the expenditures on unemployment. Maybe long term it will lead to improvement but short term, cutting government spending equates to cutting jobs.
The money the government spends doesn't just get burnt into thin air. It gets paid out in a bunch of government contracts, those contracts buy products and services provided by private companies. Those private companies employ a lot of people and buy more products from other companies that employ a lot of people.
For better or worse, you need to recognize what happens when you cut government spending (a lot of people get fired, a lot of companies lose contracts) if you want to understand why people oppose cutting it.
There are homeless because the flop houses and super cheap apartments (think ten to a bathroom) have been killed off by permitting and zoning laws. To solve homelessness you just need to make it legal to open up a for profit ten dollar a night mens dorm somewhere in a city. Hitler lived in one for a couple years.
As it is the shelters are all government run and sane homeless people avoid them because of rampant drugs and sexual abuse.
I've stayed in $30/night hostels in New York City. I don't see many places they could've cut costs and still provided a safe, sanitary place to sleep, and there are still homeless people in New York City.
$30/night is roughly $11000 a year, which is almost 3 times more than I pay in Pittsburgh for my share of a nice house. If there really is no way to cut those costs in NYC, the answer is to get out of NYC.
Just as Silicon Valley can be a good idea for a lean startup, Manhattan can be a good idea for the top tier of homeless person: The creativity, variety, and drive of the panhandling there is many levels above what you'll see elsewhere.
...I'm not sure where I was going with that, but even at $10/night that's the same you're paying in Pittsburgh.
The logic is that people who can only afford 1/10 of a standard dwelling are better off living in a doorway and carrying all their stuff with them everywhere they go with no permanent address, instead of having 100 square feet to call their own. The benefits of learning to always be on guard outweigh the laziness that being able to lock a door causes people to develop.
Am I supposed to cite Godwins Law now? (Just kidding... )
There are many cities where these permitting and zoning laws work as a subsidy for wealthy people. For instance, they do not want walmart and they do not want more apartments built in my town (which is a very liberal university town) because they want to "preserve its character"... but they go way overboard.
The effect of this is that home prices go up significantly and they profit when they sell.
This seems to be common among towns up and down the west coast. I've seen it in California, Oregon and Washington.
Artificial constraint on the supply of homes means more homelessness, but also, more returns for homeowners there.
So, they have a financial incentive to vote to prevent these apartments from being built.
And I'm talking $600-$1,000 a month apartments, not even cheap housing.
The problem is that in aggregate terms, the more cheap housing you have in an area, the more crime, violence, graffiti and litter you're going to have.
Not because all persons who live in such places are always and inherently bad, but because a much larger percentage of the people who can only afford such places do have certain cultural, behavioral and educational qualities that cause them to breed such things. You enable the Ramen-eating college student to live there, but also the basket case. The struggling artist but also the drug-dealer or gang member. The single guy living alone for the first time with an apartment full of books, but also the extended family of 10 immigrants with 5 kids and varying degree of legality, all of whom who will be consuming government services and imposing government costs and externalities out of proportion to their taxable income contributions back. Having a town where the prices are so high only doctors and lawyers can afford to live might mean there's less diversity, but also the streets and lawns will be nice and safe and quiet, speaking in general. Given a choice only between these two imperfect extremes I know I'd take the second one.
Sigh. This reminds me of the story about the poor guy in San Francisco who developed a small business (selling flowers? shining shoes? can't remember) but was caught and fined and made homeless (he'd just put down a deposit on an apartment) by the city because he didn't have a business permit.
Thanks for digging up that link. Larry got taken care of because of the stink, but here are thousands of other stories of a similar nature, up and down the spectrum. Many small businesses started by "amateurs" run afoul of regulations, or simply discover that the tax burden is too much in the early days. Once when I started a small business it turned out I'd located my office in a special tax zone that wanted %3 of all revenue earned by the business.
I have a friend who spent 4 days in jail because he was caught near a bar without a drivers license. He didn't have ID, couldn't prove who he was and got locked up. They didn't let him make a phone call, and he stayed there until they decided he'd "learned his lesson". This one was sometimes homeless, but not a drunk or drug user. Just lost his ID.
I have a friend who spent 4 days in jail because he was caught near a bar without a drivers license. He didn't have ID, couldn't prove who he was and got locked up. They didn't let him make a phone call, and he stayed there until they decided he'd "learned his lesson". This one was sometimes homeless, but not a drunk or drug user. Just lost his ID.
Wait... what? To me, that just sounds evil. Why shouldn't I be able to walk around without any form of identification?
I genuinely want to know - is it really mandatory to have some form of identification on you at all times? Sometimes I just don't - should I worry?
That decision is that states with stop and identify laws, can require someone to identify themself when there is "reasonable suspicion" a crime has occured, which is also knowns as a Terry stop. The decision does not say you have to have government ID in those states. It says you have to identify yourself. It is sufficient to state your name and birth date for these purposes.
Again, that doesn't mean police will follow the law. Most of them don't.
Here in Uruguay* we have a reasonably good solution, it's a "flat tax" (currently U$ 50/month) that includes healthcare as a benefit, which makes it very useful for a one-man business - for example, most window cleaners, car parkers and other "almost-beggars" pay this tax (the maximum income for the business is U$ 25.000 gross yearly).
It's called "Monotributo", if you speak Spanish look it up.
It's very easy to start a new business in the US. Heck we have websites now that automate the process. And actually it's pretty easy to avoid/minimize taxes in the first few years, when there's little/no/negative income. Yes, some regulation are probably too much. Yes healthcare is too expensive and employers probably should not be mandated to be involved in it. But to say that all regulations are bad, just because some may be, is a leap one cannot make.
Also the motivations of the state are based on the motivations of any government. Buracracy is unavoidable.
If you're going to be handing out money, it would be better to give it to genuine charities that have an interest in helping the homeless. They generally will be better (imperfect of course, but better) at spending the money to help the most people.
The homeless oriented charities I'm aware of do amazing things with small amounts of resources, and they have to scrape by.
A real shame when we're blowing a $3.7 trillion dollar budget every year.
Well, those charities are able to scrape by due to necessity (if they had more resources the likelihood of some percentage of those resources being wasted increases as their resources do) and because the people are generally more committed. Government bureaucrats generally aren't that motivated to cut corners, nor do they care for much beyond getting their paycheck (and maybe moving up the ladder).
Based on the (admittedly not extensive) work I've done trying to help homeless folks get back on their feet, a lot of people do just need some money to get their life back in order. For instance, it's hard to apply for jobs when you don't have an address or a phone number for people to call you back at. Giving someone the ability to not have to worry about making their rent payment for a couple months can be huge.
But a significant portion of the cases I've seen can't be solved this simply. Despite what this article says substance abuse issues /are/ a big factor for a lot of the homeless people I've worked with. Providing cash money can alleviate some of their problems in the short term, but there are generally more fundamental obstacles that are holding people back. If you don't address these issues people can very easily fall back into the trap.
The best intervention I've ever seen for a homeless person is an employer who is willing to give them a steady job and be understanding about the difficulty of the situation they're going through. Anything that can get a homeless person to this point should be encouraged. Sometimes that can mean covering their expenses for a while to get back on their feet. But often it means providing substance abuse support; often it means teaching job skills; often it means connecting them with the right social service or civil society groups.