Two months ago, I warned New Hampshire about what it needs to do to end homelessness. Stop subsidizing it. Get the government out of funding entirely and instead look at incentives that encourage private funding.
[W]e don’t want anyone to be homeless unless that’s how they choose to live, which no one ever measures. We must also be aware that the need rises to meet the amount of taxpayer-funded money made available to address it. …
If you want to end homelessness, end taxpayer-funded support, at least at the state level. Stop giving money to non-profits/NGOs now, or we’ll end up with the same problem other states have or will, as exemplified by the San Francisco model. …
That’s not to say there’s no role for government at any level. It can offer incentives to private actors or interests that demonstrate results, rather than saying it will make money available for special interests to chase.
San Francisco is the example of what not to do in the state that exemplifies it. They throw billions at it annually and, much like their illegal Sanctuary policies, invite more individuals to live off taxpayers, free to engage in a long list of crimes, petty and otherwise.
It’s not their money, so they spend more and more of it while calling taxpayers names if they dare to complain about the drugs, rats, feces, crime, harassment, or rise in third-world diseases on the streets of a once-modern Western city.
Before Democrat Mayor London Breed was ousted by a different Democrat, she spent an additional $7 million on sixty sheds to provide housing for some of the homeless. Neither she nor her replacement, Daniel Lurie, can find a place to put them. Every plan is met by local opposition and enough outrage to keep them from being deployed.
They are technically $100,000.00 homes for some number of inhabitants, and while San Francisco’s wealthy like the idea of feeling like they helped (not actually helping), they don’t want to feel it anywhere near their home. And there are other logistical issues.
A cabin is just a sturdier tent. The people in it don’t own it, so there’s no expectation they’d respect it any more than they do the street where their tent was. And there are other issues.
In a statement to the Daily Mail, a city spokesman said: ‘Operating a shelter requires significantly more than placing cabins on a site. Any location must have the appropriate infrastructure, services, staffing, funding and operational model, along with meaningful community engagement.
Appropriate placement can’t be allowed to undermine the government-funded NGO infrastructure that can’t exist without it. Looking back at a pull quote from the June piece,
“[T]he city has become dependent on its increasingly important homeless service NGOs. To shut them down would be to suddenly have a giant dependent population but no one to deal with them.”
San Francisco spends around 700 million every year on a program it pretends is getting smaller but can’t. The money lures NGOs and any bum who wants to take a shot at tapping into it. If there are 8000 homeless, San Fran taxpayers are spending 87K/year per unhoused person. If it’s half that, like Mayor Lurie insists, then its 175K/ per person per year.
The homeless problem is an NGO problem, which will always make the homeless problem worse so it can keep its jobs program funded. In other words, there is no taxpayer-funded solution to either, and this rule applies to more than just bums panhandling or walking the streets.
That’s not to say there’s no role for government at any level. It can offer incentives to private actors or interests that demonstrate results, rather than saying it will make money available for special interests to chase.
If you make it a problem for citizens and private money, (at least) three things happen. Anyone taking money to fix it actually has to try, or donors will stop giving. Vagrancy doesn’t become an occupation in search of the best “placement situation.” If there is more “green” to be had in Vermont, or Massachusetts, or Maine, they will get there from here. Maybe New York, even.
It works for unemployment benefits, illegal aliens, just about everything. If we refuse to invite/subsidize it with public money, it will either find private funding, or it’s not a problem anyone cares enough about to fix.
It is not the government’s job to make people pay for things they wouldn’t support absent the threat of force, but much of what government tries to do is exactly that. We need roads. Powerline corridors and other infrastructure. Someone needs to pay the police and the courts and the pencil pushers in town hall. The folks who plow the roads or repair them. It’s a short list that needs to get corralled back into its tiny paddock.
Because? Where there is a trough, there will be pigs.
And, of course, Theodore Dalrymple. Misery will always rise to meet the amount of taxpayer-funded money made available to relieve it.
The cost of relieving it will always go up, so the problem can only ever get worse, redirecting more resources from the people who earned them to those who did not.
The opposite is also true. The less you spend on it, the less of it you will have. And what you do have should only ever be addressed by private interests beholden to private donors. It addresses the actual problem, disincentivizes adopting the misery in question as an occupation to access resources, and is most likely to result in less of whatever it is.
Cut the budget on homelessness, incentivize private giving, and get taxpayers out of the business of the homeless industrial complex. It’ll work.
Then do it with drugs, mental health, and whatever else happens to attract NGOs to feed at the taxpayers’ trough.
