I seem to remember a North Eastern town that became the mini - Mogadishu as the result of their generous social programs. Massachusetts?
Here is the referenced article the writer was talking about.
http://wyofile.com/kerrydrake/wyoming-homelessness-place-live-save-money/
Most homeless people have drug/alcohol problems. Giving them more free stuff won’t change that.
And where is the incentive to improve your lot in life if everything is free? Apparently working is for stupid people.
If the Utah report is factual, it actually supports the sanity of home ownership as opposed to the insane payments to a fund that never developes equity.
It probably does save the state money per bum so treated. However it must draw more homeless people into the state and induce more of the barely not homeless to become homeless. Overall it must still cost more than it “saves.” It certainly doesn’t inculcate a work ethic.
Welfare Can Make More Sense than Work
Most decisions in life are the result of a cost-benefit analysis. When residents in Connecticut consider getting a job, they assume they would be better off having a job than not. They’d be wrong. Because in Connecticut, it pays not to work.
Next Monday, the Cato Institute will release a new study looking at the state-by-state value of welfare. Nationwide, our study found that the value of benefits for a typical recipient family ranged from a high of $49,175 in Hawaii to a low of $16,984 in Mississippi.
In Connecticut, a mother with two children participating in seven major welfare programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, utility assistance and free commodities) could receive a package of benefits worth $38,761, the fourth highest in the nation. Only Hawaii, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia provided more generous benefits.
When it comes to gauging the value of welfare benefits, it is important to remember that they are not taxed, while wages are. In fact, in some ways, the highest marginal tax rates anywhere are not for millionaires, but for someone leaving welfare and taking a job.
Therefore, a mother with two children in Connecticut would have to earn $21.33 per hour for her family to be better off than they would be on welfare. That’s more than the average entry-level salary for a teacher or secretary. In fact, it is more than 107 percent of Connecticut’s median salary.
Particularly early on when the person still has a chance to make it on their own. Before they become a hopeless case.
Funny. They closed all the institutions and threw the nuts out on the street. Now they’ve brought back the institutions and are marveling at how smart they are.
The mini-Mogadishu were the large groups of Somalian refugees that ended up in Lewiston Maine.
Massachusetts has a Homeless problem (along with refugee problems), MA has this law that homeless families must be given shelter (NY has this law too)
Lots and lots of families living in Hotels and Motels all over the state.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/11/14/thousands-homeless-families-still-take-shelter-hotels-and-motels/otYrDe98YlPfMCgEwiNlML/story.html
MA has the shelter law plus one of the highest welfare-wage equivalents in the country (CATO) - homeless people are flocking to the state - it even has many liberals crying foul.
We had a homeless man freeze to death just before Christmas. He was found outside of his tent when he didn’t make his rounds in town.
Over the years he’s caused a bit of trouble when he started a brush fire and burned quite a bit of acreage and his tent.
He did not want to live in a “home” and preferred being outside. Some people you cannot force to live in a dwelling. They prefer being homeless.
You have forgotten to mention zoning and over strict building codes. That have raised the cost and type of home one can build.
There are private efforts, like Habitat for Humanity, with similar notions.
In general, private is better than public for charitable efforts. Private has a face. It is funded by voluntary means only. Its agents do not have the temptation of pandering to voters in order to gain sinecures. That’s not saying that public can NOT work. But it takes more than being a bureaucrat in order to care with the kind of care needed to try to turn a beneficiary to the good rather than leaving him or her to be a bum.
Houses require maintenance and upkeep. They require utilities.
These people have no money and likely will not for who knows how long.
But here is a house, paid by the taxpayer that has a home and has to WORK to keep it and pay for these bums.
Yeah, this will totally work. Really, Utah?
Instant slums....The American dream.
There is some degree of sense here, but only if they embrace the idea from the position of cost savings to taxpayers.
To start with the dregs. Severe, chronic, homeless alcoholics are stupidly expensive to taxpayers, and despite endless efforts to break them out of alcoholism, it seldom works. But Seattle tried an experiment which worked.
Instead of trying to reform alcoholics, it put them in a refurbished old motel. They had a nurse there for any medical needs, and I believe they even got a social agency to provide them with food. And just by being off the street, it saved millions of dollars in ER, paramedic and police costs in the first year alone.
Totally unexpectedly, the alcoholics started drinking less, which I guess was an added bonus. It was even suggested that this system could be improved by letting them self-serve free grain alcohol and mixers, so they wouldn’t have to beg at all, but that was seen as too much.
The “high-end” homeless are families who are just temporarily homeless, and who get maximum public sympathy and support. The biggest help to them is having a “public boarding school for the poor” for their kids, which helps the parents find work, and earn enough money to get a deposit on an apartment, pay off some debts, etc., while not having to monitor, feed and care for their children. This can halve the time they spend being homeless.
The “less sympathetic adult homeless” are the majority that remain. They are often a combination of problems, drug and alcohol, psychiatric, and just general failure. This is probably the hardest group to help, because they generally don’t want help.
Finally there are the “young homeless”, often runaways, who are terrified of government, which they see in an even worse light than do conservatives. Oddly enough, some have severe claustrophobia, and find it intensely difficult to sleep indoors. Others have a “traveler” mindset, and migrate either with the weather, or to where they can find their peers.
Many of these are what are called “blanks”, who reject any form of identification, and do not want to belong to any system at all, for fear of control and persecution by the police and government. They try to live within the black economy, where everything is done for cash or trade. They are usually voluntary homeless, and only a perhaps 20% or less of them remain that way into adulthood.
The most effective means of approaching young homeless is done by churches, who are much more effective in helping them than is government. Especially very young runaways from extremely abusive families who know that if they are captured by the police, they will be returned to their families, where they face brutality, rape and even death.
Some of these children are effectively raised by a congregation as unofficial foster parents, who lavish loving care on them, give them a good education, even eventually sending them to college. No real name for this, but heaven must surely approve.
Maine. Also Minnesota.
Maine. Also Minnesota.
Back in the olden days when cities had VAGRANCY LAWS, there were no homeless in town.
They could reduce their ambulance bills if they just gave everyone a free car and gas.
Why not just require hotels to give them rooms free of charge, like they require ERs to treat any moocher who shows up?
I wouldn’t want to own the apartment complex where they were being put if I wasn’t allowed to evict for any reason.
What a stupid, wasteful idea.