Posted on 08/17/2019 10:19:14 AM PDT by JeepersFreepers
You already read the headline, but that’s not even the worst part.
Yes, Austin City Council is spending a record-high $62.7 million this year to try and solve homelessness, equivalent to giving roughly $28,000 to each homeless person in the city. But the more startling fact is that Austin officials are leading the city down the same dangerous path San Francisco has already journeyed—a path Austinites should be wary not to travel.
Before peering down the road toward Austin’s future, let’s look around for a moment at the crisis happening right now in Texas’ capital city. The homeless population is rapidly rising, up 5 percent a year for the last two years; the number of those unsheltered on the streets is the highest it has been in nearly a decade. And you may have even noticed people camping in the middle of public areas all across town, thanks to a recent decision by the city council that has spread contention throughout the community.
We already know city council’s plan to solve this whole problem is to spend a lot of money, but instead of just writing a $28,000 check to each homeless person, they’re sending pallets of tax dollars through a cash-eating maze of city administration and bureaucracy, hoping that a fraction of it eventually comes out the other side to the people on the streets.
Will that plan work? Enter San Francisco, the potential Austin-of-the-future.
If you look just past the shiny Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll see one of the worst homelessness disasters in the United States. The Bay City has recently become infamous for homeless crime, used syringes, and human feces littering the entire downtown area (the city even has a designated “Poop Patrol”).
San Francisco’s city government created a bold plan to solve everything, a plan Austin is now following: Spend lots of citizens’ money.
From 2016 to 2020, their city government will have spent over $1.5 billion on homelessness. If you do the math of that four-year spending based on the current homeless population of 9,784, that’s over $153,000 on each person.
Yet despite San Francisco’s mind-boggling payouts per person, the situation for those on the street—and the rest of the city—has only deteriorated.
Indeed, the homeless population has grown by nearly 7 percent in just the last two years (and 14 percent since 2013), with the vast majority of those new homeless being hometown folks. Oh, and the dangerous turmoil on the streets downtown has only intensified.
In short, the plan isn’t working. San Francisco’s city government has thrown a bewildering amount of money and programs at this problem, yet the landscape remains in shambles and littered with feces.
Back in Austin, where citizens are beginning to see more visible vagrancy and crime downtown, our city officials are trying the same exact plan as San Francisco with a fraction of the money. How should they expect that to end? (Hint: According to a city audit, Austin officials are already doing a dismal job fixing this problem with the money they do have, and the city is only just beginning their planned spending sprees.)
The path San Francisco has traveled—the path of enormous government spending—has ended in chaos, but Austinites can protect their own quality of life by telling their city officials to turn around now.
Hah! Even if Austinites tell the city officials to stop the madness, they won't listen.
per year? Some people on disability only get about $13,000 per year-
Buy them a bus ticket to some Democrat city at least 1000 miles away and wire them $100 to that city to make sure they go there.
150k on each person in five years!?!
Wow.
Why not just buy them a cheap house in a cheap state and be rid of them if you’re gonna spend that much?
Homelessness is as much about drug addiction and mental illness as it is about a “housing shortage.”
Its called root cause analysis...government idiots should try it some time.
I’ll bet that if the money could be tracked a lot of it winds up in the Austin politicians pockets and the pockets of their cronies
$28,000 , when the word gets out they’ll be flooded with Homeless
Who is getting the money that is being spent?
Bus ticket from Austin to San Fran, where welcome all homeless, is just $250, one-way. Moves them from where they are not wanted to where they are.
because much of the money doesn’t go to the end user/needy person. The money goes to the people providing “services” and people holding meetings about the issue.
Seriously, most homeless have mental problems that need to be treated.
I wonder how much of that $28,000 actually goes to help the homeless person and how much goes into the pocket of a crony.
The amount spent on a homeless person in SF is mind boggling. If that person had a job and earned as much, they would be busy collecting taxes from them. In California, the public employee unions love homeless people, along with illegals, etc., because they are the ones that actually get the bulk of the money.
I blame the voters for this crap. Anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together knows full well that you don’t let children play with matches any more than you should put a democRAT in charge of anything.
It’s not nearly enough, bump it up....
So graft, basically :)
It might start off as the desire to do good, but money has a way of changing the results.
One guesses that a lot of hands take a cut - from the salaries of social services worker to the sticky fingers of contractors hire to provide services - and the money is not actually given in any way shape or form to the homeless directly.
And those receiving the money have no incentive to do anything except make sure that the crisis worsens.
The US has become a thoroughly corrupt country.
The people are tent dwellers, not homeless.
They are not ill, they are squatters on public lands.
The people of which you speak are in the past
It isn’t supposed to work. It is intended to funnel money into Leftist bureaucracies and well connected anti-American pockets.
Yes they do, but they just get civil service salaries. The real payola is to run a private for profit entity that is contracted to provide services, and you will find the principal officers and owners are strong supporters of the continued candidacy of incumbent politicians who have some say over the whole monkey business.
Its what we do for business when real manufacturing jobs are done by cheap labor oversees.
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