By John Fund
Sunday, May 12, 2019
The more that progressive policies have failed to address
the homelessness problem in urban areas, the more that progressives are
doubling down on bad solutions.
Take Denver. The Mile High City presented voters last
week with Issue 300. It was placed on the ballot by advocates for the homeless
who wanted to legalize “camping” in parks and in vehicles on city streets,
including in front of homes and local businesses. This was too much for voters,
even in a city that only gave Donald Trump 19 percent of the vote in 2016. The
idea of legalizing vagrancy was shot down by a resounding 83 percent of local
voters.
Liberal mayor Michael Hancock said the city had dodged
making a bad situation worse. Noting that tent cities had already begun already
sprouting up in parks and alleyways, he maintained that “300 would have created
an unsanitary problem for the homeless and for Denver residents.”
But that doesn’t mean the courts elsewhere aren’t
stepping in to impose what voters rejected. Last September, the notoriously
liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that officials in Boise, Idaho,
had violated the Eighth Amendment rights of the homeless when they issued
citations for sleeping or camping in public. In 2015, the Obama Justice
Department backed a lawsuit against the Boise anti-vagrancy laws, arguing that
“if a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the
anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being
homeless.”
But it’s not as if cities aren’t already spending vast
amounts on the homeless. In 2017, the Puget
Sound Business Journal in Seattle reported that Seattle-area governments
were spending $1.06 billion a year on programs for homeless people. “Having
failed to build enough shelters for the growing numbers of homeless, the activists
will soon be back with a rock-stupid big-government solution — and all they’ll
need to implement it is a massive amount of taxpayer funding,” says John
Carlson, a Seattle radio talk-show host.
Peter Droege is a former executive director of Step 13, an
innovative homeless shelter in Denver. “What these activists do not understand
is that people struggling with homelessness, mental health issues, or addiction
do not want to be enabled in their behavior,” he wrote last month in the Washington Examiner. “Nor do they need
greater access to drugs or alcohol. What they need is community support and
supportive services that require them to be accountable and self-sufficient.”
When I first toured Step 13 some 20 years ago, it was an
eye-opening experience. The late Bob Cote, a homeless man who picked himself up
off the streets and founded Step 13, had a high success rate in rehabilitating
people with his “no drugs, no booze, find a job” program. “My biggest
adversaries are government homeless shelters that don’t ask people to do
anything for themselves, and Social Security Disability programs that allow
people to continue the same mistakes they’ve been making,” he told me. Cote was
constantly battling local bureaucrats who oversaw homelessness issues. It’s one
reason he would not accept government money, or the strings that came with it.
Every homeless person has a different story, and some are
truly down on their luck through no fault of their own. But most are mired in a
cycle of behavior that they refuse to change. I once reported on an effort in
San Francisco to encourage pedestrians and tourists to hand out coupons instead
of money to the homeless. The coupons were redeemable for many things: a free
meal, clothing, haircuts, and laundromat services. Over the course of several
days, I tried to distribute such coupons myself and met rejection about 80
percent of the time. Cash was what homeless people wanted — and for you know
what.
Allowing people to remain mired in problems involving
mental illness, drugs, or alcohol affects the wider community. In Seattle,
Scott Lindsay, a former public-safety adviser to the mayor’s office, has
written a new report called “System Failure.” He found that a mere 100
“prolific offenders” among the homeless are responsible for more than 3,500
criminal cases. Often they are released from jail the same day they are taken
in.
“We need help, I have businesses broken into every single
night,” says Erin Goodman, head of a local Seattle Business Improvement Area.
“Something has to change.” Goodman says crime is up 31 percent this year in her
area because of the “prolific offenders.”
There are options out there. Rhode Island has had great
success with its Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) program, which blends
punishment with treatment, managing to keep most addicts from straying into old
alliances and bad habits. Several people in the MAT program say that jail,
accompanied by treatment, saved their lives. Rhode Island authorities are
hosting a two-day workshop at the end of the month for cities around the
country that have asked about it. But progressive Seattle can’t be bothered and
isn’t sending anyone. The city attorney, Pete Holmes told a local podcast that
the Seattle’s problems are caused in part by its failure to impose a new city
income tax.
Last month, Michael Gordon, a former vice president for
grants at the San Francisco–based Thiel Foundation, wrote in National Review Online that a walk
through his city is a sobering experience:
You notice homeless men and women —
junkies, winos, the dispossessed — passed out in the vestibules of empty
storefronts on otherwise busy streets. Encampments of tents sprout in every
shadowy corner: under highway overpasses, down alleys. Streets are peppered
with used syringes. Strolling the sidewalks, you smell the faint malodorous
traces of human excrement and soiled clothing. Crowded thoroughfares such as
Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable
outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do
nothing.
The confused mumble, the incoherent
finger-pointing tirade, the twitch, the cold daemonic stare, the drunken
stumble and drool — these are the rhythms of a city on the edge of a
schizophrenic explosion.
Whatever cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver
have been doing isn’t working.
Finding the right balance between compassion and personal
responsibility in homelessness policy is incredibly difficult. Simply spending
money on more apartments for the homeless only attracts more homeless and
breeds corruption. Demanding that people get off drugs and alcohol and on to
any prescribed medication they have invites howls of outrage and civil-rights
lawsuits.
That’s why it’s noteworthy that the citizens of liberal
Denver finally said “Enough” to liberal plans to broaden the right of homeless
people to live on city streets. It’s now time for reformers to realize that the
public is yearning for answers and to propose tough-love solutions that address
the root cause of the homeless problem, rather than sentimentalize it.
No comments:
Post a Comment