Homelessness: A Policy Choice (7/9/14)

by Mark Dempsey

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France

It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that the large number of homeless people is a U.S. public policy choice, but it is. You can tell this by visiting countries that have not made this choice. The number of beggars, sign flyers, and window washers in Western Europe is tiny, compared to the numbers in the U.S, as is the percentage of their population living in poverty.

Where did this policy problem begin? Perhaps its roots are in the industrial revolution, when for the first time in human history so many workers were entirely at the mercy of their employers for their subsistence. The public policy to drive peasants off the land, where they were relatively self sufficient, was called “enclosure.”

Perhaps its more recent origin in the U.S. was in legislation enacted during the Carter administration that closed the large asylums housing the mentally ill. Legislators were supposed to fund neighborhood residential homes to house the people they freed, but never did. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this omission the most shameful episode of public policy malfeasance he ever witnessed.

Perhaps it was the “trickle-up” philosophy of the Reagan administration that ended programs started during LBJ’s war on poverty, or the Clinton administration’s eagerness to triangulate and accommodate Newt Gingrich by “ending welfare as we know it,” that further reduced funding. Sacramento’s local charity for the homeless, Loaves and Fishes, did not exist before the Reagan administration.

For those who think we can’t afford to house homeless people, besides the evidence of other countries that have fewer homeless people, it’s worth remembering that there are currently more vacant foreclosed homes in the U.S. than homeless people. Furthermore, the “fiscally responsible” thinking that might, at least for the moment, suggest we cannot afford to take care of the homeless was conspicuously absent when multi-trillion-dollar Middle Eastern wars or multi-trillion-dollar financial sector bailouts were the issue. The Dallas Fed estimates the financial sector received $10 trillion in bailouts, all told. For only $9 trillion, the Fed could have paid off everyone’s mortgages. Ending homelessness would surely be less costly.

Worst of all, if we really wanted to save money, it turns out that it’s cheaper to be kind and house the homeless, at least if you count the cost of policing them, and handling their illnesses in the emergency room (before those illnesses become epidemics). For one account, read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker story entitled “Million Dollar Murray” with the subtitle: “Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.” (http://gladwell.com/million-dollar-murray/)

Perhaps as an indication of its plutocracy’s insecurities, the U.S. seems to embrace industrial-strength cruelty as a solution to its social problems. It has policies like the drug war, and as one consequence, although it has only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners (yet still consumes 25% of the world’s drugs).

Incarceration doesn’t reduce crime, either. The Canadians have similar demographics, but jail roughly one seventh as many people, per capita, as the U.S. does. In the decades since Nixon began the drug war, and Reagan put it on steroids, Canadian and U.S. crime rates have differed only insignificantly.

Incarceration doesn’t cure addiction, either. It’s far less effective than medical drug treatment, and about seven times more expensive. The source of these assertions is Orange County former drug prosecutor (Republican) Judge Jim Gray. See judgejimgray.com.

So the homeless are often addicts, or are mentally ill, or simply poor, unemployed people who can’t find affordable housing. And yes, some are sick enough to refuse treatment when offered, but given the massive downsizing of the assistance available, their refusal to submit to the serial humiliation of applying for what remains of welfare is certainly not the only reason.

Don’t get me wrong. The homeless often are not sympathetic. Mentally ill people, addicts, and the financially irresponsible often are not nice. But that’s how they became homeless. On the other hand, what should we do with them? Break out the cattle prods? Kill them?

If we still want to call ourselves a civilization, we cannot be so cruel. The compassionate, and not incidentally least expensive, way to handle them would be to house them, and de-criminalize them.

Judge Gray notes that the Swiss de-criminalized even heroin, and discovered crime around the drug clinics dropped 85%, and drug use actually declined. The Portuguese had a similar experience when they decriminalized all drugs.

In our country, tremendous forces oppose sensible solutions. Some profit from crushing the poor (with payday loans at 400% interest), building or staffing prisons, maintaining a vast military  and police force, and so on. Some of us cannot see past mental illness to humanity, and the alternatives of denial, incarceration and force are effective in the short term. Americans even believe cruelty is entertaining. Turn on your TV and watch the murders, if you like.

One point of writing this is to alert people to the impact of public policy. Sacramento County, for one recent example, was going to require that builders provide 15% of their new homes as low-income housing. Providing mixed-income housing is not just do-able, it has historically been profitable in addition to being socially valuable. Less-expensive housing mixed in with the mansions appears often in traditional (pre-sprawl) neighborhoods.

Mixed-income neighborhoods let different classes encounter each other as neighbors, putting a human face on those different from ourselves, rather than creating the notoriously boring monoculture of sprawl. You can practically know how much people make in sprawl by what subdivision they occupy.

Worth remembering: We can profit from our interactions with poor people. For one thing, they are often more generous, and less preoccupied with the almighty dollar (which is why they’re poor). Contact with such people can be spiritually uplifting.

Isolating poor people in ghettos often means they have to deal with the worst elements of society, both mental illness and criminality, without much financial, political or other social support. Treating such problems without support, or much money, is often impossible, leading to a downward spiral of social dysfunction. So the rich have something to contribute to the poor too.

But is mixed-income home building really financially viable? Apartments (cheaper homes) that are architecturally compatible with neighboring larger homes are a feature of the most valuable real estate in the region (McKinley Park), and could easily provide an economically successful, kinder alternative to homelessness for some people.

Sadly, because of builders’ lobbying, the County stopped requiring builders to provide that 15%  of their subdivisions as low-income housing in favor of a per-square-foot payment to fund such housing, probably elsewhere, not mixed into the neighborhoods they were building. A local church policy group (ACT) calculates $6 per square foot would be the equivalent of the 15% requirement. The County proposed $2.25, and to accommodate the Church group’s pleading raised it to $2.50.

As Sacramento County reduced required new low income housing by more than 50%, notice that another local government (Sacramento City) moved without delay to subsidize the billionaire owners of the Kings with $250 million they didn’t have (their workers’ pensions are underfunded, reports the Bee). So locally, the ultimately cheaper policies that provide relief for poor people and the homeless continue suffer the death of a thousand cuts.

Sadly, this is typical for U.S. public policy. It’s often stupid, expensive and cruel because some group profits from the status quo. So financial sector plutocrats get billions, even trillions in subsidies while the poor and homeless, whose needs are orders-of-magnitude smaller, must contend with delay, under-funding, and other dead ends daily. Personally, if I had a homeless person’s life, I’d be mainlining heroin. Seriously, it is that frustrating.

So I write this to ask you to do two things:

First write or e-mail your County supervisor to decry their decision on low-income housing. The number of concessions they make daily to land speculators, and subsidizing the wealthy among us is shameful enough without also crushing the poor with policies that ultimately lead to more expensive solutions (e.g., incarceration, emergency rooms).

Second, the next time you have to deal with an unpleasant homeless person, take a step back from any natural angry reaction you may have. Odds are you have the space to do it. Your kindness may make a difference there too.

And if that’s not incentive enough, remember most of us are only a mugging or bad illness away from living under a bridge. Compassion may be the best form of enlightened self interest. It may come back to you too. In fact it may be the only thing that can save our civilization.

...and pass this along.