I wanted to start a thread in this forum about the homelessness dilemma.
Last night, I saw the attached image on Facebook, and many commenters were heralding the great job of the DPD for enforcing the panhandling laws. Many of those same commenters also referred to the proliferation of "aggressive" panhandling in downtown.
I have only once been "aggressively" panhandled -- when a man in Victory Park refused to take my offer of a $10 Subway gift card and insisted I go to the ATM and withdraw $10 cash instead. I was outraged, and politely let that man know how I felt.
But this photo struck me with a mix of emotion. I have been non-aggressively panhandled by this man, and he has stared menacingly when I say "no." So when I initially saw the photo, I thought, "good riddance." But the longer I stared, the less positive I felt.
I have thought through and read the history of vagrancy laws and how they were aimed at deterring and punishing otherwise able-bodied individuals from being unproductive members of society. It was a punishment of laziness and, in my mind, a punishment for not being profitable to the government, since they couldn't tax you.
But I don't get the sense that most of the homeless / panhandling folks downtown are "otherwise able-bodied" or merely "lazy." Perhaps some are, but most need help: whether it be physical shelter, drug treatment, mental health treatment, etc. Which, of course, is all very costly. So I struggle to find solutions to address this dilemma.
So-called "community activists" or "stakeholders" (particularly on Facebook) seemingly offer mere lip service. And City Hall only creates commission after commission. The status quo isn't working -- what, truly, can we do to make substantive progress?
My only answer to this question is that homelessness can be dramatically improved with the investment of a lot of money -- money that we don't have (or don't want to spend). According to this report(http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/2016%20State%20Of%20Homelessness.pdf), there are over 500,000 homeless people in the US. And over 83,000 are "chronically homeless." These 83,000 are the most dire cases that we see.
So suppose we aimed to help the most helpless -- those 83,000. And suppose (purely unscientific) that the yearly cost of living averages around $30,000 per year. (I get this number from the average cost to house an inmate). And if these individuals need special help, lets double it (just to be conservative).
So these 83,000 people would need $60,000 per year to get "better," which, of course, could be anything from institutionalization (if truly mentally unstable), or rehabilitating these people's lives over a term of years.
$60,000 x 83,000 = ~$5,000,000,000. Five billion dollars per year.
And the creation of a governmental agency to oversee this spending would surely cost billions more.
I'd love to hear other thoughts.