Punishing the Homeless is More Gratifying Than Ending Homelessness

[elfs]

I was having a conversation yesterday with Jimmy Matta, our mayor, after a symposium on dealing with youth homelessness in Burien, a city that has grown from 30,000 to 50,000 in the 19 years Omaha and I have been here. That's going from a medium-sized town to an actual city, with the usual city-sized problems that go with it. Coupled with the rising cost of living created by the tech vortex that is our major city of Seattle, and our very close proximity both to the airport and to one of the most convenient commute corridors in the county, Burien has suddenly experienced explosive growth. It doesn't hurt (or help, depending on your perspective). The four neighboring polities all depict themselves differently: Tukwila pretends its a commercial and industrial zone, both Des Moines and Normandy Park are for people with way too much money and have absolutely horrible choke points to make commuting a nightmare, and Sea-Tac surrounds the airport and has all the attendent noise and pollution issues that drive down the attractiveness of housing. So Burien is the destination for people who want to move out of the city and have a place that's at least a little kid-friendly.

Mayor Matta (and Omaha) asked me to put together a list of studies and results about "housing first" initiatives, and here's what I've found:

• Los Angeles found that it spend %20 less on helping the mentally ill homeless by giving them a permanent place to live, with monitoring.


• Several Canadian cities reported no change in costs, but the social effects of homelessness were sigificantly reduced with a housing-first approach. By "social effects," they mean that giving the unhoused housing gave those people a foundation on which to find work, and many did; the "unsightliness" of begging was signficantly reduced, and the "housing first" participants were significantly further along in substance abuse recovery than those in the "treatment as usual" categories.


• The City of Charlotte, North Carolina, realized $1.8 million in savings from a housing-first approach.


• In Colorado, the per-individual cost of dealing with homeless people dropped from $43,000/year to $18,000/years after the state opened a new housing-first shelter.


• The European Union's 2018 report on homelessness found that Finland's housing-first approach saves the country €15,000 per person per year, or about $17,000 per person per year in US dollars, while also reducing police, medical, and social costs.


• Utah, of all places, has a housing-first approach and has reduced homelessness by 74%.


• Illinois discovered that a long-term, housing-first solution for recently released convictscould save the state up to a $100 million through reduced recidivism and a sooner return to the workforce.

As I was talking to the mayor, though, I remembered Werner Herzog's quote that "America is about to learn what Germany learned in the 1930s: that one-third of you want to kill another one-third of you while the last third watches." And as Jimmy and I were talking about the implications of that quote, I came to a realization: those six studies above won't do a damn thing to convince the first one-third.

First, this is 'Murica, where it doesn't matter how damn many "studies" you have, they won't believe them. "We're different here," they'll say, "and those results don't mean anything here." Or "There's a catch, there's got to be more money going out of the system somewhere that's not exposed in the data."

Secondly, some will believe it. Some will say, "Yeah, sure, if we house the homeless people the cost of dealing with homelessness will go down, but it's still the wrong thing to do." To those people, a home, even a tiny studio apartment with its own bathroom, is the ultimate luxury, the absolute one thing we must not give people who haven't earned it. Despite its absurdly high cost and its absolute necessity in life, shelter is the one thing we must not give people who haven't earned it. These people don't care if it costs more, even much more, to manage the homeless via police and emergency room. Being manhandled by the police and ER doctors is unpleasant for all unconcerned, but if you can't earn your shelter than unpleasantness is all you deserve. The money doesn't "really" go to the homeless person in that case, as it does for housing-first; it goes to the cops and the doctors. And if that distracts the cops and the doctors from using their time on better things like, you know, catching murderers and taking care of sick kids, well, that's just the price of doing business.

It's cruel and short-sighted. It's the atttude of those who believe that the only way to inspire the masses is through punishment. But it's what we're up against: the ones who would rather spend more to punish the "undeserving," perpetuating conditions of misery and pain, than they would want to live in a better community.

Comments

[fayanora]

Someone who I know who used to live in Colorado told me that the only reason the Boulder police started giving shelter to the homeless was because it was cheaper to do that than it was to deal with all the dead bodies of people dying of hypothermia in the winter. That's government for you: no morals at all, all they care about is money.