
We know there are overwhelming problems where people who are homeless gather together in unofficial tent camps. Celebrity Dr. Drew Pinsky warns us of “tent encampments with ‘multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re going to have louse-borne illness. Measles could break into that population. We have tuberculosis exploding.”
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The following article in the California Globe describes possible approaches to ending homelessness in California:
” . . . solutions could be ordered up and neatly delivered: . . . the national guard could be deployed, working with city and county law enforcement. The homeless could be sorted into groups; criminals, substance abusers, mentally ill, undocumented aliens, and all the rest.”
‘All the rest’ presumably means the rather mundane 4/5ths of the total numbers— those who don’t have enough income to pay for housing.
Many things can apparently be done to effectively house and otherwise support all these homeless people. For example, placing the bulk of them — in California, some estimated 130,000 people — in government-run, safe, sanitary supportive tent encampments that are too far away to disrupt either homes or businesses near city centres. As a bonus there is clearly enough funding available to place at least 10,000 in newly-built housing.
Strangely though, year after year massive amounts of funding assigned to tackle enterprises such as these never seems to be enough to do the job. Why is that?
Is it because of the Homeless Industrial Complex? According to some thinking, this cross-country cabal of government and non-profit leaches is sucking up the supply of taxpayer dollars destined for homeless support, apparently digesting most of it for personal enrichment, then spitting out nothing but a thin drool of inadequate charity.
Perhaps you are aware of exasperated cries for help from local city councillors tackling and failing to solve a nearby homeless crisis? It is happening everywhere across North America. Are these councillors and their supposedly homeless-loving non-profit and/or charitable fellow travellers simply pretending to spend allotted funds on the homeless?
Are they part of a national, perhaps even international, industry, which fraudulently diverts dollars from the supply line between local taxpayers and the people in your community who are homeless? Is this the Homeless Industrial Complex unmasked?
To some ears it sounds like a conspiracy born and spread in the twitterverse, but it’s all very shocking and exciting nonetheless. Explore more about America’s shadowy Homeless Industrial Complex in the CALIFORNIA GLOBE: The Homeless Industrial Complex
For another consideration of municipal decision making in a slightly less craziod world, the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) has just released an article called A New Agenda for Local Democracy: Building Just, Inclusive, and Participatory Cities. It focusses on Toronto, yet another place with a growing population of people experiencing homelessness.
The article’s authors call for changes to local decision making processes and structures. They make reference to local decision making processes in a host of North American cities, including Los Angeles, which is the target of the article in the California Globe.
Like the author of the article in the California Globe, the authors of the IMFG article recommend changes that would help to end homelessness. The IMFG article does not, however, recommend rounding up all people who are homeless and putting them in permanent tent encampments according to their medical diagnosis or social outcast status, miles from the city’s centre.
You can read this alternative analysis and its recommendations at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance: A New Agenda for Local Democracy: Building Just, Inclusive, and Participatory Cities
Strangely, there is no hint of the Homeless Industrial Complex in the IMFG’s report.