MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Vlastula)

BuzzFlash at Truthout has posted several commentaries on the war on the homeless, including one yesterday entitled, "Liberal Bastion of San Francisco Bay Area Continues NIMBY Crackdown on Homeless." In April, we offered the commentary, "Criminalizing People Who Live in Cars Is a New Low in the War on the Poor."

Nothing increases homelessness like income inequality. Other causes of people in the United States living without permanent shelter include a decrease in services for persons with mental health needs, less funds for agencies that provide homeless services (including places to sleep), foreclosures, domestic violence, loss of work, gentrification and the lack of availability of inexpensive single room occupancy housing, teenage runaways without resources, etc.

As a result, we have seen a nationally spreading war on the homeless that aims to make them disappear without assisting them. Many cities and communities, as BuzzFlash noted in our commentary yesterday, regard the homeless as a form of urban blight.

It is a given that the growing policy of treating homeless individuals as rubbish is wanton cruelty, but a new study in Florida reveals that it is also wasteful of taxpayer funds as compared to providing permanent housing and care. As the Orlando Sentinel reported on May 21:

Each chronically homeless person in Central Florida costs the community roughly $31,000 a year, a new analysis being released Thursday shows.

The price tag covers the salaries of law-enforcement officers to arrest and transport homeless individuals — largely for nonviolent offenses such as trespassing, public intoxication or sleeping in parks — as well as the cost of jail stays, emergency-room visits and hospitalization for medical and psychiatric issues.

However, according to th analysis of homelessness in the Orlando area by Creative Housing Solutions (a consulting firm based in Tulsa, Oklahoma):

In contrast, providing the chronically homeless with permanent housing and case managers to supervise them would run about $10,000 per person per year, saving taxpayers millions of dollars during the next decade, the report concludes....

Researchers estimated the cost of permanent supportive housing at $10,051 per person per year. Housing even half of the [Orlando] region's chronically homeless population would save taxpayers $149 million during the next decade — even allowing for 10 percent to end up back on the streets again.

In a society consumed by the mantra of the efficient use of taxpayer funds, this would appear to be a no-brainer:

"The numbers are stunning," said [Central Florida Commission on Homelessness' ] CEO, Andrae Bailey. "Our community will spend nearly half a billion dollars [on the chronically homeless], and at the end of the decade, these people will still be homeless. It doesn't make moral sense, and now we know it doesn't make financial sense."

The current trend in the US to make the homeless "disappear" (this include laws against feeding those who are hungry and without a place to live) is not dissimilar to an Amtrak project in Philadelphia to create artwork that hides urban dilapidation and poverty with murals lining the rail corridor through the city. The Wall Street Journal article ,describing the "City of Brotherly Love" Potemkin Village undertaking is entitled, "Fighting Urban Blight With Art: Philadelphia combats blight along Amtrak's Northeast rail corridor with art installation."

You can't "combat" urban deterioration due to the economic abandonment of large swaths of communities - mostly minority in Philadelphia - with murals. It follows that you can't "combat" homelessness by enacting inhumane ordinances that force those without shelter to move away from business and gentrified areas.

Just like health care, permanent shelter is a right not a privilege.

Denying that basic human need is also a burden on the taxpayer. You would think that would get some attention from those who shrilly advocate against "high" taxes.

The cost-savings argument, however, hasn't worked yet, because maybe it's the cruelty of treating the homeless as disposable people that is what gives the well-off a supercilious thrill at the heart of the injustice.

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