What is the price to ransom an entire American City?
Tell you what… we’ll come back to that…
I’ve often thought that one of the worst things to ever happen to the problem of endemic Homelessness is the term “Homeless” itself… because it has allowed our feckless leaders to ignore other more promising solutions in pursuit of the fantasy that simply putting every Homeless person in a “Home” would solve the problem. Cuz the root problem is that they’re “homeless” right? I mean, it’s right there in the name.
The problem with that concept is that everyone (well everyone who is not in Government, anyway) knows that the vast majority of the Homeless in Los Angeles are addicted to hard drugs, suffering from severe mental illness, or both. Simply taking someone addicted to drugs like Fentanyl or suffering from debilitating mental illness and sticking them in a “home” doesn’t solve the problem, it just puts the problem where no one can see it (until a drug addict browns out with a drug fire cooking and burns the building down, of course… look up the sordid history of the Cecil Hotel if you doubt me on this).
But let’s stipulate, for argument’s sake, that puttting every one of L.A.’s homeless in a “home” would solve the problem… it wouldn’t, but let’s grant that for a moment. Last time I checked, the city was spending $600,000 for every single unit of housing they build. That means we’d need 6 million bucks to house ten people, 60 million for every hundred, and 600 million for every thousand homeless folks.
Guys… there are something like 70,000 homeless in Los Angeles. What is 600 million dollars times 70… 40 billion? Because that’s the ransom Mayor Garcetti is demanding to solve this problem… four times the City’s entire annual budget, and seven times the City’s total annual tax revenue.
And always assuming that thousands more homeless don’t flock to L.A. when they find out we’re passing out free homes, that’s JUST Los Angeles…. what about San Fransisco, San Diego, Sacramento, Fresno, Anaheim… pretty soon, you’re talking about real money. Even if we knew it would work, as a solution it still wouldn’t be feasible… like a ransom payment.
Which raises a question… why do politicians love building low income housing so much? It’s a fervor with California politicians that’s almost religious.
I think the answer is two-fold.
Reason number one is that city governments, and especially Los Angeles city government, is bought, paid-for, and owned by real estate developers, and building low income housing is a terrific opportunity for graft. Think about all the juicy construction contracts you get to hand out to the developers that pile your campaign coffers high with elicit cash! Not to mention the lucrative private sector jobs with the companies owned by those very same developers that are waiting for you when you term out of office.
The second reason is simple political expediency. It only takes a couple of years to build a bunch of housing units, well within the term of office of an average big city Mayor. And nothing makes for better campaign fodder than a big glossy picture of a Mayoral Candidate standing in front of a row of shiny new housing units with a giant pair of novelty scissors in his hand as he cuts the ribbon and announces the homeless problem “solved.”
By contrast, successful addiction and mental health programs take many years to build and many more for patients to complete, and even then it’s very hard to calculate the true success rate of these programs… certainly the success rate would be nowhere near 100%. And anyway you can’t very well take a campaign photo in front of a bunch of recovered addicts, can you?
So yeah, all that AND the graft.
But mostly it’s the graft… that sweet, sweet graft. Fat bank accounts last much longer than the fleeting glory of holding public office.
In the meantime, we’ll still have this horrible, tragic homeless problem… anybody got $40 billion I can borrow? I gotta pay a ransom.
The problem of the homeless was not something that I thought much about, living in a rural area with no large cities nearby. Then my brother chose to be homeless. I say he ‘chose’ insofar as a mentally ill person can choose anything with any measure of reason behind the choice. My brother had an excellent pension from his job as well as a VA income as a disabled veteran (as well as a substantial savings). It was his status as a veteran that explained his mental illness. He suffered a TBI at a young age in the Army and was never the same again. As life does to all of us it ravaged him and as he grew older the ability to bounce back simply because he was younger obviously diminished. He had a split from reality and gave up shelter to live on the streets. And that was where he died, alone.
I’m relaying all this to try to illustrate how complicated my brother’s story was and his is just one story among thousands and thousands of homeless. It’s easy to become passionate about a cause when it directly affects you but how do we get others involved? I was completely ambivalent to the plight of the homeless before my family’s tragedy so why should others be any more invested in the solutions than I was? I think for the same reason we have to invest in treating mental illness not just in the homeless but wherever it dwells. And drug addiction and domestic abuse and all the other reasons for homelessness.
We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Most normal people have immense compassion for those who suffer from physical ailments and somehow we need to harness that compassion and extend it to those who suffer from mental/ emotional ailments, as well. No one chooses to get cancer just as no one chooses to be mentally ill.
If we treated addiction/ mental illness with the same gusto as we treat cancer in our society, how many lives could we help to improve and save? Would there ever have been a War on Drugs if we treated the root causes of addiction properly and eradicated the demand? Although the article is about the homeless it’s easy to see how the tentacles of mental illness/ addiction reach across our society.
I’m so sorry to hear about your brother, that’s awful. I 100% agree with everything in your post. I think part of the reason I write about the homeless issue at all is precisely because it seems tragic to me and I hate that people get to propose ridiculous convoluted solutions that can never ever work and then go home feeling better about themselves without having solved one damned thing. Thanks for telling your story.
Thank you for your kind words.
You’re absolutely correct about these people who think they’re do- gooders when all they really do is keep promising to solve problems knowing full well they have no intention of doing so. They make bank on problems not solutions.
Ps. I really enjoy your articles.
Thank you!