The homeless crisis is a billion dollar scam. It
isn’t being solved. It’s only getting worse, by Daniel Greenfield, 8/24/18.
New
York City will be spending $2.06 billion on its Department of Homeless
Services. There are 61,421 homeless people in the city which is spending
$33,539 per homeless person.
That’s
only a little short of the starting salary of an FDNY firefighter at $39,000. More
money will be spent on the homeless than on the firefighters who save New
Yorkers from burning buildings. The FDNY will have to make do with $2.04
billion, and the health department with $1.6 billion.
That’s
impressive for DHS, a department that was only created in 1993 by the disgraced
Dinkins administration and is now burning through more cash than agencies
fulfilling actual vital city functions.
Two
years ago, DHS had over 2,600 employees. That’s 1 employee to every 23 homeless
people. Meanwhile 234 New Yorkers get only 1 police officer to serve and
protect them from criminals.
Has
this vast infusion of cash solved homelessness in the city? Nope. New York’s
homeless population has kept on growing until it now has more homeless people
than any other city. New York City’s homeless growth rate is also faster than
that of any other city.
Maybe
because it spends more than any other city. But Los Angeles is catching up. Its
$4.6 billion package of homeless tax increases are staggering. Los Angeles
doubled its homeless budget to $450 million. Los Angeles County plans to spend
$374 million. That’s 1 percent of a budget meant to service a population of
over 10 million going to just 53,193 people. As Los Angeles threw more money at
the homeless problem, its homeless population increased 26%.
New
York City and Los Angeles only account for 3 to 5 percent of the
country’s population, but for a quarter of the country’s homeless population.
Even considering inflated real estate prices in both cities, a national problem
should not be this disproportionately concentrated in only two cities.
San
Francisco will be spending $279 million on 7,499 homeless people. Seattle is
spending $63 million, up from $39 million four years ago, while the Puget Sound
area may be spending up to $1.06 billion.
Seattle’s
homeless population is up 44% in two years to 5,500. The Seattle Times claims
that Seattle has a higher concentration of homeless than New York and Los
Angeles.
New
York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle and the Bay Area are
responsible for much of the national growth in homelessness. Activists blame
the crisis on soaring real estate prices. While those are some of the most
expensive cities in the country, they’ve been that way for quite some time.
Rapid
gentrification may catch local residents by surprise in cities with more recent
booms. But no one is likely to be surprised by the cost of living in the Bay
Area, Los Angeles or New York City. And those cities are also dedicating the
most resource to fighting homelessness while only making the problem worse.
The
statistics on homelessness are full of such curious mysteries. Why do New York
and California have more homeless people than 30 states combined?
Why
does Texas have only 17% of the homeless population of California? Why does
Colorado have four times the homeless population of Utah? Why do Oregon and
Washington have more homeless than Montana, Idaho, South and North Dakota,
Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa combined?
The
pattern is political. And lucrative. Social crises justify huge spending and
expansions of the government. The homeless crisis is largely a problem in lefty
cities where it’s heavily subsidized.
Federal
HUD homeless grants hit $2 billion in 2018.
Homelessness
statistics often come from the very agencies that are being glutted with cash
to fight the problem. Worse still, many of the counts are being carried out by
volunteers. Verification is chancy. Billions are being
spent on a problem whose growth and scope is being charted by the
self-interested.
The
billions being poured into solving the problem are going everywhere but to the
homeless.
In
Los Angeles, the billions in tax hikes going to build homeless housing are
being spent on units that cost an average of $479,000 per unit. At that rate,
it would take $15 billion to house all the homeless. That’s 150% of the entire
budget. And by then the population would have doubled.
The
building boom is going on even though Los Angeles County already has plenty of
beds in shelters that aren’t being used. Anyone who travels downtown can see
homeless encampments rising around homeless shelters.
More
than half of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) shelters
aren't filling their beds. The average utilization rate is 78%. The problem
isn’t a shortage.
Homelessness
is largely a mental health and drug abuse issue. The issue isn’t a lack of
housing.
But
that hasn’t stopped cities like Los Angeles and New York from spending billions
on housing
programs that
aren’t addressing the core issue of homelessness. But they were never meant to.
Homelessness
is a manufactured crisis that funnels money to special interests, building up
a social welfare sector of the government,
while subsidizing and fueling the scale and scope of the problem.
New
York City is blowing through $1.1 billion to house the homeless in hotels
introducing drug use and prostitution problems into luxury rooms. It’s building
homeless shelters in neighborhoods that are protesting the crime and drug use
such places bring. The overall plan to spend $2.6 billion to build 15,000 units
to deal with the homeless crisis isn’t working very well.
The
Department of Homeless Services is allowing shelters to name their own price
for housing residents. Rates went from $78 per person to four or five times
that. Housing the homeless runs to $328.58 a day at one shelter run by
Samaritan Village, a major shelter provider. That’s the price of a luxury hotel room.
Samaritan
Village, which runs much of New York City’s homeless shelters, is headed by
Tino Hernandez, the former Deputy Commissioner for Adult Services at the
Department of Homeless Services. Since Hernandez took over at Samaritan, an
investigation revealed that its DHS contracts went up 590%. Meanwhile,
Samaritan has been troubled by allegations of abuse and misappropriation of tax
funds.
Meanwhile
on the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority
was using money intended for the homeless to buy its employees $165 hiking
boots and an antique brass table.
The
homeless crisis is a river of money that flows to the politically connected who
have no interest in solving it, but a great deal of interest in perpetuating
it. Dubious statistics, misleading reports, tax hikes and sweetheart deals are
used to mobilize an institutional solution that only worsens the problem. It’s
a scam that runs easily into the billions while destroying lives and
communities.
‘Homeless’
is a fake political term that deliberately misstates the problem. The issue is
mostly not a lack of housing, but some combination of mental illness and drug
use that make it difficult to maintain residential status. There are ordinary
people who are genuinely homeless, and the media makes a point of highlighting
their stories, but homelessness is mostly not a problem of housing, but of
treatment.
While
the media tells only one side of the story, it’s the mentally ill and the
severe addicts who are the public face of the homeless crisis that the residents
of major cities encounter every day. It’s these sights that move them to
approve of spending hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars on
programs that they believe will remove the horrible sights that they’re seeing
from public view.
And
that incentivizes the social welfare system and its allied activists to worsen
the problem so as to squeeze more money out of taxpayers. Every budget increase
means more homeless on the street, more street crime, drug use, and random
abuse. Funding the system isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
The
homeless crisis is a billion dollar scam. It isn’t being solved. It’s only
getting worse. Article by Daniel Greenfield
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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