April 29, 2024
Homelessness has always been prevalent in America, since its creation. However, over the last twenty years, Americans have seen an increase in those who live on the streets, which has become a serious problem. It has become a campaign issue for Congress members and those running for President of the United States. The recent reaction has been for cities and certain states to provide large amounts of taxpayer money to "solve" the problem, but it has created a new "Gold Rush" in California. Will government funds solve this crisis?
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Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and non-profits have made a mad dash to their local city councilmembers and California legislators with their hats out for tax funds to alleviate cities of their homeless problem. Residents of cities and the state government have noticed an alarming trend of homeless people in their neighborhoods, on public transit, and within trendy locales, which has seen spikes in alcohol-related arrests by police and releasing of bodily waste in public near restaurants, luxury residences, and places of work. It has generated anger and exasperation among residents, especially in large cities, and has become a campaign issue for many politicians. In some cases, the reaction has been to provide taxpayer funds to combat it.
One of the catalysts was President Reagan's initiative in the early days of his administration, with the help of Congress, to effectively end any funding of the Mental Health Systems Act (MHSA-1980), a program created by his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. That bill was part of a movement from the 1970s to rehabilitate people who suffer from mental illness, whereby the federal government provided grants to community mental health centers, part of a comprehensive desire to coordinate mental healthcare, and social support services. The essential repeal of the MHSA was done with the tacit agreement by a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and a Republican-controlled United States Senate, included in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981.
This endeavor pushed a vulnerable population who required strong advocacy and care out of medical institutions and onto the street. They had to find local organizations, or state programs, to help them if available. Since then, states and local municipalities have had difficulty dealing with a population that seems to increase. In addition to mental health issues, the other root causes are a lack of housing and financial hardship, alcohol and drug abuse, and these life challenges have affected people in California the most. The National Institutes of Health states that between 30%-40% of homelessness is related to alcohol abuse, while 10%-15% are from drug addiction and dependency, and points out that having alcohol and drug-free housing is essential to recovery.
Many American cities have sizable homeless populations, but according to CBS News, New York and Los Angeles have about 40% of the country's destitute and homeless. Recently elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised to find housing for many of her city's homeless population, which was a major theme of her campaign, one on which it seems she wants to deliver. According to local news sources, that program, called "Inside Safe," initially removed 2,000 people off the streets and, along with current and new programs, relocated 22,000 people into temporary housing, an increase of 5,000 from the previous year.
Mayor Bass's initiatives follow a 2016 countywide measure (Prop HHH) that earmarked $1.2 billion to build 10,000 apartments for the homeless within a decade, which passed with popular support. There was hope that this would transfer many homeless persons into those apartments. KCRW provided a report authored by Anna Scott and Saul Gonzalez, on what has happened so far at the five-year mark. While the proposition had good intentions and has generated a large amount of taxpayer funds, it has not achieved the primary goal of building affordable housing for the homeless in the city yet.
Developers within Los Angeles have immense power through their lobbying of the mayor and city council. Additionally, to build projects, these companies have to solicit funds through banks and government loans, using financial commitments from those entities as leverage for additional funding. After several rounds of submission and approval, Scott and Gonzalez note the process requires a lot of money and can be exhausting. Apparently, this is where most of the $1.2 billion has gone toward. Prop HHH was intended to make it more efficient to eliminate the red tape and wasting of funds, but the "administrative blob" was too entrenched. They also state that some things were also out of the city's control, which exacerbated the problems. These include changes to the corporate tax rate, reduced under the Trump Administration, which diminished the need for write-offs and tax credits, which was a major source of affordable housing funding. Private companies and entities buy those credits in exchange for cash for the developers. At the time of the article, only 1,000 of the proposed 10,000 units were built, while most of the money had already been committed or pledged. The KCRW article paints a good picture of the overlapping issues relating to homelessness, good intentions, and government red tape.
Over time, the state of California has introduced statewide ballot measures during election years to provide proposed solutions, albeit at taxpayer expense. A lot of money gets allocated via a legislative general fund and then distributed amongst the NGOs and non-profit entities, but the problem is widely visible and persists.
In California this year, the Associated Press (AP) stated during the March Primary, this latest proposal, Proposition 1 passed with a razor-thin success rate because residents of the state have paid for homeless measures before, but nothing seemed to have changed. Voters knew that Governor Newsom invested billions of dollars to deal with homeless populations within the state's cities, but there has been no visible improvement. The language in the proposition focused on creating new mental health treatment, finding more housing, and rehabilitating those within the temporary housing system into productive members of their communities.
Homelessness is a serious challenge for large cities in the 21st century. The seeds for the issue (mental health struggles, financial hardship, loss of family, substance addictions) are watered by benevolent intentions from concerned citizens without any results-driven metric. The funds generated through taxation are then used for issues not related to actually combating the problem. While those who are homeless persist, the elected officials, activists, and NGOs dealing with the problem come up with new and "better" reasons for funding, but the problem remains unchanged.
Conservative cable news pundits claim that the reason California has a large homeless population is that individuals arrive from other states, and it is primarily due to generous benefits. However, an article in The Atlantic presented an empirical study with data that shows most of the state's homeless are residents who have lost homes due to financial hardship in the same county where they are living on the street, a surprising finding. What can be done? It would be good to ensure most state residents have immediate options available to them to avoid going the shelter route and reduce the influx of people without help.
If these proposed programs can avoid the same red tape that other county initiatives encounter, then money will be used for its intended goal. A good step in that direction was the recent news that the homeless programs within the city of Los Angeles will be audited by an outside firm, approved by the Los Angeles City Council. How the funds are being used by collecting and reviewing service providers' metadata can bring forth better solutions. For instance, the audit needs to determine the varying types of reasons people fall into homelessness within the city and provide a breakdown according to:
- percentage with a substance addiction
- percentage with mental illness or combined with addiction
- percentage coping with financial hardship
In the current economic climate, it would not take much for the average American to lose their housing and fall into homelessness, and we should be aware that it can happen to anyone at any given moment. Having empathy for those who struggle is good, but it should not be taken advantage of by elected officials and those who want to make a profit from those good intentions.
I believe that those homeless who are housed under city initiatives must be grouped together based on similar situations. Once data has been collected, it would be smart for city agencies to separate those who need rehabilitation and healthcare, and those who need shelter until they are financially independent again. It would be a challenge for those who are living on the streets because of bankruptcy, and who must share housing with those who suffer from mental illness or drug addiction and require rules-based, case-managed administration. It will pose obstacles of compatibility to those individuals or even families facing different challenges who are forced to live together in a building or in similar settings.
I wonder whether "solving" homelessness is like the military-industrial complex's business model, in that funds are needed to combat dictators and authoritarians who threaten America and to protect the country. Regardless of the validity of these threats, money still transfers out of the government treasury regularly and into the willing hands of the defense contractors who build more weapons and hardware than what is requested. It is funny how these threats never go away, but neither does the money flow. Either the problem is meant to persist, but never solved, or the underlying administrative hurdles are too entrenched to mitigate. There is too much money to be made by those who have skin in the game keeping the problem around, and there are many voters who are willing to keep the "Goldrush" open for business.
I would be happy if I was proven wrong, however. Hopefully, voters will see in their neighborhoods the good-intentioned proposals actually rehabilitate those with mental health struggles, addictions, and financial distress and provide shelter for those who actually need it, and deliberately and purposefully eradicate this problem.
