This week, prickly Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, a supposed bleeding heart liberal, said that he will seek a new ordinance that prohibits “urban camping” in order to clear down town Tucson of its homeless population. The move would create more criminals, but decrease the daily reminders of his failures.
This week, Charles Koch, the evil billionaire chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, called for a reform of America’s criminal justice system. According to the Huffington Post, “Koch has unofficially teamed up with progressive mega-donor George Soros and the American Civil Liberties Union to address prison reform.”
So, while simple-minded Tucson and Pima County officials go about their business keeping more companies, like Hudbay Rosemont, from doing business, and finding new ways to turn more people into criminals – problem solvers – big thinkers – are thinking big.
But it doesn’t take a Koch brother or George Soros to come up with a solution to Tucson’s homeless problem. Even bureaucrats can think outside the cardboard box every now and then. In Salt Lake City there resides such bureaucrats.
Now for years, the City Councilpersons have used activists like Jon McLane and Brian Flagg to stir up support for their political agendas. As a result, the two gained a tremendous amount of power. They could mobilize bodies when Regina Romero, Karin Uhlich or Steve Kozachik needed an army to fight for whatever hair-brained scheme they had at any given moment.
As a result, the two organizers may have no real interest in a solution, but you can bet, most of those bodies they rally have brains and would prefer a bed instead of a concrete sidewalk, or a cramped wooden pod any day of the week. They would jump at a solution – if someone was interested enough – in developing one.
Salt Lake City has one that is lauded across the country, by people on both sides of the aisle. Utah is succeeding with a program based on the concept called “Housing First.” Instead of using the standard approach, which is “to try to make homeless people “housing ready” by getting them into shelters or halfway houses and treatment first.
“Handing mentally ill substance abusers the keys to a new place may sound like an example of wasteful government spending. But it turned out to be the opposite: over time, Housing First has saved the government money. Homeless people are not cheap to take care of. The cost of shelters, emergency-room visits, ambulances, police, and so on quickly piles up…. with the traditional approach, the average chronically homeless person used to cost Salt Lake City more than twenty thousand dollars a year. Putting someone into permanent housing costs the state just eight thousand dollars, and that’s after you include the cost of the case managers who work with the formerly homeless to help them adjust. The same is true elsewhere. A Colorado study found that the average homeless person cost the state forty-three thousand dollars a year, while housing that person would cost just seventeen thousand dollars.
With about 73% of all homeless persons experiencing mental illness, domestic violence or other barriers to stable housing, the primary goal of Salt Lake City’s Homeless Services was to “help homeless individuals and families get off the street, especially in Pioneer Park and downtown,” just like the pod people near Veinte de Agosto Park in Tucson.
According to Salt Lake City literature, “the City, County, State of Utah, nonprofit organizations, the Downtown Alliance, and the Pioneer Park Coalition as well as the greater community” recognized that homelessness was “impacting Salt Lake City in negative ways.”
In a negative way? And they didn’t want to turn their jails into quasi-homeless-shelters-turned-quasi-FEMA camps? Revolutionary, at least for the Tucson peeps.
“It may seem surprising that a solidly conservative state like Utah has embraced an apparently bleeding-heart approach like giving homeless people homes,” writes James Surowiecki in The New Yorker. “But in fact Housing First has become the rule in hundreds of cities around the country, in states both red and blue. And while the Obama Administration has put a lot of weight (and money) behind these efforts, the original impetus for them on a national scale came from the Bush Administration’s homelessness czar Philip Mangano. Indeed, the fight against homelessness has genuine bipartisan support. As Pendleton says, “People are willing to pay for this, because they can look at it and see that there are actually solutions. They can say, ‘Ah, it works.’ ” And it saves money.”
Tucson, and Pima County for that matter are broke or nearly broke. Maybe, they need to look to the left, to the right, and north for a humane solution to a problem that will surely grow if they continue their anti-business policies.