We read a long, fascinating article about homelessness the other day – a sentence we never thought we would utter.
The piece, “Seattle Under Siege,” is in the latest issue of the quarterly City Journal (and can be read online). Its author, Christopher Rufo, is a former candidate for Seattle City Council and a fellow at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank.
The subtitle tells the story: “Record numbers of homeless people are occupying the city’s public spaces, despite massive government spending to fight the problem.” One commenter suggests another: “Record numbers of homeless people are occupying the city’s public spaces because of massive government spending to fight the problem.”
One of the reasons this has caught our attention, of course, is because we report and comment all the time on these problems in Southwest Colorado, where we have comparatively few homeless. We want to know if we can learn and apply anything from the problems of big cities.
Rufo says there are, as of last year, 11,643 people sleeping in tents, cars and emergency shelters in Seattle. “Property crime has risen to a rate two and a half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s. Cleanup crews pick up tens of thousands of dirty needles from city streets and parks every year. At the same time ... the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child ... yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. By any measure, the city’s efforts are not working.”
Rufo attacks what he says are myths about homelessness, such as the role played by economic factors like rising housing costs. Only 6 percent of Seattle homeless cited that in a survey. The Seattle area, he says, is home to more than 1 million residents earning below the median income, “and 99 percent of them manage to find a place to live and pay the rent on time.” Instead, he says, homelessness is more likely caused by “domestic violence, incarceration, mental illness, family conflict, medical conditions, breakups, eviction, addiction, and job loss.”
He also says they are not the working poor. “Only 7.5 percent of the [Seattle] homeless report working full-time... The reality, obvious to anyone who spends any time in tent cities or emergency shelters, is that 80 percent of the homeless suffer from drug and alcohol addiction and 30 percent suffer from serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.”
We sometimes hear that homelessness is a homegrown problem that needs homegrown solutions. Not necessarily true, Rufo says:
“More than half of Seattle’s homeless come from outside the city limits, according to the city’s own data. ... More rigorous academic studies in San Francisco and Vancouver suggest that 40 percent to 50 percent of the homeless moved to those cities for their permissive culture and generous services.”
It is hard for us to accept that the solution lies in being less generous, but we have to consider, as city councils do, that being generous with the public’s money also could be counter-productive — that it could be “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm.”
So what is the answer? Rufo cites Houston, where “local leaders have reduced homelessness by 60 percent through a combination of providing services and enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for street camping, panhandling, trespassing and property crimes.”
For us, the prescription would seem to be being more generous in some ways and equally strict in others.
