Homeless Shelter Policy In NYC Hits Asinine Levels; Hearings Match

The NYC City Council held a hearing yesterday over a homeless shelter policy change that was going to require a homeless person prove that they had no where else to go in order to gain admission to a shelter. How asinine is it to have that kind of policy, though the administrators claimed that with so many people seeking shelter they have to turn away those who really need assistance and that they lack the funds to make sufficient sheltering possible. And the City Council, which has to balance competing funding needs - can't find the money to fund the programs, but will hammer away at the officials putting forth a policy justified because they lack the funding to do otherwise:

Ten years ago, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office, the homeless population stood at less than 25,000. In 2004, when the homeless population stood at 38,000, he promised to cut the number by two-thirds. This week, the Coalition for the Homeless put out a new report, with an eye-catcher: the homeless population stands at 41,204.

Seth Diamond, the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services, showed up on Wednesday at a City Council meeting to testify about the changes in eligibility. He read his testimony as if working his way through the agate in a bond offering, his voice a dead-on-arrival monotone.

Herewith, a Diamond sampler: “State administrative Directive 94 ADM-20 states in pertinent part and I quote ...”

The homeless, he noted, can “explore their options.” If there is “a situation,” there will be “discussions.”

It is, he noted, “incumbent upon us to assist those seeking shelter services to avoid entering the shelter system.”

A George Orwell shudder to the side, it’s not hard to sympathize with those officials who care for homeless people. Theirs is a Sisyphean task, as they are given too little money and tasked with sheltering too many of the poor in a city that grows more expensive by the hour.

Press on one policy lever or another, and something always seems to go tilt.

Money is perpetually tight. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration cut $50 million from a New York City housing program for homeless families. City officials refuse to make up the difference, and thousands of families face eviction.

The shelter system undoubtedly looks and smells better than it did years back. And Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo have pumped many millions of dollars into creating supportive housing for homeless people who are mentally ill, which is the only sure means of reducing shelter numbers.

The City Council can be its own punch line. But Wednesday was one of those days when, in its inchoate anger and frustration and lack of politesse, the council members became a rarely heard collective voice of New York.

How can anyone prove that they have no where else to go?

You can't. It's a policy designed to try and exclude people from the shelter system, and it creates all kinds of perverse incentives to exclude individuals from shelters.

This comes as the need for shelters is greater than ever and the same preening City Council members can't find the funds to make the shelter system work.

Obamavilles? Shantytowns Pop Up Around Nation?

While some folks don't think that this is a mirage and that some cities have faced this situation for years at a time, it is undeniable that many of these cities have encouraged homelessness and sport unemployment figures that are twice the national average even in good times.

Reports about how these shantytowns have sprung up are creeping into news reports, including the New York Times.

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

In Seattle, homeless residents in the city’s 100-person encampment call it Nickelsville, an unflattering reference to the mayor, Greg Nickels. A tent city in Sacramento prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce a plan Wednesday to shift the entire 125-person encampment to a nearby fairground. That came after a recent visit by “The Oprah Winfrey Show” set off such a news media stampede that some fed-up homeless people complained of overexposure and said they just wanted to be left alone.

The problem in Fresno is different in that it is both chronic and largely outside the national limelight. Homelessness here has long been fed by the ups and downs in seasonal and subsistence jobs in agriculture, but now the recession has cast a wider net and drawn in hundreds of the newly homeless — from hitchhikers to truck drivers to electricians.

“These are able-bodied folks that did day labor, at minimum wage or better, who were previously able to house themselves based on their income,” said Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group based in Washington.

The surging number of homeless people in Fresno, a city of 500,000 people, has been a surprise. City officials say they have three major encampments near downtown and smaller settlements along two highways. All told, as many 2,000 people are homeless here, according to Gregory Barfield, the city’s homeless prevention and policy manager, who said that drug use, prostitution and violence were all too common in the encampments.

It shouldn't come as a surprise in places like Fresno. The homelessness issue is one that is the result of political choices made by the local governments that encourage homelessness through the economic policies and practices. That speaks volumes over the political choices made by the elected leaders. Increasing the minimum wage has meant that people who were formerly employed in those jobs may now face loss of their jobs because their employers can't afford to pay the higher wages, increased taxes, and maintain the same staffing levels. Higher unemployment rates can be traced to the higher minimum wages.

Gov. Schwarzenegger, instead of taking a zero tolerance approach and demanding that these people be placed in shelters, is setting the stage to making the situation permanent by allowing the group to take up residence on the state fairgrounds. How is that a solution to the problem? He's just shuffling these people around.

Meanwhile, the situation in places like San Francisco and Seattle are the result of government policies that tolerate homelessness and encourage homeless people from other jurisdictions to come. My own experience in Seattle finds that quite a few of these homeless are mentally ill and unstable and need medical care, rather than being on the streets where they can menace people and cause harm to themselves or others (particularly around Pioneer Square). The policies by the local governments are anything but humane and just; they're tolerating lawlessness and do not address the core reasons why these people are on the street in the first place. Unaffordable housing as a result of government policies that restrict construction of housing and pushing to expand lending to those who are incapable of repaying their obligations means that prices rose unnaturally.

It's all about the unintended consequences.

Writing of unintended consequences, there's this: registry requirements for sex offenders that leads those offenders to conclude that going homeless is a way to avoid ostracism and may actually make communities less safe.

Nice.