Money Spent on Homeless Humans Gets Wasted

I know, I know: the words in the headline today parrot what El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells and other reactionaries are using to campaign against Democrats. In Mr. Wells case, he’s gone on to flailing about all those immigrants being dumped in San Diego, despite the fact that 95% or more of those people are gone within a week.

We’re being told that, while the state has spent untold billions (it varies depending on whether its apples or oranges as the standard) and still the number of homeless humans keeps rising. Bloomberg news says Gov. Newsom has overseen spending more than $20 billion in state funds over the past five years while the homeless population in California has surged by 20%.

The MAGA faithful regularly imply that the numbers of unhoused people are rising because of all the money the government is spending. The solutions being offered on the right always boil down to either treatment or incarceration. 

In San Diego, respected community leaders are supporting a pie-in-the-sky concept of a not-a-concentration-camp; the basic idea being that people living on the streets just need to go away. Fortunately, no land has been found far away enough to satisfy the local “me first” citizenry.

Mayor Todd Gloria’s biggest camp-style holding facility yet near the airport has turned into a campaign issue for Supervisor candidate Kevin Faulconer. People living in multi-million dollar homes in Point Loma are terrified about the possibility of odorous wafting. Their objections are always capped with the phrase “somewhere else.” 

It would serve them right if the city decided to block off one lane of some of the overly wide residential streets on Point Loma’s east side to allow camping. Kevin Faulconer lives on one of those streets; imagine his outrage!

The Los Angeles Times and other publications recently ran a column on the state's failures by the dean of California political reporting, Dan Walters, currently embedded with CalMatters.

• One factor, certainly, is that the underlying causes of homelessness, such as sky-high housing costs, family breakups, mental illness and drug addiction have not abated.

• Another, probably, is that here is no consensus on what programs would be most successful and officialdom has taken a scattergun approach, providing money to a bewildering array of often overlapping programs and services in hopes of finding approaches that work.

• Gov. Gavin Newsom, who pledged 20 years ago to end homelessness in San Francisco when serving as the city’s mayor, is touting a measure on the March 5 ballot that would authorize bonds to build facilities for treating the mentally ill and redirect some funds from a two-decade-old special mental health tax into new programs. He’s also won legislative approval of “CARE courts” that could compel some mentally ill Californians into receiving treatment.

Proposition 1, now facing a furious opposition social media campaign, has something for both popular political sides: funding for what could be 11,000 homes and expanded treatment for mental illness and addiction. Opposition to the measure centers around conflicts some claim would be created among agencies already providing services to unhouse people.

Anybody who says Prop 1 isn’t a solution is correct. We are past the point where ‘build, baby, build’ and ‘treat, baby, treat’ aren’t going to work to eradicate (what an awful verb!) a population that continues to grow. But, given that nothing else is on the table at the moment and that it can take years for any new program to make through political hoops. Prop 1 is better than nothing.

If we start by examining what we know about people on the cusp of being unhoused, some problems become obvious. Basic economic forces and life challenges are driving them out of their homes. 

Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, using the standard of one-third of monthly income for housing. In San Diego, the number of household spending above that level equals 59%; 28.9% spend more than 50% to keep a roof over their heads. 

What would actually work to keep people housed would be cash payments. Two grand a month in a no strings attached bank account would be a lot cheaper per capita than the $3,500 currently being expended monthly for each unhoused person.

This idea isn’t new, and based on the success of government programs during the pandemic, there have been more than 150 ongoing and pilot programs nationwide. Most pilots have been offering hundreds, not thousands of dollars, targeted at lower income people fortunate enough to still have a place to live.

Locally, the SD Housing Commission offers $500 a month toward rent and utilities for about 300 households, but it’s paid directly to the vendors.

Last month was the end for theSan Diego for Every Child Guaranteed Income Project, which enrolled 150 families, providing them with $500 a month for 24 months, with no strings attached. It was funded thru the San Diego Foundation, administered by Jewish Jewish Family Service of San Diego, with the support of mayors in San Diego and National City.

The US is among the world’s wealthier nations, has more poverty  and has one of the stingiest when it comes to the social safety net.

Being poor has been otherized by politicians for decades; fear of the unknown is a great ballot box motivator. As part of the Great Political Realignment during the last few decades, Republicans (and some Democrats) decided that cash assistance was enabling society’s evils. 

Thus we ended up with imagery of Welfare Mothers (always Black or Brown) driving Cadillacs and snorting heroin while having unprotected sex to increase their household income. All this crap had one purpose and that was to make life harder for people of color and those not considered middle class..

From NPR’s Morning Edition:

• Researchers also reject the stigma that poor people can't be trusted with free money.

• "They spend the money in ways that everyone does," says Stacia West with the University of Tennessee, and a co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Guaranteed Income Research. "Going to the grocery store, making sure the rent is paid, paying the car note."

• She and her co-researcher Amy Castro have published peer-reviewed research on several cash aid pilots, including in Stockton, Calif., and are following others around the country. They find that — no surprise — the extra income makes people more financially stable. After about six months of payments, they also start to see "little glimmers of changes in a person's psychology," says West. "We see increases in a person's psychological well-being, so a reduction in psychological distress."

At the core of the flavors of evangelical Christianity motivating policy these days is the concept that suffering is a necessary process in order to achieve redemption. This provides cover for soulless humans to drive past encampments and consider round ups as a curative for being unhoused. 

In better off circles this misery as necessity can mean (as the Awaken Church does) saying that living a bountiful life under God won’t happen unless parishioners give more than 10% of their monthly income to keep these chapels of grift afloat.

I think there should be universal basic income, child tax credits, and whatever’s needed to stem the most obvious misery we see around us. And we should start by making misery a call to action.

Once we stem the flow of people moving into homelessness, perhaps all the other “solutions” will have a chance.

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Tuesday’s News to Think About

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The most epic (and literal) gaslighting of all time by Bill McKibben at The Crucial Years

• For everyone who’s ever asked themselves, why isn’t Exxon (and Chevron and the rest) leading the charge to renewable energy, there’s the answer: you can make money doing it, but not as much as they’ve made traditionally. That’s because the sun and the wind deliver the energy for free, and all you need is some equipment to turn it into electrons. But Exxon controls the molecules—that’s what oil and gas reserves are. And that control means they can make outsize profits—as long as they can persuade the world to keep burning stuff.

• And it’s the story of that persuasion where Woods’ words go from galling to really really gross. Because he explains to his nodding interlocutors that the world “waited too long” to start developing renewables. Or, in his particular brand of corporate speak: “we’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society.”

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Dartmouth Men’s Basketball Team Votes To Form First Union In College Sports Via HuffPo

• Dartmouth’s trustees have disputed the athletes’ legal status as employees eligible to unionize. It could be years before the case is resolved at the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees private-sector union elections, and possibly federal court afterwards.

• But for now, the players have made clear they intend to bargain over their working conditions as part of the Service Employees International Union Local 560, the same group that represents cooks, custodians, groundskeepers and other workers on campus.

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Scanners that spot smuggled fentanyl at the border sit unused because Congress hasn't provided the cash to install them Via NBC News

• Customs and Border Protection has spent millions on the most up-to-date high-tech scanners to spot fentanyl crossing the southern U.S. border, but many scanners are sitting in warehouses unused because Congress hasn’t appropriated funds to install them, acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller told NBC News.

• Miller gave NBC News a tour of a port of entry in Nogales, Arizona, where half of all fentanyl seized at the border is stopped on its way into the U.S. from Mexico.

• Officers in Nogales have found fentanyl hidden inside crates of Coca-Cola, where bottles are painted black to look like liquid, sawed in half and filled with fentanyl pills; they’ve confiscated millions in fentanyl pills stuffed inside the water barrel of a commercial bus’ bathroom; they’ve even found fentanyl in cars carrying young children in the back in car seats. More than 95% of fentanyl seized at the border, Miller said, is actually brought into the U.S. in personal vehicles.