The Costs of Homelessness

 A friend recently expressed the opinion that an appropriate response to law breaking by homeless individuals would be to lock them up and throw away the key.  The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on the issue.

It appears, judging from court records that a sizable portion of the homeless population is already incarcerated, though not with a sentence of perpetual incarceration.

Ethical and constitutional issues aside, there are some practical issues with jailing as a solution to homelessness and associated burdens to society.

Looking at just the economics, the average cost of locking up a person in Albuquerque is about $124 per day.  That amounts to $3,720 per month.  Homeless people have illness and death rates much greater that of the general population, so the monthly cost of incarceration may be quite a bit higher for homeless individuals than the average.

Another practical consideration is the current state of the City's capacity to manage the incarcerated population.  In spite of a robust recruitment effort the City prison system is perpetually understaffed, currently with around a 25% deficit.  It seems like policies that would greatly increase imprisonment rates would make an already difficult situation close to impossible.

The current Albuquerque budget for dealing with homelessness is $25 million per year. I do not think that includes the current costs for the incarceration of homeless individuals. In any case, the money expended clearly has not made any real impact on the magnitude of the problem.

It seems like using the funds currently appropriated for dealing with homelessness and incarceration might be better spent on just supporting housing initiatives. Aside from getting people off the streets, housing would greatly decrease the usually minor offenses like trespassing that often lead to incarceration of the homeless.

 UPDATE:

The New Republic has some interesting comments on the unavailability of affordable housing.  It turns out that that financial speculation is at the heart of the problem:

...In 2018, corporations bought one out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, who notes that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter...”

The Root Cause

I listened to a good broadcast this morning on Native America Calling about the high levels of homelessness among Native Americans and the setbacks in efforts to combat it all over the country.  Most discussions about the topic focus on bandaids to the problem, I think.

    The government economic aid packages of the Covid years reduced homelessness by a significant amount.  It seems pretty clear that homelessness has developed in parallel with the constantly increasing economic inequality in the U.S.  Reducing inequality should clearly be a priority in regard to homelessness, along with approaches to a lot of other chronic problems in this country such as medical care.  An important first step would be a massive overhaul of the U.S. taxation scheme.

Getting Real about Homelessness

 One local Albuquerque news program reported this evening that there are currently about 2,800 people living on the city's streets.  The encampments are all over the city in parks, under highway overpasses, in empty lots and on sidewalks.

The City Council voted to authorize some safe campsites recently, and then turned around and decided to prohibit such refuges.  The mayor vetoed that change.  The Council voted again to over-ride the mayor, but one councilor changed her mind and the veto was upheld. So now there are two official sites with room for maybe a hundred tents.

Mayors, city councils, governors and state legislatures are not going to solve the homeless problem.  Experience has shown that improved conditions for the homeless in any given locale will ultimately attract more homeless. It is a National problem which will require a significant commitment at that level.

A lot of problems contribute to homelessness including addiction and mental illness, but the fundamental cause is simply explained -- it is the lack of affordable housing -- and that affects not only the down-and-out but also families who are working and still unable to afford exorbitant rents or house purchase loan payments. So the inescapable conclusion is that what is needed in the way of a solution is a massive effort to create affordable housing nation-wide.

The housing crisis in turn is really just a symptom of an economy featuring ever-increasing inequality in wealth and income over the last fifty years.  The extent of that inequality has been well known for a long time: the top one percent are now likely paying a smaller percentage of their income than the guy who delivers your Sunday newspaper.

Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, concluded this about what must be done to make the economy work for the rest of us:

"The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital.  This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instance of primitive accumulation.  For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 or 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 5 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros.  This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market.  Historical experience shows, moreover, that such immense inequalities of wealth have little to do with the entrepreneurial spirit and are of no use in promoting growth..."

In fact, Biden has recently promoted the idea of establishing some reasonable tax rates for the country's top earners.  I would suggest that the income from that sort of tax on the billionaires might be devoted entirely for at least the first year or two to the objective of creating affordable housing.  Such a financial injection into the national economy would have an immediately obvious effect on homelessness as well as improving the prospects for working families for home ownership, while simultaneously providing a big boost to the home construction industry. It seems like a win-win which even some Republicans might get behind.