In her latest communication with her constituents, Sacramento County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez deflects concerns about the region’s mismanagement of homelessness with magical thinking. Her (magical) excuse for the growing homeless problem is the lack of coordination between agencies whose mission is to address homelessness and the addiction and mental illness that produce that problem.
But Ms. Rodriguez’ constituents elected her to solve problems, not formulate better excuses. And somehow, despite local governments’ “lack of coordination,” they still manage to perform homeless sweeps, evicting people and their meager possessions from whatever shelter they’ve managed to secure. One Sacramento woman even rented port-a-potties for the homeless population near her, but local government put a stop to that. The homeless must continue to be a health hazard!
To understand such public policies, it’s helpful to think of homelessness as a kind of torture. Torture is a terrible interrogation technique if you’re interested in accurate information, but when publicized, it lets the rest of the population know what’s in store for them if they step out of line.
Meanwhile, studies say the majority of the unhoused are homeless because rents have been rising faster than paychecks. In one poll, 82% of the homeless said they’d rent a house if they could afford it. Remember: 40% of them are employed and still can’t afford rent. Sure, homelessness can produce a variety of PTSD, just as any torture can, but money and resources, not addiction or mental illness, are at the root of the problem. Poverty is.
Finland’s public sector solved its homeless problem by building public housing. Poor rural people in China would flock to cities and become homeless beggars. The Chinese solved that problem by giving these people public sector jobs in their city of origin. These solutions worked even though both Finland and China are poorer than the US.
US public policy has deliberately produced and perpetuated homelessness for generations now. Richard Nixon put a moratorium on building federal affordable housing, and Ronald Reagan, as he cut income taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, reduced HUD’s affordable housing budget by 75%.
You might think financing is a problem, but Sacramento County has enough money that it’s seriously considering a $2 billion expansion of the County Jail, and the City of Sacramento somehow produced a quarter billion dollars to build the Kings Stadium. Also worth remembering: the US has more vacant homes than homeless people. San Francisco has five times their homeless population in vacant homes. We’re not short of resources, they’re just distributed badly.
Ms. Rodriguez may believe she can excuse the County’s lame response to homelessness, but rent subsidies, rent control, public employment, publicly-financed and built housing, taxing vacancy and property hoarding—as Vancouver, Canada, did—would all more directly and successfully address and perhaps even solve the problem.
Some might say deregulating and unleashing the private sector would magically solve homelessness. Even building unaffordable, gold-plated publicly built housing ($600K per unit!) is touted as another obstacle, while the silence is deafening about programs that would actually solve the problem.
But housing for the homeless is unreachable without real resource redistribution. Confronting entrenched interests and building affordable housing, not just clearing red tape for luxury condos and sports stadiums needs to be on the public policy agenda. It means pursuing the solutions to poverty, not just fabricating more, better, and different excuses.
The author sat on a Sacramento County Planning Advisory Council for nearly a decade, and recommends this article from the Davis Vanguard for more about this issue.
