This story over at the Sentinel is still getting comments today, which seems a little unusual. If you’d like to see the following ones in context, the whole stack is just a click away.
This project at Flenniken was to have been permanent supportive housing for people who are chronically homeless, one small part of addressing another part of a huge complex of issues.
Our focus is on one fraction of people who are homeless. The people that permanent supportive housing will help are people who have been homeless for a long time due to serious disabilities.
Disability does NOT mean they’re just bums, or that they just lack gumption or drive or people skills or that they’re simply lazy. These are people who struggle with various kinds of mental illness and substance abuse, much of the latter being due to their attempts to self-medicate for their mental illness.
These are also people who who have decided to leave homelessness. They need help. They know they need help. A lot of help.
And we should give it to them. Why?
Simple economics, for one thing. It costs less money to give them this help than it does to keep on doing what we’re doing now. It costs less to place these folks in a safe, secure, permanent environment and supply them with social services than it costs to leave them on the street where they’ll cycle through jail, rehab, the emergency room, and the streets on a perpetual, costly treadmill.
Those of you who are talking about your tax dollars being wasted are right. The way we do things right now is a waste of your tax dollars. You’re spending about $40,000 per year, right now, to keep a chronically homeless person on the street. Jail is no place to house people who are mentally ill, but that’s what it’s become, and you’re paying for it. Emergency rooms are no place to go for primary care at an average of around a thousand bucks a pop, but that’s where chronically homeless people go. You’re paying for that too. The list goes on, and it doesn’t do anything to end homelessness.
That’s the status quo: your tax dollars at work. Who wants to keep doing things that way?
Permanent supportive housing changes things for chronically homeless people. It ends their homelessness. It’s being done in other cities on a large scale, and it’s demonstrated by ample evidence to be cost effective. It also, not surprisingly at all, reduces the number of people you see hanging out in the streets in those cities.
Our office is not going to solve all the ills of the streets. We’re here to help this community tackle the issue of chronic homelessness, and that’s enough of a challenge all by itself. If we can meet it, we’ll end up saving public funds because chronically homeless people on the streets consume so many resources. We’ll make our city a better place to live. And we’ll give some of our most vulnerable neighbors their best opportunity to become healthy members of our community.
I said these things because, as you can see for yourself, some of the comments on this story got a little bit away from what we were actually trying to accomplish at Flenniken. I wanted to make at least an attempt to bring them back to the issue of what we’re actually trying to do: end chronic homelessness.
One commenter said
If they where from here, then we should help. Most are from other states (95%).
To which I replied
This statement is false.
Actually, when the last survey was completed in 2006, over half were Tennesseans. That’s been very consistent as long as this issue’s been studied here.
You’re repeating a little urban myth that’s common everywhere there are people who are homeless.
We hear this kind of assertion all the time. Even if it were true, it seems to me that it’d be irrelevant. To paraphrase a famous and obviously successful campaign meme of relatively recent vintage, “It’s about the economics, stupid.”
It doesn’t really matter where people who are chronically homeless come from. If they wash up on our shores, and start camping on our beach, they’re still going to cost us forty-thousand bucks per person per year to maintain them the way we do it now. Although maybe they should, the jail and the emergency rooms and the rehab programs and the ambulances don’t give us a discount just because people who are homeless in our community are born inside the boundaries of Knox County.
Anyway, we’ve got some thinking to do about how we’re thinking. I get the sense that many people are so frustrated with the issues of homelessness and panhandling and perceived increases in crime and violence and the obviously negative impact these things make on the livability of some parts of our community that they lump all of these problems together into a big emotional ember they carry around in their bellies. It feels like “a problem” when really it’s a whole system malfunction.
We can change the ways we think about this system. It’s not a problem to be solved by one agency or another. It’s a complex system that must be addressed in a different way, a much more holistic way, by our whole community–private citizens, faith-based organizations, service providers, law enforcement and other government types alike.