Solving the Homeless Problem
by Charles Coughlin
A recent news article reports “Authorities are examining a surveillance tape that shows an elderly woman wandering Skid Row in a hospital gown and slippers as they investigate the practice of hospitals and police agencies dumping homeless people downtown. Carol Ann Reyes, 63, of Gardena, was taken from a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower on Monday to the downtown area known as Skid Row, authorities said. A surveillance camera outside the Union Rescue Mission showed Reyes walking from the direction of a taxi that had just driven away. She wandered the street for about three minutes before a mission staff member brought her inside. City officials have been looking into the alleged dumping of homeless people in Skid Row, a ramshackle area downtown. Several hospitals have acknowledged that they put some discharged indigent patients with nowhere else to go into taxicabs headed to the area because it offers a chance for getting services and shelter. Los Angeles police also are investigating whether other law enforcement agencies dump people without anywhere else to go downtown.”
Decades ago, most states had anti-vagrancy laws so that hobos could not camp out on city streets often in front of private businesses that were hoping to stay in business. About the only excuse for letting the homeless stay in the cities was so that they would have a better chance of finding a job. Today, with the Internet, there’s no longer a need for a homeless person to stay in a big city to look for work. The homeless could be kept in a low cost facility, where they would have Internet access for job-hunting.
It should be a privilege to live in a big city, not a right. Only people who can pay their rent or own their own homes should be allowed to live in big cities. If a charity wants to take care of a few dozen or hundred homeless people, then that’s fine, but all the rest should be relocated to a minimum-cost mass homeless shelter on government land in a remote location, where they would be given access to various Internet job hunting websites. Once they find a job, they could leave. (Some arrangement would obviously have to be made to get a loan against their first paychecks so they could get an apartment and busfare to the new location.)
Sheriff Joe Arpayo in Arizona has already created prisons made from old tents at minimum cost to the taxpayer. Arpayo asks why should prisoners get air conditioning if our soldiers in Iraq do not. Some people need motivation to change their lives. Living in an uncomfortable facility may be exactly what’s needed.
If anyone is worried about the issue of “civil liberties” for the homeless, then we could make vagrancy a crime, punishable by an indeterminate stay in this sort of homeless shelter until they find a job. If liberals still aren’t happy, then they can feel free to donate to charitable organizations that take care of the homeless.
It’s odd how no one in government worries about the rights of ordinary people to walk the streets without running into an assortment of homeless people ranging from the harmless, but smelly to the dangerously deranged. Small business owners deserve to be protected. They could easily be driven to bankruptcy especially if they get one of those mumbling, crazy-eyed types camped just yards from their front door.
The homeless problem is yet another serious failure by our government. While the average liberal thinks it’s merely a civil rights issue, this is not true. Homeless people scare off customers and tourists causing serious financial damage to whatever area they congregate in. Police waste countless hours arresting the homeless for public drunkenness and other problems. It would be better for everyone if the homeless were provided clean facilities and a cot in a tent city until they were able to find a job. Letting them wander the streets is a pathetic Third World solution, which should have never become government policy.