I strongly recommend that people read “The Tragedy of American Compassion” to get a more detailed understanding of what I say below.
There are four causes of homelessness, three of which are: substance abuse and mental defect, both of which prevent a person from holding a job that would enable him to afford decent housing, and life upset (loss of job, high medical expenses or incapacitation).
The first two are bad candidates for the cheap housing response because they can’t or won’t maintain the properties or stay in them. People who treat substance abusers know that absent an acknowledgment of their situation and a desire to correct it, substance abusers cannot be cured. As much as people in the business would have us believe otherwise, mental illness also is rarely curable.
The third is the group that most of the politicians point to as the reason for providing such housing and some of these may actually be helped by it. However, one has to look to the cause of their situation: How many of them didn’t pay attention in school and never learned the skills necessary in our information-age society to earn enough to afford decent housing and set aside sufficient savings or pay for adequate health insurance?
Government programs are a poor choice because they can’t discriminate between those who really want to cease being homeless and those who don’t.
Programs proposed to help the homeless (free or low cost housing, free food, ignoring the laws about obstructing public property, failure to prosecute for destruction of private property) have led to the fourth cause of homelessness: bums — people who have made the rational decision to not get saddled with a job in order to pay rent. They’d rather live in tents on property they have converted for their own use.
By trying to ease the lives of the other three categories, we make it more desirable for this fourth one. Does anyone bother to find out why the people counted in the homeless census are in that situation or where they are from?
Someone who was in a position to know told me that every summer, the number of people living on the beaches of Kauai balloons as mainland college students fly to Hawaii to spend their free time in paradise. Should we be spending our hard-earned tax dollars supporting them?
The homeless are a detriment to our society. They leave trash, needles and excrement spread out over the ground. The crime column in the newspaper is replete with crimes committed by persons “of no local address.” They destroy private property by stomping and laying in the landscaping. They deface property: See the graffiti they left behind on the Smith-Beretania Park’s wall before the police finally rousted them.
Commentary on the homeless exists as far back as the founding years of our country. The homeless will always exist. While we can try to help them, we must realize some programs work and others simply are a waste of resources.
Andrew Rothstein has been a real estate appraiser in Hawaii for over 40 years; he served on the Downtown Neighborhood Board from 1988 to 1994.
