Who would you rather have as a neighbor, Tent City or your Congressman? After reading this, you may change your mind.
I am not an advocate of the Tent City system as a means of addressing homelessness. We have an affordable housing crisis. While custom homes starting in the low $570's are profitable, they are NOT affordable. The median income in the United States is $54,000 per year, which translates into a house costing $190,000 or less to be affordable. However, most are not fortunate enough to earn the median income. A truly affordable home is in the low $120's, which is feasible but I will save the how of that for another post. This post is about the problems with Tent Cities as currently administered, and how the Credit Crisis of 2008 connects to one of those problems.
Foremost, Tent Cities provide an "out of sight, out of mind" paradigm for many of the communities which have abandoned or exiled these homegrown non-residents. It's like Pilate washing his hands, and pretending he bears no guilt. Pilate also had political motives in mind. If you retain the taxpayers (income) and throw out the homeless (expense), you can more easily balance a budget or a surplus for fun stuff; like festivals or even to fund a massive government center as a monument to one's own greatness. After all, you are entitled to it, aren't you?
It's a matter of simple economics, cut costs where there is no tax revenue or lost votes. Ah, yes, the homeless! I'm a budgetary genius!
Of course, if other municipalities are following this shrewd (pronounced "screwed") budgetary policy, you end up with a large number of displaced homeless and the need for a quick fix. Something along the order of a tent city will do, as long as it is not in my town.
Wow! I'm quite the social engineer, too! How many million for that government center?
This is exactly what we have done.
I know the argument, "They aren't from here. They should go back to where they came from" and in many cases this is true. However, what of the cases where it is not true? What about those homegrown homeless? Therein lay the problem of the large group of displaced homeless necessitating a quick fix. So, we legislate, harass, or otherwise "encourage" the indigenous non-resident (aka- transients) population to go to a Tent City or anywhere else they have "the resources", which is anywhere but here. The place they came from.
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| Ah, we have arrived! |
Sure, they may have grown up here, and perhaps their parents did, too. Yes, their grandparents were some of the first to settle this area back when we didn't have to worry about transients like them. We are doing fine and we can't imagine a time when medical bills or losing an income would make us an unwelcome transient in the community we have lived in and loved all, or much, of our lives. We can never imagine being told that we have to leave what little support network we have and go where they have "the resources".
Perhaps you were picturing something like this...
Fire resistant, temperature controlled tents maintained in good condition because we are allegedly the richest country in the world, are we not?
No, we are not!
The resources are a freezing cold nylon tent in a muddy field a long way from anything or anyone you know. It is a two-mile hike to the nearest bus stop, not that the few personal belongings you still have are safe to leave in this castaway place, this leper colony of modernity filled with strangers you can't trust which looks like this...
We never have to worry about that. We are doing great and we pay your taxes! We pay thousands for welfare for the bum who can't get a job, or has a job but can't afford a home starting in the low 570's. What is it to you that the junkie needs rehab, or the mentally ill needs whatever it is those people need. You work or worked damn hard and it's not your problem!
The welfare state allows us to soothe our consciences with the mantra of, "I pay my taxes" and shirk the personal responsibility to help those in needs, to do what we can, to do unto others, to love thy neighbor as the Master we talk about in church on Sundays taught... and He did.
You see, welfare systems not only benefit the recipient, they help us to avoid that nagging sense, to assuage our guilt to do something more. While, the recipient is often trapped into bartering a life for existence, abundance for subsistence, and their lifelong Values for a monthly value, we are at peace. They have just enough in cash and benefits to remain at the subsistence level of existence. A subsistance that would be ripped away the moment they attempt to work their way higher.
This system serves the welfare administration bureaucrats who derive their substantially higher level of compensation from managing and maintaining a desperate, obliged group under their oversight. It doesn't take long before critical links that promote motivation, independent thought, creative problem solving, and augments self-esteem which is crucial for human development are broken.
My Productively = Pay
My Performance = Rewards
The entitlement mentality’s only link is My Existence = My Contribution.
Tent Cities provide nothing in the way of human reclamation. Nothing in the way of teaching people that they have a God-given Right to something more, that they have expectations placed upon them, and that to meet those expectations that must do at least one thing every day of which they can be proud. We are not requiring anyone be perfect, merely continuous improvement.
Instead, they languish with no transportation, no education, and no way to secure and maintain employment. The only certainty is moving every few months to a place called "To Be Announced.” It's the Warsaw ghetto American style. These are "the resources" our third-generation "transients" are exiled from our/their community to enjoy. And we wonder why they lack motivation?
Many great thinkers have said,
"A crisis is an opportunity in disguise!" This may be true, but in the Tent City system, the resident’s crises of stagnation and idle desperation are an opportunity for exploitation as a constant pool of disenfranchised and fractious demonstrators for certain political agendas, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement.
While I strongly support the Right to Assemble and Petition for redress of grievances, Occupy is "petitioning" with the wrong grievances and "assembling" before the wrong institution. We do not vote for corporate officers on Wall Street, nor do those corporate officers write the laws by which all business is conducted. We vote for our elected representatives to write the laws by which we are governed, including the corporate officers who were supposedly "drunk at the wheel" when they drove the economy into a ravine.
My question is who provided the alcohol? Washington DC is where the financial crisis moonshine was distilled, and the Federal Reserve kept the still cooking with low-interest rates and lax regulations such as No-Income /No-Assets mortgages, called "NINA loans".
Washington DC was busy over-serving the big banks, mortgage firms, insurance companies, and anyone else with deep campaign contribution pockets while basking in praise for stoking an overheated "borrow and spend" economy into a conflagration fueled entirely with hot air.
Then blaming all the destroyed credit ashes of millions of American families who were sold a pipe dream of home ownership for all even when housing prices are rising exponentially on an unelected, unaccountable, and non-specific Wall Street boogeyman who was drunk.
While Occupy burned the "corporate culprit" in effigy, the banks and insurance companies were bailed out immediately, and the foreclosed families were offered a badly packaged and even poorly implemented government mortgage restructuring program that only addressed a small percentage of those harmed by very system the "people's representatives" designed. The system our elected representatives built while under the influence of the big campaign contribution narcotics of the very same big banks, mortgage firms, and insurance companies that they so swiftly and so fully rescued from harm.
These are, by no small coincidence, the very same big banks, mortgage firms, and insurance companies which Occupy impotently protests while the elected representatives impatiently step around the protesters to kiss the ring of their real constituents who also just happen to reside on Wall Street. Tent City is both the manure used to fertilize the fields of government-sponsored enterprise and the bitter harvest of enterprise sponsored government.
It is an educational anomaly that those who reside in Tent Cities are too poorly educated by either of these infectious behemoths to understand how exploited and abandoned they have been by both.
Those of us who enjoy the comfort of housing, regular meals, indoor plumbing, heated or air-conditioned bedrooms, and all the other comforts of life may be satiated by the fact that "We pay our taxes".
Yes, we do. All the above should tell us that we should re-examine what is being done with those revenues, and ask what is being done by our elected representatives who drink from the gushing revenue stream we provide. Perhaps, the elected representatives need to be held personally responsible and accountable for their actions. As above so below.
Perhaps, we might offer a sip of water to those who languish in the remote, disconnected Bedouin ghettos we call Tent Cities. Perhaps, we could be demonstrating OUR sense of personal responsibility and accountability to the people we sent by indifference to these Tent Cities. The same people whom we too quickly accuse of being bereft of these virtues.
