The government and private sector spend enough money per homeless person per month to pay market rate rent for each homeless person. Instead, the government pursues a policy meant to discourage homelessness by, in effect, punishing the homeless. That policy is expensive and inefficient. It is also, I believe, immoral. And it is clearly against Jewish law.
Wasted Money, Wasted Lives
The True Cost of Homelessness
By Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
One thing homeless advocates seem to agree on is that most homelessness is unnecessary.
People become homeless for a variety of reasons, from battling serious illness to mental illness to addiction to jobs that pay far below living wage.
But the root of most homelessness, the thread that runs through all of it, is a lack of affordable housing.
The government and private sector spend enough money per homeless person per month to pay market rate rent for each homeless person. Instead, the government pursues a policy meant to discourage homelessness by, in effect, punishing the homeless. That policy is expensive and inefficient. It is also, I believe, immoral. And it is clearly against Jewish law.
Imagine living in a shelter because your illness or your spouse’s or child’s illness had pushed you into poverty and cost you your home. You have a curfew. You must be in by 10 pm and up, dressed and out by 6 am.
It does not matter if you are sick or if it is 15º below zero. You have to be out by 6 am.
Where do you go? What do you do?
What do you do when you need to use a toilet? What happens if you couldn’t fall asleep the night before and now you’re exhausted?
Some cities have drop-in centers, generally with limited hours, where you can sit. But many cities have regulations that forbid sleeping in drop-in centers and, at any rate, most are only open for a few hours per day.
So the unemployed homeless spend their days trudging from shelter to soup kitchen to drop-in center to soup kitchen to shelter, except for the days when the drop-in centers are closed, in which case they ride buses or subways or sit in libraries or shopping malls and wait for the soup kitchens to serve or the shelters to open.
And all of this is unnecessary.
Single room occupancy housing – essentially small efficiency apartments, sometimes with shared bathrooms or boarding houses – even renting at market rate would eliminate a significant amount of homelessness. Subsidize such housing along with larger apartments for married couples and families, and homelessness could be virtually ended.
The cost of doing this is less than the cost of maintaining homeless people in the cruel, inefficient system we currently have.
In the Midwest, a drop-in center costs about $8 per day per homeless person. Soup kitchens – necessary because the homeless have no place to cook or to store food – cost about $5 per day per homeless person. Add in the added medical costs caused by homelessness and the cost of extra policing. And then add in the cost the chronically homeless unintentionally impose on merchants and property owners.
Add all of that together and you could rent a multi-room luxury apartment for each homeless person. Families could be given houses.
So why not put the homeless in safe, clean housing, especially when doing that is much cheaper than what we do now?
We don’t do it because there is a fear common to Americans who have never been homeless – and who believe they never will be, even though they are for the most part one serious illness or one prolonged job loss away from disaster.
They fear that being kind to the poor and homeless will encourage more people to “opt” to be poor and unemployed, in order to get cheap housing and benefits.
In other words, we punish the truly poor and homeless to “prevent” or “discourage” potential welfare cheats. That is the foundation of our current housing and welfare policies.
This is profoundly immoral. And, as I noted above, it is completely against Jewish law.
The idea that you would not give tzedaka, charity, to a beggar to discourage his begging or the begging of others, or that you would make a poor person suffer or cause him to be shamed in order to discourage impostors, is completely rejected by halakha.
Barring any solid evidence that a person is not truly needy, we give and we treat the person with dignity.
Yet, somehow, many supposedly Orthodox Jews support welfare and housing policies that do the exact opposite.
The proper halakhic position on poverty and homelessness is to ensure people in need have safe, secure shelter, food and clothing, and that they are not humiliated by the process.
We can do this in America, even with the current economic downturn, for less money than we currently spend on the homeless.
In other words, we can provide more help more efficiently – and much more morally –than we now do.
We don’t because we blame the homeless for their homelessness and poor for their poverty. This is decidedly un-Jewish. It is also un-Christian.
But if the system is improved won’t more people try to cheat it?
Of course.
But the proper way to deal with that cheating is to step up enforcement of the laws that forbid it and by stiffening the penalties for those who violate them.
The poor and the homeless should not be proactively punished for the crimes others might commit in the future.
We have the ability to end a tremendous amount of human suffering.
The right thing to do, the moral thing to do, and the Jewish thing to do, is to do it.