NYC offering to pay homeless a year’s worth of rent if they leave town | Hacker News Reader

NYC offering to pay homeless a year’s worth of rent if they leave town

nypost.com

29 pointsSQL221923 comments

I can imagine situations where such a program would be a global net positive. For example, if the victim of homelessness is working homeless, and has family in another city they want to get back to, but do not have the means to secure an apartment in the other city. I doubt they are offering to toss money like this to vagrants.

The optics are awful, but I can think of situations where a program like this comes from a good place and accomplishes some good. Maybe not as much good as building 10x as many new skyscrapers for housing, but some good.

Doesn’t address the problem by shifting externalities elsewhere and reinforces prejudices. Maybe instead of arrogant “quick fixes” it’s worth considering, lower TCO permanent solutions like micro apartments, real and integrated drug, health and mental healthcare coverage coordinated with social workers would address the major sources of costs (ie social services, emergency rooms and justice system).

Most homeless are temporarily homeless, and such assistance would be a huge help to get them back on their feet. It is very difficult to pull yourself back up when you don't even have a secure place to sleep. Let alone shower or keep clean clothes. Homeless shelters help a little, but you end up needing to wait in line much of the day to get a spot making it real hard to go looking for jobs.

Under rug swept...

... or this could be a program with the same goals as Utah's wildly successful housing first program (http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...), but it's just too expensive to house homeless people in the city itself.

As someone who pays taxes in New York City, I'd much rather see my tax dollars go towards paying the rent of the homeless than 99% of the other things the city does with our money.

And they’ll all end up in San fran, Portland, Seattle, or la.

And if they end up in Portland the city won’t do anything other than move their camps around.

I've been thinking we should have a Federal program that helps people in small towns relocate into urban areas or suburban areas at the outskirts of cities. I think letting sparsely populated rural areas depopulate would save us billions on infrastructure since it costs far more per person to run and maintain miles of road out to nowhere rather than short roads to apartments, townhouses, and neighborhoods. As a city dweller, I would gladly exchange the massive federal infrastructure costs that incentivise rural life for the much more consolidated stress this would put on my local infrastructure.

The irony of my proposal is that, while it is in a sense the converse of what NY is doing, I guarantee you it would draw vastly more outrage. The costs of sheltering the 60,000 homeless in NY is nothing compared to the costs of subsidizing rural America to the tune of trillions of dollars. The former is considered a debatable charity, while the latter is never questioned.

>subsidizing rural America to the tune of trillions of dollars

I'm not sure where you're getting that number from. Here's a federal budget breakdown for FY2016 [1]:

  Non-discretionary spending:
  Social Security: $910 billion
  Medicare: $588 billion
  Medicaid: $368 billion
  Other: $563 billion
  Interest payments: $241 billion
  
  Discretionary spending:
  Defense: $584 billion
  Non-defense: $600 billion

Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payments, and defense would not decrease if rural citizens moved to the city. Thus those subsidies aren't solely for rural America, so I won't include them in your "trillions of dollars" claim unless you want to make the claim that the government is subsidizing both rural and non-rural citizens to the tune of trillions of dollars, which nobody would doubt.

The rest of the budget adds up to $1,163 billion dollars. Even if you made the wild assumption that all that money went straight into the pockets of rural Americans, it's hardly trillions of dollars.

(Note that I'm ignoring state budgets. But I think the trillions of dollars assertion is so absurd that I'm not going to waste the time to look up those stats as well.)

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs....

The problem is that you can't look up those stats. They don't exist. I'm not talking about Federal Budget alone or roads alone. I'm talking about Federal Taxes, State Taxes, and Local Taxes as they apply to roads, electric lines, sewage, bridges, community centers, and the myriad other projects that go into supporting a healthy community.

There is a well established flow of taxes from urban areas to rural areas. We frame it as a progressive flow of taxes from high-income to low-income, but much of that low-income is tied to geography. I think the reaction to my post reinforces this. Comments in support of NY's export of low-income citizens out of the city have been up-voted. But, as I predicted, observing that rural Americans are consuming more public services than they pay for has drawn outrage. It's easy to call homeless people a problem, but people get angry when you point out how reliant they are on the government for their rural lifestyle.

> The problem is that you can't look up those stats. They don't exist.

Yes you can. You can obtain just about every budget online, whether it be state, federal or local. The person you're replying to showed you the federal budget which you seem to have conveniently ignored: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs...

You can see on that chart that the chunk which might apply to "roads, electric lines, sewage, bridges, community centers [...]" is the "Nondefense" chunk, which is $600b, or about 15% of the total federal budget.

I can't be bothered listing the budget for every state in the country but they're there. As for local budgets, they're going to apply to the local area.

Parent never said "per year".

The rural America you speak of doesn't exist. Rural America is mostly small towns that look just like a suburb when it comes to population density. And it doesn't sit there doing nothing, it provides services to the people that work in resource extraction (along with manufacturing sited to take advantage of local materials) and agriculture.

There are certainly lots of dying small towns, but that is hardly evidence of profligate subsidization.

You know, your food is probably produced in these rural areas and you need infrastructure to transport that food. I don't think your "solution" is so simple and straightforward as you make it seem.

he proposed concentrating people into cities. Sounds a lot like a final solution to me.

For real though that would be a situation where people were like lambs to the slaughter. People that close together are much easier to control, and that's not a good thing.

Actually, if I were proposing a "final solution," I would simply advocate that urban areas simply stop paying Federal and State taxes. Without government subsidization, rural areas unable to financially support themselves would vanish very quickly.

But I'm not advocating that. I'm suggesting we provide support to dying communities to voluntarily relocate to where the jobs are. Communities that are doing fine would obviously forego such an option.

But they wouldn't be doing fine for long. Inevitably, policy would be structured that made those communities less able to fend for themselves. It always happens--structures of control always seek more control, and more people in fewer places means easier to control.

I'm afraid we're talking past each other--your arguments are about economics, mine concern the right to self-determination.

I don't think we are really talking past each other. To me this an issue of self-determination as well. I lived in a small town completely lacking employment opportunities for 10 years. The kids who were able to move out got careers, those who couldn't are stuck working in the service industry. With a little government assistance, they could move to where the careers are.

I regret the blunt, clinical way I communicated this in my original post.

Ok so rather than spread poor people out, let’s put them all in cheap high density housing with low infrastructure costs. This is precisely the logic that lead to the housing project catastrophes.

As for the characterization of rural and suburban areas as some kind of federal infrastructure spending black hole, that’s not an accurate representation of the United States. Only a quarter of all infrastructure spending comes from the federal government, and only about half of that goes to highways, most of that is for interstates which help us city dwellers get free shipping from Amazon, not “roads to nowhere”.

Yes, let's replace dignified rural living with the squalor of urban poverty. Only then can everyone become subject to city planners' and progressives' social engineering schemes.