If you read a recent burst of reporting in the Arizona Republic on homelessness, you’d come away with the impression that the only issue driving a current (small) increase in Arizona’s homeless population is reduced funding for government programs. That is a lie. A lot of printed words to avoid the truth: the current increase has happened during a period of increased funding.
Note: This does not include the currently $173 million per year the city of Phoenix spends on their Human Services Department, which also provides extensive homeless service funding.
Including just the direct funding listed above, that’s $10,305 per year per homeless person. Include Phoenix’s HSD funding, and the total balloons to $28,132 per. That is PLENTY to secure housing, especially since all of these individuals qualify for other forms of federal assistance (SNAP, TANF, Section 8, but also because under Obama drug addiction was reclassified as a disability, the drug addicted ones qualify for Disability payments as well). But that money isn’t being used to get people off the streets, it’s being pocketed by the Homeless Industrial Complex and grifted away into the coffers of myriad left-wing NGOs.
This is the same pattern we have seen in Portland, Seattle, New York, and California: government gets more of what it pays for, and when you make chronic street homelessness into a viable lifestyle, more people will choose it. People choosing a street lifestyle are having terrible impacts on everyone around them – turning parks, sidewalks, and entire city blocks into deadly, disease-ridden hellscapes. But their greatest impact is on the people we can and should truly be helping get off the streets: the elderly and circumstantial homeless. These are the individuals the left likes to pretend make up the majority of homeless, but in truth they are a relatively small minority – one that governments refuse to help by prioritizing services for the chronic street homeless who are choosing a lifestyle of addiction and crime.
And that’s the rub: there is plenty of money available to get people off the street who want to get off the street if we stop spending it all on people who are using it to support a drug-fueled lifestyle choice.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.