The issue of homelessness has never received enough attention from public policy makers. No incident has made this more apparent than an event several months ago in Madison, in which a police officer ordered the belongings of the homeless on Capitol Square to be brought to the city dump before other police officers ultimately retrieved them.
This is an embarrassment, but not on the part of the police; their floundering stemmed from lack of a clear directive from policy-makers. The real embarrassment is that nearly 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, homelessness is still prevalent in every city in America and we’re doing nothing about it.
In cities from Madison to Boston, Portland to Austin and San Diego to New York, it’s impossible not to notice the homeless. Sadly, these are only the homeless seen incidentally by people going to the corner store to buy milk or spied upon with curiosity by kids on class field trips. Countless more homeless people go unseen everyday.
It is simply inexcusable for a country as wealthy as the United States to tolerate this very fixable problem. It should be the policy of our nation to end homelessness.
The solution is simple: Increase funding. Of course, critics of this approach claim that you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it. That’s true to a degree. If the proper infrastructure were not in place to use the money effectively, then the funding would be wasted.
Fortunately, there does exist a fantastic network of charities dedicated to helping the homeless community. In Madison, the most prominent charity is Porchlight.
Porchlight provides affordable housing and job training to more than 300 people. Unfortunately, thousands in Madison are left out as they linger on Porchlight’s two year waiting list. The only thing preventing Porchlight from helping more people is its budget.
It’s then disappointing that Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress have targeted social welfare spending in negotiations over lowering the fiscal deficit.
They prioritize maintaining historically low tax rates over desperately needed funding that helps the people most in need. Furthermore, it’s galling that cutting spending on the homeless would even be suggested considering its puny allocation is dwarfed by our nation’s gargantuan thirst for defense spending.
Gone are the days of the “compassionate conservatism” of President George W. Bush, when conservatives at least paid lip-service to the notion of helping thy neighbor.
Instead, conservatives equate cutting welfare spending with reducing reliance on the government. Former Gov. Mitt Romney’s infamous remark about the 47 percent of Americans “who believe they are entitled to healthcare, food, and housing” is the exemplar of this selfish worldview.
Ignoring the callousness of his statement, consider how short-sighted the view is. Chances are greatly diminished that a child with an unstable upbringing—distracted constantly from homework and school by thoughts of where he’ll be living next week—will turn into a productive, tax-paying member of society. Instead, that child is much more likely to need government assistance his entire life.
Surely it’s worth the investment now to prevent this avoidable trauma from being inflicted on so many more lives.
Still, the biggest obstacle we face is our desensitization to the presence of homelessness. The hegemonic ideology is that there will always be homelessness. This hegemony can be broken.
We can end homelessness simply by prioritizing public policy that addresses homelessness and giving it the funding it deserves.
If we want to call ourselves a compassionate society, then we need to end homelessness now.
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