America’s Least Wanted

See Original Article in the Guardian

When you live in New York you spend a lot of time riding the subway. If you have an iPod and a book and manage to get a seat, it could be a pleasant enough experience were it not for the constant interruptions by homeless people begging for food and money.

It’s not like panhandling on the subway is a new thing, but there does seem to be an awful lot more of it these days. On a recent 15-minute trip to the Upper West Side, I listened to seven competing pitches from hungry and desperate people. This volume is hardly surprising in light of an alarming report released last week confirming that this year is the worst on record for New York homelessness since the Great Depression.

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, allegedly rides the subway to work every day. Fortunately he takes the express train, which allows fewer opportunities for panhandlers to board. Otherwise he might be alarmed at how badly his attempts to solve homelessness are going.

Clearly his tactics, which have included cutting off homeless New Yorkers from federal housing assistance, cutting funding to eviction prevention programmes, closing down shelters and drop-in centres and, most recently, kicking people out of shelters for breaking rules such as missing curfews, are not working. Since Bloomberg took office in 2002 homelessness has increased at a rate of 45% each year.

Still though, homeless advocates say that if you’re down on your luck, New York is one of the better cities to be in – and not just because the mayor will be happy to provide you with a one-way bus, train or plane ticket out of town.

In Las Vegas, one of the cities hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, mayor Oscar Goodman’s unique approach to dealing with the homeless was to move them to an abandoned prison in the desert. When that didn’t pan out, he issued an ordinance (which was later overturned) making it illegal to feed the homeless in parks.

Now Goodman wants to relocate the tent city dwellers, forcibly if necessary, to an area out of sight of residential and business communities, where they can, in his words, “bother each other, steal from each other, shoot drugs with each other, drink with each other”.

In Los Angeles they prefer the use of actual prisons to deal with the homeless problem. Only 21% of the city’s homeless are sheltered, and more money is spent arresting and imprisoning skid row residents than on providing needed services.

Numerous other US cities, notably Orlando and St Petersburg, Florida also have a penchant for jailing and intimidating homeless people and restricting their access to food.

As we all know, the US economy is in a bit of a mess right now. Unemployment has been rising steadily, as has the rate of home foreclosures. Since the recession began there has been a 9% increase in family homelessness.

You’d think considering the circumstances we would be doing everything possible to help those who have been worst hit by the crisis. Instead we harass and punish the people who are suffering the most. And the prevailing attitude toward government assistance – that it be temporary, conditional and inadequate, lest it create dependency – remains intact.

Ironically there is no costlier way of creating dependency than to allow a person to fall into homelessness. It costs roughly $36,000 per year in New York to keep one family in emergency shelter.

But on we go, on the high-speed train to nowhere, iPods blaring, eyes averted, deaf and blind to the worsening plight of our neediest citizens.