Sweeping A Problem Under The Rug
From the Denver Post via Earthly Passions:
This program is a little suspect, at best. While the thought of giving a person who's down on their luck a ticket to a place where they can possibly do better is a noble idea, in practice it would seem to have some flaws.
First and foremost, $370,000 seems like a lot of money to spend on a program like this. According to the article, that amount was spent on bus tickets over four years, working out to be $92,500 per year. Perhaps a better solution to the homeless problem would be to spend that money on creating more jobs or building shelters, as the article suggested.
Second, I would think that shipping a homeless family off to a different state would be quite a temptation for frustrated social workers. How easy would it be for a social worker who is fed up with a particularly problematic person to just get him or her a bus ticket and send them on their way. While the article claims they don't send these people off to other cities without first making sure they have something in the way of a job or family waiting for them, I wonder just how sure they are that this is being done. How many of these homeless people are slipping through the cracks and becoming the same problem in a different place?
Which leads me to my last point, what about the social service agencies in the locations where these homeless people are being sent? Obviously nobody from Minnesota has bothered to contact the agencies where these homeless people are being sent. What right does Minnesota have to put additional burden on the tax payers of Denver or Illinois? Perhaps if the agencies banded together to form some sort of network where they could keep track of the people being put on the buses it would ease the strain a little bit. I'm sure the social workers in Denver would have liked to have known that Minnesota was sending people there way.
Bottom line, this is a bad program. Its wasteful of money and puts undue burden on the system. Maybe if the states could form a system of cooperation in a program like this it would work better, but one state shipping their problems to another state isn't going to solve anything.
While Denver's new Commission on Homelessness struggles to find shelter for what it calls a record number of people living on cold city streets, another state is trying to solve its problem, in part, by busing its homeless here.
Over the past four years, two counties in Minnesota have given free, one-way bus tickets to some 4,500 homeless people. At least 63 of those people have taken a Greyhound to Colorado.
Mayor John Hickenlooper said Minnesota is playing a kind of shell game. "Who's got the homeless person?" Hickenlooper said. "It's crazy."
Hickenlooper and his commission members learned about the Minnesota program, called "A Bus Ticket Forward," from 9News...
Ramsey and Hennepin counties in Minnesota estimated they've spent more than $370,000 in the past four years providing free bus tickets to the homeless.
"That is more money than we need to keep a shelter open for the next four months," White said.
A new temporary shelter for 120 men in Denver this winter will cost $80,000.
The chairman of the Hennepin County Commission said the program helps homeless people who find themselves in Minnesota without family or friends.
"We think the bus ticket forward program is a humane way to help folks maybe have a better chance somewhere else," said Commissioner Mike Opat.
Opat said it's a "flat mischaracterization" of his county's efforts to suggest its homeless policy is solely based on bus tickets.
"We're not a travel agency and we're not pushing people out of the state," Opat said. "We're not going to just give them a bus ticket and say, 'Here, now you are Denver's problem.' We are going to make sure they have a family, a job offer, something at the end of the line before we put them on a bus."
This program is a little suspect, at best. While the thought of giving a person who's down on their luck a ticket to a place where they can possibly do better is a noble idea, in practice it would seem to have some flaws.
First and foremost, $370,000 seems like a lot of money to spend on a program like this. According to the article, that amount was spent on bus tickets over four years, working out to be $92,500 per year. Perhaps a better solution to the homeless problem would be to spend that money on creating more jobs or building shelters, as the article suggested.
Second, I would think that shipping a homeless family off to a different state would be quite a temptation for frustrated social workers. How easy would it be for a social worker who is fed up with a particularly problematic person to just get him or her a bus ticket and send them on their way. While the article claims they don't send these people off to other cities without first making sure they have something in the way of a job or family waiting for them, I wonder just how sure they are that this is being done. How many of these homeless people are slipping through the cracks and becoming the same problem in a different place?
Which leads me to my last point, what about the social service agencies in the locations where these homeless people are being sent? Obviously nobody from Minnesota has bothered to contact the agencies where these homeless people are being sent. What right does Minnesota have to put additional burden on the tax payers of Denver or Illinois? Perhaps if the agencies banded together to form some sort of network where they could keep track of the people being put on the buses it would ease the strain a little bit. I'm sure the social workers in Denver would have liked to have known that Minnesota was sending people there way.
Bottom line, this is a bad program. Its wasteful of money and puts undue burden on the system. Maybe if the states could form a system of cooperation in a program like this it would work better, but one state shipping their problems to another state isn't going to solve anything.
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