6
votes
A ticket out of town: when cities buy homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town, should they count that as a success?
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- Title
- Hundreds of homeless board a bus out of SF every year. What happens to them?
- Published
- Jul 29 2019
- Word count
- 1940 words
There's been pushes for a similar program here in Seattle as our homelessness crisis has ramped up in the past decade.
Words cannot express how abysmally fucking stupid I think this sort of "solution" is. There are absolutely success stories, like the one in the article, where someone had family in a lower cost-of-living area who was willing and able to support them.
But for the most part, this strikes me as the public policy equivalent of when you tell a kid to clean their room and they just stuff everything into the closet and hope their parents don't notice. In most cases, it does nothing to actually address the root causes of why that person is homeless in the first place.
It also feeds into scaremongering that some of the homeless people in Seattle are only here because other cities gave them free bus tickets and they came here. And therefore, presumably, we shouldn't try to take care of them, but just send them back to where they came from.
that's because it's literally not a solution to this problem, it's just an excuse to make the homelessness some other asshole's problem and on their dime because you're too cheap to figure it out yourself.