« Systemic consequences of exotic trading strategies | Main | How to get a cheap but great shave »
July 30, 2009
Ingenious
If you can show that you have family members somewhere else and are homeless, NYC will help provide you with the money you need to live with them instead of a shelter:
...all are families who have ended up homeless, and all the plane tickets are courtesy of the city of New York (one-way).The Bloomberg administration, which has struggled with a seemingly intractable problem of homelessness for years, has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city since 2007, as a way of keeping them out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. All it takes is for a relative elsewhere to agree to take the family in.
City Aids Homeless With One-Way Tickets Home
I have long seen homeless people with signs showing that they just need a few bucks to get home to Michigan/Ohio/or someplace like that. It is nice to know that the city is watching its budget with enough savvy to realize that it can save money by sending those folks home.
Some cynical people think this moves the homeless problem around, but given what it is like to live in a shelter and that they are requiring that you have a family member host you, this has got to help more people than it hurts. Other cities with serious homeless problems should try it.
My sister once told me that state of the art addiction treatment programs cost less than imprisoning criminals, so we could treat all our drug addicts for less than it costs to treat them as criminals. This is a policy in a similar spirit, better to treat the homelessness problem (the lack of a local family support network) than to find an institutional problem that doesn't address the causes (shelters).
HT: Homeless? If You Can Prove There's A Relative Who'll Take You In, NYC Will Pay Your Way
Posted by OneEyedMan at July 30, 2009 12:03 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)