I’d introduce a (municipal) law on homelessness in some medium-sized American city. The nature of the law would allocate some minor funding for a peculiar type of homelessness census (to occur at set intervals), and would also declare certain homeless people to be the responsibility of that municipal government while declaring the rest to be the responsibility of other local governments (municipal, county, and state) based on some rather boring criteria. Such as…
Whether or not they were born in that city, or have lived there for some significant fraction of their life
Whether they had worked in that city previously for at least 18 months of the last 5 years
Whether their mother and/or father would qualify under the same standards
Whether they had owned or rented a home in that city for 12 months of the last 5 years
Whether they had been arrested/jailed by the locals in the last 5 years (this is qualifying, not disqualifying by the way)
And so on. The details of qualification are less important than the general idea: that certain homeless people are the responsibility of the locals, and that they can’t shirk responsibility for them. But that others, migratory, are not. Even as they disqualified those homeless people, they’d also be writing up paperwork that proves they are in fact the responsibility of other local governments elsewhere.
I would expect that other nearby local governments would enact similar local laws in retaliation, so it would have a crystallization effect, and eventually most or all throughout North America would do the same. Instead of trying to shirk responsibility for this problem, they’d start to take responsibility for them… after all, it’s a much more constrained problem once you no longer worry about the solution just attracting more homeless to your city, it’s a cheaper problem, and now you’ve declared yourself to be responsible for these people when they meet some reasonable criteria.
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
The criteria can be designed such that 99% of homeless people would qualify somewhere. And the small remainder would then be a much smaller issue, one that we might even expect the US federal government to pick up the tab for.
I get tired of hearing about how it is a problem of compassion or lack thereof, it is 100% a game theory problem.
How is homelessness a game theory problem? It’s a capitalism problem. There’s literally millions of empty dwellings (at least in France and USA) that could be used. How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly, and 100% effective at housing homeless people.
I’d introduce a (municipal) law on homelessness in some medium-sized American city. The nature of the law would allocate some minor funding for a peculiar type of homelessness census (to occur at set intervals), and would also declare certain homeless people to be the responsibility of that municipal government while declaring the rest to be the responsibility of other local governments (municipal, county, and state) based on some rather boring criteria. Such as…
And so on. The details of qualification are less important than the general idea: that certain homeless people are the responsibility of the locals, and that they can’t shirk responsibility for them. But that others, migratory, are not. Even as they disqualified those homeless people, they’d also be writing up paperwork that proves they are in fact the responsibility of other local governments elsewhere.
I would expect that other nearby local governments would enact similar local laws in retaliation, so it would have a crystallization effect, and eventually most or all throughout North America would do the same. Instead of trying to shirk responsibility for this problem, they’d start to take responsibility for them… after all, it’s a much more constrained problem once you no longer worry about the solution just attracting more homeless to your city, it’s a cheaper problem, and now you’ve declared yourself to be responsible for these people when they meet some reasonable criteria.
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
The criteria can be designed such that 99% of homeless people would qualify somewhere. And the small remainder would then be a much smaller issue, one that we might even expect the US federal government to pick up the tab for.
I get tired of hearing about how it is a problem of compassion or lack thereof, it is 100% a game theory problem.
How is homelessness a game theory problem? It’s a capitalism problem. There’s literally millions of empty dwellings (at least in France and USA) that could be used. How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly, and 100% effective at housing homeless people.