Tucson Is the Canary in the Homeless Shelter

A recent news story by KVOA in Tucson was another daily reminder of the personal and societal costs of homelessness and the nation’s embarrassing inability to remedy it.

The story was about a mother and her kids who were attacked by a deranged homeless guy in the outdoor section of the Children’s Museum in downtown Tucson.

The attacker was arrested, charged with misdemeanors, and quickly released.

If mom had taken the kids to a city park instead, it wouldn’t have been any safer.  She would’ve had to make sure that the kids didn’t step on drug needles and human feces or be accosted in a restroom.

Well, at least mom and kids weren’t attacked by a deranged guy with a hatchet, as recently happened at a downtown bus stop.

Downtown Tucson, like many downtowns across the nation, has been turned into a spiffy office and entertainment oasis, but without first addressing the severe socioeconomic problems that swirl around the island and often enter the utopia, hatchet in hand.

There is no need for Tucsonans to ride a rollercoaster to be frightened to death.  They can just ride a city bus. You see, Tucson’s kind, caring and altruistic politicians have made bus rides free in the city, which means that riders can be terrorized at no cost by the deranged people who ride the buses and hang out at bus stops.

I’m an expert at being terrorized, having acquired my expertise by riding the El and other public transit when I lived in Chicago for ten years, as well as by living for five years in the barrio of San Antonio, where I was once shot at by gangbangers.  I’ve wondered ever since if advocates for public transit and walkable cities have ever taken public transit or walked in a sketchy area at night.

It sounds like a cliché, but problems can’t be solved without first agreeing on their root causes.  There is little agreement on the root causes of homelessness among social scientists, politicians, journalists, the intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the left, the right, or the middle.

Some say that poverty and a lack of affordable housing are the root causes of homelessness.  Others put the blame on drug addiction and/or mental health problems.  Still others say that many of the homeless like to live on the street, or at least prefer it over living in homeless shelters.

It’s interesting that almost no one says that a high divorce rate and a decline in the traditional nuclear family have left a large number of Americans without a family support network, not even a cot in the basement of a relative’s house.

It’s also interesting to reflect on what was done during the Great Depression to help the impoverished and the unemployed, and to ask if this would work today.  Consider:

The Civilian Conservation Corps put three million men to work over the nine years of its existence.  Unmarried and unemployed men ages 17 to 29 could join the CCC, and in return for building infrastructure in rural areas, receive food, clothing, and bareboned shelter in work camps, along with a monthly wage of $30 (equivalent to about $800 today), 80 percent of which had to be sent home to their families.

There was a smaller program for women, known as She-She-She Camps.

The Works Progress Administration put millions more to work in building parks, roads, schools, bridges, airports and housing.  It had a separate division that gave work to artists, musicians, writers and actors.

The CCC and WPA did such quality workmanship that much of the resulting infrastructure still stands today and can be seen in and around Tucson and other cities.

Call me cynical, but I doubt that such programs would be effective today in helping the homeless get on their feet.  The programs would be rife with crime, drugs, divisiveness, and loafing.  Also, both the left and right would find reasons to oppose them.  The left would say that the jobs don’t pay a living wage, should be unionized, and are demeaning to the disadvantaged.  The right would say that the programs smack of socialism.

In any event, the problems of mental illness and drug addiction would still need to be addressed.

The challenge is how to get the afflicted into treatment programs and institutionalized, if necessary, without violating real and imagined civil liberties.  Then there is the issue of a lack of such programs and facilities, and a corresponding lack of funding for them.

To get around concerns about civil liberties, one idea is to offer drug rehabilitation instead of jail to the homeless when they are arrested for lawbreaking.  But the problem with that is the fact that it is common for lawbreakers, whether homeless or not, to be released for minor infractions.

Over 60 years ago, President John F. Kennedy got a bill passed to establish humane mental health facilities across the nation.  Funding was stopped after his assassination.  At the same time, it had become the policy, oftentimes at the direction of courts, to release the mentally ill into the community, due in part to the awfulness of the few older mental health hospitals that remained.  The 1975 movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” helped to turn public opinion against institutionalization.

Regarding the contention that homelessness is primarily a problem of poverty and a lack of affordable housing, color me skeptical.  But even if the contention is true, the conventional wisdom on these subjects isn’t very wise.

Take affordable housing.  The old idea was to build public high-rises for the poor, such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe in my boyhood hometown of St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago.  Most of these turned into incubators for crime and have since been torn down.

Then there was the idea of mandating that a portion of new housing developments be set aside for low-income housing, an idea spurred by a New Jersey Supreme Court decision in 1975, known as the Mt. Laurel decision.

In the late 1980s, my wife and I lived near a large development in Bedminster, NJ, which was built in compliance with the decision.  It became easy to identify which homes were the affordable ones, judging by their condition.  More cops had to be hired by the police department to handle the increased crime.

A new idea to achieve affordability has been adopted by states and cities, including Arizona and Tucson.  It is to loosen zoning regulations and building codes to facilitate the building of multi-story apartments in neighborhoods of single-family homes and to allow homeowners to build rental houses, or casitas, in their backyards.

Along with the goal of increasing population density, there is the companion goal of getting people to take public transportation or walk instead of being reliant on cars.  To facilitate this, and to theoretically make construction less expensive, zoning has been revised to require fewer parking spaces per unit.

As an avid walker who dislikes the ugliness that the auto has wrought on American cities, I hope it works; but evidence suggests that it will not.  As New York City demonstrates, housing costs increase with higher population density and with vertical living in tiny apartments.  Affordability has become such a hot-button issue in New York that an avowed socialist will probably become the next mayor.

The odds are that big-time operators will build the new apartments in cities such as Tucson and charge big-time rents.  One reason for this is that small-time landlords are finding it difficult to make money, due to a plethora of regulations restricting their ability to deal with bad tenants and to increase rents enough to cover their costs.

What about backyard casitas?  Well, they are very expensive to build, even with more permissive building codes.  Rosie Romero, the host of “Rosie on the House” and a longtime contractor in Arizona, says that it can cost $400 a square foot to build a backyard casita that meets the fire code and has the proper hook-ups for electricity, water and sewer.

Most discussions on housing affordability skip over the role that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies and the federal government’s housing policies have played in driving up the cost of houses.  The policies have benefited existing homeowners over prospective homeowners, as well as benefitting the wealthy over the poor.

Regarding the theory that poverty is a cause of homelessness, a question comes to mind:  Why has homelessness increased over the decades in tandem with increases in social-welfare spending and a decrease in poverty?

Poverty is a very controversial subject, and disagreeing with the conventional wisdom can trigger name-calling.  Still, it shouldn’t go unmentioned that there is considerable evidence that the official poverty rate in the US overstates poverty by a factor of four.  That’s because the official rate doesn’t include many transfer payments and tax credits that accrue to lower-income Americans.  When these are counted, Americans in the bottom fifth of reported income actually have more income, on average, than the next fifth and almost as much as the fifth after that.  (Wealth is a different matter.)   This argument is made and backed up with compelling statistics in the book, The Myth of American Inequality, by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early.

That’s not to say that solving the homeless problem can be done without spending a lot of money, especially on mental health facilities, drug rehab, and temporary shelters. For sure, bromides, platitudes, Band-Aids, silver bullets, and tropes won’t solve the problem.

I’ll go further and say that something is wrong with the nation’s priorities when Americans are living and dying on the street like animals while other Americans don’t seem to notice as they pass by in their $50,000 cars and trucks, while billion-dollar sports stadia are being built at public expense across the country, and while Bill Belichick is being paid a million bucks to coach a college football team as he makes a fool out of himself by dating a woman who looks young enough to be a college coed.

Maybe with different national priorities, a mother could take her kids to a museum or park without the fear of being accosted.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.