Maybe my cognitive skills are declining, but a recent news story struck me as doublespeak.
The story was about the results of an initiative that Pima County implemented a year ago to clean up homeless encampments along the Loop bike/walk path and nearby washes, as well as to increase investments in treatment and diversion programs.
On a personal note, my wife and I used to take our daily five-mile walk along the path but stopped doing so when it became a downer instead of an uplifting experience. Using the restrooms along the way—which happened frequently given our age—was particularly dispiriting, sometimes scary, and usually unsanitary.
We once inquired about how to volunteer to clean the river bed of trash but were told that the Sheriff Department advised against doing so due to deranged people hanging out there among the brush.
The Loop is a lesson in how a city can take a positive and turn it into a costly negative.
The numbers are staggering. The initiative found 400 tents and ‘interacted” with 262 homeless individuals. Only 43 of them agreed to be surveyed about housing, and not one of them was interested in being connected to a shelter or a treatment program.
Imagine what the numbers are for metro Tucson as a whole.
In spite of the homeless being overwhelmingly disinterested in housing, there are still homeless advocates and county officials who claim that housing is the solution to the homeless problem, as they claimed in the aforementioned news story.
That runs counter to scores of published papers on the subject, including scholarly ones, polemical ones, sophomoric ones, bleeding-heart ones, heartless ones, conservative ones, liberal ones, Republican ones, and Democrat ones. The overall conclusion is that the majority of the homeless have a mental illness, or a drug addiction, or are pathologically antisocial.
It’s difficult to see how housing would solve these emotional and behavioral problems. Perhaps some sort of kind but coerced confinement and treatment would have more success, but courts have blocked this by taking an expansionary view of civil liberties.
Something like the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression wouldn’t be effective either. Societal norms have changed so much in the intervening 91 years that you’d be met with derision if you were to suggest that the homeless could volunteer to live in work camps to earn money, learn a skill, and develop personal pride while completing needed public works projects.
Ironically, not far from where the homeless tragically live and die on the streets of Tucson like animals, public works from the WPA can still be found and are still in good condition.
Tucsonans who want the homeless problem solved at any cost are left frustrated by the doublespeak and lack of solutions. Others lament that the US has wasted trillions in foreign misadventures while letting Tucson and other cities be overrun with squalor.
For some, the answer is to escape to private residential communities or downtown condos, where the homeless and other outsiders aren’t welcome and can be removed under trespass laws.
Just what Tucson and America need: more social fragmentation and less community spirit.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
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