For some people it's easy to look at the homeless population and come to certain conclusions. "Homeless people are drug addicts." or "They're choosing to be homeless because it's easy and they're lazy" or my personal favorite line "There are plenty of jobs out there". While it's certainly true of homelessness and social safety nets as it is of every system ever set up anywhere, there certainly ARE abuses of the system. However, characterizing the entire population as lazy drug addicts who would prefer to beg than work and are turning down job offers in an applicant friendly job market is not only incredibly ignorant of the job situation in this area, but also over simplifying the problem, and only serving to further the issue, not help solve it.
We must all start with the understanding that a) Homlessness is something we'd all like to eradicate, and b) there are paths to that solution. Once we get past the initial point, which is where some people get hung up, with both sides pointing fingers at each other as if anyone wants to fight towards no solution. We DO ALL want to solve this problem. Both sides of the aisle. They just both take philosophically different routes, and neither is correct.
In order to solve any problem, you must understand it's causes. While there are abusers of the system who would rather float along than get real jobs, that's not the main cause of homelessness in this or any other state. If it was, criminalizing homelessness might be a great answer. But it just isn't. The bulk of homeless people are there as the result of hard times economically, mental disease/condition, or drug addiction-perhaps a combination, or a domino effect where losing one's job and finances lead to drugs, lead to addiction, and now you're fighting out of a deeper hole than most people are capable of.
The real problem with our social safety nets is not that there are too many, or that there aren't enough restrictions. Quite the opposite. The real problem is that individually, one can only access enough help to exist. And it can often be difficult, requiring repeated visits to a social worker, acquiring documents, making phone calls, etc. Social workers are over worked, difficult to get ahold of, an missing just one appointment can mean months of delay in getting the help you need. This is a system that actually caters to the abusers. The abusers of the system have time to sit around cutting through red tape, they can drop everything at a moment's notice to go meet a social worker and keep their aid, they may even have vehicles to get to these places, making it that much easier. By contrast, a single mom of 2 who is homeless after her husband died in a car crash, losing their only vehicle, with limited job skills as her job was once caring for her kids while her husband works, might have a more difficult time fulfilling certain requirements.
She might have a low skill minimum wage job she can't get time off of for various meetings, or her kids' doctor appointments, or whatever. Making an appointment to keep a hundred or a couple hundred in food stamps might cost her that job. Riding the bus places adds hours on to your trip, so she's already limited in where and when she can travel to job interviews, look for apartments, or anything else to help herself and her family.
I spent a year working at Crossroads while in college, and we used to see first hand all the time both sides. You see the people struggling, who need that extra hand to get back to where they want to be, where they used to be, or where they should be. But you also see people abusing the system terribly. And your hands are tied, you simply can't do anything about it.
I believe that if we continued federally funding social safety net programs, but made approval a much more localized process, primarily the responsibility of the social worker, we'd save a great deal of money. I think if social workers were allowed to help individuals more than current limits allow, and were able to act as the red tape for the approval process, they could cut out the percentage of people abusing the system, give real help to those trying to get off of government help, and with the same pool of money make a MUCH larger impact than they currently do. The inability to abuse the system should push the optional homeless population back into the work force as well, or at very least out of the city and state, to a place they can more easily abuse the system.
In this manner, we're limiting the potential for abuse by taking away the ability to simply learn acceptable answers and fill out forms, we're assigning personal responsibility to the social worker in the assistance they're issuing, and helping tie them to the success of their clientele. Help would be available, but not easily abused. Social workers would need to be held to a high ethical standard, overseen as far as the assistance they issued, and potentially higher qualifications would need to be sought for new workers, but within the first 6-12 months I'd expect their workload to decrease, and the intrinsic rewards of their job (nobody gets into social work for the money) to drastically increase, making their job that much better as they watched themselves making real, life changing impact in the lives of those who truly need it.
I believe this to be a great solution to the homelessness problem everywhere, not just here in Providence. Maybe you disagree, and maybe I'm wrong, but one thing I'm certainly right about is that it's not so simple. The issue of homelessness isn't a cut and dry choice of the homeless themselves. It's not a mark of laziness, it's not a mark of stupidity, and it's not an open door to ridicule, harass, or arrest people. We cannot let the desires of the few to abuse the system turn us into heartless and cold monsters who no longer help those who need it.
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