The late great George Carlin with a solution to homelessness that he came up with in the 1980's. It's Carlin, so that means NSFW, and a fair amount of profanity. So don't watch this at work, unless you work some place pretty cool.
I'll let this bit speak for itself, but I just want to remind everyone that 2022 is the 20th anniversary of the 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness. What did that give us? MORE HOMELESS PEOPLE! Carlin saw it coming, 30-some years ago. Enjoy this hilarious comedy piece.
What George Carlin didn't see coming, was that The 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness actually seems to have been the 10 year plan to monetize homelessness. Los Angeles has been spending $400 million a year on homelessness, and now plans to spend $3 billion over the next five years. San Francisco has $1.1 billion to spend on homelessness. Seattle is set to spend $173 million on homelessness this year. Contrary to mainstream media reports, homelessness is not just a West Coast problem, New York City is set to spend $2.1 billion on homelessness.
So obviously, someone has figured out how to make homelessness profitable for someone. That $6.2 billion spent across four large cities, and all the rest spent elsewhere, doesn't go into homeless people's hands. But it does go somewhere. Where those hundreds of millions of dollars have been going in recent years, it hasn't made much of a dent in the number of people on the streets. Neither did Covid (sorry folks, most of us bums survived). I know there were a lot of civic leaders secretly hoping the pandemic would take half of the homeless (like me) out. Apparently God, The Universe, or whatever higher power you may believe in, had other plans.
My quick point here is that homelessness is now a growth industry, and somebody, somewhere is making a killing off of it. But it doesn't seem to be permanently housing very many people yet. Don't believe me? Here's one of the winners in the homeless industry game, Pallet. They make "tiny homes," which are really prefab tool sheds for the homeless, wired for electricity. Their business has gone up 7,000%, over the last couple of years. And who owns Pallet? Well, it's not a bunch of Left Wing Liberal do-gooders, that's all I'll say.
If you're beginning to get the idea where all these billions of dollars are going, you're probably Right. Don't get me wrong, small, prefab buildings could play a significant role in the solution to getting thousands of people off the streets, if done well. Or it could mean a city pays $17,000 to $55,000 (actual prices I've seen mentioned) for tool sheds they could buy at Home Depot for $4,000 each (which are 50% bigger than the "tiny homes"). Then they group these into what is essentially a crackhead and tweeker trailer park, with 100-200 people stealing from each other and sharing communal showers, all paid for with your tax dollars and inflation money.
We can do better. That's what I'm saying. I'll have more of my thoughts on actual, real world, pragmatic solutions to homelessness in future blog posts. But for now, homelessness is a growth industry and a cash cow for what appears to be mostly one side of the political spectrum. And there are still tens of thousands on the streets. I do really like Carlin's idea of the golf courses, though. Add some native plants to the idea, and we could save a lot of water, now being wasted, since we're in such a major drought out west now. But that's a whole different issue, for another day. As one last bonus, here's Robin Williams on golf, another great comedy bit from the 80's (90's?), also NSFW.
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