I feel this is mostly true. The city council has been dodgy at best lately. I heard from crosscut there’s now over a billion dollars per year spent to combat homelessness in seattle. The problem is the spending is ineffective. With a recent count of homeless being around 6500 (let’s call it 7500 for margin of error), take the billion that’s appropriated and perform a couple experiments with the money. What we know is that the current effort is short term ineffective. What are some other ways to spend this money for short term and also long term effectiveness? We need some econo-science on the city council, not a bunch of folks with clearly obfuscated and outside funded political agendas.
Personally I would perform a basic income experiment with the money. $1 Billion / 7500 homeless = $0.1333 million per person per year in spending. Even with a basic income of $40k per year per person, which can really change a life if you prop up someone for a few years like this, you have enough left over to fund a 2:1 case manager > homeless person ratio - to ensure they’re not spending the dough on heroin which is a big problem here. This will free up our army of police to concentrate on freeing the city from our hard drug, property crime and murder problem, instead of mobilizing and raiding the homeless camps twice a week.
