What happens when the homeless from other cities start making their way to Medicine Hat?
I'd like for this to work out long-term, but it strikes me as unrealistic. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
I'd like for this to work out long-term, but it strikes me as unrealistic. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
To put it another way, why are there any homeless people in Canada or the northern USA at all when they could just move to Florida where it's warm?
San Francisco and Portland both SEEM to have a problem with destination homelessness, in particular, Portland was known to have strong city services and may have led to that.
Given, the job industry there is recovering from a major source of industry, so I could be massively wrong, but it seems like the case.
Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Though I recently remember reading an article from the Slack CEO, where he justified taking a large investment round he didn't need because the VCs were not going to spend it on homelessness.
Unfortunately we still incentize the wrong things in seeking profits. Obviously, we can't call a single case out, but in the end, there's enough funding here to completely fix it if people rallied together and the Medicine Town thing could probably be done at SF or Portland level scale.
It would be crazy expensive, yes, but would also greatly improve those cities.
Isn't central SF - presumably the location that homeless people for various reasons prefer to be located in - so expensive that even software developers employed by these companies on salaries north of $100k per annum feel they're being priced out of it?
The TL's cheaper, sure, but still rather expensive.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sfc/apa?nh=156&maxAsk=150...
Like someone like Ellison or Page or Musk builds a big tower or buys up several blocks, maybe it's not even downtown.
OTOH, people would also want to live there with other people and other root cause problems would have to be addressed for many. So you might need many of these scattered around, and would need to figure out NIMBY factors.
But yeah, the idea is someone else would need to front that bill.
There are also a lot of homeless people that moves north from Montréal.
They are quite mobile but only if there is a reason to. Good housing is a big reason and I'm sure many of them will consider moving there.
If (although it's quite a big if) homeless people from other cities move to Medicine Hat, that means the problem of homelessness in other cities is reduced.
Is that a bad thing? I claim: not in any way.
Other cities should easily recognise the benefits, in that case. The federal government should be happy to pay for this and similar projects in other cities.
It seems like a bad thing for Medicine Hat, which makes it a bad thing for the future of initiatives like this.
(However, another possible scenario: some homeless people move to Medicine Hat, and Medicine Hat is still better off than it was before because it's better to have the greater numbers in houses, than the smaller number on the streets.)
There will always be people trying to game things, even for marginal benefit.
However, in the overall hierarchy of how much I value people, I place the well-being of the people I love, and myself, above all the rest. And I'm not afraid to admit that.