Peasy

Of the myriad conversations I found myself in over the long holiday weekend, the most surreal was one about homelessness and "crime." But, I think, that a lot of discussions of homelessness and "crime" have this quality, which is that they're spoken of as if they were dirt simple problems to solve, even when the person who claims so admits to having no idea of how they would (or anyone else) would actually go about crafting a lasting solution.

Part of it is, I think, that many people don't seem to understand the root cause of homelessness; which is that some number of people find that the least expensive housing available to them in the area in which they are attempting to live costs more than they can afford to pay for it. Which might seem obvious, but in that case I would remind everyone that my father's definition of "obvious" was something that's so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it.

The reason for the miss, in my own opinion, is the fact that very few of the people I speak to who consider homeless to be an easy problem to fix understand their own housing situation to be at all precarious. They tend to own their home, and perhaps one or two others besides. Even if they rent, they tend to do so out of choice, and while their might be circumstances that might warrant them moving for reasons not entirely of their choosing, they're not in a situation where that would land them on the street.

Even so, I tend to be surprised that their ideas of what should be done (vague as they often are) never seem to entail increasing the housing stock to the point that prices would start to come down. Rather they tend to be something akin to deportation or banishment, seemingly unaware that none of the municipal or state governments they think should be acting have the power to simply round people up, force them to go somewhere else and not return.

Likewise, their answers for the sorts of pretty crimes of poverty that bother them (and the only sort they seem to have any actual awareness of) also tend towards the cartoonishly simplistic. Want to stop people from shoplifting? A single security guard near the exit should handle that.

To be sure, what's really at work here is a fairly mild form of the tripartite structure that academics often ascribe to right-wing populism; a corrupt glass of "élites" in government do nothing about the homeless and/or petty criminals who, in turn, offer their political support to the corrupt in government. And, as always, it's "the people" are left holding the bag. The idea that these are problems that have existed for more or less the sum total of human civilization doesn't factor into it. Nor does the idea that the actions, and attitudes, may play a part. The answers to these problems are simple to implement and inexpensive to fund. Just ask them.