It's an old concept sometimes called workfare. It can work until a government gets short sighted and cuts their budget by replacing employees/contractors with unemployed labor (let's use the homeless to mow the lawn at city hall!). At that point it's using an unemployed person to create another unemployed person.
That's in theory but in practice this doesn't how it always works.
Especially when you are replacing already cheap "unskilled" or manual labor with even cheaper labor.
In the long run markets will adjust but the long run in this case can be longer than the life of a single worker.
Depending on how much labor you introduce you get get into a pretty never ending cycle of rotating your employment force.
And one can make an argument that displacing day labor with homeless people can have a bigger negative affect since employed day labor is more likely to have financial obligations and dependants than a homeless person.
This is why it's very important to carefully manage these programs and ensure they are at best self sufficient with some public funding but never profitable.
You want them to maw the lawns where lawns would not have been mawend before not to take over existing works.
So all we need to do to create more jobs is abolish the minimum wage? The savings will be used to create more jobs! Econ 101 doesn't actually explain the world that well.
Oy. "The homeless" are not a separate race, religion, creed, etc. If you get housing, you stop being homeless. Programs aimed at "helping the homeless" tend to be inherently deeply fucked up.
We need more affordable housing generally and other solutions aimed at helping human beings with personal challenges. Those are the folks who end up homeless. Designing programs to help the homeless actually incentivizes being homeless and becomes another barrier to getting off the street because you need to remain homeless to qualify, and that is all kinds of fucked up.
Source: Had a class on homelessness, been homeless for 4.5 years, and I run the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide (a blog).
I wish every city gave money to people to returned bottles to a bottle depot. For those not familiar: Buyers of recyclables pay a recycling deposit up front and any one who returns the recyclables will get the deposit back.
It would also be fascinating to provide transportation for the homeless to the nearest garbage dumps. Pay them for sorting out any recyclables. Allow them to take anything which might be of use to them.
You must not live in Berkeley. Thanks to a recycling center placed in town, "independent recyclers" roam the streets, collect all the recycling from people's bins on trash days, and it's a terrible situation for both the collectors and other residents.
While collecting the recycling, the collectors steal (from my family multiple times), root through unlocked cars, knife open garbage bags, trespass, wake up sleeping people, and act aggressively towards anyone who interferes.
The collectors themselves live outside of the system of taxes and services, have no safety equipment to to protect them from broken glass etc, and end up in a constant cycle of unemployment, drug dependence, and other ills.
I feel like Berkeley manufactured this "picker" existence - it's an externality of trying to be the most progressive recycling town, and it's no good for anyone involved.
Exactly right. People _steal_ recyclables in my area, too, and many Progressives seem fine with theft and the unreported income that results. We have many other criminal acts (which have been caught on camera) associated with this, including rummaging through cars and package theft.
When "three strikes" was foolishly overturned by pro-crime Californians, the amount that you have to steal to be charged with a felony also increased. So people can steal items from cars and doorsteps, in addition to recyclables, and never have to worry about spending a day in prison.
Do you honestly think anyone is "pro-crime"? Being against 3 strikes is just about believing judges should be using their own discretion when sentencing as far as I can tell and not required to hand down mandatory sentencing.
The problem most people have with "stealing" garbage are that it makes a mess (some scavengers are more polite than others -- I don't have problems in my neighborhood).
The other issue I've heard of is that the companies that collect recycling get money for them, too, and this is factored into their contract with the city. So when independent operators take the recycling it cuts into their revenue and upsets the government.
I think of the bottle deposit fee as an extremely inefficient wealth redistribution scheme. Nothing wrong with redistribution, but it might be a lot cheaper to give people money.
When I was kid, recycling was less common and the bottle return fee was worth more so I feel like more people participated. Now most people put their cans and bottles in the city recycling and lose the fee.
My grandfather used to manage a solid waste disposal station in Palo Alto. He got to be friends with a number of homeless men who made their living doing just that. The one guy I remember best (Bert) lived out of his 56 Chevy station wagon. He would dumpster dive for electronics and disassemble them to get at what had recycling value.
Really you don't want to do that at the dump though, as by that time useful items have been commingled with actual trash. Another memorable story is that there was one worker who couldn't deal with glass bottles if they had any liquid in them and would just freak out and put them in with the trash.
Norway has an interesting approach to the bottle return.
There is a tax on beverage containers of all types. This tax is reduced to be inversely proportional to return rates when return rates exceeds a certain level. So return rate of 40% means the seller pays only 60%. There is an additional charge on all containers that are not recyclable, regardless of the return rate.
There is then a recycling scheme that retailers can participate in which involves bottle collection and centralised reuse (glass bottles in good condition only) and recycling (glass and plastic bottles) and redemption. As a result of the high return rates coupled with the tax reduction, most larger stores etc. have machines you can feed bottles for store credit, and at least when I was a kid pretty much any corner store etc. would also take bottles and pay out cash.
This ability to return and redeem everywhere made picking bottles a simple way of making extra cash without having to go somewhere. When I was a kid it was a go-to way of supplementing my allowance, and you'd also see homeless people and retired people etc. doing it.
It's given Norway a return rate for glass bottles of 99%, and an overall return rate for recyclable beverage containers of 95%, which is well in excess of most places with bottle return programs.
Retailers have strong incentives to participate in the recycling programs to reduce their tax, especially given that all their competitors does too, and people expect to be able to return their bottles at the same time as making their purchases - if you don't participate in the return program, you force your customers to make an extra trip if shopping with you.
The fee used to be quite substantial, though I believe it makes up a smaller percentage of most beverages now as I don't think (I haven't lived in Norway the last 16 years) the redemption rate has kept up with inflation. When I was a kid at one point the bottle return for 0.5l bottles of soda was about 5% of the purchase price.
The problem with programs like these is that they tend to incentivize nefarious "scavenging" of lower hanging fruit such as bikes and other private property.
The type of supervised work described in this article seems like a much better approach.
I wouldn't mind seeing a $500-2000 per-employee annual tax credit for businesses that employ the homeless. The types of jobs that are around minimum wage seem like they'd mostly be low-margin businesses, so this would be a pretty big incentive. And it seems cheaper than expanding shelters and similar programs(though you'll still need some shelters).
Maybe it would be better to assess the tax on non-homeless needed for this credit at the county level, since cost-of-living and homelessness are both local issues. Maybe it would work better as a property tax than an income tax, for similar reasons.
How would you ensure that the company is actually hiring homeless employees? What exactly is homelessness? Where is the line? Who does background checks? What are the penalties for lying about being homeless to get the tax credit?
There's also precedent in prioritizing auditing resources on offenders with large payoff, having the computer watch for suspicious tax forms, pricing penalties to include the people who get away with it, and whatever else they do to enforce the existing 2600 pages of federal tax law plus whatever state tax law.
The problem is most chronically homeless people don't have any work or social skills, and aren't very smart or have addiction problems or mental illness. Even if they were "working" for free it wouldn't be worth it.
Even for minimum wage jobs most employers expect decent personal hygiene, punctuality, respectful behavior, at least some amount of self-discipline, and actual work.
This doesn't seem like a very scalable plan nor will it help with the chronically homeless. NYC does something similar with giving park clean-up jobs to recently released convicts or other homeless people. It's better than a simple handout, but doesn't address underlying problems.
There are multiple underlying problems: overpopulation, people not being right for jobs, jobs not being right for people, education requirements, failed federal programs, etc. It's very sad.
Mental illness and substance-abuse as well. So much of homelessness in America is a result of deinstitutionalization decades ago with no credible alternative put in place.
Exactly this. This program will probably help a lot of people down on their luck. Those kind of people utilize shelters and will generally do whatever they have to to get off the streets. The classic panhandling hobo however, is mostly incorrigible and nigh impossible to get on the right path. It takes a huge amount of intervention to get a chronic subtance abuser or schizophrenic to live independently.
I don't see how that fallacy can apply. We have pretty good definitions for chronically homeless. Here's a good summary, and there's a linked PDF with more data. Exhibit 2.7 in the PDF says that among the single homeless population (not families) 68% are substance abusers and 48% are mentally ill.
A B testing will keep showing them better, so I suspect it will continue. Unless you give up all privacy, then the producer can see YOU don't respond well to click bait and fix your titles...
