Spectator's Journal/Thoughts on Homelessness Today
Haag, Ernest van den
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THOUGHTS ON HOMELESSNESS TODAY According to a poll recently published in the New York Times, more than 70 percent of the American people think that the homeless are a serious...
...2) Homeless persons often are mentally or psychologically ill...
...The country is prosperous...
...Welfare schemes take care of most of the old and disabled...
...Regulations have grown so numerous and the licenses, permits, and inspections required so many, that contractors must spend considerable sums to conform (or to get around them...
...But others, even though addicted or mentally handicapped, might not be homeless ifcheap apartments were available...
...They lost their homes because of family rifts, housing 'The "vagrancy," "public drunkenness," or "disorderly conduct" laws used by the police in the past to confine the homeless have been declared unconstitutional, or are not enforced...
...Rent control leads to the abandonment of old buildings...
...destruction (for construction of new housing), abandonment of old buildings by landlords, unemployment, or illness...
...The result is that landlords of older buildings often find that the cost of maintenance and taxes exceeds the income they yield...
...If affordable private housing could be built again, if local governments were to change their cost-raising policies, some persons still might require a subsidy: their income may be too lowto pay the rents that would have to be charged even after the scarcity created by local governments is overcome...
...Some indeed are homeless for entirely endogenous reasons...
...The effects—e.g., cirrhosis of the liver—are...
...The number of inhabitants has not risen in the last ten years...
...They constitute perhaps 30 percent of the total...
...Still, more might be lured into a semi-institutional setting, somewhere between leaving them altogether to their own devices and totally restricting them...
...Yet they are unable to provide shelter for themselves and often refuse public shelters as well, preferring railroad or bus stations, parks, or doorways...
...They also make it nearly impossible to employ nonunion labor...
...In the past, public housing has never come near making up for the private housing that local governments have discouraged...
...There would be nothing wrong with high wages for construction workers, if the wages of future tenants had kept up...
...Rent control does protect tenants in possession, but enables new buildings to charge rents so high that the poor cannot afford them...
...Still, the contribution of the homeless themselves to their homelessness should not be overestimated...
...1) Many alcoholics and drug addicts are homeless, because their addictions cause them to spend what money they get hold of on alcohol and drugs...
...Many would find shelter—if it were available...
...It seems unlikely that more than a few alcoholics or drug addicts can be removed from the street...
...Psychological support can be useful in this respect, and should be provided...
...Yet the poor rarely were homeless...
...Here is a new phenomenon that defies easy explanation...
...Apartments will be built privately, just as shirts or cornflakes are produced privately, if the government allows them to be produced at reasonable costs...
...Many have been released from institutions that previously sheltered them...
...Isn't it odd that a country that produces food and clothing and all other consumer goods efficiently and cheaply is unable to produce housing cheap enough for the poor to afford...
...This group, too, is new on the scene...
...Consider the addicts first...
...2 Aban'If he can sufficiently upgrade it, a landlord may coopt the building, selling apartments at market prices, whenever those tenants who did not buy die or leave...
...Since they are not diseases there is no medical treatment and no medical cure for the habits themselves...
...In older buildings, rents are usually kept down by rent control and stabilization laws...
...But many do not take medications outside an institutional setting, or visit clinics, or allow social workers to help...
...but it is not effective with cocaine or alcohol...
...There is such a thing as competition outside the construction industry...
...Building regulations often specify materials more expensive to install than some alternatives...
...These laws cap the rental income of landlords, while imposing costly maintenance and service standards...
...This, too, at the behest of unions...
...Addicts and those with psychological problems have rational intervals...
...Hence they abandon these buildings...
...They also make it hard to evict those tenants who, complaining about maintenance or services, refuse to pay their rent...
...Alcoholics Anonymous can be quite helpful to those who want to get rid of alcoholism...
...This may preserve the building, but does not create additional dwelling space...
...Having created the problem, local governments clamor for federal funds for more public housing...
...Yet there is a housing shortage, and rents are sky high in new buildings...
...Further, many construction jobs, such as plumbing or electrical installation, require licenses, which are hard to get and allow the few possessors to charge monopoly prices...
...Legal and union obstructions also hinder the use of prefabricated parts, let alone altogether prefabricated houses...
...What is going on...
...C onsider New York...
...Such persons should receive a rent subsidy in the form of vouchers, sufficient to rent apartments at market prices...
...Alcoholism or drug addiction, once acquired, becomes a tenacious, sometimes pathogenic, habit...
...As for the mentally impaired, social workers and mental health clinics might help some of them...
...No longer...
...We can classify the homeless into three groups...
...Actual diseases, such as cancer or the common cold, are not volitional: they do not start, continue, or stop depending on the patient's actions and they can be cured regardless of the patient's volition...
...Maintenance standards imposed by law, combined with rent ceilings, all too often make it unrewarding for landlords to rent apartments in old buildings...
...3) An increasing number of persons, neither addicted nor mentally ill, are homeless because of circumstances beyond their control...
...Much chatter to the contrary notwithstanding, however, these habits themselves are not diseases...
...But these are not medical treatments, any more than genetic predispositions (whether to obesity or to alcoholism) are diseases...
...They are right...
...So can "clinics" (usually at a high price...
...Yet there are many homeless persons...
...Currently, the most reliable, or least unreliable, is about 500,000...
...Somehow they fell through the cracks in the welfare system and are left without enough income to rent an apartment at current rates...
...Yet public housing has many drawbacks that are too well known to bear rehearing...
...But what...
...Addiction, however, depends altogether on the addict's volition...
...According to current criteria they are not dangerous enough to themselves, or to others, to warrant involuntary institutionalization...
...The number of homeless fluctuates with various factors and many shun all contact with enumerators...
...Hence the poor cannot afford the rents driven up by building unions...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THOUGHTS ON HOMELESSNESS TODAY According to a poll recently published in the New York Times, more than 70 percent of the American people think that the homeless are a serious problem about which something should be done...
...These are, as it were, the traditional homeless, who used to be labeled derelicts, vagrants, or bums...
...Too few such settings are available...
...Skid row (more accurately the police 1) no longer confines them, wherefore they have become quite visible...
...Private construction of nonluxury buildings has stopped, because unions, together with local governments, have raised the cost of construction so that apartments cannot be rented for prices the poor can afford...
...unemployment is low...
...by Ernest van den Haag donment contributes to the scarcity of dwelling space and, consequently, to the high rents in newer, uncontrolled buildings...
...Homelessness has become a problem even for unimpaired persons because housing has become extraordinarily scarce and expensive...
...Some addicts, in time, get rid of their addiction, with or without help...
...These homeless persons, estimated to be about 40 percent of the total, are comparatively new on the scene...
...One can try, however, to motivate the affected persons to get rid of their addiction...
...They have not and cannot...
...New construction now is confined to luxury buildings with luxury rents, because the cost has been driven up by exorbitant wages exacted by construction unions protected by local governments...
...Thus, the poor, if they are not lucky enough to possess a rent-controlled apartment, cannot find one they can afford...
...Every year, during the last ten years, more dwelling space is being lost in New York than is being added by residential construction...
...In the past the poor, just as they would drive used cars, would rent apartments left by the rich who moved to more luxurious ones or to the suburbs...
...Ernest van den Haag is the John M Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...
...They have been around for a long time and have defeated many attempts at rehabilitation...
...Finally, consider those homeless who function reasonably well, but cannot find dwellings they can afford...
...No estimate of their number is more than a guess...
...At any rate, it seems most unlikely that thefederal government can appropriate enough money to make a difference...
...Surely Americans were poorer in 1940, or 1910, and less often insured than they are now...
...They constitute perhaps 30 percent of the homeless population...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 To be sure, psychological prob- lems, mental disease, and addiction would contribute to homelessness even if cheap apartments were readily available...
...Further, methadone can advantageously replace heroin—if the addict so desires...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
