Cities Prop Up Homeless Camps

Right on, TC! Well put.

You got that right, K-guy, and the situation would be even worse, had it not been for the stimulus money going to states and municipalities. We needed a bigger stimulus package but, alas, the necessity of getting 60 votes in the United States Senate, prevented this.

The local gov'ts would have to spend tons of cash bringing most of these buildings up to code though.

@Radzyn, not necessarily. Yes, to make them more residential in nature, but have you ever seen the inside of a homeless shelter, or for that matter a tent? An office building is vastly more livable than a shelter. Not to mention, the cost of keeping a homeless person alive (because they go to the hospital too, some commit crimes and go to jail) is quite a lot. I think that the cost of upgrading an office building a little would pay for itself in the long run. Additionally, moving the homeless is only part of the solution. While there are some homeless people who are content with where they are or there are some who don't want to work, the majority are there because they were dealt a bad hand and would jump at the chance to work. Helping these people learn how to find a job, get cleaned up, etc. pays for itself too.

Kyleleitch, I agree with everything you're saying. But homeless shelters already up and running across the country are in danger of closing now because of lack of funding. And those ones, whatever the condition they're in now, have already passed whatever inspection they need to pass in order to run in the first place. There's a ton of red tape that, as much as I would LOVE to see everybody decide to just cut right through, this being the country that it is, there's just no way around. And the red tape has quite a bit to do with the initial investment. No city's going to put out that kind of money in the first place. I think the WIA (workforce investment act? not sure) is already taking care of the job training (in IA and SD at least... I know here if you make under 10.40 per hour, you get a free $5200 a year for two years to go to college or trade school on top of any other federal grant and funding you recieve, making community college affordable for everybody). So at least that program's doing some good. Another argument that these local governments will make about converting all of these empty office buildings will be that this recession/depression is supposedly temporary, so these people will only have to live in these conditions for such and such an amount of time, and when the recession really ends, some company will move into this office building, and it'll have to be converted AGAIN back to office building standards. This, you and I know, is a bullshit excuse, but they're going to use it, and there's not much we can do about it.

sorry if that comes across as confusing. I'm a video editor, not a journalist :p