MicroHomelessness

I discovered a new news source, http://www.capoliticalreview.com. If you want to feel better about your own government then give it a look. By way of introduction, they have an article on a solution for homelessness that has been proposed up and down the Left Coast and it’s hard to say whether the concept is dangerously naive, a backdoor for funding illegal immigration or the ugly bastard of care-based morality and hipster trendiness.

“What Could go Wrong in Building Tiny Houses for Homeless?”

http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/what-could-go-wrong-in-building-tiny-houses-for-homeless/

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors just voted to go forward with a pilot program to house homeless people in tiny houses in the backyards of single-family homes. And if you pay taxes in L.A. County, you’re going to pay for it.

The program will pay $75,000 to homeowners who agree to have a tiny house constructed on their property, or $50,000 to upgrade an illegal dwelling unit, like a converted garage. The selected homeless person or family will pay rent, covered by low-income vouchers. Tenants would contribute 30 percent of their incomes. Taxpayers, presumably, would make up the difference.

That’s the gist of it. The government puts a microhome in your backyard, gives a homeless person rent money and the homeless dude rents it from you. Homeless problem solved!

Now that your head has stopped spinning, let’s go down the list of abovementioned possibilities beginning with dangerous naivete. Best efforts of globalism notwithstanding, the two main causes of homelessness are still mental illness and drug abuse. (“Registered sex offender” is sometimes #3.) Allowing one of these groups to live in your literal backyard cannot possibly have a happy ending.

Second possibility, funding illegal immigration. Illegals are infamous for housing illegal numbers of people in a home. This program gives them the option to legalize that housing situation at taxpayer expense.

These days, it’s hard to know if a politician is malevolent or ditsy. It’s possible that the driving force behind “microhomes for the homeless” is female/mangina politicians fascinated with microhomes and how they can cure homeless so cheaply. After all, if you give a homeless a home then they aren’t homeless anymore! Never mind that many homeless already have soft-shelled microhomes called “tents”.

Fortunately, the efforts have been mostly futile. The linked article describes the failure of a Portland program. Reading between the lines, the gov’t zoning commission went to war against the gov’t welfare commission, leaving the gov’t paralyzed because both side’s lawyers are taxpayer-funded into eternity.

Seriously, apart from issues of more crime and more welfare and more incentive for more homeless to move here, these politicians shouldn’t try to overburden residential infrastructure like this. Microhome or McMansion, more people means more power/water/sewage needs, more congestion and similar ills that plague the poorly planned urban community. Therefore, I’m rooting for the zoning commission.