Libs In New York Come Up With The Best Program To Help The Homeless Ever! Yes — Really!

It would be tempting to mock the libs who run everything in New York for trying to pawn the homeless off on other people, but reluctantly, I have to admit that I think they’ve come up with an excellent program to help the homeless,

New York has found a novel, if expensive, way of dealing with its overcrowded shelters – buying one-way tickets for homeless families to leave the city.

Under the initiative, by the administration of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, hundreds of families have been given plane, rail, and bus tickets and even petrol vouchers to leave the city. One homeless family of five was given $6,332 (nearly :£4,000) worth of travel costs to Paris, according to the New York Times.

The city justifies such costs because it argues the alternative is more expensive. It costs New York’s taxpayers $36,000 to put up a homeless family in a night shelter for a year.

Families can qualify for the tickets if they have a relative in another part of the world, including the US, who says they are willing to house them.

Since the $500,000-a-year scheme was launched in 2007, 550 homeless families have been paid to leave the city. None have come back.

“We want to divert as many families as we can that need assistance,” Vida Chavez-Downes, a city official said.

“We have paid for visas, we’ve gone down to the consulate, we’ve provided letters, we’ve paid for passports for people to go. Anyone who comes through our door.”

Critics have dismissed the initiative as a gimmick.

Arnold Cohen, head of a New York campaign group, Partnership for the Homeless, told the New York Times: “The city is engaged in cosmetics. What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless.”

They’re saving the city lots of money and helping the homeless get to a relative who can help them get back on their feet. To me, that makes a lot of sense.

The homeless bean counter can complain that they’re “taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family,” but isn’t that infinitely better?

You may not be able to pick your family, but you do have a certain obligation to help them out. If there are relatives out there who are willing and able to help a homeless person get back on his feet and the government can make that happen, that’s one of the rare cases where I say, “The government should go for it.”

It’s better for the taxpayers, because they don’t have to shelter a homeless person. It’s also better for the homeless person because he’s staying with a blood relative — and, I’d be willing to bet that many of them will work a lot harder to pull it together if they’re living under a relative’s roof. In all honesty, who cares what some schmuck who works for the government thinks of you — but, you don’t want someone in your family to be disappointed in you — especially when we’re talking about someone who was willing to bring you into his home in your hour of need.

Let me also add that while not everybody is in a position to help someone out, the relatives probably benefit from this, too. Anybody who’s willing and able to shelter a homeless relative — well, that says something positive about you. Not only would other people think better of you, you’d probably think better of yourself after doing something like that.

At the end of the day, this is not the answer to the problem of homelessness. There are only going to be so many homeless people who can be helped this way and, of course, some of them will get kicked out by their relatives and will simply end up homeless in a new city. Yet and still, this is cheaper, smarter, and more likely to produce good results for the people who are participating. In my book, that makes it a good idea.

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