"The figure is the sum of shelter, food, medical care and law enforcement expenses, including court costs."Talk talk talk talk talk.....
It's important to know that words don't move mountains. Work, exacting work moves mountains. Danilo Dolci
It's not likely we'll ever be able to completely cure the social blight of homelessness, but we certainly can do a better job than we have been doing. That's the conclusion of the Fresno County grand jury, and its new report should start bells ringing in every public and private office in the city and county.
The grand jury says that local efforts to house and care for the chronically homeless are not well coordinated and cost us dearly. It estimates, based on the experience in other cities, that it costs local government about $100,000 annually to care for one homeless person.
That's a serious sum of money, multiplied by the number of homeless in the region. The figure is the sum of shelter, food, medical care and law enforcement expenses, including court costs.
There is no easy answer, but answers must be found. In addition to the monetary expenses of dealing with the homeless, there are less quantifiable costs. For instance, the presence of homeless people -- and the perceptions that follow them -- are an obstacle to the revitalization of downtown Fresno.
The widespread -- and wildly overblown -- notion that downtown is populated by thousands of homeless people committing crimes, panhandling and spreading disease makes it much harder to build the public support that downtown revitalization efforts must have. Thus those who support downtown renewal have a large stake in helping to mitigate the problems of the homeless.
There are intangible costs as well. We may not be able to save all the homeless people from the rigors and dangers of their lives, but some, at least, can be helped. What is the value of each of those wasted lives, and the psychic and emotional cost to each of us who is more fortunate if we do not help?
There are many reasons people find themselves homeless: substance abuse, mental illness, economic misfortune. Some want out of their lives on the streets. Others are comfortable, in ways that seem inexplicable to most of us, living in such conditions.
Many private, nonprofit agencies are doing the best they can with the resources they have, and we're grateful for those efforts. The grand jury report suggests that better coordination between local government agencies is needed.
That may be on the horizon. Last month the city and county agreed to form a task force that will spend about three months trying to come up with a 10-year plan for dealing with homeless people in the area. That's a good step, but it must be followed with specific and aggressive actions.
The problems of the homeless aren't the same as those created by local gangs, but the city's anti-gang effort may provide a useful model. It's not enough just to have a strong police presence, and Fresno police are already well deployed in the areas frequented by the homeless. Suppression of criminal activities, while essential, is only part of the answer.
We must also be engaged in prevention and intervention efforts, which are frequently more effective and less expensive that relying on suppression after problems have worsened. That means things like treating people in clinics before they must seek help in more expensive emergency rooms.
The problem of homelessness is not intractable, though it sometimes seems so. We all share a responsibility for finding solutions that work, and not entirely because that will save a lot of taxpayer dollars. There are also moral and ethical imperatives that drive this need, and we will be measured by how we respond to them.
