Gee, what could go wrong with this proposed public policy:
As the Post-Gazette reports it, Pittsburgh City Council is considering new zoning changes to create specific areas within the city designated as homeless encampments.
Sounds innocuous enough – until one starts peeling back the onion layers, that is.
As the P-G tells it, two city councilors want to create a “temporary managed community” where homeless people would have access to temporary or permanent structures to use as shelter.
“Such camps could have no more than 50 residents at any given time and would have to include access to restrooms and bathing facilities,” the P-G reports.
There would of course be electricity and, oh, yes, trash removal.
And residents would be given access to mental health services, job placement assistance and other aid, the Tribune-Review reports.
One of the legislation’s sponsors says the camp(s) could be set up in as little as one week at a cost of about $50,000.
The proposal now must go before the Pittsburgh Planning Commission – the same commission that has, in the past, criticized parking garages for looking like, well, parking garages and put Point Park University through the ringer for taking commonsense measures to stop homeless drug-dealing and urination/defecation on one of its properties. Among other things.
Will the commission rubber-stamp this proposal and send it back to City Council for its prescribed “further discussion”? Maybe it will ask for encampments that are “more aesthetically pleasing.” Ahem
We also can imagine the likes of the ACLU filing a lawsuit against the city for “warehousing” the homeless. Double ahem.
In other cities, some of the leftist persuasion even have gone as far as calling such government-sanctioned homeless sites “concentration camps.” Triple ahem.
Those on the right are cautioning that without a dedicated “exit strategy” for those housed in such facilities, chaos could ensue.
As well-intentioned as this proposal might be, it is fraught with potential problems. Considering “temporary” government action has a habit of becoming permanent, welcome to a new kind of permanent shanty town.
And if one doesn’t “get the job done,” look for such shanty towns to proliferate.
Where might such an encampment(s) be located? You can bet the “social justice” crowd will rally against locating it or them on their designated proverbial wrong side of the tracks.
In fact, the “social justice” folks already are weighing in, as per the P-G:
“Rachel Nunes, executive director of the Thomas Merton Center, a local nonprofit that works with marginalized communities, said police should not patrol the sites.
“She also suggested that the sites be what’s known as ‘no-barrier,’ instead of ‘low-barrier.’
“Low-barrier shelters … don’t have sobriety requirements for people who use their services. Some low-barrier shelters have curfew requirements for people who are staying overnight. A no-barrier shelter wouldn’t have a curfew.”
Well, isn’t that a loony recipe for certain failure of an already dubious public policy pronouncement?
Let the robust debate continue. But also let it be fully acknowledged that such encampments easily could devolve into a mess even greater than the mess they supposedly are designed to eliminate.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
