Ain’t Technology Great!

Don’t you just love technology. They now have parking meters that alert Meter Maids the INSTANT the meter expires, so he/she can rush to get you ticketed.

Just wonderful!

It’s Getting Cool; Time to Break Out the Homeless Newspaper/TV Files

Predictably, this is the Season of the Homeless, and every year the newspapers and TV are filled with the subject, and every year I have published my solution to the homeless problem, which I’ll probably do once again this year.

But first I want to cover the California history, because there will be partisan sniping, blaming the homeless on Governor Reagan, and it is certainly true that the institutions were closed in his era — what the liberals will not tell you is that they were closed as a direct result of liberl courts ordering them closed and the mentally ill released.

I went to two great liberal sources — one an academic study of the California homeless problem by the University of California at Berkeley and another the liberal  PBS Frontline series.

PERHAPS homelessness was the result of Reagan’s thrifty budget policies does not reflect my memory of the 1981 situation, nor does it comport with the available non-political literature…so hopefully I can set those who believe in Old-Wives Takes to rest.

 

“Homeless in America, Homeless in California” study (http://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/QRS_REStat01PB.pdf) mentions on page 1 (Introduction), “THE visibility of street beggars and those sleeping in

public places increased substantially about two decades

ago, and the homeless became a substantive political issue

at approximately the time of the inauguration of Ronald

Reagan in 1981.”

There is nowhere in the study any correlation with budget cuts that explains the increased homelessness. In fact, the above is the only reference to Reagan in the study.

Indeed the fault is placed on the effort to “deinstitutionalize” along with increased use of crack cocaine, and housing prices…but primarily the nationwide effort to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill, a movement that preceded Reagan by two decades. (See below.)

Now the movement to deinstitutionalize, as I recall was driven by liberals claiming that those institutionalized for mental illness, public drunkenness and substance abuse were institutionalized against their will, and as citizens this was a violation of their rights. That policy gained increased support and it was deemed a human right for the institutionalized to be released – but the premise was that localities would increase their support to offset the lack of state institutions. (Local entities never took up the slack.)

It would be an error to attribute deinstitutionalizing to Reagan or his policies.

From the PBS Frontline Special “Deinstitutionalization began in 1955 with the widespread introduction of chlorpromazine, commonly known as Thorazine,…The magnitude of deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill qualifies it as one of the largest social experiments in American history. In 1955, there were 558,239 severely mentally ill patients in the nation’s public psychiatric hospitals. In 1994, this number had been reduced by 486,620 patients, to 71,619, as seen in Figure 1.2.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html

(PBS Frontline Show: The New Asylums; chapter “Deinstutionalizing: A Psychiatric “Titanic”’)

In brief, if a Berkeley study, and  PBS special do not attribute the homeless problem to Reagan budget cuts, perhaps the insinuation by liberals is more political polemic than a substantive analysis.