There was a recent post on nextdoor demanding that the Louisville City Council eliminate the homelessness problem. The undercurrent of the post and most of the comments is that the City Council could make it all go away if they wanted to.
Now I don't know any of the City Council members, but I'm willing to bet that they would all happily make it go away if that was in their power. Why wouldn't they? Homeless people don't vote, and most of the complainers do. Easy choice.
The problem is - this needs to be addressed at the state level. If Louisville addresses it alone, they either need to go heavy on the enforcement driving the homeless elsewhere with strict laws and significant additional police presence. Or they need to provide the housing and mental health care to get them out of the parks and other areas.
Either approach is very expensive. The city's main revenue is sales tax. If you increase that say 25% (wild ass guess at the cost), then you drive business away from local restaurants & stores. You could well end up with the same total revenue because of reduced business.
So you need to have this handled state wide. The state can have the localities implement the system, but it will need state level money and guidance on what works and how to implement. With state level you also avoid cities pushing their homeless into adjoining cities (the police approach) or attracting homeless from neighboring cities (the address the problem approach).
Ok so great, you talk to your state legislators, you come up with a workable program, everyone thinks it's great. Now you have to fund it. Because of TABOR you will need to put a proposal on the ballot to increase taxes to cover the cost of this. The state budget is incredibly lean so there's no spare money to fund something of this size.
So what will you tax that a majority of voters will approve? Higher income tax, higher sales tax, higher tax on oil & gas production? Can you get this through when rural voters see no need for it as the homeless are an urban problem?
You want homelessness addressed? The above is a very high level listing of what you need to step up and do. Yelling at the local city councils won't accomplish squat on this issue. So if you are serious, start working with your state legislators and get ready for a lot of effort over a couple of years to have a prayer of success.
Isn't democracy wonderful?
ps - I posted the above on NextDoor and it received a total of 4 comments. An earlier post that was a rant about homelessness and claiming the Louisville City Council could fix it if they wanted received 644 comments mostly agreeing. It's interesting that people will happily rant calling for impossible simplistic solutions blaming the problem on others. But actually discussing the true issues of a problem evokes almost no discussion.
