$150,000 Taxpayer Funded Apartments for Alcoholics?

Would you like a $150,000 apartment in downtown Seattle, free of charge? If you are an alcoholic who has failed alcoholism treatment programs at least 6 times in your previous 15 years of raging alcoholism, and ended up in the slammer more often than you can count, then you qualify.
King County has begun selecting the lucky 75 from among its most hard-core alcoholics who will be rewarded with an apartment in the newly constructed, $11.2 million Downtown Emergency Service Center facility called 1811 Eastlake. King County plans to choose those who have drained the most money from the county’s criminal justice and emergency budgets.
At times, I marvel at how much expense is required to repair the damage done by the compassion fascists in the first place. It may come as a surprise to many of you that homelessness, as we know it now, is a creation of liberalism and good government. It’s not that the conditions that predispose the homeless to their miserable status are new. But, what has happened over the last few decades is that the lower rungs of the ladder have been kicked out, placing the lowest steps out of reach for those who grasp is shortest.
Unlike most who regularly pontificate on the topic, formulate policy, or who exploit the homeless for their own, self-serving moral exhibitionism, I have actually worked (yes worked), eaten and conversed with the demographic that we now call “the homeless.”
In those days, we called them “bums.”
In my youth, I worked as a farm laborer in Central California. It was piecework. We were paid for each box of produce we picked. To get a job, one simply presented oneself to crew boss at the field where the produce was ripe for harvest, signed up and went to work. In those fields I worked alongside migrant farm workers who were either guest workers from Mexico, recent Asian immigrants, career alcoholics, and occasionally, another child laborer, like me.
All of us lost our jobs thanks to good government and Cesar Chavez. Cesar Chavez unionized the fields, meaning that he controlled who was permitted to work there. The career alcoholics did not live in circumstances that even made union membership or 40 hour workweeks practical. Good government ensured that the farmers had to generate mountains of paperwork before adding an employee to the roll, meaning that it wasn’t worth the trouble to hire bums who wandered in irregularly when their funds ran low. And, of course, nobody was paid in hard cash at the end of the day anymore. Employees had to wait for a paycheck issued at the end of the month, with income taxes, Social Security and union dues deducted. And Cesar Chavez had a big family to support.
There were other jobs available to the not-yet-homeless back then too. Street people could rustle up cash by making themselves available to businesses that occasionally needed a little extra muscle on the loading dock or had a stockroom that needed sweeping once a month or so. Today it makes much more sense to call a temporary employment agency or pay an employee already on the payroll little overtime.
Urban renewal and health inspectors forced the demolition of the shelters that many of these people called home. The people I worked alongside spent their nights protected from the weather in so-called “single room occupancy” hotels, or SRO. These were forced to close by health and building inspectors who decided that these hotels did not meet sanitation and other standards. Perhaps not, but they were certainly better than sewer grates, where many of the street people now find warmth.
And now, we’ve come full circle, to the 21st century version of the SRO. Only this time, it’s costing taxpayers a good deal of money. The old SRO’s were privately funded, profit-making ventures. The residents were responsible for their own rent and did in fact work to pay their own rent, buy their own food and restock their booze supply.
The 1811 Eastlake is largely taxpayer funded, costs far more than an SRO ever would, and simply warehouses its inhabitants. Residents may live there indefinitely, rent-free and may drink as much as they want, as long as they don’t leave the building to cause a public disturbance.
Yesterday’s bums were at least permitted dignity denied today’s homeless.