from Hacker News

Albuquerque program hires panhandlers to work in maintenance jobs

by andersthue on 8/13/16, 12:24 PM with 35 comments

• by cheriot on 8/13/16, 9:03 PM

  It's an old concept sometimes called workfare. It can work until a government gets short sighted and cuts their budget by replacing employees/contractors with unemployed labor (let's use the homeless to mow the lawn at city hall!). At that point it's using an unemployed person to create another unemployed person.

• by Mz on 8/14/16, 3:00 AM

  Oy. "The homeless" are not a separate race, religion, creed, etc. If you get housing, you stop being homeless. Programs aimed at "helping the homeless" tend to be inherently deeply fucked up.

  We need more affordable housing generally and other solutions aimed at helping human beings with personal challenges. Those are the folks who end up homeless. Designing programs to help the homeless actually incentivizes being homeless and becomes another barrier to getting off the street because you need to remain homeless to qualify, and that is all kinds of fucked up.

  Source: Had a class on homelessness, been homeless for 4.5 years, and I run the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide (a blog).

• by yazaddaruvala on 8/13/16, 7:23 PM

  I wish every city gave money to people to returned bottles to a bottle depot. For those not familiar: Buyers of recyclables pay a recycling deposit up front and any one who returns the recyclables will get the deposit back.

  It would also be fascinating to provide transportation for the homeless to the nearest garbage dumps. Pay them for sorting out any recyclables. Allow them to take anything which might be of use to them.

• by MichaelBurge on 8/13/16, 7:28 PM

  I wouldn't mind seeing a $500-2000 per-employee annual tax credit for businesses that employ the homeless. The types of jobs that are around minimum wage seem like they'd mostly be low-margin businesses, so this would be a pretty big incentive. And it seems cheaper than expanding shelters and similar programs(though you'll still need some shelters).

  Maybe it would be better to assess the tax on non-homeless needed for this credit at the county level, since cost-of-living and homelessness are both local issues. Maybe it would work better as a property tax than an income tax, for similar reasons.

• by tootie on 8/13/16, 7:04 PM

  This doesn't seem like a very scalable plan nor will it help with the chronically homeless. NYC does something similar with giving park clean-up jobs to recently released convicts or other homeless people. It's better than a simple handout, but doesn't address underlying problems.

  http://www.doe.org/rwa.cfm

• by tomjen3 on 8/13/16, 6:01 PM

  Since the headline doesn't tell you: the city has started to hire penhandlers for simple day jobs.

• by notadoc on 8/13/16, 7:17 PM

  Really can't stand these type of headlines, really looking forward to when the trend dies off.