The current New Yorker has a very provocative article by Malcolm Gladwell,
Million Dollar Murray. His thesis is that the hard-core homeless, the alcoholics and addicts, cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year in medical bills.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060213fa_fact
The solution under consideration is to set these hard core homeless up with apartments, provide access to wholesome food, and have counseling available on a round-the-clock basis.
Quote:The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. The idea is that once the people in the program get stabilized they will find jobs, and start to pick up more and more of their own rent, which would bring someone's annual cost to the program closer to six thousand dollars. As of today, seventy-five supportive housing slots have already been added, and the city's homeless plan calls for eight hundred more over the next ten years.
Of course this money-saving treatment would be limited to the hard core homeless.
Should efficience trump traditional compassion?
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