New Moon Holiday Edition December 2023

There are certain subjects that cause us to glaze over at their mere mention. Our synapses disconnect, the brainpan fuzzes over, ears begin to buzz, a tick colonizes our cheekbone just below the glazed-over eyes. I can name a few: small town politics, universal basic income, homelessness. There are many others, of course, but those will work for now. The Pharyngeal reflex suggests you still are sentient, so here goes.

Let’s begin with politics, the kind that runs little burgs like Ashland, Oregon, where this is being written. What is it that is said about power, incremental to absolute? How much corruption accrues to each stage of that narrative arc? Is it truly corruption or simply genuflecting to the inevitable? Whose bidding does politics do?

Communities have different power bases, depending on place and size. One thing small towns have in common is that the power resides in realty. Maybe one-tenth of one percent of the population owns the town. Everybody else is a tenant, even if they own their home. Their well-being is held in the hands of others.

If you own a few commercial properties in the center of town, in this case on or near the Plaza or further on along Main Street, where rentals pull in high four or low five figure monthly fees plus a percentage of the gross, you have a lot at stake. The image you want to project is not homeless people under foot, tents on the sidewalks where shoppers fear to tread, unsightly scenes in postcard settings. What to do? One solution is discussed HERE, but here’s what works for Ashland’s leadership.

Well, you buy a building, that’s what you do. One that is as far from the city center as you can possibly be and still be within the jurisdiction of the mayor and city council, those sensitive souls who know the clock is ticking, and whatever its shortcomings – and they are many – you declare it the homeless shelter, the place where these unseemly people ideally will be parked. Set up the port-a-potties, a couple of outdoor showers, put a fence around the place, lay in a hundred or more sleeping cots, and by god we’ve got ourselves a solution. If only it was to code. but let’s not split hairs.

Now that the solution is in place – a far away place, thank god – we can legislate away any vestige of that former problem: all those people who can’t afford to live here but don’t have the simple decency to go somewhere else are no longer allowed to do anything as outrageous as fall asleep in public places, not for more than two hours anyhow, nor camp in parks or near waterways, schools, or basically any place proximate to where the decent, meaning the housed, people live. Arms-length is better than hand-out, right? Let the homeless panhandle in the hinterlands and free up the Plaza merchants for well-heeled shoppers with cash in hand.

What about just giving people money? Is that crazy, or what? Maybe not, the evidence suggests. If you can get over your Calvinist indoctrination about the necessary righteousness of toiling for your sustenance, you might be surprised at the efficacy of the idea called Universal Basic Income.

In fact, all of the experiments, the practice of simply giving poor people money, has positive results, outcomes that are surprising in the ways they meet both liberal and conservative goals. Not just standard do-gooder, conscience-salving gestures but also smaller government and bottom-up economic stimulus to boost the tax base. HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.

But, wait, these people are alcoholics, drug addicts, mental cases, post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers, are they not? Well, yes, some of them are. And you too might be severely stressed after living on the streets for a time. What they do have in common is that they all are without shelter primarily because housing is unaffordable and a little cash along with far fewer Airbnbs could make that a lot less a problem. We can continue to push them to the farthest fringes of society, which of course is where they already are, or we can make shelter and the funds to pay for it available. Maybe it’s time to try a different approach? Think it over and Happy Holidays!