What the heck does housing Maine’s homeless have to do with homeland security?
A new study in Maine shows that the state will actually save money by providing housing for the homeless (because of reduced costs for emergency room treatment, social services, etc.). I remember NPR ran a story earlier this year about similar — counter-intuitive — findings in LA.
So what, pray tell, does housing the homeless have to do with homeland security?
Plenty!
We need to take a systems approach to homeland security, as I’ve argued on numerous occasions in the past, just as authorities are now doing with a number of social ills:
- In dealing with the homeless, if you look at medical costs, social service costs, public safety costs, etc. in isolation from each other, you fail to see that, when aggregated, it really is cheaper to provide housing for them (because you can then provide on-site services instead of them having to depend on expensive emergency room care, etc.).
- neighborhood groups participating in the Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles project (which, BTW, would be a lot more effective if they cleaned up their crappy web site, which fails to display half of the promised maps … but I digress) have applied a similar approach to neighborhood blight, by doing overlays of 7 factors implicated in decline, ranging from unpaid property taxes to code violations. This kind of data visualization dramatically spotlights areas with multiple problems in time to take coordinated steps before there really are serious problems.
In the case of homeland security, if we look at factors such as:
- how the US’s heavy dependence on Middle Eastern oil leaves us in thrall to theocracies that deny free expressions and democracy
- how NAFTA has hurt the Mexican economy so many people feel compelled to cross our borders illegally
- how drug dependency in the US creates opportunities for the Taliban to fund its operations through opium sales
- how we infuriate the entire Muslim world by continuing the war in Iraq
in isolation from each other, we’re likely to spend a lot more on homeland security and get a lot less in return than if we pursue integrated strategies with less war making, more foreign aid, more leadership on global climate change and development of renewable energy resources, etc.
IMHO, we’d be a lot farther ahead on combating global terrorism if we made sure every child in developing nations had a One Laptop Per Child computer than if we continue to fight in Iraq (and would have a hell of a lot more money left over to devote to problems at home such as children’s health — or the homeless!).
Housing the homeless and homeland security? We need systems thinking for both.
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