Seattle and King County were spending a cumulative $100,000/year per homeless person. That's higher than the per capita income of the county. No way to sustain that in the long term. If you aren't prepared to tell high-school dropouts, drug addicts, and the lazy, that they shouldn't aim for more than an ultra-high density apodment and generic brand everything and no kids, then you can't have a high standard of living city for anyone.
American cities aren't really growing their infrastructure that much (that's one of the problems), they are just maintaining what they already have. But ya, we will spend billions on a link from Ballard to West Seattle here, and it won't be ready until sometime after 2040.
> Whenever I see comments like this, I always note there doesn't seem to be any broader solution than 'ship them somewhere else and make them someone else's problem'
That's because while the problem is national, the resources expected to solve it are local. Since the problem is also mobile (as anyone taking a greyhound bus to Seattle could see), at least not being a preferred destination for the problem is a valid strategy. Shipping it off is also valid, but mostly the chronic homeless will go places where they can survive (looking for better weather, generous social services, and police that aren't going to throw them in jail for doing fent on the bus).
Is a valid local strategy. Not a national one. The cities are just responding as best they can to the brokenness of the national (lack of) response.
Let them explain, ever year, why your child is less deserving of the public investment.
You are ignoring the 9 people they did help that way, but they didn't stay homeless for very long and aren't counted as chronically homeless. The one person that did burn down their hotel room is chronically homeless and very difficult to help...well, they are chronically homeless after all.
Not really exaggerated at all, I'm guessing you live in a nice suburb or somewhere without a chronic homelessness problem? Or you are just trying to gaslight us into thinking our property crime/drug problems aren't as extreme as we see them to be?
Oh, I thought that by non-contributing you meant tax dodging millionaires that incentivise vast array of useless luxury services and extract undue rent from the populace through their various schemes.
It's a grim situation that doesn't even require decline, just the end of growth:
Big piece right there. If cities can finally stop subsidizing suburbs, they can probably shore themselves up just fine.
If state governments took over more of the functions of local governments, or if local governments were merged – such as a single local government for an entire metro area – that might solve many of these problems.
When the state government takes over, the suburbs contribute to the state-wide tax base. Similarly, when the suburbs are merged into a single metro-wide local government, their local taxes now start contributing to services in other parts of the metro area which they commute to or rely on.
It's a complex issue and many people are sure they know the solution, but the reality is that the only way we know how to govern ourselves anymore is scraping the bottom of the barrel with knee-jerk responses to acute events.
Edit: I can tell by both responses that I wasn't clear enough in my main comment. Civically, America's representative governments have collectively established a policy of maintaining function just slightly above total catastrophe, while robbing taxpayers blind through nearly every single initiative they fund.