The administration of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been buying one-way bus tickets for homeless families to leave the city, in an effort to ease its welfare costs.
Since 2007. more than 550 families have taken the offer, saving the city US $36,000 a year per family.
The city spends US $500,000 a year on the program, and has a contract with travel agency Austin Travel to book the one-way trips.
The only stipulation the city requires is that the homeless family has relatives willing to take them in.
The New York Times notes the program is not as harsh as it may initially seem:
“In the past, the city contracted with the Salvation Army for a now-defunct program called Homeward Bound, but only for single adults and couples, not families with children. Both versions followed the example of Travelers Aid, a 150-year-old nonprofit organization that provides stranded and homeless people emergency aid so they could return to their homes, and which still exists today. Other cities have experimented with similar programs, but they are largely focused on adults without children.
[....]
Once a family leaves New York, homeless services officials say they follow up with a phone call to make sure they arrive safely, then make a few more calls over the next two to three weeks. In rare cases, they will advance the family up to four months’ rent, a one-month security deposit, a furniture allowance and a broker’s fee.”
The program is not without its critics. Arnold S. Cohen, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for the Homeless, says “The city is engaged in cosmetics. What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family.”
“Essentially, this family is still homeless.”
The homeless families have been shipped off to relatives on other continents, and have wound up in cities such as San Juan, Puerto Rico, Paris, France, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Department of Homeless Services employees do all the planning for international travel.
The most frequent destinations for the homeless are Puerto Rico, Georgia and the Carolinas.
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How perfect.
A blue state sending away the very same problem they’ve been fighting for the whole time. Careful what you wish for, Dems! You just might get it.
I can hear it now “Gee, trying to make a few people carry all the rest is hard to do”.
Buffoons.