Murray Barr

Here's a link to a fantastic article from the New Yorker that I found thanks to Myrna the Minx about the real cost of ignoring the problem of chronic homelessness. Murray Barr, featured in the article, was a man who for years leading up to his death last year was a fixture on the local scene, a homeless man who was...well, maybe I should just quote the article:

On the streets of downtown Reno, where he lived, he could buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle of cheap vodka for a dollar-fifty. If he was flush, he could go for the seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle, and if he was broke he could always do what many of the other homeless people of Reno did, which is to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables.

"If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day." Patrick O'Bryan, who is a bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. "And he's gone on some amazing runners. He would get picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and start up again. A lot of the guys on the streets who've been drinking, they get so angry. They are so incredibly abrasive, so violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great sense of humor that we somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we'd say, "Murray, you know you love us," and he'd say, 'I know' and go back to swearing at us."

"I've been a police officer for fifteen years," O'Bryan's partner, Steve Johns, said. "I picked up Murray my whole career. Literally."

The point of the article is that while Murray was clearly the sort of person who didn't do so well on his own, he was actually a fairly functional person when he was under strict supervision. Rather than providing this, what the system does with people like him is arrest him when he commits a petty crime or just starts bothering people, or bring him to the emergency room when he is sick or injured, but ultimately to ignore him until his situation reaches some kind of crisis point.

Now providing people like Murray with a place to live and someone to basically keep an eye on him on a daily basis to make sure that he isn't abusing substances or getting into trouble is politically impossible. Such a proposal would be lambasted as the throwing away of public resources on a bum. But regardless of what you may feel about people like Murray, the fact of the matter is that it may very well be cheaper to do this than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in emergency services and public resources over the years to ignore people like him.

A lot of people walk around downtown Reno and grumble angrily to themselves about aggressive panhandlers or homeless people who seem to make public intoxication a way of life. It's easy to get mad at these people and blame them for their own situations, but that doesn't help anything and neither does dealing with them only when they present police or medical emergencies. Where I work we euphamisitically call guys like Murray "frequent flyers." We see them on an almost daily basis, so I know firsthand that there is a small but highly visible portion of the population that for whatever reason (mental health issues, addiction, physical injury, whatever) just isn't capable of functioning in day-to-day society on their own. The article calls them the chronically homeless, and it makes an excellent point: no matter how you may feel about the notion of extending public resources to make sure people like Murray are permanantly off the streets and living ordered lives (i.e. giving them a permanant place to live and the services they need to deal with whatever their problems are), the bottom line is that we are already subsidising their lifestyles by ignoring them until we simply can't ignore them anymore, and then going back to ignoring them once whatever crisis is past. Perhaps we should think about dealing with this issue in a way that actually solves the problem.