Sedona is great. When I was young I worked bussing tables in The Grand Canyon and used to go down to Sedona. I would load up my car with Beer and sit on the banks of Slide Rock to sell beer for a dollar a can to the College students. Made a ton of money until the park rangers caught me one weekend and told me it was illegal to sell beer without a license in a State park. Had no idea it was State park. I went back there a couple of years ago and now they have fences up to where you have to pay to get in now… Beautiful place but really expensive for people who are working there.
Andy
And then there is the Parisian approach.
Yep, if you don’t want people sleeping in tents in the park or decrepit RVs parked on your street, you’re going to have to raise taxes to provide some kind of income-based. subsidized public housing.
At some point, the hit to property values from homelessness causes the capitalists to fix the problem and provide the public housing. It took about 6 years in Portland before they started to address the problem and no doubt a decade of work to put a dent in it.
In Vienna Austria, about 60% the population lives in socialized public housing.
intercst
"sell beer for a dollar a can to the College students. "
man, you must have been a popular guy ! I did some backpacking in the hot and dry SW a few times, and we would have bought the entire supply if we had ran into any beer vendors coming off the trail, lol
have been to Sedona once, stunningly beautiful place. I’m sure the businesses in Sedona need service workers, but those jobs won’t pay enough for the workers to buy/rent homes in the area. Living in a car is a stopgap solution, but it is chance for them to maybe get enough saved up to get a roof over their heads.
Area I live in has a similar problem, needs lower wage workers, but housing far too expensive for them to buy or rent. The city and county has some type of windfall fund from natural gas extraction in the area, and some citizens are calling for it to be used to build housing for the homeless ( and low-wage workers ) to rent at a fraction of the market rate. Other citizens are in an uproar as they claim that this will only attract more homeless to the area. Both sides have a point. Normal winters can be pretty brutal, so that might act like a natural check on the attractiveness of the area for homeless. But nobody wants a homeless shelter built in their neighborhood… But lack of workers for entry-level jobs is a problem.
Sounds like two related but not completely overlapping problems. One is too many homeless and the other is not enough entry level workers. The two obvious long-term solutions are:
- Raise local taxes high enough to build subsidized public housing.
- Raise the local minimum wage high enough so that entry level workers can afford to live locally.
The “advantage” of (2), at least to local residents, is that it specifically benefits people who want to work (as opposed to attracting more homeless to the area).