The Exchanges

Q Well, so, so, so someone might, who doesn't know this issue might say, well, that sounds really heartless to me. You're just trying to take these people and not look at them and send them away. Like, so what, why, why is enforcing the ban the good thing for the homeless people? Isn't that, isn't that just like pushing them out of our sight?

A No. So, I mean, you know, when the city's We see what happens both when cities do and they don't enforce the bans. And let's, as you mentioned, you know, there's, we've already discussed some of the, the public issues that there is crime, there is a disorder on the streets and all of that, but the main issue should be like, well, how does this affect the homeless? And, you know, one of the examples I cite is in Los Angeles, uh, where LAPD commissioner Willie Bratton, uh, one of the best cops in American history, he was famously a former NYPD commissioner, came over there and said, we're going to enforce the safer cities initiative. We're going to actually Really banned camping on Skid Row in, uh, in LA. Now, of course, infamous. And it worked. A study done right afterwards showed that, uh, crime and violence in the area, mainly against the homeless themselves, went down 40%, and it didn't seem to spill over to these other neighborhoods.

AI assessment note: “crime and violence in the area, mainly against the homeless themselves, went down 40%”

Q So, and, and, and what, what, are there lots of good nonprofits you've encountered? Or like, what are the ones that seem to be aligned with the right answers?

A Yeah. I mean, there, there's a million good people working on great stuff out there in homelessness, and I've been astounded in my, my work on the issue, uh, the number of them, uh, you know, two of the ones that, the one we feature in the, in the documentary, uh, for PragerU is, uh, Community First, which is outside of Austin. A man named Alan Graham started this up, a developer originally, who devoted his life to kind of a, you know, the community first name was kind of imagined as a counterpart to housing first. He says, well, the issue with someone in the street isn't just, well, they don't have, you know, four walls and a roof. They, they need something.

AI assessment note: “the one we feature in the, in the documentary, uh, for PragerU is, uh, Community First”

Q So, so what's Cicero doing on housing or local government? Are there issues here that we are doing or that we could be doing to help, help make these things better?

A So, you know, we, we are, when we were previously based in California, we did a lot of stuff about trying to rearrange the incentives. And, uh, as you and I know, you're still, you know, trying to help groups in there do that, but California is a different, difficult place to get things done. It's a difficult place to get things done. So a lot of what Cicero is doing is Trying to get some of the, the property tax incentives right. We have a bill that we've been working on to try to help, uh, local governments put up more of these, uh, sort of windfall funds they've gotten recently, the stimulus into, uh, into the hands of taxpayers. Uh, there's a sort of tradition in the urban economics literature called the fly paper effect, which is specifically that the bigger the government and the fewer competing governments you have, the more likely money is to stick to that government instead of returning down to the people as you do when you have more I mean, so we're trying to encourage that in one of our property tax bills, but a lot of what we're trying to doing, uh, is around homelessness and it's around, uh, uh, trying to take the problems, which as we all know are actually tend to be very focused in those center cities where there is sort of less competition and less sort of voice for your median voter, uh, and that are pursuing.

AI assessment note: “a lot of what Cicero is doing is Trying to get some of the, the property tax incentives right”

Q Why is that? How have they made it work?

A So, I think it goes back to what you were talking about before, this incentive issues. So, they have something in the sort of urban economics literature called fiscal zoning, which is the idea that, well, you want to, Uh, zone for certain things that bring more fiscal benefits towards your city and maybe your school district as well. And a lot of people kind of poo-pooed the idea. It's supposed to be discriminatory. You're not, ah, you know, encouraging building in the right places, maybe the higher end suburbs and so forth. But you looked at California in the 19 sixties and fifties before these sort of court rulings messed up the system. And yeah, the areas where you had much more development were poor areas, because they were more willing to offset the sort of fiscal gains From new development and take the other real cost of development.

AI assessment note: “they have something in the sort of urban economics literature called fiscal zoning”

Q a huge boom time and they would just build lots of housing. And if they needed more money for their local area, they could allow more housing and let people build more housing and that would fund the local area. And so the incentives were really aligned and then something happened where they became misaligned, right? So what was, there was a court case in the seventies where this happened.

A That's right. So, uh, the basic idea of California was the fastest growing state in the nation for decades and Uh, surpassed New York as the single largest state in the country in around 1960. Uh, and it was a very welcoming environment for builders. Uh, the, one of the main reasons people moved over there is because of the low cost of living, much like people moved to Texas today because of the low cost of living. Especially housing costs. Uh, but something changed around 1970 in California. Suddenly you saw a very sharp decrease in the amount of building happening in the state, and you saw a lot more growth boundaries, anti-permitting sort of laws in the local level, and anti-permitting, uh, in housing laws at the state level.

AI assessment note: “something changed around 1970 in California. Suddenly you saw a very sharp decrease”

Q went up dramatically amongst homeless people is my understanding. And, uh, and of course we were involved in passing a lot of ban, ban the camps, but there's, there's obviously that's, there's still like lots of things to fix and the solutions there though. So what's the, what, what, what are we working on right now? Are we trying to educate people? Are we trying to get certain laws passed?

A Well, both definitely. So as you said, you know, you and I work, uh, work in this area has been inspired by a lot of what we've seen and experienced in San Francisco and Austin. And both those areas are great examples of how not to do things. I think, you know, the results speak for themselves there. Uh, yeah, what you saw in Austin was in 2019, the, the city council, uh, turned back a previous ban on street camping. They repealed the law that said it was illegal to camp and sleep on the streets. And what you saw was pretty surprising and pretty rapid. You had, About a 40 to 50% increase in unsheltered homelessness in the year. That's homelessness out in the streets. And a lot of people said, well, it's just more visible. And like you mentioned, you know, some people weren't shy about the, what they saw as the benefits of that. This is, well, it's better to recognize the cost of homelessness than hide it. And if people recognize it, then they'll be willing to take more supportive, supposedly generous actions to, uh, to fix it. Uh, but one of the surprising things we saw there, and we've seen this elsewhere, Is the amount of sheltered homelessness went down by about 20%. So clearly people were leaving the shelters for the streets, and this is actually not uncommon in these areas that sort of allow street food.

AI assessment note: “Well, both definitely. So as you said, you know, you and I work”