List of homeless relocation programs in the United States

Last updated

For several decades, various cities and towns in the United States have adopted relocation programs offering homeless people one-way tickets to move elsewhere. [1] [2] Also referred to as "Greyhound therapy", [2] "bus ticket therapy" and "homeless dumping", [3] the practice was historically associated with small towns and rural counties, which had no shelters or other services, sending homeless individuals tickets to the nearest large city. [3] More recently, a nationwide investigation by The Guardian in 2017 found that many homeless relocation programs are offered by cities with high median incomes, helping people move to places with cheaper housing and a lower cost of living, but also fewer economic opportunities. [1] While some individuals welcome assistance to help them relocate, others say that they have felt "targeted" and forced to move, under the threat of arrest by police. [4]

Contents

Debate over effectiveness

Proponents argue that there are legitimate reasons for seeking to reunite homeless people with their friends and family in other locations. [3] Returning to places they have lived before can help people reconnect with their support networks and find a place to sleep until they are able to rebuild their lives. [1]

Critics counter that while some instances can result in positive outcomes for the individuals being relocated, the programs in general have served as a convenient way for cities to reduce their own homeless populations and associated policing, medical, and support costs. [1] In aggregate, they argue, the programs have essentially pushed homelessness to other jurisdictions, rather than provide support services or eliminate homelessness. [1]

Data on long-term outcomes

In 2017, The Guardian published the findings of an 18-month investigation, obtaining data from 16 cities with homeless relocation programs. [1] The cities themselves were able to offer almost no information about the long-term outcomes for bus ticket recipients after they had reached their destinations, making it difficult to assess the success of those programs. [1]

While some relocation programs check whether individuals are subject to local arrest warrants before helping them leave town, others do not. [1] [5] An investigation by The Sacramento Bee published in 2013 suggested that dozens of mental health patients who received bus tickets after being discharged from Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital were later involved in a range of crimes and found that some of them were suicidal. [5]

Many cities count every homeless person given a free relocation as a person who successfully "exited homelessness", thereby making cities' homeless programs appear more successful than they are, especially considering cities rarely even attempt follow up to determine whether the person was able to find housing at their destination. [1] For example, in one three-year period, half of the people that San Francisco claimed to have successfully moved out of homelessness had simply been given bus tickets to be moved out of San Francisco. [1]

Examples of relocation programs by state

StateCityDescription
CaliforniaSan DiegoDuring a criminal trial in 1990, San Diego police officers and supervisors testified that they routinely "cleared" downtown streets of "transients" by rounding them up before dawn and moving them to other jurisdictions such as National City or other unincorporated areas in the county. [6]
San FranciscoThe City of San Francisco has a program called Homeward Bound, first started when Gavin Newsom was mayor. [7] [8] Between 2005 and 2017, the city of San Francisco sent 10,500 homeless people out of town by bus. [1] A 2019 article in The New York Times reported that many bus ticket recipients were missing, unreachable, in jail, or homeless within a month after leaving San Francisco, and one out of eight returned to the city within a year. [7]
FloridaKey WestThe southernmost Homeless Assistance League (SHAL), a nonprofit operating the homeless shelter in Key West, suspended its homeless relocation program at the end of September 2016, due to lack of funds. [9] Until that time, SHAL had sponsored more than 350 bus fares to leave Key West. [9] In return, clients had to promise never to return to Monroe County. [9]
GeorgiaAtlantaIn 1996, the Atlanta Police Department defended its homeless relocation program in the run-up to the Olympic Games, saying that tickets were only offered to individuals with family members or a job elsewhere. [10]
HawaiiHonoluluIn 2009, nonprofit Waikiki Care-A-Van stated that it was helping two or three people each month return home to the mainland United States, providing them with clothes for the flight, transportation to the airport, and buying tickets. [11] In 2016, The Orlando Sentinel reported that in 2014, as many as 120 homeless individuals in Waikiki were sent back to the mainland, to be reunited with family and friends. [3]
NevadaLas VegasBetween July 2008 and April 2013, the state-run Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital discharged 1,500 mental patients, sending them via taxi to a Greyhound bus station and on to cities across the U.S., sometimes while heavily medicated. [5] An investigation by The Sacramento Bee found that out of 1,000 patients given one-way bus tickets, more than 325 had been sent to California. [5] The investigation also found that dozens of relocated patients appeared to have been involved in crimes after they were discharged, including murder, attempted murder, assault, drug crimes, sex crimes, and theft, in addition to vagrancy-related offenses. [5] It also found that in some cases, the program had helped patients who had been accused of committing crimes in Las Vegas skip town. [5]
RenoThe Homeless Evaluation Liaison Program (HELP) is run by local police officers out of an office within the Greyhound bus station in Reno. [12] Individuals may apply for a free bus ticket only once. [2] Officers call the contact named by the applicant to confirm that someone will in fact be taking them in once they arrive at their destination. [2]
New YorkNew YorkThe Guardian has suggested that New York City may have been the first American city with a homeless relocation program, starting in 1987. [1] As of 2017, the New York City Department of Homeless Services was spending $500,000 annually on relocation, [1] [3] making it significantly larger than other schemes across the United States. [1] The Guardian reported that New York spent 20% of its budget on airfare to destinations such as Puerto Rico; Atlanta, Georgia; Orlando, Florida; the Dominican Republic; Mexico; and even New Zealand. [1] New York was also unusual for sponsoring moves for entire families. [1]
Since 2017, New York City has offered Special One-Time Assistance (SOTA) grants to homeless shelter residents who have been earning a steady income. [13] The program funds one year of rent anywhere in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and is only provided if the households have demonstrated that they will likely be able to earn enough to pay for rent themselves once the grant has ended. [13] [14] New York City reported spending $89 million on SOTA vouchers to help 5,100 households move out of shelters between August 2017 and August 2019, of which nearly two-thirds moved out of the city, including 1,200 households that moved to Newark, New Jersey. [15] In December 2019, the city of Newark filed a federal lawsuit to stop the city of New York from sending people to live in the Newark area, charging that SOTA recipients were often being sent to live in uninhabitable conditions, lacking heat and electricity, and with "excessive vermin". [16]
OregonPortlandPortland started its homeless relocation program in 2016. [7] In 2019, city officials told The New York Times that of the ticket recipients it had been able to reach, nearly half had lost their promised housing three months after leaving Portland. [7] In its fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, the city sent away 383 individuals to places such as Las Vegas, Seattle, and Phoenix. [7]
WashingtonSeattleAs of 2019, the city of Seattle offered flexible, one-time financial assistance for the homeless, rather than a dedicated bus ticket program. [7] Bus tickets were also offered by nonprofits such as the United Way of King County, which reported funding about 116 journeys out of the region in 2018. [7]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Berkeley, California</span> City in California, United States

Berkeley is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emeryville to the south and the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington to the north. Its eastern border with Contra Costa County generally follows the ridge of the Berkeley Hills. The 2020 census recorded a population of 124,321.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sacramento, California</span> Capital city of California, United States

Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. Located at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in Northern California's Sacramento Valley, Sacramento's 2020 population of 524,943 makes it the fourth-most populous city in Northern California, sixth-most populous city in the state, and the ninth-most populous state capital in the United States. Sacramento is the seat of the California Legislature and the Governor of California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracy, California</span> City in California, United States

Tracy is the second most populated city in San Joaquin County, California, United States. The population was 93,000 at the 2020 census. Tracy is located inside a geographic triangle formed by Interstate 205 on the north side of the city, Interstate 5 to the east, and Interstate 580 to the southwest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gavin Newsom</span> Governor of California since 2019

Gavin Christopher Newsom is an American politician and businessman serving since 2019 as the 40th governor of California. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 49th lieutenant governor of California from 2011 to 2019 and the 42nd mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greyhound Lines</span> North American intercity bus service

Greyhound Lines, Inc. (Greyhound) is a company that operates the largest intercity bus service in North America. Services include Greyhound Mexico, charter bus services, and Amtrak Thruway services. Greyhound operates 1,700 coaches produced mainly by Motor Coach Industries and Prevost serving 230 stations and 1,700 destinations. The company's first route began in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1914 and the company adopted the Greyhound name in 1929. The company is owned by Flix North America, Inc., an affiliate of FlixBus, and is based in Downtown Dallas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness in the United States</span>

In the United States, the number of homeless people on a given night in January 2023 was more than 650,000 according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homelessness has increased in recent years, in large part due to an increasingly severe housing shortage and rising home prices in the United States.

KOVR is a television station licensed to Stockton, California, United States, serving as the CBS outlet for the Sacramento area. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division alongside KMAX-TV, an independent station. The two stations share studios on KOVR Drive in West Sacramento; KOVR's transmitter is located in Walnut Grove, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amtrak Thruway</span> Connecting transportation services brand

Amtrak Thruway is a system of through-ticketed transportation services to connect passengers with areas not served by Amtrak trains. In most cases these are dedicated motorcoach routes, but can also be non-dedicated intercity bus services, transit buses, vans, taxis, ferry boats and commuter rail trains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Francisco Transbay Terminal</span> Former transit terminal in San Francisco, CA, USA

The San Francisco Transbay Terminal was a transportation complex in San Francisco, California, United States, roughly in the center of the rectangle bounded north–south by Mission Street and Howard Street, and east–west by Beale Street and 2nd Street in the South of Market area of the city. It opened on January 14, 1939 as a train station and was converted into a bus depot in 1959. The terminal mainly served San Francisco's downtown and Financial District, as transportation from surrounding communities of the Bay Area terminated there such as: Golden Gate Transit buses from Marin County, AC Transit buses from the East Bay, and SamTrans buses from San Mateo County. Long-distance buses from beyond the Bay Area such as Greyhound and Amtrak Thruway also served the terminal. Several bus lines of the San Francisco Municipal Railway connected with the terminal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sacramento Valley Station</span> Railway station in Sacramento, California, US

Sacramento Valley Station is an Amtrak railway station in the city of Sacramento, California, at 401 I Street on the corner of Fifth Street, built in 1926 on the site of China Slough. It is the thirteenth busiest Amtrak station in the country, and the second busiest in the Western United States. It is served by four different Amtrak train routes and connecting Amtrak Thruway motorcoaches. It is also the western terminus for the Gold Line of the Sacramento RT Light Rail system and the Route 30 bus serving Sacramento State University.

Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital is a mental hospital located in Las Vegas, Nevada. It opened as a 190-bed facility on August 28, 2006. The hospital is operated by the state of Nevada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bakersfield station (Amtrak)</span> Amtrak train station in Bakersfield, California

Bakersfield station is an intermodal facility in Bakersfield, California. It is the southern terminus of Amtrak California's San Joaquins route, with Amtrak Thruway buses continuing to Amtrak stations and bus stops throughout Southern California and Nevada. The station opened with a celebration on July 4, 2000. It contains an 8,300-square-foot (770 m2) train station with two platforms and three tracks, as well as a 17-bay bus station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philadelphia Greyhound Terminal</span> Intercity bus station in Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Greyhound Terminal was the primary intercity bus station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The station's function relocated to 618 Market Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets in Center City Philadelphia. Prior to relocating to its current Market Street location on June 27, 2023, the terminal was located at 1001 Filbert Street in Center City Philadelphia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BoltBus</span> American commercial intercity bus service

BoltBus was an intercity bus common carrier and a division of Greyhound Lines that operated from March 2008 until July 2021 in the northeast and western United States and British Columbia, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Megabus (North America)</span> American commercial intercity bus service

Megabus is an intercity bus service of Coach USA/Coach Canada operating in the eastern, southern, midwestern, western, and Pacific United States and in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. It is the North American service equivalent to the European Megabus.

Greyhound therapy is a pejorative term used in the US health care system since the mid-1960s to refer to mental health authorities' buying a ticket on a Greyhound Lines bus or other coach bus to get rid of possible "troublemaker" patients.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area</span>

The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains four of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness in the United States by state</span>

Homelessness in the United States has occurred to varying degrees across the country. The total number of homeless people in the United States fluctuates and constantly changes hence a comprehensive figure encompassing the entire nation is not issued since counts from independent shelter providers and statistics managed by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development vary greatly. Federal HUD counts hover annually at around 500,000 people. Point-in-time counts are also vague measures of homeless populations and are not a precise and definitive indicator for the total number of cases, which may differ in both directions up or down. The most recent figure for the year 2019 that was given was at 567,715 individuals across the country that have experienced homelessness at a point in time during this period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness in California</span>

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that more than 181,399 people were experiencing homelessness in California in January 2023. This represents more than 27% of the homeless population of the United States even though California has slightly less than 12% of the country's total population, and is one of the highest per capita rates in the nation, with 0.46% of residents being homeless. More than two-thirds of homeless people in California are unsheltered, which is the highest percentage of any state in the United States. 49% of the unsheltered homeless people in the United States live in California: about 123,423 people, which is eight times as many as the state with the second highest total. Even those who are sheltered are so insecurely, with 90% of homeless adults in California reporting that they spent at least one night unsheltered in the past six months.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Columbus Bus Station</span> Intercity bus station in Columbus, Ohio

The Columbus Bus Station was an intercity bus station in Downtown Columbus, Ohio. The station, managed by Greyhound Lines, also served Barons Bus Lines, Miller Transportation, GoBus, and other carriers. The current building was constructed in 1969. From 1979 until its closure in 2022, with the demolition of Union Station and a short-lived replacement, the Greyhound station was the only intercity transit center in the city.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Gee, Alastair; Wong, Julia Carrie; Lewis, Paul (December 20, 2017). "Bussed out: How America moves its homeless". The Guardian . Retrieved June 5, 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Wright, James D. (2017). Address Unknown: The Homeless in America. Routledge. pp. xxxii. ISBN   9780202362571.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Santich, Kate (April 23, 2016). "Is homeless exporting a real thing?". The Orlando Sentinel . p. A1, A13. Retrieved June 9, 2023– via Newspapers.com.
  4. ↑ Alexander, Jeannie (July 28, 2008). "Some understandably fearful of strategies". The Tennessean– via Newspapers.com.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hubert, Cynthia; Reese, Phillip (December 23, 2013). "Crime follows bused mental health patients". The News Tribune. The Sacramento Bee. Retrieved June 11, 2023– via Newspapers.com.
  6. ↑ Serrano, Richard A. (November 26, 2016). "'Greyhound Therapy' Detailed at Officers' Trial". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved June 10, 2023.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Baker, Mike (September 14, 2019). "Homeless Residents Got One-Way Tickets Out of Town. Many Returned to the Streets" . The New York Times . Retrieved June 18, 2023.
  8. ↑ "San Francisco to Expand Access to Homeward Bound Program to Better Meet Clients' Needs". SF.gov – City and County of San Francisco. March 30, 2023. Retrieved June 17, 2023.
  9. 1 2 3 Filosa, Gwen (November 26, 2016). "Key West homeless shelter asking for money for bus tickets". Florida Keys Keynoter. pp. 1A, 2A. Retrieved June 10, 2023– via Newspapers.com.
  10. ↑ Butler, Pat (August 3, 1996). "Homeless, Atlanta police in uneasy truce". The State. Columbia, South Carolina. p. 6 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. ↑ "State lawmaker: Buy homeless tickets back to mainland". West Hawaii Today. January 26, 2009. Retrieved June 15, 2023– via Newspapers.com.
  12. ↑ Pike, Deirdre (November 14, 2002). "Just the ticket". Reno News & Review. Retrieved June 9, 2023.
  13. 1 2 Brand, David (October 13, 2021). "Far Fewer Homeless Families Using Rent Subsidies to Move Out of NYC". City Limits. Retrieved June 20, 2023.
  14. ↑ "Rental Assistance – SOTA". NYC Human Resources Administration. Retrieved June 20, 2023.
  15. ↑ Stewart, Nikita (December 3, 2019). "They Ended Up in Decrepit Housing in Newark. Is New York to Blame?" . The New York Times . Retrieved June 24, 2023.
  16. ↑ Romine, Taylor (December 5, 2019). "Newark sues New York over homeless relocation program". CNN. Retrieved July 9, 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.