If you think housing is expensive now, wait ’til it’s free!
Blaska Policy Werkes declares this immutable Law of Nature: More free stuff exerts costs down the line exponential to their original price.
Madison’s deputy mayor for law enforcement has been deployed to 7933 Tree Lane on the far west side, just off Mineral Point Road. This taxpayer-subsidized, $11.7 million housing project is the newest of Madison’s growing number of war zones.
Social justice warriors, write this down: cops go where the crime is. This month alone, police have been called to the public housing site 50 times in fewer than 30 days. You do the math.
Deputy mayor Gloria Reyes is a former active-duty cop. Gloria, hope you’re carrying.
Shoplifting, fraud, loitering, vandalism, fights, and (of course) shootings. All spilling over into the neighborhood, retail to the south along Mineral Point, single family homes to the north. As Gomer Pyle used to say, Surprise, surprise! If junkies and drunkards did not make poor choices they wouldn’t be in their predicament.
Think of the costs at 7933 Tree Lane of all those police calls. The reduced property values in the neighborhood. The food stamps and other subsidies that — yes — enable their substance abuse.
More free stuff!
Incongruously, the same day my favorite Madison morning newspaper expertly detailed the issues at Tree Lane, its editorial page applauded “Good start on helping the homeless.” The WI State Journal applauded the state interagency council on homelessness (chaired by Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, no less). It proposes spending $3.75 million a year on “Housing First.”
Housing First turns on its head the standard social-service policy of providing housing in return for clean and sober. The idea is that substance abusers will survive long enough to clean up their lives through on-site counseling, better living conditions, etc. Fair enough. (The City of Madison’s Jim O’Keefe defended the concept to the Policy Werkes back in August.)
The Policy Werkes does not want to stumble upon any frozen-hard bodies on sidewalks this winter. But no requirements? You want a roof over your head? Fine, you got it. But you got to pay.
You will attend counseling at oh-eight-hundred hours. We come knocking at your door if your assigned chair is empty. Four hours of sheltered workshop begins at oh-nine-hundred hours. Mandatory. Ten hours of building and grounds maintenance weekly.
One more thing: the grounds would be fenced; access and egress would be limited and controlled. (We are told that much of the trouble comes from old acquaintances from outside the complex, perhaps jealous of the others’ good fortune.) Visitors check in at the office and are buzzed in. Them’s the rules. You want “free housing?” This is the price.
Blaska’s Watch Tower: another of these things (perhaps not Housing First, that is unclear) is planned for the site of Babe’s Restaurant on Schroeder Road.
Fire in the forest!
From the Chico, CA Enterprise Record:
Most cities have grass. Paradise’s predominant ground cover is [was] pine needles — extremely flammable pine needles. … When PG&E went into Paradise earlier this year to cut trees that were near power lines, people complained. Pines were the very reason many people move to Paradise. They accepted the danger, despite warnings from so many people.
Underbrush and foresting waste, tinder dry, contributed to the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871 that claimed as many as 2,500 lives.
Here kitty, kitty!
Now that Scott Walker has lost his bid for a third term as governor, Democrats can stop pretending that Wisconsin’s natural environment has been turned into Mars’ Elysium Planitia.
General Motors cannot make cars that no one will buy. That kind of socialist cluelessness is what sank the Soviet economy. The 14,500 laid-off workers can apply at FoxConn Wisconsin.
Blaska Policy Werkes 
17 responses to “Taxpayers are subsidizing Madison’s crime zones”
Have all the options been explored?
Has the Madison/Dane County furiously hand-wringing, deeply brow-furrowed, eminently White Lefty Guilt suffocated contingent even considered Community Policing at the Tree Lane Housing First facility?
The Gotch
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“You will attend counseling at oh-eight-hundred hours. We come knocking at your door if your assigned chair is empty. Four hours of sheltered workshop begins at oh-nine-hundred hours. Mandatory. Ten hours of building and grounds maintenance weekly.
One more thing: the grounds would be fenced; access and egress would be limited and controlled. (We are told that much of the trouble comes from old acquaintances from outside the complex, perhaps jealous of the others’ good fortune.) Visitors check in at the office and are buzzed in. Them’s the rules. You want “free housing?” This is the price.”
Great suggestions DB: rehabilitative on multiple levels, safer, and all quite doable.
People are always better off when they must work for virtually anything, even if they don’t immediately understand. Free sh*t is psychologically debilitating.
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A prime example of the Left’s utter ignorance of (or intentional blindness to) human nature. If you give free stuff to someone with no strings attached, they will swiftly conclude that they’re entitled to said stuff. If you try to impose conditions, no matter how limited or reasonable, your’re a racist, a heartless hater, an oppressor of a “marginalized” group. You can move a pig into Buckingham palace, but it will still act like a pig. You can move a lazy, drug-addled ne’er-do-well into taxpayer subsidized housing (and make every social service under the sun available free of charge), but to expect him to turn into a model citizen illustrates perfectly the kind of magical thinking Madison liberals are so good at. I noticed, by the way, that when one of the local stations first started reporting on the extraordinarily high number of police calls to Tree Lane a couple of days ago, they failed to mention that building in question was inhabited by the formerly homeless. Last night, they finally came clean. The best we can expect from”objective” the local media, I guess.
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This is not subsidizing housing, it is reparations to those that suffered at the hands of evil capitalism. We need Equal Misery for ALL!!! Now!
BTW, Tony Evers has just announced he is going to stop the worst of the worst policy. He is looking to facilitate a new state constitutional amendment, that will permanently call it a “Holiday Tree”
“Christmas Tree” was a bridge to far the Walker Regime!!!!!
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Plant a tree for Xmas would be a far better thing to do.
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Apparently Lesiak never tried planting a tree in Wisconsin in December. Once every few years you might be able to, but without glowbull warming every year, the ground is pretty hard.
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When you live a life with love in your heart like I do; everyday is Xmas.
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With apologies to Jackie DeShannon.
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San Fran spends something like $60k administering each homeless person per year. THAT is liberal compassion and trust me, they’d like to spend more. Quite a bureaucracy. Quite a growth expenditure.
The form is to administer a program that says, ‘Darn it. We care.”
The function is to make large tracts of a once beautiful city into a s#*^hole covered with infected needles.
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@madisonexpat;
“The function is to make large tracts of a once beautiful city into a s#*^hole covered with infected needles.”
If the needles were merely the all of SHIT!
The Gotch
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Erratum: link broken; sorry.
The Gotch
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I used to love visiting SF. Its natural beauty enabled you to forget the lefty looniness that defined local politics. No more. Now the visitor is treated to hordes of drug-addled bums pissing and shitting on every other street corner before clambering into their cardboard shelters that crowd pedestrians off the public sidewalks. Visible proof of the boundless compassion of the liberal elites in charge–the same ones who have managed to make living in SF unaffordable for anyone but subsidized bums and multi-millionaires. Kind of a preview of where Madison is headed.
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My Dear Sister is a homeless advocate in the Pacific NW. Even as a career Lefty, she’s willing to admit that many of the homeless are layabout @$$holes that gravitate to Lefty-Centric cities (SF, Portland, Seattle, etc.) where the free $#!T and guilt-inundated Lefties are available in abundance.
Anywho, anyone remember that goofy $#!T Z! Haukeness?
S/He moved a Black woman (and children) into a vacant townhouse on the SW side ~ 8.5 years ago as a part of what was hoped would be the Lefty Next Big Thing, the Take Back The Land movement, because…welp…just because.
It was quaintly called Housing Liberation, and S/He, et al, uprooted this vulnerable young family (technically homeless because they lived in an apartment) for the publicity.
Oh, it tugged mightily at Madison/Dane County Lefties heart strings and deftly mined their suffocating White Lefty guilt.
But what did it do for this family? Welp, they got kicked out faster than you’s can say gimmee gimmee. Cannon fodder.
I wonder how she felt after she discovered she was being cynically used to further a Lefty agenda, would a Where Are They Now segment be out of the question. What about the CHILDREN? Would she do it again? I’m betting not.
The kicker? While the face of homelessness is young Black female single-heads-of-household, the off-the-charts reality of homelessness is Veterans with substance abuse/mental health issues.
Unfortunately, Veterans don’t elicit the same cachet and attendant Gosh I’m Nice endorphin surge to which Lefties (most, not all) are addicted.
Alas, a story as old as Patchouli Oil-n-Paisley Tie-dye itself, and yet another example of Lefty being led glassy eyin’ lock-steppin’ & unquestionin’ by the nostrils by their handlers.
Ah Lefty; so MUCH hypocrisy, so little time!
The Gotch
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The taxpayers have and still are funding criminals from the WH on down for decades.
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Jon Corzine and both Clintons come to mind.
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Keep thinking and a lot more names will come to mind.
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Looks like THE RANT IS DUE!
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