Lubbock Left

On Thursday, the Lubbock City Council voted 4-3 to ignore the homeless situation in our city.

Thank you Councilman Klein for introducing the resolution to form a committee to evaluate the homeless situation in Lubbock. Thank you also Council members DeLeon and Price for supporting the resolution.

To the rest of the Council: what were you thinking?

This is the most willful head-in-the-sand moment I can recall. Sure, the City Council has ignored the recommendations from citizen committees in the past, but now they don’t even want to form a committee in the first place. Advisory committees don’t cost anything, so why not form one? How can Council members Beane et al make final pronouncements about what our city government can and cannot do without even studying the problem?

The A-J article covering the Council’s vote is online, and the discussion on that article has already fleshed out some of the main positions. Here’s Councilman Beane from that article:

“What do homeless people need?” Beane asked. “They need shelter. We don’t need a committee to study it to death.”

What proud ignorance! Homelessness is more than a question of roofs over heads. How about finding out why people are homeless in the first place? How about connecting homeless people with existing social programs that might be able to help? How about City/County/State cooperation?

What about grants?

What about tax breaks for businesses that provide food or shelter to the homeless?

What about any outside-the-box thinking at all?

This is a fundamental flaw of conservatism, by the way: a lack of imagination and vision when it comes to problem solving. The conservative impulse is to say “not my problem” and move on. Conservatism applied on a society-wide scale means that “not my problem” becomes “not our problem,” which is a recipe for disaster.

Applied on a Lubbock-wide scale, “conservative” “leadership” has resulted in a volunteer community that is struggling to keep up with huge social problems like homelessness largely without government support.

Churches and volunteer organizations are showing great leadership on the issue of homelessness. It’s a shame that 4 members of the Lubbock City Council won’t do the same.