Fingerprint and Drug Test Public Housing Residents?

But, security can be provided. It's not just drug dealers and gang members who are kept out. Anyone without a reason to be in the building, and a proper ID is kept out.

If the city of New York, or Chicago wants to be in the housing business, they owe it to their tenants to provide proper security.

 

exactly!


furthermore, if my tax dollars are paying for your healthcare (medicare) or retirement (social security) your ass should be tested.


do you know how many billions of dollars we spend on medicare and social security? i don't. but i'm guessing it's a lot. probably.


anyway, you can't tell me with 100 percent certainty that some of those people aren't doing drugs. illegal drugs. with my money?! no sir.

 

Urine tests are a routine procedure in healthcare.

As government takes on more of the costs of healthcare, you don't think they're going to want to know what's in your piss, and why it's there:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/business/increase-in-urine-testing-raises-ethical-questions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

Every number right now shows that cities are growing faster than suburbs -- and not just with younger folks. A lot of seniors are moving into cities.

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/04/03/moving-back-into-city/
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/06/05/Why-Millions-of-Seniors-Are-Moving-Back-to-Cities.aspx#page1
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/06/28/new_census_data_show_us_cities_growing_faster_than_suburbs.html

Also, crime disparities between cities and suburbs are falling, and so are links between neighborhood demographics and crime. Crime itself has gone down significantly.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/5/26%20metropolitan%20crime%20kneebone%20raphael/0526_metropolitan_crime_kneebone_raphael.pdf

This guy quoted in the Trib article must not have done his research, because, yeah, Uptown tends to be one of the North Side's higher crime areas. It would be as if someone wanted to move to the suburbs and figured Harvey and Lake Forest were equals.

Also, back to drug-testing public housing residents, here's a big flaw: often, the dealers there are selling to white suburban kids. Naperville Magazine dubbed I-88 the "Heroin Highway" because of all the nice suburban kids going to Chicago's West Side to buy the drug, then bringing it back to use or resell. So why aren't we drug testing any white suburbanite who drives up to a public housing project?

Speaking of which, one thing unique in Chicago regarding shootings is that the surge came after the city knocked down public high-rise projects. It was a defensible move, given how hell-holish many of them were, and that they were built in the first place to warehouse the poor away from everyone else. But the unintended consequence is that residents spread back out through the city (and some suburbs), upsetting set gang borders and creating a wave of battles for turf.

 

Shit, we had this figured out back in 1986, you just need the courts to allow it:

 

Uptown is improving.

It's seen as a neighborhood for folks who can't afford to live in Boystown or Andersonville:

And redevelopment dollars are being committed:

Crime will keep people from moving in, and drive out investments.

 

Ah, drug forfeiture laws. You really want to beat THAT drum? Drug forfeiture laws have been used and abused by cops to take cash and property from people under the most specious of purposes. On this, I'm with the libertarians.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket

I'm also surprised to see a conservative arguing for expansion of government power, given I though government was supposed to be stupid, incompetent and wasteful. Hey, why not find a way to get more guns in the hands of inner-city people. Isn't that a free-market solution to the problem -- let the good guys with guns take out the bad guys? I'm amazed the NRA doesn't push for this. After all, it's more than happy to inform us that Chicago's gun laws aren't "stopping crime."

 

Me, Ignorant? A Troll? Oh well, consider the source. Oh yeah, I've forgotten more about the Yankees, government and politics than you will ever learn in seven lifetimes.

If you knew anything about HUD or public housing, the government is tending to do that. Most new public housing construction is for senior citizens' housing. How many cities have build new public housing. The biggest program is the Section 8 program where low-income people are given vouchers to pay for housing based on a sliding scale.

As for zoning, what you are saying is that in a suburban Republican-leaning community of one-family homes, someone could buy one of those homes and put a 10-story apartment building there. Go to a suburban city council meeting and see what the reaction is. If any reasonable local elected official, Democrat or Republican, would see your proposal, here is what they would say to you after they stopped laughing at you. "Ok, Mr. YF, what about the increased sewage? What about parking? What about the schools facing overcrowding? What about adding police protection? What about increased waste collection? Where are you going to come up with the money for these increased services?"

There is all this complaining about government interference. However, if you study the matter and think about it for longer than the time it takes you to read a bumper sticker or hear a 30-second political commercial, you learn that government does things which the private sector can't or won't do. The railroads, New York City subways, and bus companies were once privately owned. Now the government does this with varying degrees of success. A private company couldn't turn a profit doing this, but the employers on Wall Street and Rush Street still need a way for employees to get to work. Recreation programs are another example. Governments provide some recreation services and private, usually non-profit, organizations such as AYSO, Little League provide these services. You can't eliminate government recreation services or non-government recreation services with out hurting people.

I think people on this board know who is the troll in this discussion.

You think you have all of the answers but you don't even know the right questions.

 

I'm inclined to listen, for a second or two, to the "I don't want my tax dollars paying the rent for some druggie!" argument.

Then I start to think about all the things my money pays for without my permission:

* Illegal wars
* Making rich corporate assholes richer
* Supporting my ex-wife's extravagant lifestyle
* Funding college athletic programs

Etc. Then I'm less bothered by the fact that some down-and-outer might or might not be taking a hit every once in a while to forget about being down and out.

If it's a moral concern, fine, go ahead, test. Test for alcohol and tobacco, too. Otherwise, leave public housing residents alone. Give them a hand up off the streets, make sure that public housing is as safe as possible. If my money must be spent for these sorts of things, I'd rather it get spent on housing and maybe some education than some sort of dumbass random drug testing program.

 

And don't get me started on people using my roads! If anyone who has ever used drugs has ever driven on roads paid for by my hard-earned tax dollars they should be expelled from the country!

 

Re senior housing as public housing: I would love to see what happens when my 89-year-old grandmother gets piss-tested. Really, she and the other residents should, because that place is packed full of more drug users than you'll see anywhere.

 

It'd be real funny and ironic if Randy Levine or one of the Steinbrenners tested positive for something.