Reply to Can someone explain “defund” the police vs police reform?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If we are going to defund the police in DC we need to pour an enormous amount of money into housing.  HOUSING.

I work in DC Medicaid in case management.   The number 1 (and 2, and 3 and 4 and 12 and 50th) concern of people who receive Medicaid in DC (which is basically a way of saying the "poor") is HOUSING. 
I get 20 calls a day about housing a day.  I call people about diabetes and they don't care.  They need housing.  I call the parents of kids with asthma and what do they want to talk about?  Housing.
No one can afford to live here and the city pretty much does nothing.  If I had dollar for everyone I talked to daily who was sleeping on a friend's couch, crashing with an aunt, sleeping on the streets I'd be wealthy in about a week. 
It's IMPOSSIBLE to get city funded housing as a black male.  The only ones who have any chance of getting off a list in under a decade (or ever) is a woman with young children.

The lack of affordable housing (and I mean affordable to people making under $25K) is what drives a TON of the crime and desperation in this city.  
But no one wants to fix it because it costs a lot of money.

[b]We need housing for people who make minimum wage. [/b] Not a few units for $400K in a development where the rest of the units go for $800K.

The rest of this is just putting a bandaid on a severed leg.

Camden NJ had a much easier problem to fix because they don't lack affordable housing.  DC is up against a MAJOR issues here and it grows every year as the city gentrifies .

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I wish we could get a few reasonable people together and figure this stuff out.

I was on a task force in my city once upon a time because of an issue with overflow in emergency rooms all around the city, and it was decided that what was needed was an intermediate crisis center with drug/alcohol detox available.  Someone was able to secure $20 million between the city and philanthropists to make it happen.  
Then somehow politics got involved, and we ended up with a new state of the art emergency room.

(I actually work there now.  They couldn't find anyone to work in it, so they offered a ton of money.  It's great for me, but it's not at all what our city needed.)

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