New York Homeless Get Plane Tickets to Paris

The New York homeless get plane tickets to Paris, or San Juan or any number of other destinations. The point is to just get them out of New York City and off the welfare dole. Read about it below and see a video.

Homeless

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come up with an innovative plan to rid New York City of its homeless problem. Its what we used to call this ‘turfing’ when I worked in hospitals. When no one could come up with any place to send a patient, some hospitals would just ‘turf’ them over to another hospital. You see, in spite of what we are being told, hospitals are required to serve indigent patients and can’t (at least used to couldn’t) just put them out on the street with no where to go. Of course, now that there is more government intervention, the concern about just putting patients out on the street is less and we’ll undoubtedly see more of that as government takes over health care. Anyway, apparently New York is ‘turfing’ their homeless to other places.

The city is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city. This keeps them out of the city’s homeless shelters, which can be quite expensive at $36,000 per family per year.

So are, New York City has transported 550 families out of the city since the program began in 2007. To date, families have been sent to 24 states throughout the United States and to five continents throughout the world. Most of the homeless have been sent to Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. The only requirement is that there is a relative in the destination willing to take them in. A travel agency has been employed by the city to handle domestic travel while the Department of Homeless Services handles international travel. The city is willing to send families any where in the world and the homeless are not required to take the offer to be sent to another city. The program cost the city $500,000 per year and all the the tickets are one way. So far, no one has returned to New York’s homeless shelters once they have been given transportation out of the city.

The Partnership for the Homeless points out that this program fails to address the underlying problem of the families that are homeless. Many were homeless before they came to New York and will be homeless when they leave. Still the issue for New York seems to be simply to get them out of the city.

One family of five received tickets to France. They got airline tickets to Paris, then train tickets to a small town in northwest France. The cost of that trip for the city was $6,332. Sometimes the city provides money for rent, security deposits and furniture as part of the deal. Apparently, showing up at a shelter in New York can get you more than you bargain for in some places, after all, the New York homeless get plane tickets to Paris!