北美的流浪人士與社會福利

Why there are still so many beggars on the streets of Toronto given the "proud" s ocial welfare in Canada? Answered in 2017 by Alex Wong, a Canadian. 本文將無家流浪人士等同於乞丐，但我這兩年瞭解到，我們北加州有不少無家人士住在自己的車裡，有份工作，並不乞討。文中所分析的舊金山homeless人數大概沒有包括這些無家人士。

So the question given was: Why there are still so many beggars on the streets of Toronto given the "proud" social welfare in Canada?

Well, let me rephrase it to: Why are there beggars in Toronto? This is a more neutral question that I can actually answer because I don’t know what you count as “so many” and I don’t know what you count as “proud social welfare”. Those are normative statements where I have no idea where your value system stands. What if you, to you, even one beggar is “so many” and even one cent given to those who are in need is “proud social welfare”?

Firstly, we can look at the kind of spending Toronto does on housing assistance. From the Toronto city budget you see that the spending is $650 million a year. I’ll judge the number of beggars by the number of homeless in Toronto: 9636 according to one source, 5700 according to another source.

The population of Toronto core is about 2.6 million. So the rate of homelessness is about 219 per 10 thousand to 371 per 10 thousand.

Now, first I’m going to try answer the question of whether we have enough social welfare per person in Toronto by comparing it to other cities in North America. So, let’s go with a sanctuary city like San Francisco.

San Francisco spends $241 million on the homeless and has about 6700 homeless. The population of San Francisco is about 864k.

But let’s also grab data for an American city in cold weather for good measure. So let’s also look at New York City. It has a population of 8.55 million, 59k homeless, 1.29 billion was spent on homelessness (according to the Department of Homeless Services).

Let’s put all this together: Toronto spending on homelessness per capita: $250. Its homeless rate: 219–371 per 10 thousand. San Francisco spending on homelessness per capita: $278. Its homeless rate: 779 per 10 thousand. New York City spending on homelessness per capita: $151. Its homeless rate: 690 per 10 thousand.

Well, firstly, it would seem that NYC is far more efficient than SF in combating homelessness. This is likely due to the cold weather pushing people from warm cities to shift to cold cities if possible.

Secondly, it would appear that Toronto does in fact spend more than our example American city in cold weather. It’s 60% more (or 40% more depending on which you use as your baseline). However, there is a far larger percentage drop in homelessness in Toronto for that price increase (even with the largest homelessness estimate in Toronto).

So, it would appear Toronto does not, in fact, spend that much more in social spending than say a leftist enclave like San Francisco. It appears to spend slightly less. But, we do appear to be substantially more efficient with our tax dollars than our American counterparts.

My conclusion therefore is that we do not have a social welfare to be proud in its scope but proud about its efficiency. Considering how little we spend, we should expect lots of homelessness unless we believe ourselves somehow magically far superior than Americans in dealing with the same problem with same or less money.