It would also be fascinating to provide transportation for the homeless to the nearest garbage dumps. Pay them for sorting out any recyclables. Allow them to take anything which might be of use to them.
While collecting the recycling, the collectors steal (from my family multiple times), root through unlocked cars, knife open garbage bags, trespass, wake up sleeping people, and act aggressively towards anyone who interferes.
The collectors themselves live outside of the system of taxes and services, have no safety equipment to to protect them from broken glass etc, and end up in a constant cycle of unemployment, drug dependence, and other ills.
I feel like Berkeley manufactured this "picker" existence - it's an externality of trying to be the most progressive recycling town, and it's no good for anyone involved.
When "three strikes" was foolishly overturned by pro-crime Californians, the amount that you have to steal to be charged with a felony also increased. So people can steal items from cars and doorsteps, in addition to recyclables, and never have to worry about spending a day in prison.
When I was kid, recycling was less common and the bottle return fee was worth more so I feel like more people participated. Now most people put their cans and bottles in the city recycling and lose the fee.
Really you don't want to do that at the dump though, as by that time useful items have been commingled with actual trash. Another memorable story is that there was one worker who couldn't deal with glass bottles if they had any liquid in them and would just freak out and put them in with the trash.
There is a tax on beverage containers of all types. This tax is reduced to be inversely proportional to return rates when return rates exceeds a certain level. So return rate of 40% means the seller pays only 60%. There is an additional charge on all containers that are not recyclable, regardless of the return rate.
There is then a recycling scheme that retailers can participate in which involves bottle collection and centralised reuse (glass bottles in good condition only) and recycling (glass and plastic bottles) and redemption. As a result of the high return rates coupled with the tax reduction, most larger stores etc. have machines you can feed bottles for store credit, and at least when I was a kid pretty much any corner store etc. would also take bottles and pay out cash.
This ability to return and redeem everywhere made picking bottles a simple way of making extra cash without having to go somewhere. When I was a kid it was a go-to way of supplementing my allowance, and you'd also see homeless people and retired people etc. doing it.
It's given Norway a return rate for glass bottles of 99%, and an overall return rate for recyclable beverage containers of 95%, which is well in excess of most places with bottle return programs.
Retailers have strong incentives to participate in the recycling programs to reduce their tax, especially given that all their competitors does too, and people expect to be able to return their bottles at the same time as making their purchases - if you don't participate in the return program, you force your customers to make an extra trip if shopping with you.
The fee used to be quite substantial, though I believe it makes up a smaller percentage of most beverages now as I don't think (I haven't lived in Norway the last 16 years) the redemption rate has kept up with inflation. When I was a kid at one point the bottle return for 0.5l bottles of soda was about 5% of the purchase price.
The type of supervised work described in this article seems like a much better approach.
Especially when you are replacing already cheap "unskilled" or manual labor with even cheaper labor.
In the long run markets will adjust but the long run in this case can be longer than the life of a single worker.
Depending on how much labor you introduce you get get into a pretty never ending cycle of rotating your employment force.
And one can make an argument that displacing day labor with homeless people can have a bigger negative affect since employed day labor is more likely to have financial obligations and dependants than a homeless person.
This is why it's very important to carefully manage these programs and ensure they are at best self sufficient with some public funding but never profitable.
You want them to maw the lawns where lawns would not have been mawend before not to take over existing works.
Maybe it would be better to assess the tax on non-homeless needed for this credit at the county level, since cost-of-living and homelessness are both local issues. Maybe it would work better as a property tax than an income tax, for similar reasons.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/11302
There's also precedent in prioritizing auditing resources on offenders with large payoff, having the computer watch for suspicious tax forms, pricing penalties to include the people who get away with it, and whatever else they do to enforce the existing 2600 pages of federal tax law plus whatever state tax law.
Even for minimum wage jobs most employers expect decent personal hygiene, punctuality, respectful behavior, at least some amount of self-discipline, and actual work.
http://www.abqheadinghome.org/albuquerque-heading-home-initi...
We need more affordable housing generally and other solutions aimed at helping human beings with personal challenges. Those are the folks who end up homeless. Designing programs to help the homeless actually incentivizes being homeless and becomes another barrier to getting off the street because you need to remain homeless to qualify, and that is all kinds of fucked up.
Source: Had a class on homelessness, been homeless for 4.5 years, and I run the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide (a blog).
