City Aids Homeless With One-Way Tickets Home

They are flown to Paris ($6,332), Orlando ($858.40), Johannesburg ($2,550.70), or most frequently, San Juan ($484.20).

Hector Correa and Elisabeth Mojica were at Kennedy Airport on Tuesday to fly home to Puerto Rico, to stay with her father.

Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, with Inez, returned to North Carolina after only a few days when relatives paid their back rent.

They are not executives on business trips or couples on honeymoons. Rather, all are families who have ended up homeless, and all the plane tickets are courtesy of the city of New York (one-way).

The Bloomberg administration, which has struggled with a seemingly intractable problem of homelessness for years, has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city since 2007, as a way of keeping them out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. All it takes is for a relative elsewhere to agree to take the family in.

Many of them are longtime New Yorkers who have come upon hard times, arrive at the shelter’s doorstep and jump at the offer to move at no cost. Others are recent arrivals who are happy to return home after becoming discouraged by the city’s noise, the mazelike subway, the difficult job market or the high cost of housing.... (Read the entire story here.)

I know here in Dallas it has been reported that vans from surrounding suburban cities drop homeless persons off at The Bridge, our city's homeless assistance center. Love to hear your reactions.