That's One Way to Do It

New York has found a way to get the homeless off its rolls.

New York is providing homeless families with one-way airline tickets out of town in an effort to keep them out of the city's shelter system, officials say.

Since 2007, the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

City officials say there is no limit to where a family can be sent.

So far, the program has provided flights to 24 states and five continents, most often to Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

One family with 10 children accepted an offer to go to Puerto Rico while another family moved to France with their three children.

  UPI

I actually had that same idea for the University of Missouri's mental health hospital. It seemed to me that the inmates there were much saner than many of the homeless people walking the streets in San Francisco. A bus ticket would be cheaper than incarceration.

New York's solution is only slightly less heartless than another solution I read about some years ago. I can't remember what city, and it may well have been New York, but it was a northern area whose solution to the problem of homeless people gathering about steam vents in the sidewalks during freezing weather was to build cages around the vents.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.