mgroves.com

Parking meters in Denver

• politics
• economics

By: mgroves 10 March 2007

The city of Denver has an innovative idea to fighting both homelessness and panhandling at the same time. They are using old parking meters to collect money from people who would normally give it to panhandlers, and giving that money to "organizations fighting homelessness".

Normally I would criticize yet another government assitance attempt out of hand, but since taking economics courses and reading Freakonomics, I'm starting to look at these sorts of things through a different lens. (See also: Million Dollar Murphy and the problem of principles vs practicality).

The idea is very clever, and obviously well-intentioned, but there are a few assumptions that this idea depends on in order for it to work:

1. The type of people who give money to panhandlers are willing to put money in these meters instead.
2. There are enough meters to go around
3. (Enough) money will actually go to organizations fighting homelessness
4. Organizations fighting homelessness actually work, and all they need is more money
5. There's a measureable way to determine success

Let's say 1-4 are actually true assumptions (which is a pretty big stretch if you ask me). How can they determine that their program worked?

They can measure the number of homeless people every quarter and see if the amount goes down? First, it's incredibly difficult and expensive to measure such a thing accurately.

Second, how do you know this program is directly responsible? Suppose the number does go down every quarter. Maybe the homeless just left Denver because suddenly the cost of switching cities has gone down since no one is dropping coins in their cups anymore. So now maybe Denver's homeless population drops and Boulder's skyrockets.

So, yeah, I don't think it will work, but it seems like a perfect political move: you're seen to be doing "something" and you can almost surely claim success no matter the outcome.