Like tidying up the house before a big party, Indianapolis is taking steps to be sure its unseemly side is tucked away before the guests arrive.

In deference to Super Bowl visitors next month, the city plans to move the city’s homeless population off the streets. Where they’ll go is anybody’s guess. Officials say they won’t force relocation on street people, but if the move goes like it has in other Super Bowl cities – Jacksonville, for example, set up a temporary shelter far from festivities when the NFL championship game was played there in 2005 – it’s easy to imagine people being rounded up and put aboard buses bound for somewhere out of sight.

It’s the perfect metaphor for our sports-crazy times. While we spend hundreds of millions on palatial stadiums, astronomical salaries and glitzy events like the Super Bowl solely in the name of bragging rights, the subtle rot beneath our feet continues.

Take the current example: On any given night in Indianapolis, more than 1,500 people are homeless, according to the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention. More than half of them have drug or alcohol problems. The economic disaster – from which the NFL was immune, by the way – has deepened the problem: From 2008 to 2009, homelessness among families in the city increased 78 percent.

These statistics don’t include the thousands of others who will watch the Big Game at the homes of friends or family members because they’ve lost their own homes.
This isn’t to bash the Super Bowl or pro football. Both are as big a part of our cultural fabric as a Fourth of July barbecue.

But it’s easy to get cynical about a temporary solution to a long-term problem undertaken just to make the city look good to big-spending out-of-towners.

The day they leave, the street people will be back. No amount of “economic impact” from the game is likely to change that.
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