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Google knows everything and is never wrong. Except when it sent the lawn service to aerate the property across the street from our house instead of ours.

It says our house is a good three miles from the Road Home shelter and its surrounding aggregation of homeless people. And all those Google Maps and Google Earth photos would show it as a nice middle-class neighborhood.

What it wouldn't be able to tell you, until now, is that, twice in the last few months, homeless people have appeared at my back door in search of sustenance or shelter.

I once heard a high-ranking Google engineer explain how his search engine was good at data and getting better at understanding, but had not yet achieved wisdom. So what Google may still not grasp is the strong evidence that, looking at the crisis of homelessness in Salt Lake City, there's no such thing any more as Not In My Back Yard.

Our first visitor was a friendly fellow who was hungry enough to knock on our door and ask if we could spare some food. He was only a little bit scary, so we gave him some things we had on hand and some milk.

It didn't put us out much and our only hesitation, which we did not express to him, was that if we fed him he'd never go away. Or that the word would get around.

(Usually I am deeply offended when people argue against helping the poor or the homeless by comparing them to stray animals or overly domesticated bears. But this was about my home and family.)

We never saw him again. I hope he's OK. Not that I've bothered to check.

Then, just the other day, we were awakened at 3 in the morning by a most mournful sound. It was hard to tell if the poor old man sitting under the canopy over our back porch was vomiting or trying to sing.

We kept the door locked and called 911.

The police came in short order and talked to him very patiently. The two officers never did seem to get any kind of intelligible answer from him, but did manage to coax him into an ambulance.

Because I am a poor excuse for a human being, I went back to sleep. I never checked up on what happened to the poor guy, nor did anything to return the stocking cap he left behind.

And because I would make a lousy politician, it is just as well that it was a handful of accomplished ones, and not me, sitting next to Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes at a public forum on the issue of homelessness last Monday.

Hughes is taking a real leadership position in accepting that homelessness is a state issue, not just a local one, and proving he means it in the only way a public official really can: volunteering to help pay for it.

Hughes and some other House Republicans see that not all the homeless come from Salt Lake City and that, if the city can't do a better job of caring for them and moving them out of homelessness and into self-sufficiency, the problem will grow to other communities.

So they are scaring up millions to help create new resource centers in Salt Lake City and to open more jail and treatment beds for those, like my most recent nocturnal visitor, who belong in them.

City Mayor Jackie Biskupski and County Mayor Ben McAdams were appropriately grateful for the speaker's alliance in the effort.

Had it been me, I would not have been able to resist the urge to tell Hughes that the truck he's helping us buy is nice and all, but that it would have been a lot nicer if he hadn't slashed the two front tires by blocking state acceptance of Obamacare Medicaid expansion. It is really very hard to take anything Hughes says about helping the homeless seriously after he pulled that partisan stunt.

This will be doubly true if the excuse given for Utah turning its back on the effort that would have done so much for the homeless and other mentally ill and drug-dependent souls around here — that the money might go away in the future — turns out not to be true. The word burbling out of Washington is that states that did accept expanded Medicaid dollars will be able to keep them under whatever repeal-and-replace scheme gets adopted.

Yeah, I know. If you like your Medicaid expansion, you can keep it. Sure.

But it would be foolish to reject the help Hughes is offering just to have the pleasure of spitting in his eye. I'd probably miss, anyway.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, will opine for food. gpyle@sltrib.com