I want people to have homes, dude. Not jail cells. If there were enough shelters, we wouldn't have encampments, but shelters are not a good end goal either. Have you ever spent time in one? Can you imagine living the rest of your life there? Shelters are a start, and we should certainly building them, more and better, but a homeless American is in need of more than just a shelter for tomorrow night. The United States has, in failing to meaningfully regulate the housing market or otherwise prevent it from becoming a casino, failed to provide sufficient housing for all of its citizens on a catastrophic scale. Your solutions aren't solutions, because they do not address the problem.
What do you believe actually DOES address the problem? What do you think would actually fix this, in a way that is reasonable and feasible, and doesn't massively detriment other people?
I add the last requirement because hypothetically, the problem could be "solved" by the government taking everyone's income, redistributing it so that everyone gets the exact same amount, building cookie-cutter homes, and assigning everyone to them... but I don't think anyone would accept that as a reasonable solution, and a whole lot of people would see that as a massive detriment to a huge number of people.
Emily, we've discussed a lot of solutions to homelessness in this thread, and none of them were the ridiculous and impractical solution outlined in your post. Fundamentally, the root cause of homelessness is a lack of homes, and the government
does need to step in on this front, not by suddenly taking on a fundamental restructuring of home ownership but doing what it already can to expand both availabilty and accessibility to permanent shelter. That said, there is no one size fits all approach to a problem as complex as homelessness. While there are some factors that link homelessness in various cities in states, they are not homogeneous, and indeed many towns and cities either have no homelessness problem or are adequately managing the problems they have. Where there are crises, the stories tend to be particular to those regions. So I can't give you a simple The Answer, only point to some strategies and iniatives that have been proven as effective in some communities and nations around the world:
1. "Shelter" is not enough
People often believe that there "aren't enough shelters" or "aren't enough soup kitchens" in their communities, and sometimes this is demonstrably true. But whether it is or not, simply having a shelter for the night does not solve the problems of a homeless family. If spending the night in a substandard shelter is obviously worse than spending it on the street, people won't go at all. There are many reasons why unhomed people avoid shelters: they don't want their family split up, they know drugs are pushed at a certain shelter, they know a shelter has a reputation for theft or assault, they object to forced religious worship services, many other reasons. If they
do go, having a roof for the night isn't helping them afford rent. The most effective civic programs are those that treat intake into a homeless shelter as an important first step toward addressing the root causes of homelessness, an approach known as
coordinated entry. That means that while you absolutely do strive to provide enough itinerant shelter, the process of seeking out that shelter also enrolls individuals and families in an ongoing system of care that paves the way for them between the various service providers that they will need to seek out in order to get back on their feet. In an effective system of coordinated entry, a person may enter the shelter with no one on their side, but they leave it with a social worker and some numbers to call.
2. The importance of having a plan
A common problem is that although services are technically available, they are scattered piecemeal across a constellation of public and private agencies, often at odds over the very purpose of their organizations. A city with an acute crisis of homelessness cannot afford to let squabbling between stakeholders undercut every solution they advance. They need a single master plan for their community, democratically arrived at and published in a forum that all players have equal access to. When the police, the prisons, county mental health, the state courts, the shelters, job placement services, and whoever else all have a single document and forum to refer back to when it comes to policy and placement, and a number to call if they have questions.
3. Human empathy
If those involved in "solving homelessness" do not regard or treat their clients as human beings worthy of respect in consideration, whose rights to freedom of choice, family, and personal property are respected, initiatives will fail no matter how well they are structured.
4. Funding
Often, poorly designed master plans fail because the city or state was unwilling to provide a realistic budget to staff and supply them. Especially common is a situation in which a program is initiated with the best of intentions and adequately funded at the start, but defunded two or three years later. The subsequent failure of the program to meet demand is then taken as proof of its inadequacy on a more basic level, and it is either abolished entirely or subject to further rounds of defunding until it is. Funny how calls to defund the police create a panic, but defunding county mental services or elementary ed so often gets a yawn from the public! Addressing homelessness realistically is not cheap, nor is it a one time investment. If we truly desire a long term solution to homelessness, it needs to come with a long-term plan for funding, that has some form of armor against the vicissitudes of civic politics.
5. Data Collection
There is very often more myth than reality when it comes to a community's understanding of homelessness, which lends itself to a situation of tilting at windmills while giants overrun the countryside. Every city is different, and every city needs to set up a perennial system of data collection to ensure that labor and resources are being sent toward where they will be most effective. Often, public perception and calls for action are aimed at the most
visible signs of homelessness, while the more pervasive causes go unaddressed. A common example is targeting homeless encampments in a polity where the majority of homeless people do not live in them. People like Derec and yourself get a strong sense of emotional satisfaction when you see an encampment "cleaned" but then are surprised when another encampment springs up a few blocks away three months later. Because clearing an encampment, arresting the inhabitants, and stealing what little capital they've managed to accumulate "ends homelessness" much in the same way that putting a facial tissue in front of your nose when you sneeze cures your cold. If you really want to address homelessness, your city needs to know how many homeless citizens they have, where they live, and what has caused their situation to develop. A heavy police presence becomes a huge problem here, as if homeless people believe that talking to any civic worker for any reason is putting them at risk of arrest, deportation, or other abuses, they will quite sensibly conceal their situation from as many people as possible.
5. Data Sharing
Often times that same constellation of agencies that bungle services are also bungling data collection. If every stakeholder has a set of data but no centralized system for disseminating and comparing those data sets, all of them are impaired. Those master plans I mentioned? Should always include plans for where to share and store such data as have been collected.
6. Housing Affordability
All of this is for nothing if there simply are no homes available that a working person at minimum wage can reliably afford, or that a retired or disabled person can somehow access. Unfortunately, in the United States, talking about housing affordability at all is a "leftist" issue that only the most "progressive" politicians are willing to bring up at all. Nevertheless, projects to end homelessness are meaningless in the absence of this particular avenue of progress. I note that it is the only one of these points that your post is trying to address. Although your goal seems to be to break housing reform through hyperbole, you
do instinctively recognize that housing availablility is the true root of the problem, and about this you are correct.
So I'm going to break this one down into some further, more specific policies and initiatives need to be addressed:
- The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program has been gutted to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars at the federal level, despite having been one of the single most effective legislative initiatives on homelessness in American history. This has resulted a waiting list that is stretching years into the future when to used to be weeks, just eight years ago. Of the families that apply for assistance, now only one in four receive it by the end of their application year. It needs to be re-funded in the next appropriations bill.
- The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants program has also been wildly successful, and continues to be, but we cannot afford to let political forces destroy it, so likewise when it comes to appropriations, it needs guardians and defenders. Also, many towns and cities are unaware of these grants or lack the political will to seek them out, so some publicity is warranted.
- HUD's Housing First policy initiative is under serious legislative attack despite being, once again, an extremely successful program to date. The Trump cabal must be opposed on this matter, and Housing First must be protected meaningfully from these assaults. This is not the time to be cutting off support of individual home ownership at the knees.
- In general we need to combat false narratives about housing reform. Often programs that exceeded their goals by enormous margins - Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHVs), HUD's "House America Project", the VA's internal version of "Housing First", the WH-led Continuum of Care program - are falsely described as "failures" in the popular press, in stark contrast to the realities of their success. In cases where housing inequality is already being meaningfully addressed, there needs to be a stronger counter-narrative advanced against dishonest and disingenuous attacks by a mass media market that makes more money off of perceived crises than real and lasting solutions. Otherwise, you get mass defunding and refusal to participate in programs that are not only known to work, but indeed have been working for a decade or more.
- Power to the cities. Ultimately, these national level solutions can only go so far. Cities and metropolitan regions need to be proactive in their efforts to address housing inequality, and state governments need to adopt the humility necessary to support these civic level initiatives without attempting to control them. There needs to be a lot more trust exercised here, because San Francisco's housing market does not resemble San Bernardino's, does not resemble Fresno's, does not resemble Topeka's, does not resemble Baltimore's. Local agencies and polities that DO possess data and a plan need to be lifted up by state and federal agencies, not ignored or actively undercut in furtherance of some other political goal. This is a problem across the board, and constitutes one of my consistent personal frustrations with the Democratic Party, which engages in crisis vote merchanting almost as fervently as the Republicans traffic in crisis creation.
I would like to re-iterate that the above are not intended as a smoking gun solution to end all homelessness in all places. That isn't possible or realistic, and cities, regions, and countries vary considerably in the specific problems and barriers they face. The single best thing you can do if you wish to address homelessness in your community is to get involved at the civic level, and approach the problem with enough humility to listen to the advice of those who are already in the trenches rather than assuming that your favorite news agencies have told you all you need to know about the homeless.
