Photo by A McLin
For the past several year-ends, I have listed America’s top ten positive solutions to ending homelessness. Hope was in the air when those of us who have dedicated our lives to addressing homelessness saw new ways that jurisdictions addressed homelessness. So many innovative ideas. So much success.
The slogans were hopeful: Don’t manage homelessness. Rapid Re-Housing. Housing First. Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. Ending Homelessness will happen soon. They completely tore apart (and threatened) the establishment’s existing homeless system.
Forget shelters, they were simply bandages. Tear those shelter Band-Aids off quickly. The new, and improved solutions to homelessness were supposed to end veteran and chronic homelessness by the end of 2015 (A five-year goal was originally created in 2010, but the target dates have changed.). Numbers don’t lie. Best practices don’t lie.
I remember sitting in in one community meeting with a large group of very smart experts on homelessness, and was asked what would each of us do at the end of 2015 when we have ended veteran homelessness. The answers were diverse, but no one denied that this idealistic dream would not happen.
So here we are. The year of 2015 has ended. We were supposed to celebrate the end of veteran and chronic homelessness like it was New Years Eve in Time Square, Mardi Gras in Rio, and a world-wide housing warming party, all at once.
Instead, we are just thankful that a new terrorist attack didn’t occur during our NYE celebrations.
The year of 2015 was not really a good year for ending homelessness in America. Sure, some smaller cities proclaimed the end of veteran homelessness. But veteran homelessness in these cities numbered a couple of hundred – an amount that the federal government could easily house with housing vouchers, especially when thousands of vouchers are distributed throughout the country each year.
And from 2010 to 2015, homelessness indeed decreased. But the larger goal of ending chronic and veteran homelessness did not. And in the past year, in many large cities throughout America, homelessness increased. Visible homeless encampments seemed to be everywhere, not just in the urban core. Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Seattle… Cities with the largest homeless populations seemed to struggle.
So, do we give up? Or do we double-down?
If I were to fast forward to the end of 2016, here is what I would hope were the top five approaches to homelessness in America:
Realism Prevailed – In 2016, we became realists, not simply idealists. We know that permanent housing is the solution to homelessness. As a nonprofit housing developer, I know that building permanent supportive housing apartments is not cheap. (Let alone paying for subsidized housing rental vouchers.) But this year, instead of lofty unrealistic goals, we know that each year we could house 10 percent of the current (and newly) homeless population, so that in 10 years a true plan to end homelessness would be realistic.
Housing Became an Investment – We saw building affordable housing units as an investment to a better quality of life for people who were homeless, and for neighborhoods that struggled with homelessness. In 2016, we saw building affordable housing as an infrastructure investment, just like building public transportation is an investment toward better traffic. It is costly, takes years, encounters NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard), and is a constant year-to-year investment.
Balanced Strategies – In previous years, all of the resources for homelessness were directed toward the long-term goal of permanent housing. In 2016, communities realized that sometimes short-term solutions—like emergency shelter and street outreach—were needed to reduce street homelessness. So communities began to invest in more balanced approaches toward short-term and long-term solutions to homelessness.
Homelessness Redefined – In all of the messaging of ending homelessness, the most prevalent theme was housing. And rightfully so. Housing is the end-game in solving homelessness. You are not home-less, if you have a home. But we sometimes forgot about why people became homeless in the first place. Most people don’t just wake up one morning, and become instantly homeless. For many, if not most, homelessness was a result of poverty, or because of personal barriers that are prevalent because of poverty. In 2016, we redefined homelessness, not as a state of not having a home, but as an extreme case of poverty.
Compassion Returned – In the past several years, solving homelessness was defined as, “Good for business.” No one begging in front of the business district is good for profits. Housing people saves society money because people won’t use the community’s costly first responders system. It is better to house people, than having a row of tents in front of your home. But in 2016, we began to realize that homelessness is a terrible human and moral tragedy.
Solving homelessness is not just an economic issue, but a human issue. No matter what the financial cost.