Homelessness looks very personal. And it is, in the way that all tragedies are personal.
While it’s a national crisis — created over generations by local and federal policies and perpetuated today by a lack of a nationwide vision — we ceased any forward momentum on a national level. Instead, we’ve lost ground. Now, after years of steady decline, homelessness is back on the rise.
This week we begin “Finding Home,” a series of stories that look at the big picture of our national homeless crisis, from our current administration’s stance to long-standing, nationwide issues that perpetuate homelessness today.
In this issue, we examine how the Trump administration has retreated from policies such as Housing First, an approach that has produced real results in ending people’s homelessness. The administration has also called for defunding successful grant programs local governments have used to prevent and end homelessness, build affordable housing and improve neighborhoods. Ben Carson, the head of the federal housing bureau, has questioned Congress on the federal obligation of funding these programs, citing local responsibility. The president himself has said in regard to addressing homelessness, “That’s not really the kind of work that the government probably should be doing.”
That fits if you take an individualist view of homelessness, along with education, health care, mental health, addiction, success and failure. It fits if you see economic and social opportunity as equally proportioned to all, leaving it only to the individual to squander. It fits if the world were turned upside down, which, you could argue in this year of 2020, it pretty much is.
But we all know that economic and social opportunities are not equally proportioned and never have been. Historically, the country’s systems for building wealth — education, employment and homeownership — were designed to favor white families and exclude people of color and women. Black people in particular were blocked from the same channels that allowed white families to escape poverty — policies of exclusion that have scarred generations to this day.
As a nation, our attitudes toward addiction and mental illness have been anchored in shame and criminalization, to the detriment of millions of lives crippled by criminal records and incarceration that contribute to homelessness. According to the National Alliance of Mental Health, a person with a mental illness is nine times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized — more than 2 million people each year.
Our free-market housing system, left to cater to the highest dollar, has over the course of the past two decades created a massive shortfall in housing affordable to people of lower incomes, people working essential jobs providing food and services with poverty-level wages.
Today, a global pandemic is poised to push more people to the streets. A shocking 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since February, and many are perilously close to losing their housing after eviction moratoriums expire. A study commissioned by the National Council of State Housing Agencies estimates that by the start of next year, renters will be between $25 billion and $34 billion behind in rent due to the coronavirus, and that more than 8 million renter households — constituting 20 million individual renters — could experience an eviction filing, a driving factor to people losing stable housing today and for years to come.
These will be tomorrow’s homeless, and our existing social services, nonprofit organizations and government programs will never be able to keep pace on their own.
The lack of vision on all these fronts costs us dearly, and the federal government is not only the appropriate authority but the necessary agent to change the course. This vision is costly, but a bargain compared to the price exacted on generation after generation for neglecting the bigger picture of homelessness and its causes.
We need national priorities for street-level interventions around addiction and mental health, one that supplants police tactics and correctional institutions as expedient, social salves, and instead focuses on real, long-term health care approaches grounded in science and compassion. Local communities have started this approach, such as the new Portland Street Response, built on the CAHOOTS model in Eugene. The federal government needs to make it a priority with political and financial support, not double down with the increased policing and criminalization this administration has pushed for.
We need substantial federal funding for programs that work, including Housing First initiatives that are proven to not just get people off the streets but build a foundation for recovery, employment, and the full breadth of opportunities of social engagement. To withhold housing for any idealized intention is a path to failure. We know how to design housing for all capacity, and all people. We need an infusion of national support to scale it up to the level of need we see on our streets today.
We need universal health care that doesn’t discriminate.
We need housing for all.
We need rent forgiveness and landlord relief, not just delays to an inevitable collapse.
And we need a real living wage.
All of this is what a country should expect from its national leadership. We have every right to demand it.
Local governments can only do so much. They need federal funding and initiative to push through systemic changes that will end homelessness and prevent another generation from being left to the streets. Business as usual doesn’t work anymore. This is personal.