Outline of Speech

The last article I published, "How Not to End Homelessness," is the opening of a speech I am going to be giving on Wednesday.  This is the outline of the speech:

• How not to end homelessness:
  • Treating homeless people's problems is right and good and necessary; it's NOT ending homelessness. Ending homelessness will take changing the system that created homelessness.
  • How bad things really are
    • There are more people homeless now than when all the "Ten Year Plans" to end homelessness began.
    • The emphasis in the Ten Year Plans is supposed to be on getting the most vulnerable off the street, but agencies are being rewarded for how fast they get people into housing, therefore they are focusing their efforts on those easiest to get into housing -- not the most vulnerable and hardest to serve. *More* of the people with the most severe problems are ending up out on the street late at night when all the shelters are full.
    • More people are dying outside, homeless and without shelter, every year. Violence against homeless people is increasing.
      
      
• How to end homelessness
  • The factors that keep people from becoming homeless
    • Dependable source of income
    • Available, affordable, appropriate housing
    • Adequate health care
    • Community; social support network
  • The condition of those four factors 40 years ago, when we had a fraction of today's homelessness
  • What happened to change those four factors
    • The increasing wealth divide, assaults on job security
    • Federal abandonment of housing programs; developers destroying low-price housing to build high-price housing
    • Rise in health care costs, decreasing numbers of people with any form of health insurance
    • Loss of community, fraying of social support networks
  • The result. We created homelessness. We can uncreate it by reversing the actions we took to create it.
    • Decrease the wealth divide. "Distribution of wealth" is a dirty term, so stop it: stop redistributing wealth from the majority at the bottom to the minority.at the top.
      • much of the accumulation of wealth depends on unpaid labor, like that of volunteers and mothers and even homeless people
      • a living wage is the minimum fair return for labor
    • Change the housing market
    • • Make it profitable to create affordable housing; tax incentives, subsidies, federal housing money
      • Make it unprofitable to destroy affordable housing: tax penalties; a cap on condo conversions
      • Get the federal government back into the creation of housing
      • A rising tide really does lift all boats, IF it rises from the bottom up. When everyone has housing, the economy booms.
        • Nobody really benefits from having large numbers of people outside, unsheltered, hungry, and sick. It's an accident that occurs as the result of systems that some people do profit from. Change the system and more people will profit.
    • Remember the potholes? Studying other cities that don't have potholes, to see what they are doing right? Countries that have a fraction of the homelessness that we do also have universal health care. It's time to bite the bullet and get it here.
    • Change the social attitude. It is NOT virtuous to promote your own gain without regard for any cost to others. We ARE responsible for, and to, each other.

How can you claim to care about a homeless person's future when you do not take care that he survives tonight?  When I am told that "increasing shelter now is politically impossible," I know that all the talk about caring for homeless people is lip service. If you care about somebody, if you value them as a person, you do whatever it takes to keep them alive. That means MORE shelter right now, not less. It means allowing Tent Cities or any other interim survival mechanism until there is enough housing for everyone.

There is no either-or, short-term solutions OR long-term solutions. If we care about each other, we keep each other alive tonight AND we work to make the future better for each other.

If we care about each other, we will continue to increase our efforts to take care of people who are now homeless, get them out of homelessness, and prevent other people from falling into the hole. And, because we care about each other, we will also change our economy, our housing market, our government policies, our health care system, and whatever else it takes, to eliminate the black hole of homelessness forever.