All Together Now: Changing Society to End Homelessness

This is the text of a speech I gave at the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless on May 9 (2007).  A lot of background knowledge is assumed that the audience here might not share with Coalition audience, so please feel free to ask questions!

Imagine this scenario:

One of your downtown streets has a big pothole in it.  It's been growing for years, and other than a lot of new hires in the auto repair industry, nothing much has been done about it.  Public pressure is rising.  Finally, the city government acts. They do a serious study, and they find that people who have pothole accidents have a lot of problems. Nearsightedness, ADD, alcoholism... and that although the towing and auto repair industries have been booming for years, they haven’t decreased pothole accidents.

With a lot of publicity (and not much money) the city starts a Pothole Accident Prevention Program (PAPP). Towing companies and auto repair companies that wish to do any business with the city are required to refer the drivers in pothole accidents to counseling, so that they will get treatment for their problems and avoid potholes in the future.  The most lucrative contracts and tax breaks go to the companies whose customers go the longest without another pothole accident. None of the companies are given any authority to fix the pothole.

The auto industry goes along with the PAPP because it’s politically impossible to get money to fix potholes right now, and at least this way something is being done.  And isn’t it good to help people who have problems like nearsightedness, ADD, and alcoholism?

In real life, of course, the city would just fill in the pothole. Right? A city that had a high occurrence of potholes would try to make its streets more pothole-proof – right?

Homelessness is a hole in the street.  The people who fall into that hole need help to get out of it.  They have problems that need to be addressed.  All of that is necessary and worthwhile action.  It will not end homelessness, any more than auto repair and driver education will end potholes.

We all know homelessness hurts homeless people.  Some are beginning to realize that homelessness hurts all of us.  The full reality is,  the same system that creates homelessness creates most of your problems, too.  You work hard to help people who often yell at you because they can't yell at the people who are really abusing and frustrating them, you accomplish something each day but the scope of the problem keeps getting worse; then you go home and wrestle with the bills and worry over how you are going to pay for your son's dental care or your daughter's education.

Today:

1. There are more people homeless now than when all the "Ten Year Plans" to end homelessness began.

2. 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.

3. More people are dying outside, homeless and without shelter, every year.

4. Violence against homeless people is increasing.

5. With all the new low-cost housing created, we have a net loss.

6. The wealth gap is widening, the middle class is vanishing like buffalo, job insecurity has become the new norm.  

7. Health care costs keep rising, along with the numbers of people who can’t afford health insurance.   

8. One reason I am frustrated today is that at a Roots of Poverty confer I attended years ago, incarceration was identified as one of the roots of poverty, and to this day, nothing has changed. The U.S. has the highest number of people incarcerated than any other country in the rest of the world, and it’s giving Communist Red China a run for the money for the world record.  We’ve already got their official numbers beat.  Let’s see if we can beat their unofficial numbers!

9. Our social fabric is cut to shreds.  Lack, or loss, of a social network is the most basic reason a housed person becomes a “homeless person.”  The lack, or loss, of a sense of community, of responsibility to our neighbor whatever her religion, politics, or even personality, is the basic reason the black hole of homelessness exists for her to fall into. 

The homeless person who is at the bottom of the housing market is also at the bottom of the clothing market, and he doesn’t go naked, does he?  No.  THAT would offend our morality.

Forty years ago, people had problems.  We had alcoholics, drug addicts, mental illness, domestic violence, people with physical disabilities and severe illnesses who were not able to work, people getting out of prison, people getting out of the hospital, people getting out of foster care – all of the reasons given for why people are homeless today.  We had a fraction of the numbers of homeless people that we have today.

What has happened over the last forty years?

1. The real income (purchasing power) of 60% of our population has gone down.
2. The federal government has invested less and less money in housing.  Since 1996 they've spent $0.
3. In private housing development, developers seek the most profit out of every square inch of real estate, resulting in the continual destruction of low-cost housing in order to put up high-cost housing.
4. The cost of health care has continued to rise, while less and less of the population have any form of health insurance.
5. The numbers of homeless people have skyrocketed.
6. The stigma of homelessness was created.  Unemployment insurance was won by a campaign of working people and out-of-work, often homeless people, allied.  Most housed people at that time had no problem seeing themselves in the shoes of someone who was homeless.  Now “homeless” is a separate class, and homeless people are to be treated differently than anyone else is treated. 

What happened in the last forty years was, we created homelessness.  In order to end it, we have to reverse what we did to create it. 

Current community efforts to help homeless people should continue.  When we have a flood, we have to get people to high ground, get them fed and keep them warm. 

People will always have problems.  There is not one human problem that isn’t easier to solve when you are in safe, clean, secure housing.  There is not one human problem that isn’t harder to solve when you’re homeless.

My husband has a doctorate in math, and I checked this with him to make sure I'm right: If you have 100 people and 80 houses, at one person per house you will have 20 homeless people. If you move all 20 of those people into houses, you will displace 20 currently housed people, and still have 20 homeless people. If you improve the health, income, and education level of all the people currently homeless, you will have 20 healthy, wealthy, and well-educated homeless people.

I also checked this math with him: If you start with 20 homeless people, build 20 new houses and tear down 30, you will have 30 homeless people.  The only thing he found wrong with that is that in real life, we are not losing housing at one-and-a-half times the rate we are creating it, we are losing housing at four times the rate we are creating it.

Building more affordable housing would be a step in the right direction.  What we really need to do is rebuild the middle class.  And just as labor and unemployed were allies in the campaign to create unemployment insurance, you -- what is left of the middle class and the people who are very poor and who are homeless -- need to be allies in building a society that will not have a big black hole in the middle. 

• We need to decrease the wealth divide. "Redistribution of wealth" is a dirty term to many people, 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. A labor force with strong bargaining power was one of the forces that built America's middle class. A strong middle class is the backbone of the country and the mainstay against homelessness.
  
  
• We need to change the housing market.
  • Make it profitable to create affordable housing. Some methods could be: tax incentives, subsidies, federal housing money.
  • Make it unprofitable to destroy affordable housing. Some possible methods: tax penalties; a legislative 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.
  
  
• Let's 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.

Speaking of responsibility: 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.