Homelessness Is Both Occasional and Chronic

I hope you're over the notion that homelessness is confined to some male drunks. In reality, this population includes many women, an increasing number of children, and many veterans. Sometimes people just have a string of bad financial luck that spirals out of control. This page gives you some perspective on the causes of the problem, and effective solutions, including establishing an SRO.

At the neighborhood and community development level, you can't afford to ignore the problem.

Dimensions and Causes of the Problem

Two trends have converged to cause the current homelessness problem in the U.S. Rental housing, or at least affordable rental housing, is in relatively short supply in many places. There is often a long waiting list (think in terms of years, not weeks) for public housing units. Single men especially who were living on the margin financially could find refuge in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels or places such as YMCAs or YWCAs. Those resources are disappearing. And in many cities the rental market is focused on young people who want luxury amenities, and older apartments that are torn down are not replaced with modestly priced housing.

Secondly, the poverty rate has begun to rise again, so somewhere around 13% of the U.S. population is estimated by the government to fall below the poverty line. Various estimates are that between 10% and 20% of the homeless population is employed, but minimum wage jobs don't pay for an apartment in many towns. Many employed people have only part-time work, and others frequently lose jobs because of lack of job-related or social skills.

Causes of individuals or families becoming homeless are as diverse as human fingerprints. But four groupings stand out:

1. Medical bills combined with lack of health insurance

2. Mental illness, which lowers employment opportunity and compounds the inability to take intelligent action on one's own behalf

3. Substance abuse leading to poverty, and then lack of ability to obtain effective treatment after becoming homeless

4. Domestic violence

Why It's So Serious: Housing Is Item #1

After working hard on low-income housing issues for several years, a friend once asked why I was so passionate about this issue. It all comes down to the fact that none of us function very successfully without a home base.

Think of the times in your life when you've moved from one residence to another. Were you your most alert, organized, well groomed, well behaved self during that week or two? Now magnify this by being homeless for five months or seven months, not uncommon experiences.

Not only is there no place to stow your stuff (the shopping cart with the garbage bag in it probably doesn't include a safe place for your resume and your diploma), but also you begin to face the new elements of fear for your safety, fear of negative confrontations with neighbors or law enforcement, and fear that your hiding place will be found out or purloined by others.

In some parts of the country, climate extremes compound the problem.

Some of you are thinking no one is really homeless, because everyone can go to a shelter. That's not really so. In larger and colder cities, on some nights there aren't enough beds for the entire homeless population. In major metro areas, shelters often limit the length of time one person can stay, and they often lock people out during the day. Shelters also may be infested with crime, lice, roaches, and bedbugs, not to mention of course loud and obnoxious drunks or mentally ill folk who sneaked in while acting normal.

The homeless also complain of weapons and various forms of intimidation, not to mention complete lack of privacy, in the shelters. Like every human society, shelters have their own pecking order and their own rules of the road, so people who can’t conform are left out (in the cold) again.

Short-Term Solutions and Relief

Prevention is the best program, with three essential elements:

1. Good information about housing opportunities. Major cities need housing hotlines for those who are having difficulty finding housing. If you're marginal in income, you may not have as much access as more prosperous folks to telephones, newspapers, and transportation--the elements that middle-income people use to find housing. In small towns, or even at the county government level in more rural parts of the country, social service agencies need to go out of their way to be competent in keeping track of available reasonably priced housing.

2. Financial literacy at all levels. Communities should make sure that public schools teach financial literacy early and often. People get themselves into impossible situations often because they don't know any better.

You'll think I've lost it, but I really believe financial literacy training for adults should be mandatory in certain situations. If you need government housing assistance or need to be in a homeless shelter for even a night, you should be offered some training in basic household finance. If the shelter is government-supported, maybe you should be required to learn about managing money.

3. Community retention and provision of affordable housing. A community should fight to retain whatever affordable housing it has. While the federal government theoretically doesn't allow public housing units to be destroyed without replacement, that doesn't seem to happen in some cities. And public housing can go vacant for months because its environment is so scary that no one wants to move in, or simply because the units haven't been repaired since the last people trashed the last place when they were evicted.

But beyond public housing as such, a community can look for opportunities when obsolete motel types go out of business, college dorms or student housing become vacant, and so forth. Community development dollars should go toward refurbishing these facilities into decent if modest housing allowing short-term leases if need be.

Especially anything that still resembles an SRO downtown should be rescued and rehabbed, concentrating on making sure electrical, HVAC, and ventilation systems are updated. Since the advent of microwaves and mini-fridges, a very livable single room can be devised. Make the rooms energy-efficient and well-repaired, allow occupants to choose their paint color, divide the smokers from the non-smokers without compromise, install any soundproofing possible, and provide good laundry facilities.

Most of all, an SRO needs a social worker, or two or three, living on-site. This is an ideal learning and living situation for the graduate student or new grad. They can monitor for mental health needs, make sure people take their meds, make sure addictions and relapses are addressed, and teach life skills. If the facility is large enough, a job coach could live on site as well. It might sound daunting, but it's do-able if a city has the will. Some people may never be able to advance beyond the SRO, but with support, they can live independently, stay off welfare, stay clean and sober, and support one another.

Ideally, a community also should provide an adequate number of well-run shelters with supportive daytime social service programs. The kids need to be able to go to school, and the preschoolers need to have their own agenda while mom or dad is out looking for a job, going to school, or getting their heads together.

There aren't too many shelters that offer the comprehensive programming that's really needed to provide a base of stability, albeit temporary.

Solutions for Chronic Homelessness

This is short and to the point: As a society we can't afford to ignore mental illness and addiction among poor people any more. (And mental illness and addiction will make you poor, unless you're a celebrity or something.) It leads to too much crime and general disorder. We have to treat these conditions aggressively, frequently, and for as long as possible.

Refer to our community mental health page to offer some ideas on how the community can foster better identification of people having problems and offer more effective programs. The community poverty page is helpful also.

In terms of addiction, we could begin with a broader education of children and youth about life coping skills, and then of adults. People need to be rewarded for starting to become self-aware enough to understand what drives them. And then they need straightforward and sufficiently rigorous rehab programs.

As a sidebar it's important to note that our policy as a society has been not to even try to heal addictions, unless people have money. We lock people up if their dealing or using happens to end up right under our nose; otherwise we pretend it isn't happening. Prison doesn't cure addictions, and it incubates some. Let's quit the drug incarceration insanity and concentrate on treatment, teach coping skills, and set up ordinary life so it's not quite as stressful.

Systemic Solutions

Long-term, the solution for homelessness requires increasing housing supply in affordable price ranges, in addition to dealing with the domestic violence, mental health, substance abuse, and financial illiteracy issues. We need to design more attractive affordable housing , learn sophisticated strategies for mixed-income-housing within our neighborhoods, and generally de-stigmatize accepting housing subsidies for a short time.

By the way, most us live in subsidized housing. I take my mortgage deduction on my income taxes; don’t you?

Return from Homelessness to Housing

Go to Useful Community Development home