Unhoused People Need More Than An Apartment Key

I was asked in a job interview once, “What phrase would you want to describe you at the end of your life?” The answer came to me instantly, “Some men see things as they are and say “Why?” I dream things that never were, and say, “Why not?” That’s a Robert Kennedy’s paraphrase of a line from George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, poignantly recalled by his brother in his eulogy.

Grandiose? Of course. Hopeful? Yes. I used the line when I ran to be a delegate for Jerry Brown (yes, Jerry Brown!) during the 1992 California presidential primary. I won and so did Brown in my congressional district. I thought of Bobby Kennedy then as a guiding light, selfless and something of a dreamer. Almost everyone who enters public service of any kind, left or right, could associate themselves with Kennedy’s eulogy and his brother’s speech that he quotes.*

All of this isn’t a conventional lead in for a post on homelessness, but anyone who has followed thus far realizes that indeed, if we’re going to reform housing policy in this country to help the people who need help the most, we’re doing to have to stop asking “Why?” and start asking “Why not?”

Why not tell the truth about “homelessness?”

I get it. If we say that homelessness is about drugs then we absolve the apparent inequities in the economy. And yes, if we impose requirements on people who are consuming drugs on the street as a condition for getting housing, aren’t we essentially consigning them to the streets? I’m with you. Harm reduction is a conservative principle, just as much as order is. As a conservative in the shadow of Edmund Burke, I prefer pragmatism over purity and patience over paternalism.

And to those who feel order unraveling, I agree, in some places it is. We’ve seen a shift away from enforcement toward tolerance and a preferment of self-determination over social norms. If we add potent drugs to this mix along with social distortion and economic uncertainty, some would argue we’ve created an underclass of zombies, lost and forlorn on our city streets seemingly both irredeemable and a threat to our wellbeing. Watching people suffer and create suffering is frustrating. “Can’t we make it stop?” people reasonably ask.

But c’mon, this isn’t just a housing problem. And jailing and forced institutionalization will have bad results and is unsustainable. The fact is that our fight over ideology has prevented us from addressing the deeper issues. The questions about why people are homeless, self-determination, social cohesion, and economics are all important and legitimate, but there needs to be a move toward what we know: people who are unhoused need more than just an apartment key. Comprehensive supportive services will be essential to helping individuals identify and sustain personal recovery goals, and achieving this is worth the investment.

We can’t make this commitment, however, when so many resources are being spent – tens of billions of dollars each year – to subsidize people who have incomes, cars, and are reasonably self-sustaining. Deregulating the housing economy would mean those subsidies wouldn’t be needed, and if we subsidized working people who needed help with cash, it would be far more efficient. Extra money would be well spent on the difficult task of both engaging unhoused people, offering them choices, and then providing the necessary scaffolding as they become self-sufficient.

I’ve proposed an idea based on value capture that would use public debt to raise the capital to fund these interventions then service the debt with the savings realized when people move off the street. Everyone could rally around this solution because it would use public credit as an investment, when success is achieved people are housed, the expense to the community is eased and ended, and then savings can be used to address other issues and invest in prevention. But to make something like this work, people have to move beyond ideology and look at math, both in terms of the first points I made in this series – deregulating housing, cash benefits – and that homelessness is a complex issue that includes but is not limited to housing funding.

* “Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.”