The Obvious Answer to Homelessness—and Why Everyone’s Ignoring It [TheAtlantic.com]

Jane Stevens 12/30/2211:38 AM

^{Danielle Del Plato}

When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.

But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.

You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them.

Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.

In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.

To continue reading this article, go to: https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...crats-causes/672224/

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Leisa CaravelloMember

Excellent read, thank you for your insight!

1/3/231:50 PM

Max TaylorMember

One key problem is the cultural narrative about homelessness.

Far too often, the issue is that people (including policymakers and decisionmakers) believe in the myth that the homeless did it to themselves. Rather than rightly understanding that the cause is a societal one, they frame it as a personal failing issue. Such a framing justifies failure to act, since it seen as though the homeless are "doing it to themselves" and have empowered choice to not live this way or be in such struggle.

I would encourage PACEs Connections to challenge such myths. You already do, but I would still say the trauma-informed movement could do so even more loudly and more clearly than they already do.

We need to be more vocal about failed systems, lack of effective resources, lack of financial and social capital to build better resources, lack of involvement of service users in design of new resources, etc.

Why are we looking only to data scientists and professors instead of asking the homeless themselves what they think about the situation and centering them in the discussion and solution-making?

1/2/2312:43 PM

Frank Sterle Jr.Member

Homeless people are susceptible to being written-off as disposable life by mainstream society. Even by an otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nation, their worth(lessness) is measured basically by their 'productivity' or lack thereof. Those people may then begin perceiving themselves as worthless and accordingly live their daily lives more haphazardly.

12/31/223:36 PM

Robert OlcottMember

In my own situation, at age 15, I witnessed my Mother's [aided/abetted] handgun suicide, followed by my father's subsequent remarriage less than two months later, and my difficulties for me 'adjusting' to the 'new family'. Shortly after, a 'home/school counselor at my high school facilitated my moving to a state-run youth home. I changed High Schools and continued residing there until the middle of my Senior year, when I obtained part-time employment... I was subsequently ejected from the youth home, and began 'Couch Surfing' [during the winter], until an opportunity to move into an apartment in my own name availed me. I did not realize, as an 'Emancipated Minor', that without a 'Credit Rating' in my own name, I might have difficulty obtaining gas and electric service, as my new high school offered no "[Adult] Financial Literacy" courses at that time... I think Jane's article, and the research she cited, are 'Right on the Money' though ! ! !

12/30/221:10 PM

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