A good friend of mine told me last week that he had read that Utah is ending homelessness. He read it all over the Internet.
Oh boy, I thought to myself.
After reading more and talking to advocates around the country, it was clear that the public was being bamboozled. Utah was not on the verge of ending homelessness, regardless of how many liberal bloggers might think so. In fact, overall homelessness in Utah has grown in the past decade.
Utah is having success at ending chronic homelessness. What’s that? No, it’s not a super strain of marijuana named after homeless people. It’s a method developed by the federal government as part of their 10-year plan to end homelessness. The focus was on housing individuals who have been homeless for more than a year.
According to our sister paper in Seattle, Real Change, who actually followed the numbers, Utah’s baseline homeless population grew by nearly 1,300 people from 2007 to 2013. What decreased was the “chronic” homeless population.
It’s all so confusing, right? It’s just one example of both the mainstream media and citizen journalists believing the hype on homeless issues without fact-checking. The reality is our country has a long history of putting Band-Aids on the problem of homelessness and calling it a new plan to end the problem.
Since 1980, the federal government has had four different plans to end homelessness. Within those plans, comes any number of changing requirements, community planning processes, data requirements and priority populations that will be served.
What they don’t tell you is that during that same time the federal government has defunded low-income housing by more than $40 billion.
Currently, the Obama administration and federal officials are saying that by 2015 the U.S. will end veterans’ homelessness. Uh-huh. It’s my educated guess that after spending 15 years engaged in war overseas and currently being involved in any number of shadow campaigns around the world, that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to veteran homelessness. I hope I’m wrong.
Slogans and campaigns to end homelessness are good for both re-election campaigns locally and nationally, and serve as a mechanism to rally nonprofits and the general public toward creating political will to tackle the problem.
It’s not so much that the plans are flawed. It’s the fact that local communities are handed down mandates by state and federal officials and then given crumbs to solve the problem. It’s a joke.
Local governments are then forced to carry the load. Depending on the local government, the political climate on any given day and the hard realities of seeing thousands of people sleeping outdoors, communities are then caught between public opinion, outside forces and having to manage the problem instead of solving it.
It becomes a cat-and-mouse game between local business interests, non-profits, law enforcement and the general public; using the homeless as a political football for any number of social ills. Compassion fatigue sets in and people start to really believe there isn’t a solution.
The result is criminalization in public spaces, mostly targeting the homeless and people of color, and competing interests among local nonprofits and politicians for funding and controlling the message of the day. Solving homelessness becomes political theater.
The great journalist Edward R. Murrow once said, “Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.” Unfortunately, when it comes to homelessness we have both the slogans and the solutions. We just don’t have the support from the state and federal government to prioritize the harsh realities of poverty in America.
Don’t get me wrong. We do need a plan, right? Well, of course we do. Housing in America is complex.
I’m not giving up and more importantly, readers shouldn’t give up. Being a critic is easy, but actually creating real change in the community is very real and achievable.
People experiencing the trauma of homelessness should not be punished for the shortfalls of a nation. We see it collectively, in the individuals and families who are unable to obtain housing. To ignore the problem would be catastrophic. We must continue on, because the reality is that housing does in fact equal opportunity, especially when there’s a safe place to call home involved.