At first, this seems very socially liberal and at odds with a Conservative party kind of thing until you look at the financials and realize it actually is fiscally very conservative- it saves a ton of money on policing and medical care.
All that said, have you been to Medicine Hat? That's not a place with a very relaxed 'homeless lifestyle'. It's -15C here in Toronto today, and we're like 700km further south. In the west coast of the USA, you can survive on the street without the air itself killing you.
So what's the political argument against it?
1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.)
2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.)
3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:)
4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs.
I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems.
(source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)
This is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, proponents of the 'HF creates slums' theory tend to fall into one of two camps:
- functionally blind
- landlords
The functionally blind (note that I'm not saying 'sight impaired...this is by design) tend to argue that homelessness is okay...as long as they can't see it. Often, they live in cities like mine (Regina, Canada) where for 3-4 months of the year, it is too cold to sleep outside. Because of this, homelessness in these cities often involves a mishmash of shelters, crashing on various couches, and sleeping in malls during the day/hanging out in coffee shops at night. The rest of the year, whether through policing or civic design, 'homelessness' consists of guerilla camping in parks and other out of the way places. HF does tend to make homelessness more visible. Programs generally start with a marketing campaign designed to attract landlords, then word gets out on which buildings house the formerly homeless.
And, that's when the functionally blind start to complain. Often, the complaints take the same form as people who protest against halfway houses opening up in their neighbourhoods. They print up flyers decrying the 'death' of their neighbourhood, and show up at city council meetings. Later, they seize onto minor crimes (ie - my sister's former roommate's cousin's veterinarian had her purse snatched two blocks from that building) to justify their beliefs.
Landlords are in a more precarious situation. Since HF does not have its own housing, it absolutely requires the support of landlords. Some HF programs are not terribly well funded so, while they guarantee that rent will be paid, they often require some form of discount to be financially feasible. That alone is a strike against them, at least from the perspective of business.
But, if you are a landlord and are willing to work with HF, you have a difficult choice. Realistically speaking, HF candidates have issues which create homelessness in the first place. Candidates often suffer from severe mental illness, chronic addiction, and health problems. They aren't always capable of basic upkeep in suites. So, do you offer up, say 15 suites in one building to the program, or do you spread the suites around multiple buildings. Some landlords have reported that the buildings that house HF candidates are more difficult to rent out and that the rent for all of the suites has to drop accordingly. This is one of the biggest reasons that landlords drop out of the program!
- end racism.
- end childhood sexual abuse.
- decriminalize all drugs, treat addiction as a health problem and make addictive drugs available under provincial prescription drug programs.
- invest billions of dollars into mental health care.
If you think you can accomplish any of the above, I'll not only vote for you, but I'll quit my job and work for you (for free).
Traditional anti-homelessness programs kind of stink because they work in stages. Candidates have to pass a stage in order to move onto the next and if they fail, they move backwards. The problem with this is that it is hard to stay motivated to stay sober if you live in the same dormitory style shelter where you used to live, where all of your goods are subject to theft, and where you are surrounded by people who are high/drunk on the substance you are addicted to! The other problem is that if you stumble, you generally move backwards and end up even further away from independent housing.
I am Canadian where a striking percentage of the homeless population (especially in the west) is aboriginal. In Canada, we have something called The Indian Act which provides certain benefits to 'status Indians'. One of the benefits it provides is that income earned on a reserve is not subject to federal income tax. The big problem with this is that reserves are often horrid places with absolutely no employment and substandard housing. The second biggest problem is that the Indian Act also works to make the concept of status extinct, but that's far from the point. As an example, the reserve where I spent the first two years of my life (I am not aboriginal, but my Dad was in the RCMP) is more like a concentration camp than a community.
I argue (and this pisses just about everyone off) that one way to cut down on aboriginal homelessness would be to amend the Indian Act so that any money invested on a reserve (provided that the venture employed a certain number of people) would trigger an immediate tax credit and not be subject to any Federal capital gains taxes. Further, I'd argue that any profits earned from these ventures should never be subject to any form of Federal income tax.
Because aboriginal people with status (aka 'status Indians') do not pay federal income tax, if you provided strong tax incentives to investment, you can see a route through which manufacturing in Canada has a similar cost structure to manufacturing in either Asia or in our NAFTA partner countries. Employment on reserves would encourage aboriginal people to move back to their communities, provide more pressure to the federal government to fix the woeful state of housing, and ultimately give people an easier route to gainful employment. Studies have shown that when you bring aboriginal people back into their community and their culture, their mental health/addiction outcomes improve.
Alas, the odds of that happening are likely equivalent to the odds that I will be drafted in the first round of the next NHL draft. (I am 38 years old and don't know how to skate).
So, I think that HF is about the best policy that we have. Though, I would like to see it amended.
Purely from a business point of view, I would like to see HF provide more services (financial and otherwise) to the landlords that participate. I argue that landlords who participate in HF often put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. Therefore, I would like to see strong municipal and federal tax incentives for their participation.
Further, I argue that HF programs themselves could do a far better job of moving their candidates into jobs that they can do. There is no way in hell that many of the people I know who would be HF candidates could ever work in a traditional 'job', but I would like HF to do a better job of exploring non-traditional options.
For example, I am heavy into street papers and think that panhandlers are likely the greatest marketing force on the planet. When a friend and I launched our paper, we gave out a few hundred copies to two highly trusted friends in hopes of doing a nice soft launch to work out the problems. The 'soft launch' generated absolutely massive media coverage - we were featured in every print publication, more than half of the radio stations, and 2/3 of the television stations in our city. It would have cost me thousands of dollars to get that kind of coverage at a PR firm. More interesting, our advertisers had tremendously high conversions, to the point that within two months, our advertisers were offering to pay more to keep their competitors out!
One good friend of mine who sold the magazine those first days suffered from schizophrenia and had spent most of his adult life panhandling. In one very upsetting conversation, he remarked that he always believed that people were following him around with microphones and he wasn't sure, but he was absolutely convinced that this time they were real.
Or, I'm reminded of my friend Scott, an insanely talented artist who buys canvases, paints them at night in his shelter, and then sells paintings on the street.
Consequently, I would argue that HF could turn into something of an incubator for street businesses. Everyone, even the homeless, has an incredible array of talent and often it is more a challenge of how to monetize the talent without contributing to the underlying problem. I can foresee all sorts of businesses from online/bricks and mortar art galleries, to graffiti remediation businesses, to clothing design companies, to full blown guerilla marketing teams emerging out of HF programs. The HF of my dreams would give candidates the option of learning basic building maintenance by providing ultra low cost maintenance/building management services to the landlords who participate.
I also tend to argue that HF needs to do a better job of attracting a more diverse set of professionals to run their programs. Traditionally, they draw from social workers whereas I tend to argue that they should be drawing more from business people. Startup founders in particular have so much in common with homeless people that it would be a match made in heaven.
The conservatives we have in the US are so extreme they make even the ones in Canada look very, very liberal. A proposal like that here would induce horrible rage and kicking and screaming about "the free market" and "entitlements". Someone would be called a communist. Maybe impeached. Conservatives run on platforms of removing programs that help the poor, not starting new ones.
There's a reason the blog poster addressed his open letter to the chief of police, and not to a local homeless charity with a check attached. He doesn't want to help solve the problem, he just wants to whine about it really loud to powerful people without doing any work or spending any money and hope it goes away.
it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government.
Do you have examples of effective non-government solutions? Looking at my own country my impression is that government is far more effective than charities (in America or elsewhere) on this issue.
So you pack housing developments with addicts, crazy people and criminals. Next step is they start attracting their friends, and all of the sudden the development turns into a crime-ridden shithole. The families living in these development get screwed.
It also causes other disruption. NYC is adopting this type of policy, so people on waiting lists or in housing they don't like are flocking there from all across the region, and are receiving enhanced benefits. (It's pretty difficult to prove that someone is bona-fide homeless.) Meanwhile, the chronic homeless people who can't hold it together are still addicted, still in need of mental healthcare and are still living under an overpass.
Seriously, this is a human issue. We somehow look on these individuals as if they were almost non-human, yet they have powerful stories and painful experiences.
I'm not doing a good job at that but I try to make it a point to reach outside of my fully-customized bubble, and engage other people who could use some respect and human dignity. My impact is minimal in terms of numbers but chatting for 10 min with someone on the street can really make their day. Who knows, if it happens enough, that person may regain the courage it takes to get back in society and reach out to services that are more competent than I at helping in the details.
quit disparaging people who disagree with you. attempt to understand their real motivations rather than harping against some lame stereotype (that doesn't even make sense). that's the way to progress and solving our problems.
