Homelessness

My understanding of the homeless situation, confirmed by people who actually work in the streets with the homeless, is that there are three major groups of those who are homeless—those who are circumstantially (and temporarily) homeless through loss of job, divorce, or domicile, those who are homeless mainly due to substance use and addiction, and those who are homeless mainly due to mental illness.  (Many of these have both substance and mental problems.)  Also, included in the latter two groups are some who prefer being homeless to having a permanent house or home, usually to avoid the daily grind and responsibilities of being a permanent part of any group.

Those who are circumstantially homeless need specific material help—a place to sleep, money for transportation to interview for a job (or maintain a job), proper clothes for job interviews, help finding possible jobs, perhaps moving expenses to another state where the right job is available, etc.  We are reluctant to help these people because we are used to expecting everyone to do these things for themselves, without realizing how difficult it is to do these things while homeless.  If you’ve lost your job, your clothes, and your car (and have no savings, like so many other Americans), how are you to find the cash to remedy any of this (particularly when we have trained Americans to spend all their money consuming, so that few have any savings to fall back on?  Finding another job did not require so much of us in the past when things were simpler, but now everything is more complicated, and there is a much greater need for some fall-back ready cash.  My proposal for a “job for every person” above speaks to the help that I believe government should provide (which, by the way, in getting people back to being tax payers, benefits the rest of us directly).

Those who are homeless due to addictions need help with addiction.  There are public and private programs for this purpose but not enough of them—especially not enough of them for those without money.  Also, this help takes time, and during that time, these people need a place to live and help in regularizing their lives and escaping the chaos that addictions have brought to them.  I will support development of additional helping facilities (recognizing at the same time that if a person really prefers substance use to normal life, we cannot help him or her).

Those who are homeless due to mental illness have serious mental illness—psychoses, untreatable depression, or mania.  We do not have enough public clinics to help these people, and most of the clinics now focus on maintenance (medications), while local governments give just enough cash help to survive but not thrive.  We have given up on the seriously mentally ill (SPMI or SMI) becoming any more than peer-helpers to other mentally ill persons and do not expect them to become tax payers again.  I will support providing more treatment facilities for them (and providing government-supported jobs that can provide motivation for them to do more).

Some believe that giving everyone a place to stay is the answer to all three of these types of homelessness, and certainly having a place to stay would be a great help to many homeless, but it does not in itself solve addiction or mental problems, and these will require perhaps a doubling of our professional helpers to assist with these problems.  The greatest block to low-cost housing in our towns and cities is the refusal of other citizens to live near the currently homeless (“not-in-my-backyard”).  Perhaps those neighborhoods who refuse to live next to recovering persons and homeless should pay a special tax to help maintain helping agencies.

Helping those who are homeless and do not want to have a home if it will mean participating as normal citizens in our society is a tougher problem—one that will not be solved by providing housing.  Some simply don’t want to work and prefer existing by scrounging, but many are unable to be normal citizens due to their life experiences, addictions, and/or mental illness.  Helping these will require helping them to adjust to the many demands required of us “normal citizens” (such as following social rules and getting along with everyone around them).

An additional concern to keep in mind is that as our businesses move toward more automation and require increasing amounts of prior experience and expertise of hirees, the more homeless we will have.  There are only so many starting-level, no-expertise job for this growing segment of society to fill.

I will press for establishing and maintaining the addiction and mental health treatment programs needed to actually make a difference and for funding for transitional housing for those needing the stability of housing help.  This will be costly, but our response will show just how serious we are as a country about solving the problem.