Ending Homelessness
is a Moral Imperative By Ranen Miao, Staff Writer
In a 2013 report on housing insecurity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness nationwide-less than a third of what Americans spend each year on weight loss. Subsequent reports have found that it would cost less to place our unhoused neighbors in supportive housing instead of keeping them in the streets, that ending homelessness would decrease healthcare costs and hospital visits, and that guaranteeing housing would save thousands of lives. Today, empty homes outnumber unhoused people six to one. These statistics point towards a simple fact: as the Urban Institute puts it, “homelessness is a solvable problem.”
Despite this feasibility, the housing crisis remains salient. Over 35,000 veterans are unhoused, often hindered by economic hardships or the wounds of war ranging from traumatic brain damage to post-traumatic stress disorder. Numbers from the Department of Education indicate that 1 in 16 children under the age of six experienced homelessness from 2017-2018, making them more susceptible to emotional and behavioral problems, serious health issues, and worsened economic performance. Amongst unhoused families, the most frequent demographic are single mothers under the age of 27-disproportionately Black–with two children. Amongst these women, 90% have experienced severe trauma. Since the start of the pandemic, in the aftermath of what has been called a “tidal wave of evictions [and] utility shutoffs,” the housing crisis is only likely to get worse.
Why, then, has the United States continuously failed to act? While the answers are multifaceted, the simplest problems are the criminalization of poverty and misinformation about unhoused people. Paired with structural problems, ranging from racial discrimination to economic stagnation, our housing crisis is only doomed to worsen. However, by following in the steps of governments who have stepped up to end homelessness, ranging from Utah to Finland, the federal government can reverse these dangerous trends and end homelessness on the national level. What it requires is moral courage and investment.
Before addressing the solutions, we must understand the causes. A key problem is pervasive misinformation surrounding homelessness, and who unhoused people are. One common trope is that unhoused people are lazier or refuse to work; in contrast, many unhoused people work in low-paying occupations, with a survey of 27 American cities finding that 13% of unhoused people are employed. Employees at major corporations ranging from Amazon to Disney have reported experiencing homelessness, in large part due to low wages that lead workers to fall into desperate situations of poverty.
Even amongst unemployed unhoused people, the root of their unemployment is rarely a lack of motivation or drive; it’s a lack of resources. Unhoused people also often struggle to access self-care and personal hygiene facilities, including showers and laundry, which makes it more difficult to meet the professional expectations of cleanliness at job interviews. Without a home and easy access to a printer, it may be challenging to update, edit, and print copies of a resume on demand. Many unhoused people may have extended gaps in employment on their resumes, often the cause of their homelessness, which is viewed negatively by employers.
Many unhoused people also face substantial employment discrimination when they fail to present an address or put the address of a homeless shelter on resumes and job applications. A 2014 survey reflected that over 70% of unhoused people reported perceived employment discrimination from private businesses due to their housing status. A study by the Chronic Homelessness Employment Technical Assistance Center reaffirmed these perceptions, finding that providers working to connect qualified unhoused applicants to employers were “frequently challenged by pervasive negative stereotypes when approaching employers about hiring qualified homeless job seekers.” Employers frequently expressed concerns about unhoused people’s willingness to work, capabilities, reliability, appearance, cleanliness, and habits-factors that are often premised on stereotypes employers hold before even meeting applicants.
These barriers make chronic homelessness difficult to escape. Even if one wants to find a job, underinvestment and widespread negative perceptions preclude unhoused people from equal opportunity in the workforce. In the words of Jeff Johnson, an unhoused veteran in Washington D.C.: “A lot of people look down at people like myself. So I gave up hope.”
Social and structural struggles are exacerbated by policies which criminalize instead of supporting unhoused people. A 2015 report from the Institute of Policy Studies, titled “The Poor Get Prison,” found that “many U.S. cities have criminalized life-sustaining activities, such as sleeping, sheltering, sitting, asking for help, sharing food, and even resting.” 34% of cities have criminalized “public camping,” 18% have criminalized sleeping in public spaces, 24% have criminalized begging citywide, and 76% have banned sharing food with unhoused people. These policies have led to the rise of what the American Civil Liberties Union has called “modern-day debtors’ prisons.”
Incarceration solves no problems for society, costing taxpayers over $60 billion a year to lock up millions of low-income people in traumatizing, dehumanizing conditions. Factoring in the social costs of incarceration, a Washington University study found the true annual costs to be over $1 trillion. These criminal records, in turn, make it even more difficult for ex-convicts to find jobs, with research from Harvard and Northwestern indicating that ex-felons are half as likely to find a job when compared to applicants without a criminal record.
Time and time again, the housing crisis is met with punitive measures that fail to equip unhoused people with job skills, resources, and basic needs. The solutions we’ve tried have not only failed but worsened the economic and employment prospects for unhoused people, exacerbating the housing crisis.
Solutions to Tackle Homelessness
The European Union has already committed to ending homelessness in all of its member states by 2030: the United States ought to commit to the same. Policies like a Homes Guarantee will follow in the steps of Utah’s “housing first” directive, focusing on placing people in homes to meet basic needs. Quality housing that is “safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable” will ensure that no American will have to sleep in the streets in the wealthiest nation in the world.
Beyond meeting housing needs, the government should invest in programs that support unhoused people in the long-run. Policies like Representative Jayapal and Representative Meng’s “Housing is a Human Right Act” protect unhoused people’s right to vote and access personal documents, invest in medical and mental health care, incentivize non-punitive responses to homelessness, and authorize increased investment for affordable housing. These programs are so essential to ending homelessness that the National Coalition for the Homeless writes that “connecting people experiencing or at-risk of homelessness with job training and placement programs is critical to ensure they have the tools they need for long-term stability and success.”
Workers also deserve to earn a living wage so that full-time employees are not forced to rely on government welfare programs or be left without housing. Today, the average American worker making the minimum wage of $7.25 would have to work more than two full-time jobs to afford a 2-bedroom apartment. Raising the national minimum wage to $15 and indexing it to inflation would increase the wages of 40 million people and also lift over 900,000 Americans out of poverty. This is not a radical ask: had the minimum wage caught up with inflation since 1968, it would be $24 today. Politicians ranging from Missouri’s own conservative Senator Hawley to almost every Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 have supported a $15 minimum wage in some form. States ranging from conservative Florida to liberal New Jersey have passed $15 statewide minimum wages. Polling shows that almost 6 in 10 Americans support a $15 minimum wage.
These reforms are just a few basic steps to end the housing crisis that continues to plague our country. In the long run, our government must commit to serving all Americans: it is a moral atrocity that in the wealthiest nation in the world, hundreds of thousands continue to live unhoused and in the streets. Ending homelessness is not just a possibility: it should be our moral imperative to do so. It’s time to follow the research and invest in our unhoused neighbors we’ve neglected for far too long.