In the Midst of Plenty. Marybeth Shinn

Image: © Alessandro Conti/Getty Images

For Dave and Tom, with thanks for their love and support, and many dinners cooked along the way.

Foreword

      Though many dispute it, we have not always had widespread homelessness in the United States. I know this because my first job out of graduate school was working for a policy advocacy organization (National Association of Neighborhoods) in Washington, DC whose major concern was residential displacement. At the time, in the 1970s, cities were just exiting a period of intense urban change characterized by slum removal, highway construction, and urban renewal. Many affordable urban housing units had been lost. And our organization felt that more losses were to come. Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels that could be paid for by the day, or week, or month were vanishing. Multifamily rental housing (and other than in New York City almost all multifamily housing was rental) was disappearing—converted to ownership in the condominium boom of the 1970s. Cities were sitting on properties acquired through tax foreclosure, and with no resources to repair them they were being lost to the affordable market. In short, federal policies and social movements were resulting in a declining supply of affordable housing, and we feared that the result would be homelessness among very poor people. At the time, this position was viewed as alarmist in the extreme. There was no way, we were told by a prominent liberal senator, that the American people would tolerate widespread homelessness. It simply could not happen.

      If only he had been correct. When we started, if someone poor and down on their luck needed a place to live, one could probably be found that same day. If a day laborer spent his earnings at the bar instead of on the nightly rent for an SRO room, he might sleep on the street—for a night or two. But being homeless for weeks or months on end was nearly unheard of.

      All of this changed relatively quickly. Affordable housing continued to be lost, and starting in the early 1980s, the relatively robust federal subsidies to replace it were slashed. What had been a national surplus of affordable housing relative to the number of poor households that needed it had turned into a growing national gap. Around 1982, people started sleeping on the steam grates of Washington, DC and the cities across the nation, and homelessness emerged as a national problem.

Over the years since then, the nation has dug itself into a deeper hole on housing, seen homelessness grow and take hold, and moved from short‐term responses like “a hot and a cot” to more effective and sophisticated ones like permanent supportive housing. It has seen the number of people who are homeless recede—but not go away. Homelessness has settled in, and to many it now seems inevitable and unsolvable.

      But my experience leads me to believe that it is neither inevitable nor unsolvable in a nation with the resources and capacity of ours. And the knowledgeable and thoughtful authors of this book—two brilliant women who know as much as anyone in the country about the nature of homelessness and its solutions—have done a great service by taking us on a journey through the history of homelessness, how our responses have changed, and how we can end it.

      Chapter 1 describes the problem of homelessness in terms of the number, characteristics and trajectories of people who experience it. It describes how people use the various programs that constitute the emerging homelessness system, and looks at how this system has changed over time. It also reflects on the very important fact that homelessness is an experience that a wide variety of mostly poor people face: not a characteristic that defines a person.

      In Chapter 2 the authors explore whether homelessness is the result of personal characteristics or outside factors—or an interaction of the two. Here they make the case that housing affordability (a combination of the cost of housing and people's incomes), while not accounting for everything, is the primary driver of homelessness to which personal characteristics or experiences (mental illness, gender identity, criminal records, etc.) contribute. They examine how the U.S. experience of homelessness compares to that of other countries, and why.

      Chapter 3 looks at what it takes to end homelessness for people who experience it. If homelessness is defined by not having a home, then acquiring a home must be its solution. The authors describe two approaches to providing that home: long‐term housing subsidies for families and individuals whose problem is largely affordability; and permanent supportive housing (also referred to as Housing First and Pathways to Housing) which provides a long‐term housing subsidy plus services to people with chronic health disorders. They also look at what services people may need to maintain their housing. Chapter 4 explores how the various homelessness interventions are being brought together into homelessness systems, with the goal of coordinating resources to reduce and end homelessness. The authors point out the strong and weak elements of these systems and the challenges not only of delivering quality assistance, but delivering it to scale.

      Getting people who have become homeless back into housing is one way to solve the problem. Another is to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place. Chapter 5 explores this option, pointing out that prevention must first figure out who is going to become homeless and then intervene in a way that stops them from having that experience (the first being harder to achieve than the second). Housing‐focused prevention is examined, as is preventing homelessness for people exiting public systems such as foster care and criminal justice, and geographic targeting.

Finally, in Chapter 6 the authors present a more wide‐ranging vision of a social contract that would ensure all the people of our nation could afford decent housing. They propose various ways to accomplish this from both the housing and the income side. They also point out that making sure people have resources to support a decent standard of living would help to mitigate other problems such as racial discrimination. And they recognize that ensuring everyone has decent affordable housing will require significant political will: will that has not been present over the past 30 years of widespread national homelessness.

      Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri have provided us with a full‐fledged history of homelessness and what has been done about it—successfully and otherwise. They make a strong case that ensuring the most vulnerable people have safe, decent and affordable housing would probably cost less and certainly yield far more than allowing tens of thousands of people to become homeless every year. Their wise and educated voices provide a rational vision of how homelessness can be ended. It is to be hoped that this vision will be widely adopted.

      Nan Roman

      President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness

Acknowledgments

      Many people helped improve the quality of this book—its accuracy, its clarity, the force of its presentation.

      Four people were kind enough to read the entire manuscript, and they made helpful comments and corrections throughout: Paul Dornan, formerly responsible for research on homelessness at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); Lucie Khadduri, who lives in Olympia WA, a city with a recent upsurge in homelessness; Daniel Perlman, Series Editor for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, who provided encouragement throughout the book's long gestation period; and Nan Roman, President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Zach Glendening, Molly Richard, and Jason Rodriguez at Vanderbilt University read portions of the manuscript and provided comments that improved clarity and pointed to additional sources of information.

      Meghan Henry, project director for the Annual Homeless Assessment Reports at Abt Associates, commented extensively on Chapter 1 and confirmed numbers. John Miller, an experienced journalist, also read