A Resilient, Long-Term Approach to Addressing Homelessness
Tent cities and their demolition are often in the news these days. It’s not surprising that during a year of enormous economic challenges, more and more people would be forced into homelessness. Nor is it shocking that many city residents and leaders would desire to get rid of the evidence. But kicking needy people out of parks and highway underpasses will do nothing to solve the problem of homelessness. Instead, we should see it as a sign that perhaps—finally—it’s time to address the root cause for good.
What would an incremental, fiscally responsible and local approach to solving homelessness look like?
During the last decade, I worked for federal and local government housing agencies (in Washington state and Washington, DC), as well as served at multiple homeless shelters and managed a rapid re-housing program (in Milwaukee, Wisconsin). What follows are my own views, deeply informed by Strong Towns principles (although other members of the Strong Towns movement may approach things differently).
Understanding the Different Types of Homelessness
It’s important to begin by distinguishing between “chronic” and “temporary” homelessness because these two types of situations demand very different responses. Someone experiencing chronic homelessness, as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has been consistently without a home or repeatedly falling back into homelessness over the course of a year or more, and lives with a serious mental health challenge, addiction or physical disability. These are folks who may never be able to work a job that pays enough to cover a standard one-bedroom apartment and may not be able to safely live on their own anyway.
People who are chronically unhoused are often who we picture when we think of “homelessness,” but the majority of homeless people are much more hidden because they are experiencing “temporary” or “transitional” homelessness. They’re young adults crashing for a few months on a friends’ couch, families bouncing around shelters, or couples sleeping in their car.
For these people, homelessness often has a more economic cause, as opposed to a health-based cause (although health may be related). It could be that a father loses his job at the same time as his wife gives birth to their fourth child, and the costs are too much to manage. Or a woman with two young kids leaves an abusive relationship where her boyfriend was the main income-earner in the family. Or a young man who has been piecing together part-time low-wage work gets kicked out of his parent’s house and can’t afford a place on his own. For so many Americans, it only takes a small crisis to push them over the edge into a situation of homeless because they simply don’t have the savings or family safety net to fall back on in a time of need.
How do we respond to chronic homelessness?
In cases of chronic homelessness, many experts agree that something called permanent supportive housing is the best long-term solution. This sort of housing is typically an apartment building of sorts where residents may live in their own spaces but have access to on-site counselors, support groups, meal programs and other services that can help them live with their health challenges. Permanent supportive housing is not going to be provided through the market, but through government or a nonprofit agencies (and even nonprofits are likely getting government funding in some fashion).
You may have your own opinion about whether public money should be spent on something like this but, suffice it to say, if we built our cities in a way that generated sufficient tax value per acre instead of squandering our land and spreading out our neighborhoods, we wouldn’t have to worry about this question so much. I hope we can all agree that we’d rather have our neighbors housed (and not living in parks or empty lots downtown) than to have an extra lane of roadway—something our governments routinely spend tens of millions of dollars on without batting an eye. We could likely accomplish this goal of housing the chronically homeless for a lot cheaper than that highway, too, because, again the amount of people who meet this definition is fairly small—and most are already covered by programs like social security, Medicaid, and the VA.
How do we respond to temporary homelessness?
When it comes to addressing the approximately 75% of other homeless people who are in a temporary phase of being without housing, there is a lot more that can be done within the market, without government funding or large nonprofit programs.
Places for kids to sleep at a warming shelter run by Sheltering Silverton, in rural Oregon. At one point last winter, the shelter was home to three families with children. Image via Strong Towns contributor Hilary Dumitrescu.
Housing flexibility and availability play a huge role. Single people and adult couples made up 87% of the homeless population on a given day in 2019. For these folks to be able to access affordable housing, we need permission to build more tiny homes, accessory dwelling units and single-room occupancy buildings. We also need more flexibility around roommates and boarders, which is probably the quickest path to securing housing for people who need it within our existing homes and apartments.
On the other side of the spectrum, we also need more large apartments, and permission to legally house bigger families in smaller spaces, if needed. For example: Occupancy limits in many states only allow a certain number of people per bedroom of a house, so a family with two parents and five children would need at least a three-bedroom apartment—even if the children were young and could easily share a bedroom or sleep in the living room. Such crowded arrangements are not ideal, of course, but they’re far better than living in a car or staying temporarily in a shelter, only to have to move on a couple weeks later. Many of the families I remember working with in my rapid re-housing program in Milwaukee had three or more children and struggled to find a space to rent that could accommodate everyone together on a limited budget.
(I’ll add briefly that another barrier to housing for people experiencing short-term homelessness is requirements around credit scores, background checks, no previous evictions, and demands for large security deposits and multiple months of rent up-front. If nonprofits, governments, landlords and property managers want to help people get into housing quickly in a manner that doesn’t cost millions and require a top-down response, these agencies and individuals can consider waiving strict requirements and providing one-time grants for costs like security deposits.)
Missing middle homes. Image via the Sightline Institute on Flickr.
Small scale developers and the missing middle housing they create play a vital role in providing affordable housing options. By fixing up and constructing duplexes, row houses, cottage courts and other modestly-sized residences that fit within traditional neighborhoods, small developers create opportunities for people of minimal means not only to secure housing, but also to live in places where they don’t need a car to get around, and may be able to access better resources, schools and jobs than if they were forced to live on the edge of town or in high poverty neighborhoods.
In sum, if your city wants to address temporary homeless, the most significant, long-term solutions demand that you get rid of the regulatory barriers that make development difficult for small-scale builders. This means getting rid of parking minimums, removing minimum lot sizes, loosening up on setback requirements and lifting the thousand little pieces that can crush any hope of basic, naturally-occurring affordable housing from being built.
A Resilient, Long-Term Approach to Addressing Homelessness
It might seem inadequate to propose all these small changes and permissions when we’re talking about a huge problem like homelessness. But, in fact, incremental improvement is the only way to ensure a lasting solution to homelessness—no matter who’s holding public office or which funding streams are flush with cash.
Think about it this way, if a nonprofit affordable housing developer comes in and constructs a massive new apartment building with the aim of housing every homeless person in a given city, that might be helpful for a little while. But what happens when that developer loses funding, or can’t afford to properly keep up their building? What happens when the needs of the population change? All of a sudden, hundreds—maybe thousands—of people have lost their stable housing.
Furthermore, a top-down large-scale solution just doesn’t make sense for a multifaceted challenge like homelessness. Think of all the different scenarios—some of which I mentioned above—that might lead someone to become homeless and all the different sorts of people that might find themselves in a housing crunch throughout their lifetime. Is one big building constructed in one style of development going to be able to accommodate the 75-year-old veteran in a wheelchair, and the family with four school-age children, and the young adult fresh out of college? I doubt it.
A far more resilient solution that can more readily adapt to the many different needs of unhoused people is to approach the problem from myriad angles and, overall, to remove the barriers that prevent different sorts of housing types from being built.
A city that permits a variety of housing types can adapt overtime. Perhaps the people with the biggest housing challenges right now are single adults who would be glad to rent an affordable room from a family or live in an efficiency apartment above a shop. And perhaps the greatest housing needs in ten years will be older couples with mobility issues who need ground-floor units or opportunities to move in with a family member. If our housing market is flexible and adaptable with permission to build SROs, allow lodgers and short-term renters, subdivide single-family homes into duplexes, and so on, then we can work to meet everyone’s changing needs.
But if our market only allows for very specific types of housing—large single family homes with driveways and garage, for example, or big luxury apartment complexes—then we can’t hope to provide housing options for different price points, abilities and family sizes.
At Strong Towns, we believe the first step to any new project or public decision should be to humbly observe where people struggle and ask them what they need. Tent cities could not be a more clear indication of struggle that is begging for a response, and they are an outward sign of the thousands of other people in every city whose homelessness is hidden from plain view.
So before your mayor gives the order to start bulldozing tent cities and forcibly removing someone who’s sitting on a park bench, ask whether you’ve taken all the above steps to clear the path for greater housing availability. These neighbors wouldn’t be living in tents or sleeping on park benches if they had any other option.
Go deeper with these articles on homelessness and affordable housing:
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