Florence Graves and Hadar Sayfan recently wrote about “housing first,” a new approach to end homelessness. I include an excerpt:
In the past, society’s approach to homeless people with chronic health problems such as addiction has been governed by tough love: Stay in treatment, or you don’t get the opportunity for publicly supported housing. People who could not confront their addiction, the thinking went, could not handle an apartment.
But a new approach, called “housing first,” is gathering momentum. The idea is to target the most difficult cases — the chronically homeless who make up between 10 and 20 percent of the homeless population and spend years cycling between the streets, shelters, jail cells, and emergency rooms — and give them apartments without requiring them to get sober, in the hope that having a place to live will help them address their other problems. More than 150 cities or counties around the country already have programs of some kind or plans to initiate one, and last month the Massachusetts Senate Ways and Means Committee recommended doubling the size of a small pilot program in the state. If the pilot succeeds, proponents say it could force dramatic changes in homeless policy — and a recognition that the current shelter system, built on what they call a punitive moralism, has fundamentally failed.
The traditional ways of fight homelessness and poverty have failed, so we do need to find new ways. However, I fear giving people unconditional housing assistance. If we give people housing regardless of whether or not they try to fix their own problems, then these people have no reason to fix their own problems.
We cannot realistically expect a person to fight off addiction and fix their problems if they live on the streets. So, it does make sense to get them housing assistance first, but we need to end the assistance if these people do not do what they can to fix their own problems. If they stop attending treatment facilities, then we need to stop giving them housing assistance. Let’s focus our resources on the people who want to help themselves.