The results are clear: the more money we spend on this strategy, the faster the homelessness crisis grows.
In this file photo a dog sits chained to a fence at a homeless encampment in Ontario. Over the past decade, homelessness in California has been rising at alarming rates. California already topped the national list in 2014 when it had a homeless population of 114,000, but according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s count, that number has grown to more than 180,000—nearly a 60 percent increase—and an astonishing two-thirds of these individuals are entirely unsheltered.
The Housing First philosophy contends that the most effective way to address homelessness is to offer people immediate, no-strings-attached housing. Service providers forfeit their grants if they make housing conditional on, say, sobriety or participation in treatment programs. In theory, supportive services are voluntary, but in practice they are almost non-existent.
We did not always treat permanent dependency as the best-case scenario for homeless individuals. When the Clinton administration first established the continuum of care system for homelessness services in 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development that “the goal of the comprehensive homeless service system is to ensure that homeless individuals and families move from homelessness to self-sufficiency, housing, and independent living.
We can accept that there will always be people who require permanent assistance, but state policy should not treat this assumption as universal. Even if we could end homelessness by permanently warehousing people, we should strive to do better.
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