Homelessness – What Will Be the Tipping Point?

Homelessness – a topic that continues to be a major concern in the region as the annual Point-In-Time-Count reveals a nearly 19 percent increase in the number of people living on the streets year-over-year.

Additional funding and new city and county initiatives have been introduced to address the problem, including Housing Our Heroes, a landlord-outreach collaborative that aims to house 1,000 homeless veterans within a year, and Project One For All, which seeks to provide long-term housing and care to 1,250 mentally-ill homeless people in the next two years. But despite these efforts, San Diego continues to lag behind other cities around the U.S. – like Houston and Central Florida – in solving homelessness.

Why? Because we continue to follow policies and procedures that are outdated, waste time and money, dehumanize our homeless neighbors and only serve to further exacerbate this social problem.

What Doesn’t Work

It takes time, coordinated efforts and proven best practices to solve homelessness. But frustrations have boiled over, and the desire for a quick fix has led to pricey and ineffective anti-homeless tactics throughout the county, with the city and local businesses recently taking steps to further marginalize our neighbors without a home:

Installing jagged rocks near Petco Park where the homeless once slept – to the tune of $57,000.00; implementing massive sweeps downtown that require people remove their tents – often the only protection they have; constantly issuing encroachment tickets which can’t be paid. These are just some of the methods being employed.

The Hillcrest Business Association also went so far as to hire security to remove the homeless from its core business district, cutting outdoor movies and advertising from the Hillcrest Farmers Market to fund the endeavor.

Constantly displacing people, depriving them of sleep and turning them into criminals for simply trying to survive does not lead to a person that is easier to house and employ.

Aside from being inhumane and building bad will, these actions do nothing to solve the issue, and actually make it worse by wasting funds that could be put towards methods that have been proven to work.

What Does Work

First, the city and homeless service organizations need to look at what’s worked in cities across the U.S., and develop balanced and clear policies that will keep our neighborhoods safe and clean for everyone – including our homeless neighbors, businesses and residents – while we work on real solutions to get people off the street.

Second, we have to focus our investments on what is proven to work and abandon the ineffective and inefficient practices of the past that have helped lead us to this point.

Permanent Supportive Housing – an evidence-based housing intervention that combines non-time-limited affordable housing assistance with wrap-around supportive services – has been proven to help end homelessness across the country and our local data is showing the same success. Specifically, Permanent Supportive Housing has been shown to keep over 90 percent of residents housed, and Rapid Rehousing – which places a priority on moving a family or individual experiencing homelessness into permanent housing as quickly as possible – has shown a more than 70 percent success rate.

Compare these numbers with the less than 40 percent who are successful using transitional housing, and approximately 20 percent who transition from emergency shelters to permanent housing, and it’s hard to understand why we’re still wasting money on these approaches that simply manage the issue, instead of solve it.

Lastly, we need to realize that solving homelessness does not mean that new people will no longer become homeless. We will still see people who fall into homelessness on our streets. It is our choice whether to let them linger in homelessness for long lengths of time or take the humane and cost effective choice of helping them resolve their crisis quickly.

This article was written by Michael McConnell who is a business owner, philanthropist and advocate who serves on multiple local and regional homelessness advisory committees.