What on earth does the Suez Canal have to do with homelessness? That might be the question you are asking yourself. However, if you have followed our blog for any length of time, you probably know that this is not the first time we have found important lessons regarding the fight to end homelessness embedded in contemporary issues.
Historically, there have been two approaches to dealing with the modern homelessness crisis that mirror more general approaches to dealing with poverty in America. The first approach is what we refer to today as “housing readiness”.
This traditional approach, practiced by almost everyone in the homelessness sector in the first two decades of the crisis, posits that homelessness is largely attributable to personal failures of the individual. Therefore, the solution to homelessness is to help the individual take responsibility for their choices, and through a rigorous program of self-improvement, become once again “housing ready” like the rest of us. These programs had many requirements for entry, and many more requirements that needed to be met to stay in the program.
This approach had several flaws. The biggest flaws were that it never really worked for a majority of those experiencing homelessness, and the worse off you were to start with, the lower your chances were of graduating from the program. However, no one could think of an alternative, and this approach resonates with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” attitude of the average middle class American.
Eventually, someone decided to try something else, that someone being Dr. Sam Tsemberis, “father” of Housing First. Housing First is both a program and a philosophy. It turns the traditional model on its head. It posits that homelessness is largely due to larger structural problems in our society. Therefore, the solution to homelessness is for us as a society to take responsibility for the results of our choices and ensure that everyone has rapid access to an exit pathway from homelessness.
Under this approach we do not set up barriers or conditions for obtaining or keeping housing beyond what we expect from ourselves. All we ask is that those exiting homelessness into housing abide by the terms of their lease and meet periodically with a case manager. And we offer them services tailored to their needs and their situation to help them keep that housing. The best part? These programs work on average for about 85% of people, though in Dallas, we usually hover around 96%.
I know, I know, what does this have to with the Suez Canal? Here is the thing about most structural problems. Though they are huge, they are very easy to miss. How many people outside of the homelessness world know that today’s homelessness is a modern phenomenon that has only been with us since the mid-late 1970s? How many people know that up until that point there was an abundance of cheap housing options, especially single resident (or room) occupancies (SROs)? And how many of us realize that these cheap housing options were mostly eradicated in that very period that today’s homelessness crisis began?
The Suez Canal with its effect on world supply chains is much the same. How many of us, before the crisis, had any idea how vital this artery was to the entire world’s commodities’ markets? How many of us knew that 12% of world commerce came through this canal halfway around the world? How many of us realized that the entire world’s supply of oil for one day could get stuck behind one ship?
None of us blamed anyone operating one of those other ships for failing to get around the one ship that was stuck. None of us blamed those trying to dislodge it for not working hard enough to move this huge ship out the way. We all understood, looking at the picture shared here even without it being memefied, that this was a structural system problem that demanded a structural system solution, and that only by working together as community (in this case a world community) could it be solved.
This is why, in today’s homelessness arena, communities that are successful in reducing homelessness are those that take responsibility and attack this problem as a structural problem, one that only they as a community working together can fix. This is why we are doing the same here in Dallas and Collin Counties, all of our member organizations as a Homeless Collaborative and all of us here, at MDHA, as its backbone organization. There is simply no other way. We hope you will join us in this effort and help make homelessness a social ill of the past. Together, we can do this.
