What if I had said to you, while you were out of power during the storm of mid-February, that it was your fault? What if I had told you, during the first few weeks of the pandemic when you were searching for toilet paper and paper towels, that the reason you could not find them was because you just did not try hard enough? What if I told you that the reason you were not yet vaccinated against COVID-19 was that you were too lazy?
Well, aside from the fact that this would make me really unpopular at dinner parties, you would not have to be an expert in epidemiology, energy grids, or supply chain management to know that I was just deeply deeply wrong.
Though most of us prior to the 2020-2021 disruptions in our lives didn’t know what ERCOT was, never gave a thought to just-in-time supply chains in the paper products industry, and certainly had never heard of mRNA vaccines, we all understand that what has been happening to us is due to systems that are far out of our control.
In fact, it is only because of deep failures at the system level, that we are even aware of how fragile many of these systems are, and how the slightest flaws in system design and governance can have far reaching, even catastrophic, effects on our lives.
And yet, how often do we overlook how similar systems affect others, most notably, those experiencing homelessness? That man is homeless? It must be his fault. That woman is in a shelter? She did not try hard enough. That family lost their home, and do not know where they will be sleeping tonight? They are just lazy.
Do we really need to be experts to understand that the fact that at any one time about 4,500 people in Dallas and Collin Counties and about 570,000 people in our country are homeless, cannot be attributed to these easy excuses?
Such deeply catastrophic outcomes reveal to us a truth that we have been avoiding for all too long. The system, though it delivers adequate housing to many of us, is catastrophically flawed. By necessity, if we want different outcomes, we need to fix things at the system level.
We must attend to system design and system governance, and we must never stop attending to these. Much like in the realm of physics, every system if left to its own devices, will degenerate into a more disordered state.
This is why we have initiated a system transformation in our homeless rehousing system. This is why we have invested and continue to invest so much so much time and effort into system design. This is why we have so carefully redesigned our system governance.
We are done tinkering around the edges. We are done investing in solutions that do not attack the problem at the system level. We are done kicking the can down the road. It’s time to end homelessness in Dallas and Collin Counties. Let’s get to work.
