Want to end Homelessness? Here’s How
By: K Marlo Yost
Tags: Politics, Poverty, Social Justice, Homeless, Love

Without dwelling on how homelessness became epidemic, and what is short term vs. long term, I feel that the following suggestions applied together would eliminate homelessness. Not that any of them are easy, not that they aren’t immediately even possible, but we need to ask those in power to consider them. Not just once, but repeatedly, until the specter of homelessness is gone.

1. We have to get serious about affordable housing.

The average rent in Salt Lake City, where I live, is $1,235 for an apartment of just over 800 square feet. That’s more than what a person earning minimum wage makes all month. In order to afford that rent under the 30% rule, a single renter must earn more than $23 an hour, or $47,840. That’s a nearly unheard-of wage in Utah, even for college graduates. The median per capita income in Utah is only $29,775. So, people are routinely spending more than 30% of their income on rent alone, this puts them at risk for homelessness. This was before the pandemic, which has of course made everything much worse.

I met a lot of people during my time in the shelter who were only homeless because they became disabled, or they were on social security. The average income from disability is only $1,258. Social security provides an average of only $1,503 a month, depending on the lifetime earnings of the recipient. My wife, a registered nurse who was disabled through no fault of her own receives $1,173 a month. These are people who worked all their lives, only to find that Social Security or disability doesn’t provide anywhere near enough to live on, and housing assistance of any kind means spending at least 5–6 years on a waiting list. What can one do for 5–6 years?

It isn’t just Salt Lake City that income inequality and lack of affordable housing have become critical, it’s true of every metropolis in America.

2. The Minimum Wage must be raised.

President Franklin Roosevelt was campaigning for reelection in Massachusetts when a young girl rushed forward and tried to pass him an envelope, prompting a policeman to throw her back into the crowd.

Roosevelt saw this, however, and he told an aide to get the note from the girl. Her note read as follows:

“I wish you could do something to help us girls….We have been working in a sewing factory,… and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week… Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 a week.”

At the time, children were working from 10 to 14 hours a day, sometimes for zero wages, their only compensation being food and shelter for their families. Sweatshops and textile factories actually preferred women and children laborers at the time because they were cheaper.

That note lead to the establishment of the minimum wage, albeit over the fierce opposition of conservatives. Roosevelt later said on his radio program, “Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day tell you that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”

The minimum wage right now is $7.25 an hour, the same thing it’s been for almost 14 years, and conservatives still rage against any consideration of an increase. It should be noted that a full-time job on minimum wage provides for rent on a one-bedroom apartment in exactly ZERO cities in the United States.

When any person or family is paying more than 30% of their income on rent, they are at risk of becoming homeless. From that perspective, a person earning minimum wage can safely afford an apartment rent of around $345. Apartments that rent for $345 simply don’t exist, here in Salt Lake or in any other large American City. Millions of Americans face an untenable situation where up to 60–80% of their income goes toward rent, leaving precious little for food, transportation, medicine, and especially, emergencies.

Lower-income jobs very rarely provide adequate healthcare, and with so much income dedicated to rent, a single illness or injury can mean the difference between being housed or being homeless. I know, I’ve seen it firsthand.

3. The “War on Drugs” must be ended.

Why? Because it never worked. All the ‘war on drugs’ ever accomplished was to give the ‘land of the free’ the black eye of having more people in prisons than any other nation on earth. The war on drugs has turned us into the imprisonment capital of the world.

We need a war on addiction, not a war on drugs. At one time during the drug war, we were beginning construction on a new jail or prison somewhere in America every 2 months. Imagine if we had built new addiction treatment centers instead! What if we had made compassion a valid approach to the problem instead of brutality? What if we had focused on perfecting the science of healing addictions instead of simply tossing people into giant concrete bunkers full of cages?

Treatment centers are often derided for having a low rate of success, which is patently ridiculous when compared to the success of jails and prisons. Throwing someone in a cage and psychologically beating the humanity out of them very rarely, if ever, returns a better human being to society. Instead, we have built a class of people who can no longer get by because of the ubiquitous background checks required for a good job or an apartment.

We live in a nation so backward that we’ve largely legalized marijuana but provided no remedy for marijuana convictions! Far too many people are consigned to live on the streets for felony drug convictions related to marijuana.

4. We must help the mentally ill.

It’s incomprehensible to me the cruelty of today’s society with regard to the mentally ill. Since Ronald Reagan emptied the mental hospitals in the 80s, it has apparently become OK to just let people with mental disabilities languish on the streets. I really don’t understand this one. Most of the mentally ill that I saw while homeless seemed to be schizophrenic, as they were detached from reality. There are good medications to treat schizophrenia, but the streets and homeless shelters aren’t well suited to the management of those kinds of medications.

There were also autistics like me, our various communication difficulties contributing to our situation. Many if not most of the mentally ill among the homeless are perfectly treatable. American society must be more humane in this regard.

5.We’ve got to find help for foster children “aging out” of their homes.

When unfit (or imprisoned) parents lose their children to the foster system, those children often wind up homeless when they turn 18. I was actually surprised to learn that. All over the country, over 6,000 children a year have a birthday and instantly become homeless.

This is often an especially tragic result of the ‘war on drugs,’ as parents with addictions are imprisoned instead of treated, a tactic that destroys both lives and families at the same time.

The child welfare system is badly underfunded and poorly managed, and it shows. By the last year of high school, only 20% of foster children are proficient in English, just 5% are proficient with math and only 1.2% ever earn a college degree. More than half will experience homelessness or incarceration before their 26th birthday, and for far too many, that will become their permanent way of life.

6. We need more supportive housing.

Many among the homeless are not ready, for one reason or another, for their own apartment. This is where supportive housing has been extremely successful. Placing these people in supportive housing with on-site case managers can get them recovered enough to move out on their own. Retired hotels can work well for this purpose. This approach to the eradication of homelessness is actually more economical than letting people languish on the streets.

7. We need low-barrier apartments.

Anybody who has rented an apartment recently knows how many invasive examinations of their life are necessary before they can move in. Credit checks, background checks, income verifications, prior eviction checks, and whatever else the property managers want to know about you. It’s as if you applied for a job at the CIA. The problem is, many people are blemished enough even without this kind of scrutiny, and they still have to live somewhere. Giving them nowhere to go ensures that they will, in fact, go nowhere, and the next stop is either a shelter, a park, or a prison. Building a crueler society only ensures crueler people, and we’ve got to get past this. There have got to be carefully managed low-barrier places where people can live while doing what they need to in order to improve their lives. Low barrier apartments can be managed like supportive housing for some, just not as intensively.

Before the pandemic comes to an end, America will face the greatest housing crisis in its history, as 30 to 40 million people are facing imminent eviction. As it is right now, in almost every big city in America, there is already shock and dismay at the ever-growing number of homeless. Now just imagine the reaction when the number of unhoused in our streets people double, triple, or even worse in the coming months as millions upon millions of leases come due and there is no money to pay the rent. I’m not saying that it might happen, I’m saying that it will. It’s inevitable.

How many of the 30–40 million of those evicted will wind up homeless is unclear. But it will hit hard and last for quite some time.

Dealing with this will take money, there’s no way around that. We just might have to tax a few billionaires.