By KIM BELLARD
Congratulations, America. We have another new record, albeit a dismal one. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there are now 653,000 homeless people, up 12% from the prior year. As one can imagine, compiling such a number is problematic at best, and no doubt misses a non-trivial number of such unfortunate people.
“Homelessness is solvable and should not exist in the United States,” said HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge. Well, yeah, like kids without enough food, pregnant women without access to adequate prenatal care, or people without health insurance, yet here we are.
HUD says that the increase was driven by people who became for the first time, up some 25%. It attributes this to “a combination of factors, including but not limited to, the recent changes in the rental housing market and the winding down of pandemic protections and programs focused on preventing evictions and housing loss.” As with the recent increase in child poverty, the lessons that we should have learn from our COVID response didn’t survive our willingness to put the pandemic behind us.
Like poverty, homelessness isn’t inevitable; it is a policy choice. Sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of the must-reads Poverty and Evicted, told Ms. Lowrey: “Think of lining up families who qualify for food stamps and only one in four families gets to eat. That’s exactly how we treat housing policy today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because, without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.” Accordingly, Ms. Lowrey asserts: “affordable housing for everyone, everywhere, and the end of homelessness should be the policy priority now.”
We may not be able to end homelessness, but we can and should stop treating them as undesirables and start treating them as people – people who first and foremost need a place to live.
Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor
