4. Shelters are a humane solution to homelessness.
When homelessness became a national epidemic in the 1980s, reformers responded with emergency shelters that were meant to be temporary havens. But as homelessness became more entrenched, so did shelters: Their capacity more than doubled by the late 1980s, then again a few years later, and then again by 2000. Along the way, they became institutionalized way stations for lots of poor people with temporary housing crises, including those avoiding family conflicts, leaving prison or transitioning from substance-abuse treatment.
Large shelters are notoriously overcrowded and often unruly places where people experience the ritualized indignities of destitution: long lines for bedding or a squeeze of toothpaste; public showers; thieves; conflict. Many people have voted with their feet, and as a result, street homelessness persists.
Shelters may be the final safety net, but that net scrapes perilously close to the ground. To be in a shelter is to be homeless, and the more shelters we build, the more resources we divert from the only real solution to homelessness: permanent housing.
Researchers and policymakers are newly optimistic about the prospect of ending homelessness. For two decades, the goal of our homeless programs was to first treat people for their myriad afflictions (substance abuse, say, or illness) and hope that this would lead them out of homelessness. Now, the attention has shifted to the endgame: Get people back into housing as quickly as possible, the new thinking goes, and the treatment for everything else can quickly follow -- and with greater benefits.
People who haven't had a private residence in years have succeeded in these new "housing first" programs, which place the homeless directly into their own housing units, bypassing shelters. Rent is subsidized and services are provided to help these tenants maintain their housing and be good neighbors.
According to HUD, the government has funded more than 70,000 such housing units since 2001. Meanwhile, the number of chronically homeless nationwide has decreased by a third since 2005, to 112,000.
The Obama administration's new Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing program takes a similar approach, giving people suffering temporary housing crises modest cash and service support, allowing them to avoid shelters or get out of them more quickly.
The cost of these programs is partly offset by reductions in expensive hospitalizations, arrests and shelter stays by the chronically homeless -- to say nothing of the moral victory a society can claim in caring for its most vulnerable.
