August 19, 2010
Between 2.3 to 3.5 million Americans are experiencing homelessness and it is estimated that the recession will force another 1.5 million more people into homelessness. The 2010 Update of “Without Housing – Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures” by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). This updates its 2006 report. In “Without Housing,” WRAP sets forth a timeline of modern-day homelessness, the past three decades of policy failures, provides a look at present-day realities, gives grassroots approaches on how to get involved, and possible solutions.
WRAP concludes that ending homelessness in the United States will require a serious re-commitment by the federal government to create, subsidize and maintain truly affordable housing. It notes that the root cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing.
WRAP traces the cause of the present housing crisis to the Reagan administration’s elimination of affordable housing funding and the dismantling of the social safety nets created by the New Deal. As a result, in the 1980s, under Reagan’s policies, homelessness reemerged throughout the United States.
WRAP notes that recent homeless policy has focused on a series of underfunded, patchwork efforts that tend to pit sub-populations of people experiencing homelessness, service providers and advocates, against each other in battles for meager funds. Rather than addressing homelessness by providing housing options at all income levels, homeless policy in the United States has devolved into byzantine formulas to count the number of homeless people and determine whether or not someone “qualifies” for homeless housing and services.
Unless we make a massive commitment to the construction and subsidization of affordable housing, homelessness will continue to grow no matter how many case managers or outreach workers we fund. We may alter the face of homelessness, or shift its demographics through preferential outreach to particular sub-populations, but we will not change the underlying cause.
WRAP recommends that the United States government provide more new affordable housing, better maintain existing public and subsidized housing, place a moratorium on the demolition of any public housing without an enforceable guarantee of one-for-one replacement with a right of return, develop constructive alternatives to the criminalization of homelessness, and ensure that all decisions impacting tenants in public and subsidized housing is made with full tenant participation and input.
WRAP argues that until we recognize housing as a human right, we will not end homelessness in the United States. We cannot solve the systemic causes of poverty until we recognize that quality education, economic security and health care are all essential human rights.
The primary message of the report is that building truly affordable housing – and ensuring the human right to a home – will end the crisis of mass homelessness in the United States. WRAP offers a grassroots approach to getting involved, and possible solutions to what has become the everyday crisis we know as homelessness. Change is desperately needed. Millions of people without shelter are depending on it.
The Hunger Site
August 20, 2010 at 3:53 pm
I am sure WRAP would welcome comments about its report. Contact info can be found on WRAP’s website http://www.wraphome.org
August 20, 2010 at 10:34 am
The WRAP missive certainly should be read.
While the report’s focus is on the lack of affordable housing; some other factors that grow homelessness are mentioned but minimized: the outsourcing of jobs overseas, the freezing of the minimum wage, cuts in the social safety net and expansion of military spending. More “affordable” housing is of no use if people lack good stable jobs that allow them to afford it. (The so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis was in part caused because people were lied to and told they could afford to buy their homes when they could not.)
Perhaps the WRAP report could have clarified what “affordable housing” is.
That being what it may, the report is full of vital facts and insights for anyone seeking solutions to the problem of homelessness in America today.
I hope more people will bookmark David Beall’s sfhomeless.net wiki to keep up with issues regarding homelessness in San Francisco– and to contribute to it– as it too provides much information about how homelessness impacts us locally and what resources are available to combat it.
http://sfhomeless.wikia.com/wiki/San_Francisco_Homeless_Resource