12/19/2022
When someone becomes homeless the instinct is to ask what tragedy happened to them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford ? Why didn't they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious.
When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy landed them where they are now. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didnāt they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precariousāif homelessness is about personal failure, itās easier to dismiss as something that couldnāt happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.
But when you look at the big picture, determining individualized explanations for Americaās homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in big cities? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than Bethlehem? However our shelters are becoming overloaded as we see so many new faces this year filing in from surrounding "Superstar cities". That fact disproves my point, by why wouldn't they? Word on the street is that Lehigh Valley Shelters are comparable to the Taj Mahal. Especially when youre coming from NYC. Where I might add has no affordable housing. I'd venture to bet half the working population drives an hour from outside the city to get to work.
Examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, itās all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In a game musical chairs, enforced scarcity of chairs is self-evident. The stronger, faster child is usually in the last chair, housing scarcity is more difficult to observeābut itās the underlying cause of homelessness.
Why is this so? Because these āsuperstar cities,ā as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machineāand they all need homes to live in, most cant afford to live inside the city. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructureāhousingānecessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.
When we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, itās all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless.
Itās not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway
I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They donāt. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.
With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but itās not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East, West Coast and the Midwest.
America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluthāand yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, itās simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.
Homelessness is best understood as a āflowā problem, not a āstockā problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homelessāthe problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness.
So Should the Lehigh Valley be looking to build more affordable housing or looking for placement for more or new shelters? I know both are taking place. Why them isn't one hand not speaking to the other. It seems Michael Baker believes permanent shelters with a mix of emergency shelter is the answer. This is a fantastic idea. Rome was not built in a day however what happens with what is needed compared to availability until then? I fully understand what is available currently. Shelters are bursting at the seems. Turning people away is just not right.
