Ending Homelessness Together, Once and for All

Sounds absurd, right?

Homelessness, the great humanitarian crisis of every major city, gone, ended, solved, now and forever.

In 2014, I moved to San Francisco and entered a world where stepping over the bodies of people sleeping in front of my building was a daily event—occasionally inconvenient and always sad.

Like most of us, I was raised to respect everyone I meet and, since I'm from Minnesota, to be polite to them as well. That "Minnesota nice" thing you may have heard about is helpful in every aspect of life.

But unlike most people, I've experienced homelessness, the end result of years of addiction and bad behavior.

It took years to hit my bottom and years to recover, but eventually I did, not by pulling myself up by my own bootstraps (a ridiculous concept) but through the combined efforts of county workers, friends, employers, and other sober people. I was useless for the first year, but by the second year, I could hold down a job as a night security guard. A gift of some professional clothes started me on the path to an executive position at Hilton. I was terrible at that job, totally unprepared to manage 100 employees, but I did my best and made a graceful exit.

Many years, jobs, and careers later, I moved to San Francisco and met people on the streets who had more education, a better job history, long-term sobriety, strong families, and religious ties but who had lost their housing through any of a number of personal crises.

And I saw endless versions of how my life could have turned out.

I am not traditionally educated and barely made it through high school. I tried college but left with a 1.65 GPA and wasn't invited back. I've had over a dozen jobs in a half-dozen careers, and I still succeeded by every measure I know. I was a bad roommate and a lousy friend, and god help you if I owed you money because you'd never see me again and it took me years to undo these bad habits.

Still, today I live a privileged life.

When I think about what made my path different, the one word that comes to mind is "opportunity."

People offered me jobs and I took them, even if I was unqualified (see above). I learned how to work—how to show up early, stay late, and never ask for a raise. I learned the gift of staying small, in the middle, to be of service to my employers and, if I had the chance, to my employees.

The basics of living a spiritual life at work.

But there are many people who are better than me at everything who didn't make it—who didn't get the opportunities I did—and after years of watching, listening, and learning, I think I know a solution or at least what that solution looks like.

As there are many paths to homelessness—job loss, health crisis, divorce, and domestic abuse, to name the four most significant—there are also many paths to reclaiming the dignity and agency required to move forward—maybe as many paths as there are people. These are four of the steps on that path that I think made the difference for me.

Housing

The first step was stable housing. A friend I went through treatment with helped get me a one-bedroom apartment I could barely afford. I slept on the floor on a found mattress and worked my 11-7 shift as a security guard. I got a little aluminum camp kitchen set from Sharing and Caring Hands where I ate sometimes, and a friend loaned me a couch and a 5" B&W portable TV. I was set.

It was a beginning, at least. A safe place to sleep meant the world to me and made everything else possible. Sadly, there just isn’t enough affordable housing today. By some estimates we’re short 3.8 million units of housing overall and even building those would barely meet the needs of people who can afford ‘market rate’ housing (we’ll dive more deeply into this in a future post). Without housing, the institutions that serve the unhoused struggle to meet even basic human needs on a daily basis, forget building the community, resilience and teaching the personal and job skills that might help the unhoused succeed.

Without access to affordable housing, most of our efforts are just busy work, and even our sporadic successes are not enough to stem the tide of newly unhoused people.

That number grows every day.

Community

What held me together through everything was community. Belonging was built into my path through a recovery program, specifically through a relationship I forged in those early years that gave me 23 years of emotional stability, a sponsor.

I'm not saying everyone on the streets would benefit from a recovery program (overall, it's estimated that 10% of humans have addiction issues), but everyone benefits from community. Maybe that goes without saying, but I don't see it provided for or encouraged on the streets. Too often, I've seen people shuffled from place to place without regard to their need for companionship and community. That's changing, but we need to put as much focus on building strong communities as anything.

This is where those neighborhood organizations I've worked with excel. Organizations like SELAH, LAN4N, HousingMV, HoFoCo, and a handful of others. They're on the streets working directly with people experiencing homelessness, and they exist because people, entire neighborhoods, couldn't bear to see their unhoused neighbors suffering. They're creating community and opportunities for others to help and be helped; this is the core of the solution I believe will end homelessness.

I'll end this by mentioning this means the WHOLE community—business owners, homeowners, housed and unhoused neighbors—everyone. It will take all of us to do this.

Health Support, Mental, and Physical

I can't stress this enough, not just the support that long-term involvement in my sobriety has afforded me but also the support I’ve received from all of the other mental health issues that have troubled me as well. Depression was probably genetic but certainly made worse by my chemical use and the death of most of my friends in the mid-’80s. The ups and downs of relationships, jobs, and family stuff—If I hadn't had access to therapists, reading materials, and, eventually, medication, I know my life would be much worse today.

I read recently that when surveyed, people living on the streets self-reported 45% needing mental health care. It might surprise you that a similar study at UCSF reported that 48% of the youth they studied said the same thing. Not as much of a difference as you'd expect, right? I know that COVID played some part in the numbers from the UCSF study but it’s still clear that people need more access to mental health support. There are so many layers to this that I can’t address them all here, but one of the best support modalities I know of, talk therapy, isn't generally available to people living on the streets. They can get all the medications they need (and a few they probably don't), but talk therapy is almost non-existent. However, one organization I've worked with, Sidewalk Talk, is bringing its solution to the streets. Seeing their teams of trained listeners at events has always been a joy.

As for healthcare, if you’re poor in the U.S., you definitely can’t afford to get sick. It’s estimated that 25% of personal bankruptcies are because of medical bills. Getting sick is expensive and if you’re living outdoors, you’re going to get sick, age faster, and receive less care, that’s just a simple fact. MediCal and other programs only provide basic care. We need a different healthcare system and I’m going to have a few guests and guest bloggers who know this stuff better than me write about healthcare reform in future posts. For now, suffice it to say that better access to physical and mental health care would benefit everyone.

Opportunity

Without the opportunities I've been given, things would undoubtedly have turned out worse or at least differently. I'm always careful when I bring this up because I'm a white male, and my privilege is evident to me in the ease and mobility of my work life. I've had periods of unemployment, but they always led to much better jobs than the ones I'd lost. I'd like to thank my higher power for that, but honestly, race probably played the biggest part.

That said, opportunity is the key to long-term recovery from economic ills like homelessness and hunger. For example, right before COVID, the LA Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity reached out to me about a new program they were launching to support entrepreneurs. They recognized (as I have been telling people for years) that people living on the streets are often natural entrepreneurs and if given the opportunity and support afforded to almost every other economic class in our society, there's no reason to believe these entrepreneurs wouldn't succeed just as often as everyone else.

Opportunity changed my life, and I've seen it change the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of others. But I've also seen that when people have no dignity, no agency, no housing, no community, poor health, or even a few missing teeth, opportunity passes them by.

Summary

The four points above are hardly debatable, but the "how" always trips us up. How do we offer people without resources the same quality of life that those of us with resources take for granted? That would require us to treat them like human beings first, which is not baked into our current basket of solutions. Somewhere we lost the ability to treat others like we would want to be treated. We lost the capacity to treat others with dignity. And that will have to change before we can truly begin to effectively end homelessness, poverty, disaffection, and loneliness.