TRUE or FALSE: We Can Fix Homelessness
Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a book on the crisis of homelessness—and how to fix it.
(I thought so. Me neither until this month.)One of the avoidable mistakes in my career was reading too narrowly—just stuck in my lane (see Mistake #3 below). So when John Ashmen, CEO of Citygate Network, invited me to join a panel on “mastering mistake making” at his
CEO Summit in San Diego this week, I decided to read a new book on homelessness.
Whew! I urge you to read it also.
No Way Home: The Crisis of Homelessness and How to Fix It with Intelligence and Humanity will shock you! The book quotes Edward Ring of the California Policy Center who warns that
“a homeless-industrial complex has arisen in California that acquires power and profit by pursuing an utterly dysfunctional strategy” and “has grown into a voracious leviathan, devouring billions in taxpayer’s money.”If you’ve got any kind of a heart for every precious person created in the image of God, you must read this important book—with just 12 short chapters (138 pages, plus appendix and notes). It’s readable, but also upsetting. Last week I described
No Way Home to a colleague, “A journalist, a filmmaker, an economist, and an attorney…walk into a bar and have a robust conversation on homelessness in California.”
The four co-authors (not a typo: four!), Wayne Winegarden, Joseph Tartakovsky, Kerry Jackson, and Christopher F. Rufo, have street cred. As Stephen Moore notes in the foreword, this book project was organized by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI).
“The PRI team visited shelters, listened to those who work with the homeless every day, researched problems and solutions outside the state, and studied the methods of successful private organizations that are improving lives.” The result: “…a unique guide that state and local policymakers, social service groups, academics, and grassroots organizations could draw from…”So how can I convince you to get unstuck and read outside your discipline? How about a True or False Pop Quiz?TRUE OR FALSE?_____ 1.
“California has the worst homelessness crisis in the country [151,000 Californians were homeless in 2019]. More than 39,000, or 40.6 percent, of the nation’s more than 96,000 chronically homeless are located in California.” (Chronically homeless: “a person with a disabling condition who has been continually homeless for one year or more.”)
_____ 2. “Homelessness also puts the public at risk.
This is particularly true in San Francisco, where the ‘streets are so filthy,’ reports National Public Radio, ‘that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.’” _____ 3. In a Santa Clara County economic impact report on homelessness: “These costs arise because homelessness is an important risk factor for many adverse health outcomes. In part due to these health risks,
the unsheltered homeless population die, on average, 20 years earlier than people who are sheltered.” _____ 4.
What would it cost to end homelessness just in the Bay Area “under the current methods of building and providing services?” To create “…a new unit of permanent housing (at $450,000 per unit) for each of the 28,200 people experiencing homelessness identified in PIT [point-in-time] counts…”
the cost would be $12.7 billion. Plus: “Providing services (at $25,000 per person per year) to half of that population over 10 years would require an additional $3.5 billion.”
_____ 5. “Today, the old models of punitive workhouses and drafty police station ‘tramp rooms’ are memories of an unfeeling past. They have been replaced by ‘wraparound’ service shelters with professional staffs trained in medicine or social work.” Note:
“In 2019, Los Angeles spent an average of $1.7 million a day directly on homelessness.” _____ 6.
“During the winter of 1935-1936, California and Florida set up border patrols to blockade indigents from entering.” Fast-forward to 2019 in San Francisco, where per Heather MacDonald, we find that “the city enables the entire homeless lifestyle”—and what the authors detail as “the mass migration of out-of-state residents in search of the ‘San Francisco Special’” (housing and generous benefits).
_____ 7. In San Francisco, “Harm reduction methods and treatment goals are free of judgment or blame and directly involve the client in setting their own goals.” When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in 2020, “San Francisco placed about 1,200 homeless people in city hotels…”
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the city “provided these quarantined homeless with alcohol, tobacco, medical cannabis, and other substances ‘in an effort to prevent a handful from going outside to get the substances themselves.’” _____ 8.
“The Perilous Trifecta.” The data sheet “on the perilous trifecta is nothing short of catastrophic:
there are 4,000 men and women in San Francisco who are simultaneously homeless, psychotic, and addicted to alcohol, meth, and heroin: 70 percent have been on the streets for more than 5 years; 40 percent have been on the streets for more than 13 years.”
_____ 9.
In San Francisco, “The current policy regime can be divided into three domains—the hospital, the jail, and the subsidized apartment. Together, these institutions represent the new orthodoxy of the socialized state: they reduce homelessness to a set of social-scientific variables, to be manipulated through the intensive application of the medical and social sciences.” Yet…look deeper at San Francisco’s stats:
•
“…70 percent of all psychiatric emergency visits involved a homeless individual and…66 percent of all visitors had co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders.” • Not 80/20! “In total, the top 5 percent of ‘super-users,’ the majority of whom fall into the perilous trifecta, accounted for 52 percent of total systemwide service use.”
•
“According to the San Francisco County Jail, the homeless account for 40 percent of all inmates.” • “The problem is that members of the perilous trifecta are the least likely to seek services.”
_____ 10. “Today, across Los Angeles’s 500 square miles, roughly 10,000 people live in some 5,000 vehicles.”
SPOILER ALERT: THE ANSWERS! How did you do on this True or False Pop Quiz? Sadly, all of the above statements are true.
Is there hope for California and other major cities? Part III of
No Way Home devotes the final three chapters to “Innovative Ways to Reduce Homelessness Despite Budget and Legal Constraints.” But note this: when I finally read a book on how to read a book (see Mistake #3), the author gave me permission to skip around, so I read Chapter 8 of
No Way Home first. It’s a short course on “Housing First”—“the political class’s primary mantra on homelessness.” (Per the authors: It’s not working!)
In 2015, the
Washington Post crowed that the inventor of Housing First, Sam Tsemberis, had “all but solved chronic homelessness.” He boasted, “Give homes for the homeless, and you will solve chronic homelessness.” That was in 2015. The result now in 2021?
Not so fast, Sam! Chapter 8 is a must-read—as is the entire book.To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for
No Way Home: The Crisis of Homelessness and How to Fix It with Intelligence and Humanity, by Wayne Winegarden, Joseph Tartakovsky, Kerry Jackson, and Christopher F. Rufo. And thanks to Encounter Books for providing a review copy and to
Jim Palmer, whose book endorsement inspired me to read the book!
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:1) According to a Housing First experiment in Ottawa, Canada, researchers divided up a study into two populations: an “intervention” group that received Housing First and numerous services, and a non-intervention “control” group that received no services and remained on the streets. Shockingly and sadly, after two years, “…doing nothing resulted in superior human outcomes than providing Housing First with wraparound services.” Question: before we trumpet our success stories, should we measure them against others who don’t receive our products, programs, or services?2) Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a book on the crisis of homelessness—and how to fix it. In addition to No Way Home, click here for more resources from Citygate Network and the Invisible Neighbors book by John Ashmen and resource videos.
MISTAKE #3 of 25: Reading Too Narrowly—Stuck in My Lane
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned
“I should have read a book on ‘how to read a book’ 50 years ago!” That’s the subtitle of Mistake #3 in the new book by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. John quotes Steve Leveen, author of The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life: How to Get More Books in Your Life and More Life from Your Books. To uncover the books that will change your life (the big idea of the book), the author suggests you have two libraries:
1) The Library of Candidates (based on your List of Candidates)
2) The Living Library (your library of well-read friends).
Leveen cautions: “Do not set out to live a well-read life but rather your well-read life. No one can be well-read using someone else’s reading list.”
Each chapter features a brief and personal “mistake story,” (often a hilarious management mistake), and then what John learned after reading a recommended fork-in-the-road book. He recommends one book for each mistake: 25 must-read books! However, for Mistake #3, he couldn’t help himself and thus recommends TWO books! If you’ve been stuck in your reading lane too long, read “The Heroes Chapter” on Zheng He and Harriet Tubman in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s book, Leaders: Myth and Reality.
Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
For supplementary resources, click on John's "Bucket" book and workbook below.
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. As you evaluate the effectiveness of your products, programs, and services—are you using outside eyes and ears to weigh in on your sacred cows and dead horses? Check in with Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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