Gimme Shelter — But What Kind?

Today’s biggest public policy error concerning homelessness emerges from the fallacy that everyone deserves his own apartment and that true compassion means providing one. The federal government’s “Housing First” mandate sits on the materialistic assumption that an apartment is the appropriate response to addiction, mental illness, loneliness, and purposeless living.

Thirty-six years ago, I came out with a book entitled The Tragedy of American Compassion. It included seven ways to fight poverty in alphabetical order. The first two were Affiliation and Bonding: restoring social ties that were broken or weaving new ones. Many recent trends have battered affiliation and bonding, but they are still key. Falling into addiction instead of falling in love is a frequent failure. Although some are called to singleness, not marrying or staying married is a problem for most, and not developing work skills and attitudes is a problem for all.

Social impediments include family malformation and non-formation, broken foster care and mental health systems, and a reduction of religious or community involvement. Those trends, including less marriage and more divorce, began expanding in the 1960s. “Gimme shelter,” to play off the Rolling Stones single, was a reasonable theme song when it included congregant living (shared space with a few other people) or cubicle housing (in converted meeting halls or gymnasiums). Yes, we should get rolling stones off the streets. “Housing First” one-person apartments, though, are invitations to die alone.

The field of taxonomy is famous for having lumpers and splitters. Some lump together lizards with small variations and place them all in one species. Others are prone to a “one stripe, one species” attitude. “Housing First” policy lumps and splits simultaneously. Instead of recognizing that mentally ill persons, alcoholics, addicts, victims of abuse, young people who have lived in ten different foster homes, and so forth, all have specialized needs, we lump them all as “the homeless.” Instead of seeing that humans need each other, we take those who need to be in a nucleus and instead see them as quarks with quirks.

Extreme splitting contributes to our thinking that homelessness results from lack of housing. In America generally we’d have plenty of housing if we lived as often with others as people did in the mid-20th century. The percentage of one-person households increased from nine percent in 1950 to 28 percent in 2020. A little of that comes from people living longer and a spouse dying, but most of it is a difference in priorities. (In most small cities, a person earning even a minimum wage can afford to have his own bedroom if he’s willing to live with two other minimum-wage earners.)

Four D’s contribute to giving many cities an F in homelessness. Deinstitutionalization: Reducing insane asylum beds by 90 percent left thousands on the streets. Destruction: Tearing down SRO (single room occupancy) hotels eliminated housing for thousands of others. Danger: When homeless shelters must be so “low-barrier” that drugs and weapons come inside, many seek a safer alternative even if it means hiding in the woods. (Every night more than 100,000 U.S. shelter beds are empty.) Divorce: One household becomes two and less housing is available.

If families were not weaker in modern America, our response to homelessness could be more vigorous. In 1950, the average new home was roughly 1,000 square feet and the average household included four persons. Today the average new home has 2,500 square feet for 2.5 people. Given more space, when there’s a will for renewed affiliation and bonding, there’s a way. Even with our societal dysfunctions, 10-15 percent of homeless people return to the homes of family members.

The importance of affiliation is evident in the way members of some ethnic groups keep others from being left out in the rain. Asian-American homelessness is rare. When Perryton, Texas, home to many Hispanic immigrants, had ten percent of its housing stock wiped out by a tornado, Hispanic homelessness remained uncommon there. My town of Austin, Texas, is now host to hundreds of poor refugees from Congo and adjacent countries, but they don’t sleep outside as long as a couch or even floorspace is available.

“Housing First” is a social revolution created by ideologues who believe we’re all naturally good and will give up drugging and drinking as long as we have roofs over our heads. They hurt the people they say they’re helping. Jacob Maze, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow in 1921, wryly summarized the results of radical hubris with a joke about Communist leader Leon Trotsky, whose name was originally Bronstein: “The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills.”