Homeless Heroics in Houston

Through no Fault || Overarching Crisis || Asking Ourselves || Solution Houston

One city works to solve a national embarrassment

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Through No Fault

“When I pulled up to the house I knew something was wrong,” Art told me.  Yet it would be several days until he found out his world would soon be turned upside down.

Art¹ greeted the well-dressed man with Brylcreemed hair and an adulating assistant returning from the front door.  “Would you happen to know if Mr Smith² is available?”

“That’s my landlord.  I hardly ever speak to him.  I think he has a bunch of houses like this,” Art answered back.  When inquiring about the visit, he was only informed they were from a bank Mr Smith did business with, thank you very much, but confidentiality and all.  Art told me this story early in 2020 over a pitcher of beer in Humble, TX.  I had known him for about a year, though we worked in vastly different departments, and every time he advanced in his job, learned a new skill, he was driven almost to tears.  In my paraphrase here of our discussions I’ll tell his story, one which tens of thousands of Americans went through during the 2008 financial crises over sub-prime loans, where banks repossessed houses in every county, and almost every ZIP Code, in the country.

“It was 10 days later I found out the house was being taken from the owner,” he continued, taking a healthy swig of lager.  Art was dutifully making his lease payments.  Mr Smith wasn’t turning over these payments toward the mortgage, and the foreclosure meant Mr Smith was being evicted in 30 days.  “From 10 days before,” as Art told me.

Now, with only 20 days to go, he and his 2 children – about 5 and 8, as I recall – had to scramble to find affordable housing.  2 years before, his wife died in a late-night drunk-driver double fatality crash returning from her nursing job in a rural Oklahoma hospital.  His position as an apprentice in a machine shop meant the couple was doing fair financially; young, but slowly stepping up the ladder into the lower middle financial class.  Mom, however, was the main bread winner, as apprentice wages were appreciably pale in comparison.  Now, with her income gone and expenses piling up, Art finished his 3-bed apartment lease and found a 2-bed home with 2 full bathrooms and a small pool for less money.  He even signed a 2-year lease, and paid 4 months worth of payments in advance.

His brow furrowed, sweating, as he told me how he scrambled, when finding out about the pending eviction, trying to get money back from the owner, appealing to the bank, even trying to take the owner to small claims court.  Yet the expenses he would incur, including revenue lost from taking time off to create and attend a court case, and the money had already paid in, were more than the limit for small claims court, and no attorney would take him without a retainer fee when they could — during America’s worst housing crisis since the 1930s — be paid to represent similar clients.

Through no fault of their own, Art and his children became homeless.  “I picked us up a membership at the Y, and we carried duffle bags wherever we went, showered there and no one in the school or at work found out for weeks we were living in our car.” Eventually the wife’s family found out and moved the trio to a north Houston suburb.  After nearly 5 weeks of homelessness, Art had a place to stay and started working at the same company I worked, slowly advancing him in new skills, at a great company (where I have been for nearly 9 years now) with low cost health insurance for the trio.

Others had it much worse during that crisis, still in nearby memory, becoming permanently homeless, dying of exposure, becoming addicted to drugs, in trouble with the law, beaten, robbed, ignored by society.  The “dregs of the Earth,” some have called the homeless³.  We avoid catching their gaze as we walk the streets in our shiny urban downtowns, blaming them for crime, blaming them for their looks, their smell, and of course the panhandling.  Some see these supposed outcasts as victims of their own decisions only, and figure any help to them, from any source, only supports their habits, exacerbates their problems, and drains precious resources from the public coffers.

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Overarching Crisis

A report released just this January surveyed the horrifying number from 2023.  Over 653,000 people were homeless, meaning without a mailing address and permanent, reliable shelter.  Just over half experience sheltered homelessness, meaning they occupied an emergency shelter, safe haven or transitional housing.  The rest, the study reported, were “experiencing unsheltered homelessness in places not meant for human habitation.”⁴  And nearly a quarter million were either part of a family with children, or under the age of 25, considered “unaccompanied youth.”

The problem is not getting any better.  In the past decade the number of people experiencing homelessness increased each year from 2016, though understandably the numbers from 2021 were not in the report.  In those years, the scale went from 550,000 to over 100,000 additional Americans on the streets, or in some form of shelters.  The largest numerical jump was after 2022, when the economic impact of the government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 epidemic proved disastrous for household stability.

The causes of homelessness in the U.S. are varied, ranging from mental health and substance use issues, and even PTSD and brain injuries, with military veterans sharing a greater proportion than the general population. Sexuality, sexual abuse in the home and even a family “rejection because of pregnancy”⁵ are cited causes among youth. During and after the Covid outbreak, rising rents, especially in the apartment sector, added large numbers to the cement jungle.

In addition, per capita numbers are disproportionately horrible for Latino, black, Asian, other minority groups, LGBT⁶ and — especially — Native Americans.

If you look carefully at these cases, you can decipher a humanist meaning to these statistics, namely that few are outside the realm of the fault of the person or outside the realm of something which could be done by society to dyke the rising tide.

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Asking Ourselves

So what and why for our social attitudes surrounding the issue? The media? Societal responsibility?

Let’s start with religion. That right, this atheist wants worshipers of Jesus to take a deep look at words considered by top scholars to be the authentic words⁷ of that important 1st Century Palestinian prophet. Jesus, if we look at his Good News, would abhor the Prosperity Gospel with billionaire bishops and propertied preachers. Our favorite Jew seems to genuinely have wanted us to take care, individually and socially, of those less fortunate. If you doubt me, check out Matthew 5 and 25. And in the Old Testament, Proverbs 19and 17, as well as over 4 dozen other telling lessons⁸ illustrate the importance of helping your fellow man. For someone unsheltered, these words are certainly front and center. Clothing. Food. Water. The essentials of life, confidence, feelings of self-worth and our role in civilization’s many advantages.

How did we get to this place, where in the richest country on the sphere we have the largest percentage of homelessness?

The statistics are sobering, even shocking. Let’s compare other countries. Out of the 34 OECD countries⁹, the U.S. and the U.K. are the only countries where someone was at one point in their life considered homeless – this includes in temporary, transitional, episodic, chronic and hidden homelessness¹⁰ – with more than a marginal percentage of the population. But that’s a story for another post.

What’s the cause? Clearly, no single answer or combination thereof accounts for each individual case. To point out a few issues here may be helpful. Thom Hartmann on his blog writes

Anyone old enough to remember can tell you that before Reagan cut funding for public housing and Section 8 subsidies by half in the first year of his first term, there wasn’t much of a homelessness problem in America. Reagan justified this and subsequent cuts in a speech saying that homelessness in America was a choice.

But, prior to Reagan, homelessness was so rare in the US that, as Henry Graber noted for Slate:

A 1976 history of low-income housing in America made the impossibly foreign observation that “the housing industry trades on the knowledge that no Western country can politically afford to permit its citizens to sleep in the streets.” The word homeless, in those days, was used mainly to describe persons displaced by war or natural disasters.

Reagan famously cut taxes on rich people (the top 74% income tax bracket dropped to 35%) and homelessness exploded. And the taxes haven’t gone back up, and homelessness has gotten worse¹¹.

Certainly the extreme drain in both temporary and permanent assistance programs on both the federal and state levels since the 80s have been part of a general trend with multiple steps, from the post-Powell Memo world implemented into Reaganomics and the explosion of Conservative media, which has always favored views that homelessness is not a problem of social situations, but of choices and personal shortcomings. Laws, regulations, tax structures and anti-unionism heavily favoring the wealthy have made things worse, by separating the ability of non-moneyed citizens from active participation in the legal process. Yet these essentials pale in comparison with the devastating impact of the Citizens United decision which legalized legislative bribery.

Others, like my pal Art, are victims of financial scams, and maybe I shouldn’t need to remind you that not one person implicated in the 2008 crash, in which thousands of people made billions of dollars despite also leaving tens of thousands homeless, not one person has been convicted of their crimes, and not one single participant spent even a single minute in jail.

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Solution Houston

In addition to being proud of the progressive nods to my new hometown (13 years now), Houston is one of many cities making a great utilization of resources, including the city budget, to provide real world workable solutions. As outlined in a segment on the show CBS News Sunday Morning on April 14 ¹².

The reasoning behind the shift in resource utilization can be explained in the paragraph below, taken from a segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about homelessness¹³:

Housing First programs clearly require significant resources and funding, but it is not like our current approach is cheap. One study in Florida that tracked a decades’ worth of spending on just 107 chronically homeless people found that just between money spent on incarceration and emergency medical treatment, their local governments had spent just over $31,000 per person per year, when the estimated cost of providing permanent supportive housing would have only been just over $10,000 per year.

So if your argument against housing for the homeless was purely monetary, congratulations, your concerns have been answered.¹⁴

A better – and in this case more progressive – approach is to eliminate the concern homeless people have in attempting to get their lives together, and it comes down to one main answer; An address. Not having an address can mean an inability to receive government assistance, have a driver’s license or state-issued identification, and ability to apply for a job. Simply having an address can make a major difference in someone attempting to piece together the puzzle of a renewed life in civil society. In addition, when there is a home at that address, formerly homeless people have places to have a stable life, the ability to cook healthier meals, keep themselves and their clothing clean, have an internet connection to search for resources and jobs, and even be able to set their own hours, where they can have the flexibility to take a job outside of the hours of some temporary housing facilities. Yes, some halfway houses restrict the hours a temporary resident can leave and enter back into their services, punishing residents for taking odd-hour positions, even for having missed the bus back to the facility.

The endless cruelties in how America has worked to solve the crises may be coming to an end. Having helped build such houses for Habitat for Humanity in Michigan, and seeing with my own eyes finished buildings here in the Petro Metro, I can tell you these are not palaces. One formerly homeless ex-military veteran profiled in the CBS piece was moved into a 320 sq ft studio apartment.

‘Housing First’ is the concept utilized here, and is defined by GivingCompass as:

“…homelessness is a problem with a solution, and that the solution is housing…Whether you have a criminal record or not. Whether you have been on the streets for one day or ten years. Permanent housing is what ends homelessness. It is the platform from which people can continue to grow and thrive in their communities…Housing First is a philosophy that values flexibility, individualized supports, client choice, and autonomy. It never has been housing only, and it never should be.

“Supportive services are part of the Housing First model. That might include formal support services, like a doctor, therapist, or social worker. It might involve informal supports, like connecting with family, friends, or faith groups.

“But, in Housing First, these supports are not prescribed; people have the agency to select the supportive services they need and want, tailoring their supports to their own unique situation¹⁵.”

The CBS report, citing Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, tells us that homelessness declined 63% between 2011 and 2022. In a county with 5 million people, more than 30,000 people, thanks to programs like this, have been housed. Helping people stabilize their lives, stabilize and provide services for their health, and allowing them to become productive members of society, acquire jobs, pay taxes back into the system which helped them in the first place. It is a solution based on empathy, humanist principles and a better use of resources.

Maybe now, with new elections of government officials from mayors and state legislators to federal offices coming up in 6 months nationwide, we can look at where prospective electives stand on the issue. And maybe, just maybe, we can then tackle the very real legislative and societal problems which led Art to be homeless in the first place. Maybe now, those formerly homeless individuals will use their addresses to become registered to vote, and help turn over the social and legislative norms which have led to the problem.

On Election Day, Art will certainly be standing in that line.

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header image c. 2024 https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-streets-people-8422696/; used WOP

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