An Alternative Perspective on Operation Rio Grande & the Criminalization of Homelessness

Anybody else remember when Utah was the envy of the country as they implemented Housing First? A relatively conservative state brought Housing First to life on scale. You may remember Lloyd Pendleton at national conferences touting their achievements and approach, or The Daily Show’s feature on Housing First in Salt Lake City. And while there has been healthy debate on whether Salt Lake and Utah as a whole was achieving what they said to have achieved, the progress they made and the strategy to get there was still enviable.

Those. Days. Are. Gone.

Under the direction of the State of Utah, Operation Rio Grande has been implemented. It is draconian. It is a huge, expensive step backwards for a community that used to give the rest of the nation so much hope. In a nutshell, it aims to restore public order to an area through arrests, then provide treatment, and then provide opportunities for employment. They are in Phase 1, which started mid August, with a stated objective of identifying, arresting and locking up dangerous criminals. Despite claims by the Speaker and the Lt Governor that they are rounding up the worst of the worst and interrupting drug cartels, the data does not bear this out. There have been more than 1,600 arrests, mainly amongst people who have no fixed address. There has been a handful or so of people with multiple warrants arrested, but by and large, no kingpins, senior members of drug operations, or anything that would come close to “worst of the worst”. It is not dangerous criminals that are being arrested, it is low level drug offences, jaywalking, and such. A previous article by the Salt Lake Tribune highlights this. Operation Rio Grande is a $67 million investment, of which $34 million is directly linked to police and jail.

At the Utah Homelessness Summit on October 11, 2017, I was critical of the State’s Operation Rio Grande. Since that time the Tribune published an article highlighting my critiques of the Operation, and while there has been an overwhelming outpouring of agreement and support through social media from across the country, it seems to have unleashed the trolls that are of the opinion that I am misinformed. The Speaker himself has been a vocal critic lamenting that being out of state somehow should negate my expertise on the issue. Others have suggested I do not know what is really going on.

We (OrgCode) have a vested interest in Salt Lake’s response to homelessness. We are currently under contract to advise on the development of three resource centers (shelters). Given Operation Rio Grande has been touted by some as the model for how the resource centers should work, we need to be informed and apply critical thinking to Operation Rio Grande.

I think it is important to provide an informed opinion on complex social issues. What many in Utah were unaware of is that I was in Salt Lake City just the month before the summit. On my own time, I spoke with many people impacted by the Operation. Those people experiencing homelessness overwhelmingly expressed fear and distrust of what was happening; felt they were living in a police state; felt they were much less safe than when the initiative began. I spoke with some state public servants who felt Operation Rio Grande is all about law and order and not about service, and see no way that the objectives of Phase 2 or 3 could possibly be met with the resources identified. Furthermore, state staff also spoke in hushed tones knowing that given this initiative was being spearheaded by the Speaker with the support of the Lt Governor that any dissenting opinion may result in their job loss. I spoke extensively with service providers, at different levels within their organizations, who felt sidelined while this process has been unfolding, making their work more difficult, and seeing many vulnerable people that they had been working with disappear. Like their state colleagues, service providers had little faith in Phases 2 or 3 being resourced in a manner that would allow them to be effective. Both the state public servants and service providers indicated repeatedly that all they had been known for in Utah in applying Housing First had been tossed out the window.

I examined all of the information that the State has put out on Operation Rio Grande. I read and reviewed a number of media reports that have come out regarding Operation Rio Grande. Up to that point, I was able to provide critical analysis of all that I had heard relative to stated objectives. While leaning towards a negative impression that this exercise was ultimately criminalizing homelessness, it is when the panel started to speak on October 11 that the intent was made clear. The first 10 minutes of Speaker Hughes speaking reinforced the objectives (which you can download and watch here). While there is language related to addressing people that are preying on those who are homeless, consider how many times “lawlessness” is implicitly or explicitly tied to homelessness. The orientation of the remarks is rooted in a lack of education on trauma and harm reduction. While nuanced, this is about command and control.

Since making my remarks, many within Utah have suggested that I am uneducated, or as the Speaker suggested, I can’t possibly know what is happening or how best to address it because I am from out of State. I am a passionate advocate for ending homelessness. I am a skeptical empiricst in the use of data to achieve this aim. I stay abreast of the peer-reviewed published literature on the subject matter, and I attempt to help community after community implement the most up-to-date approaches in ending homelessness driven by data. Working in communities throughout Australia, Canada and the United States, primarily, I spend about 220-280 days a year working from this perspective. I have the great fortune of seeing a diverse range of communities and approaches.

Imagine your community needed to build a new bridge. I am hoping that you would want the best possible engineers to design the bridge to meet the stated objectives of the bridge relative to traffic volume and the weight of the traffic relative to the length of space to be served by the bridge. You would then want the best construction team possible to build the bridge to those engineering specifications. If the best engineers or construction team were from another jurisdiction, wouldn’t you still want them? Or would you suggest that they don’t understand what bridges really are or mean in their community; or that because you were not from there you could not possibly understand their reality of spanning that space with a bridge.

To take this a step further, I am not suggesting that there are not local experts when it comes to ending homelessness, but if you had someone or a team of people that could offer expertise that you did not have locally, wouldn’t you – like the engineers and construction team – want to bring in that expertise? If the experts suggested that you do something different and could justify their reasoning with evidence, wouldn’t you want to consider that? But alas, complex social issues whether it be responses to street involved activity or homelessness often have strategies and operational responses that are designed by non-experts where their opinions of the issues inform the response rather than the evidence. Imagine if we designed bridges based upon opinions rather than evidence. Operation Rio Grande – and especially its architects (Speaker Hughes, Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox) – lack the expertise necessary to figure this out effectively. They are like people trying to design and build a bridge without the expertise.

I am not saying that issues in the Rio Grande area did not need addressing. By all accounts it did. What I am critiquing is the response. First of all, the data shows they are not interrupting criminal activity. They are adding additional barriers to housing and employment by adding more arrests to people who are homeless and already have many barriers to housing.

Perhaps the intention is one of deterrence. We can trace Deterrence Theory back to Classical Theory in the 18th Century. In a nutshell – as rational beings, humans want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. If the probability of arrest is high, the probability of conviction is high, and the severity of the punishment is large, then people will, according to this theory, avoid doing things that cause pain. The War on Drugs, from the national approach to localized responses that may not associate with the mantle, demonstrates time and again that the Deterrence Approach does not work. Drug use continues to go up decade after decade since Nixon first declared the War on Drugs, even with extremely high rates of incarceration associated with drug use. And the war is mainly on drug users, not drug makers, dealers, manufacturers or distributors.  

“The failure of crime rates to decline commensurately with increases in the rate of punishment reveals a paradox of punishment,” writes Meares and Fagan in Punishment, Deterrence and Social Control. Crackdowns also do not work over the long term. As people in the Rio Grande area have indicated, they still get the drugs they need, just in different areas. Academically we can trace our knowledge about the fallacy of the impacts of crackdowns to the work of Sherman et al in 1995, which examined the results of raids on crack houses in Kansas City and Missouri. The positive effects of the raids were negligible and decayed in two weeks. (Sherman, et al., 1995, Deterrent effects of police raids on crack houses: A randomized, controlled experiment. Justice Quarterly, 12(4)).

Scholarship on the criminalization of homelessness intensifies in the 1980s. To be clear, being homeless is not illegal. The criminalization of homelessness refers to practices of enforcement that disproportionately impact people that are homeless. The general themes in the contributions to the peer-reviewed published literature looks at various elements that are all present in what is occurring in Salt Lake City with Operation Rio Grande. For example, there is an increased police presence and increased engagement with people that are homeless. To date hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on overtime of police alone.  Another example, the language of “public safety”, “social disorder”, and “restoring order” is used by officials while at the same time there is more engagement with police, rooting out of misdemeanours, and confining use of public space (Operation Rio Grande has a “safe zone” for people that are homeless). Further, if you watched Speaker Hughes remarks you would have heard reference to these themes. “Stop and frisk” policies were made popular in New York City decades ago. It is another hallmark of criminalization of homelessness. Even the Former Chief of Police of Salt Lake City has indicated that he sees what is happening in Operation Rio Grande as an example of “stop and frisk”. Criminalization activities also are more likely to occur in areas that go through economic transformation or gentrification. The Rio Grande area in Salt Lake has been experiencing gentrification.

We would be remiss if we didn’t point out the influence of Dr. Marbut in what is happening in Salt Lake City. It is our understanding that the business community in the Rio Grande area have sought his counsel. We also are of the understanding that Marbut has had influence on the political leaders involved in the initiative, and that the State public servants involved have rejected the suggestions of Marbut. Nonetheless, we are critical of Marbut and have laid out step by step rebuttals of his claims, as have advocates like Retired US Navy Lieutenant Tom Rebman.

Another element of Operation Rio Grande is helping people access housing and treatment. On the surface, these are laudable, commendable objectives. But let us consider two things: first, the investment in these is low; and, second, these happen – by and large - after enforcement activities – not before or during.

State public servants and service providers alike that I spoke with are in favor of having more housing and treatment options. They are also suspicious that this will come to fruition. And where housing is concerned, let us be clear that the results of Phase 1 will only making achieving housing that much more difficult.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration would tell you that about 7% of the adult population in the United States has an addiction or dependency on alcohol. Further, about 3.5% have an addiction or dependency on other drugs. In both cases, about 90% receive no treatment or counselling whatsoever. To recap, almost everyone with an addiction is housed and gets no treatment of counselling.

Across the country, between 40-50% of all people in treatment programs for substance use are there because it is court ordered. While courts can force people to go to treatment and put consequences in place when people do not comply, the internal motivation to change is way more important than what is court ordered. Furthermore, most court ordered treatment focuses on Alcoholics Anonymous and/or Narcotics Anonymous, which have less than 10% long-term effectiveness rates in supporting sobriety.

While the US accounts for about 5% of the world’s population, it has the reputation of having about 25% of all people incarcerated around the globe. An enormous amount of those incarcerated, especially in the federal system, are for drug related offences. Billions are spent annually in this regard. And yet, there continue to be large volumes of people who use alcohol and other drugs. Is criminalization of substance use a deterrent to using alcohol or other drugs? Clearly not. It just ends up with more people incarcerated. And, interestingly, if you look at Department of Justice statistics you will see that when it comes to violent crimes, more people were under the influence of alcohol (and no other drug) at the time of their arrest (which, let’s be clear, alcohol is legal).

Across the country I have worked with a litany of police, sheriffs, and judges in training, policy advice and counsel to help them understand how to deal with the overlapping complexities of homelessness and substance use, helping them focus on social service rather than social control. I am honored to have had so many in law enforcement realize that OrgCode can help them improve their approach to engaging with complex social issues. They have helped me understand the pressures and realities of policing and the court process as it relates to homelessness, but would acknowledge that enforcing their way through use of drugs and alcohol and behaviors associated with homelessness has not worked historically.

If the leaders in the State and Salt Lake were to examine the peer-reviewed, published literature, they would learn the following: stable, appropriate, affordable housing is the MOST important first step if you want people to fully participate in training and achieve sobriety; health and social outcomes improve with a housing focus; people have less interaction with law enforcement when they are stably and appropriately housed.

Through HUD regulations – a major funder in homeless serving programs – every community is required to have something called Coordinated Entry. In Coordinated Entry, a community sets its own priorities related to who is going to get housing in which order. Salt Lake could very easily decide that the same population being targeted in enforcement activities is the top priority for housing. What would happen if they did? Especially if there were more resources as considered in Operation Rio Grande?

Well, people would be housed before there was any conversation about treatment. In this regard, the literature is also quite convincing (see most of Tsemberis’ work; or the evaluation of the program I designed and ran which saw a 49% decrease in alcohol use with 17% quitting altogether, and a 74% decrease in use of other drugs with 33% quitting altogether). The entire movement to have communities implement Housing First (which Utah used to believe in and be a champion of) knows that if you house people first you have a greater likelihood of addressing any other issue in a person’s life. And the approach to doing this is one grounded in harm reduction – a central and critical element to Housing First.

It is time for Utah to fully embrace all aspects of harm reduction. If you are unfamiliar with harm reduction, it was born from public health professionals. In a nutshell, harm reduction could be explained as follows: it isn’t what’s pretty, it is what works. We are trying to reduce harm to the community at large while also reducing harm to the specific person. Harm Reduction approaches have been proven time and again to produce better health, social and economic outcomes. But achieving it almost always means a person has to park their own morality to get there. People do not need to be sober to be housed unless they want to be. If a person is housed and uses alcohol or other drugs, the approach tries to reduce the harm associated with the use rather than trying to focus on abstinence or cessation of use. Harm reduction, as outlined in the literature and proven time and again, is not about legalizing drugs, nor is it about enabling people to use alcohol or other drugs.

If Operation Rio Grande had designated just more than half of the money to housing as the first step, 900 of the most vulnerable people could have received an $700 subsidy to assist with rent every month for 5 years, and still have money to assist them to stay housed through case management. Most of those vulnerable persons housed will never need treatment – they will remain housed and continue to use alcohol or other drugs. They will be like most other Americans that use alcohol or other drugs.

That said, the availability of treatment beds in the state is inadequate as it currently stands. Adding more treatment bed options is a very good idea. In the approach outlined above there would remain close to $30 million to add more treatment beds, and to achieve other objectives like participation in the labor force. As local behavioral health experts know, a focus on Medically Assisted Treatment is a very good idea rather than focusing on just willpower alone.

Substance use is not a character flaw. As Dr. Gabor Mate – a medical doctor who has worked with homeless and under-housed persons throughout his career – has demonstrated, there is a strong association between use of substances and trauma. As Dr. Carl Hart – a neuroscientist at Columbia University – has demonstrated, most of what we think we know about drugs and alcohol is wrong, and built upon myth rather than science. It is time all of us (not just the people of Salt Lake City or elected officials in Utah) improve their knowledge of the science related to substance use, not feelings and opinions related to substance use.

On the matter of labor force participation, if Operation Rio Grande is serious about increasing the number of people that were homeless having jobs, then the approach has to be Supported Employment. There is reason to believe that half or more of those housed could participate in the labor force if a Supported Employment approach is used.

They say decisions are made by those that show up. I commend Speaker Hughes for showing up in the Rio Grande district, creating a storefront, soliciting input from people that met in his office and trying to spearhead a response to the issues he was seeing. I also showed up, did my research and some critical thinking, and saw what was happening. I agree that we can do something really effective to help end homelessness and address issues that the Speaker has seen and experienced. Where I disagree is the approach. With $67 million on the table, we can and should do better to avoid criminalization of homelessness, meet people’s actual needs, and make a huge dent in the issues through housing…first.

Bigger Facilities or Better System?

I have been thinking about a question recently posed by Deb DeSantis, who is the President & CEO of CSH (which I am paraphrasing): How do we move the collective thinking from having bigger homeless facilities to better systems of care with housing at its foundation?

Let me give a bit of context: this happened at the Michigan Conference on Ending Homelessness, an event I have attended since before I even went into consulting and have spoken at almost every year. The very first presentation I ever gave at the conference was on Housing First, before it was fashionable or the central orientation to funding and service delivery. I have given variations of that same presentation at least three times since, either as keynotes or as session presentations. Either I am a lousy communicator or there are some organizations that do not believe in Housing First at all, still get funded to the same tune (or even more) than before there was a focus on housing, and have built empires to themselves.

I want to be clear that this is not a slag against any of the State entities in Michigan that have done a terrific job in trying to move towards ending homelessness. I know, for example, that all funding decisions are inherently political. I know that they have invested heavily in training and professional development for organizations so they can actually deliver Housing First programming. I have been to many states that have a similar experience to that of Michigan.

How do we balance the inherent contradiction of states and communities declaring that they want to end homelessness while some organizations in that same state and its communities expand its homeless programs rather than focus on housing?

Case in point, as I raised a glass with some folks with a large (but not Detroit) community, a service provider was going to great lengths to tell me about all of the programming they have recently added or expanded in their shelter: housing readiness, employment readiness, substance use recovery, money management, and, life skills. I asked, "How are those activities housing first?" The reply across the board - as if I was an idiot that just fell off a turnip truck - is that these things are essential to housing first success. When I challenged them further on what Housing First is and is not it was clear they were having none of my thoughts on the issue. 

Organizations like this do not exist in isolation. I think one of the greatest frustrations that I have in this work is that for every organization that we seem to be able to transform to focus on ending homelessness, there is another one expanding their program offerings to keep people homeless longer. That is certainly the perception we often share on the OrgCode team anyway. 

So how do we get people to focus on housing-focused systems of care rather than expansion of homeless services as Deb suggested? I offer these thoughts:

1. We need to educate communities better on what it means to think and act as a system rather than a collection of projects or programs.

2. We need to educate funders, especially philanthropists, on what investments help end homelessness versus which ones prolong homelessness.

3. We need CoC in the NOFA process to grow a backbone where they have not already done so and lean into conflict to address the system needs rather than avoid them. 

4. We need communities and service providers therein to know the difference between the philosophy of housing first and the intervention of Housing First.

5. We need to soundly and publicly reject empires and approaches that have more to do with the egos of the service provider than the dignity of the households being serviced through the approach.

Better By-Name Lists

This week's blog comes from David Tweedie on the OrgCode team (David@OrgCode.com):

If you're a street outreach worker, you've likely struggled to locate people referred to you through your community's Coordinated Entry system.  You have their name, and where they were last surveyed, but knowing where someone surfaced two or twelve or twenty days ago seems a lot less helpful than where they're staying now.

If you're part of the Continuum of Care governance board or leadership, you've likely looked at your Coordinated Entry system's average length of time from identification of homelessness until housing match, or from housing match to move-in, and wondered whether that represented the best your community could achieve.

Communities where quantifying the most medically vulnerable people with longest histories of homelessness happens easily, and the length of time required to enter permanent housing happens fastest, have two key things in common: they've moved from multiple by-name lists to one, and from where someone once completed a survey to where people reside in real-time.

This requires two shifts:

When we're asked to account for people who meet the federal definition of chronic homelessness, or for veterans, or youth, or families, we may begin with a "low tech" solution outside of our seemingly impenetrable community-wide data sharing system.  When people enter our system, we enter their information manually into a spreadsheet.  When they leave, they are removed, by hand.

Maybe you're the staff responsible for that process, wondering whether manual data entry into spreadsheets represents the best that your government-funded data collection offers when it comes to by-name lists.  (Spoiler alert: IT IS NOT.)  What forces us to fix the system temporarily addressed by this patchwork solution is when we're asking to cross reference specific populations or time periods.  Of everyone who is a veteran, how many have also experienced chronic homelessness?  Of unaccompanied youth, how many have also been served as a member of a family?  When the answer looks more like a sigh of exhaustion and "those are different lists" than a quickly applied filter, "good enough" might need to approach just plain "good."  Dare we dream of even greatness?

One by-name list that accounts for people in real-time -- as they change providers, demographics and engagement -- remains the best practice for data driven decision-making.  If nothing else, by 2017 we should be able to easily know the names and locations of the people we have the privilege to engage and permanently house.  One poor staff, diligently updating this information into an Excel spreadsheet, is not that.  Neither is waiting days (or weeks!) to obtain this information.  Difficult to obtain reports are a megaphone telling you the community data system is failing.

But we need not just someone's name but also where they're currently staying.  It's not particularly helpful to direct street outreach to locate someone based on where they were surveyed six days, weeks or months ago.  How many times have we heard someone's years long struggle through homelessness, only to see that they hadn't yet been surveyed?  For the purpose of our by-name list, they remained invisible, because our by-name list only contained people with VI-SPDATs.

When our by-name lists have completed surveys as a common denominator rather than everyone currently experiencing homelessness, regardless of survey status, we're left to comb cold, tired lists of long passed locations rather than where they reside right now.

And the by-name list is just the first step!  With one-by name list of people experiencing homelessness in real-time, we can then define our community's priorities to build a priority list of those we're actively working to house.  Our by-name list represents the biggest possible universe: everyone experiencing homelessness.  A subset of that list -- our priority list -- represents a significantly smaller universe of people who have consented to our assistance, completed required surveys, collected essential documentation for housing, and now engage staff to locate units and enter permanent housing with supports.

By definition, everyone (and everything) can't be a priority.  Of the dozens, hundreds or thousands of people on our by-name list, who represents our community's first priority to house -- people with the longest histories of homelessness?  The medically frail?  Those living and sleeping outdoors?  Veterans?  Youth?  Of two equally vulnerable people both experiencing chronic homelessness, who gets access to a resource if only enough exists to serve one person?  As we drill down on our by-name list to identify, and then progressively engage, people who represent our community's priority populations, we secure the documentation required for housing, at which point they represent our smaller priority list of people we're actively working to house.

This community measure of our progress -- to what extent are we ending homelessness? -- should be accessible, and not just to the HMIS or HIFIS Lead Agency!  For those who've consented to the data sharing process, everyone from the case manager who sees the new keys enter the lock of the first home secured in years, to the Executive Director of that agency and the funders of that process can see where our Coordinated Entry system succeeds and where we have obstacles to overcome together.  They can run this report themselves -- or even have it waiting in their HMIS inbox as they begin each morning.  Who has been housed, how long that took, and who is returning should be easily accessible from the very by-name list that drives that process.

Ending Youth Homelessness

Erin Wixsten is the youth lead with OrgCode and provides this week's blog. You can reach her at ewixsten@OrgCode.com

Can we get a collective ‘Huzzah!’ (sorry, it’s Renaissance Festival season here in Minnesota) for youth homelessness finally getting some attention -- and by attention, I mean new resources -- thirty three million dollars to be exact.  I know I’m not alone in my eagerness to see how the 10 communities who were recipients of the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project (YHDP) funds are going to allocate their awards, and while likely not enough to end homelessness for all young people experiencing it in those communities, it represents a significant gain in what is needed to support systems planning, innovative solutions, and an increase in supportive services and programs that work to end youth homelessness.

What it takes to end homelessness for youth who are experiencing it isn’t radically different than what works for singles and families, however I’ve seen ‘adult’ service providers tremble when talking about serving youth.  They aren’t aliens, they are just young.  Services need to be developmentally appropriate, and in addition to being Housing First and Trauma-Informed, programming needs to be grounded in Positive Youth Development.  They need to be collaborative rather than punitive.  Overall, they need to be a safe space from which youth can begin their journey out of homelessness.

Before I came to be part of the OrgCode team, I was the Director of Housing and Homeless Services at an incredible Minneapolis non-profit called The Link.  In nearly 12 years in that role, I helped to develop, open, and supervise a variety of supportive housing programs for young people who were exiting homelessness -- key word is exiting, and my team used that language intentionally to reiterate that the crisis of homelessness was over and our role was to support them in such a place.  This did not mean that there weren’t many other challenges and opportunities to come, but we wanted to ground our work in being housing and stability focused.  When I started in that role at The Link over 12 years ago now, my first task was to create a program model for their first ever housing program: hire and train staff, develop programming, oversee case management, etc.  For years I had worked with youth at risk of, or experiencing homelessness through programs such as drop-in centers, outreach, emergency shelter, and transitional living programs.  However there were almost no supportive housing programs for young people in my community at that time.  As a housing provider, I would attend funder and community meetings and trainings, policy sessions, etc. and while technically the youth in our programs were adults (18-24 years old) I immediately realized I needed to look at the information, funding, program development, staffing structure, etc. through a youth-friendly lens and translate it into a developmentally appropriate model for youth.  I was in a unique position to be straddling both the adult and youth sectors, and while challenging, at first feeling like I was at the wrong table on both sides, empowering youth voice in decision making made it much easier.  Young people helped to develop programs that they themselves either would, or had been served by.  Essentially, applying what is working for singles and families in a way that works for young people.

The most significant observation that I had from my perspective as a youth housing provider at the time was how differently youth services and interventions were applied than with singles and families.  In most ways, youth were given incredible support for extended periods of time to stabilize and were connected with intensive supportive services, programming, advocacy and case management.  Young people were nurtured within those programs and were supported in setting and achieving incredible goals around education, employment, and other personal objectives.  They had passionate advocates to help them succeed.  Unfortunately, this was most often happening in a shelter or drop-in setting.  This was over a decade ago but I recognized our role at the time was to create and implement programs that would provide that same intensity of services within a housing context with the one goal in mind:  end youth homelessness.

• Youth in a youth shelter are still homeless and while the shelter setting and services may be incredibly high quality, youth-centered, and full of highly trained and professional staff, we want young people out of the crisis of homelessness, and stably housed, as soon as possible. Housing is the solution to homelessness.

• For every bed occupied tonight by a youth in a youth shelter, there are three, six, ten sleeping outside or in a place that is unsafe for them. By quickly moving young into housing -- with the necessary supports -- more youth could be sheltered who otherwise would not be.

• Evaluating data over time, it became clear that if we were operating from a Housing First framework -- supporting youth to transition out of homelessness, and applying protective factors around areas that put them most at risk of losing their housing and becoming homeless again -- we saw that young people stabilized much quicker -- and transitioned in place, or into another housing option, much more quickly -- which allowed us to serve more youth.

• Housing First for youth is trauma informed and asset based. It directly applies the belief that young people can, and should, be housed. That they are ‘ready’ and while they may need a different length or intensity of services once housed, it’s absolutely something they can do and deserve. Housing is not a reward for good behavior or program participation. While we want to employ the principles of Youth Engagement in our programs, housing and/or services are not a result of how engaging or engaged a young person is.

• As a community or even at an agency level, we need to be creative in how we solve the challenge of the lack of affordable housing. This pairs nicely however, with what we know about young people needing a variety of options from which to choose and potentially move around in as they seek to find what works best for them. We must be solution-focused when faced with this challenge and move away from talking about what we don’t have in our community to creating what we need.

Housing First is not housing only but rather a service orientation from which all services and supports for young people experiencing homelessness should center.  Housing stability supports and housing focused, client-centered service planning are critical for housing success.  It’s invigorating and encouraging to see communities embrace this orientation for how we support young people who are experiencing homelessness, and see systems reorganize and collaborate on effective interventions that end homelessness for youth and young adults.

Stay tuned for a brief webinar coming out in the next couple of weeks that can give you some ideas (and lessons learned) on what Housing Stabilization looks like for young people.

Car Dealerships & Homeless Facilities

Car dealerships try to get you to do three things:

1. Buy/lease from them

2. Finance through them

3. Service your vehicle with them

The entire experience of the dealership keeps reinforcing these three things, implicitly and explicitly. In the process of buying/leasing the car they talk with you about finance options and how great the service team is. When engaging with the finance people, they reinforce your purchase/lease and talk about how great the service team is. Go to get your oil change, and they have stimulation that reinforces your purchase/lease and may even get you thinking about the next vehicle with them because of the sales team or the amazing financing opportunities. 

Visually, the car dealership knows their business and reinforces it unrelentingly. The psychology of reinforcing decisions through advertising is rather amazing. What you won't see in a car dealership, for example, is messaging about the importance of taking public transit or why biking to work is good for you and the environment. 

Maybe it is time homeless service facilities like shelters and drop-ins starting functioning more like car dealerships.

Let us assume that we all agree that we are in the business of ending homelessness. (As an aside, I know that sentiment is not universal.) Our business model - and advertising - needs to support our objective. If we are not doing that, with fierce singularity of purpose, we may be inadvertently be making our work that much harder. 

When I tour through homeless shelters, what do I see on the walls and bulletins boards and such? In a nutshell, confusion. I see advertisements for spaghetti dinner at the local church and when the podiatrist is coming to visit and day labor services and what the VA can do and where to worship and where to get clean underwear. I see advertisements for AA meetings and when the career fair is and how to use the telephone and when to do laundry and who to meet with to get a bus pass. I see rules posted and changes to operating hours of another organization and places to worship and when the barber is coming and a reminder not to loiter outside the front doors on the sidewalk. Some of these are on colored paper. Some of these have long-since expired. Some lack sufficient detail for me to know exactly what to do. Some are so seemingly intrusive I wonder who got access to the facility to post it and why they were granted permission to do so.

What I don't see in most shelters and drop-ins? Clear advertising and messaging - implicitly and explicitly - about the core business, which is getting people out of homelessness. We bombard people with noise and confusion. Generally we are well-intentioned but misguided. We overwhelm service users with stuff that does NOT help them get out of homelessness, but rather help them manage their experience of their homelessness.

When we work on homeless service facility improvement, one of the first things we do is try to harness the message so that the business intention is clear. All of those things (podiatrists to AA to spaghetti dinners - and everything in between) may be well-intentioned. Heck, for some they may even be helpful (though maybe more helpful after moving into housing). But they are the WRONG things to be supporting, messaging and focusing on in homeless shelters and drop-ins. 

My request of you this week is to take a look around - literally - and remove anything that is not absolutely focused on the core business of ending homelessness. If that seems to extreme, then consider housing messaging to be the dominant focus with all else relegated to its own area. 

What should that housing messaging be? Think back to the car dealership. How do people get housing (the ability to figure it out on their own or through a program like Rapid ReHousing or Permanent Supportive Housing)? How do people maintain their housing (what supports and community resources will help people when they are in housing)? And, how do we make sure that people do not return to homelessness? You can enhance the message by infusing data like the number of people that moved into housing, how long it took, and how many returned. 

Our ability to focus on housing should be unapologetic and blatant. For some, this will be a focus on how people can figure it out on their own. For others, it will be how coordinated entry works, the assessment process and such. Confusing the message only confuses the process and strays us away from the core business of what we are trying to achieve. 

Be more like the car dealership. Even if you loathe car salespeople (especially of the used variety). You may not like them, but they are really effective. People that you serve don't necessarily need to like you, but you too need to be effective.

Hurricanes Do Not Discriminate, but Others Do

The full extent of Irma's devastation at the time of writing is not known. I hope there are few if any fatalities. I want to focus on a couple of aspects of the hurricane as it relates to homelessness.

The first is that there were definitely two groups of people served in advance of the hurricane when it came to sheltering. Take a look at this story from Volusia County (Daytona) here. 

In a nutshell, those that were seeking shelter but had a permanent residence were offered one type of shelter. Those that were homeless were told that they needed to go to a homeless shelter.

Then there is what happened in Miami. As this story from the Toronto Star demonstrates, people that were homeless were assessed for the Baker Act to forcibly remove them from the street. 

I get that people who are poor, including those that are homeless, struggle to have transportation options to vacate a location where a hurricane is projected to hit. And, I would argue that there may be instances where it is justified to use an instrument like the Baker Act to take people out of harm's way if they are not making good decisions for their own safety.

But I struggle in the selective application of an instrument like this. Maybe I am naive. I watched CNN. I heard telephone interviews with people in the Keys who were not in great structures planning on getting drunk and riding out the storm. I saw people going out for a jog in the rain in the background of a segment on CNN, even with a curfew, and even with debris falling all around. I saw interviews with people planning on riding out the storm on their boat, and post-hurricane interviews with people from mobile home parks. Maybe as a person that lives with a mental illness I find it stigmatizing that we think of just those who are homeless as unwell and in need of assessment prior to a hurricane, rather than looking also at those that are making poor decisions about where they will be during a hurricane. 

Finally, there will be billions spent in disaster relief, including some forms of assistance for that that did not have any or the right type of insurance. Now I will be naive and suggest this - imagine if we saw homelessness as the disaster that it is, and invested in the same way with the same urgency.