One steamy morning last July, Ana Rausch commandeered a shady corner of a parking lot on the northwest side of Houston. Downing a jumbo iced coffee, she issued brisk orders to a dozen outreach workers toting iPads. Her attention was fixed on a highway underpass nearby, where a handful of people were living in tents and cardboard lean-tos. As a vice president of Houston's Coalition for the Homeless, Ms. Rausch was there to move them out.
I had come to watch the process and, more broadly, to see Houston's approach to homelessness, which has won a lot of praise. At first, I couldn't figure out why this particular underpass had been colonized. The sound of trucks revving their engines ricocheted against the concrete walls like rifle shots; and most of Houston's homeless services were miles away. But then Ms. Rausch's team, and a few camp residents, pointed out the nearby fast food outlets, the Shell station with a convenience store, and the Planet Fitness, where a $10 monthly membership meant access to showers and outlets for charging phones.
It also wasn't initially visible what distinguished this encampment clearance from the ones in cities like Los Angeles and Austin, where the number of homeless people has been skyrocketing along with frustrations. The difference couldn't be seen because it had already happened. For more than a month, Ms. Rausch and her colleagues had been coordinating with Harris County officials, as well as with the mayor's office and local landlords. They had visited the encampment and talked to people living there, so that now, as tents were being dismantled, the occupants could move directly into one-bedroom apartments, some for a year, others for longer. In other words, the people living in the encampment would not be consigned to homeless shelters, cited for trespassing or scattered to the winds, but, rather, given a home.
During the last decade, Houston, the nation's fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.
Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits - organizations that often bicker and compete with one another - to row in unison. Together, they've gone all in on "housing first," a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.
There are addiction recovery and religious conversion programs that succeed in getting people off the street. But housing first involves a different logic: When you're drowning, it doesn't help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you're on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
Source: How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own
(Editor's note: the full article is quite lengthy - follow the link, above, for the full article.
Having been stripped of a home, repeatedly - by not only scheming landlords lusting for more, but by our own scheming family members, hungry to literally steal, and sell, family property, and to profit from throwing our grandparents, our families, and ourselves out onto the street, repeatedly - we can say, with confidence, that if we want to solve homelessness, we need to criminalize those whom would weaponize housing.
We are also going to have to do something about real estate speculators and lawyers - most of whom later turn into local politicians and distort their local proceedings to benefit themselves and their cronies in various development schemes, which drive up the price of housing.
If you give it some thought, you will see that real estate salespeople - and some lawyers - have a serious advantage in the political arena, as they are already all about image and recognition. They know lots of [other] lawyers. They are always down at the courthouse, filing papers, which gives them an opportunity to schmooze. They hang out with people who have money to buy property. The salespeople drive around all day, deducting the cost of every mile from their cost of doing business, and they know every street. They have an advantage that is almost unbeatable - unless you are another lawyer or real estate professional, with equal backing.
In a nutshell, we think the real estate industry has captured local and state governments.
One solution is for local and state governments to purchase large lots of land, employ people to survey and grade the land, employ people to cable and pipe the lots, and either sell the lots, at cost, to future homeowners who then build their own houses, or employ more people to pour foundations and build houses, or some combination thereof. A shared building-sized 3D printer, that builders could rent from the city, would be useful in keeping costs down.
The central concept here is that our government needs to take back control of our cost of housing within our urban areas by entering our marketplace and offering us non-profit alternatives to the profit-hungry world, which has engaged in regulatory capture of our government, bought up all the large lots and plots of land for future development, and driven real estate prices out of everyone else's reach, deliberately and maliciously.
It's sad that the government should be driven to socialism but, you know, buying your power from a public utility is socialist, and dumping your sewage into a sewer system instead of carrying buckets of nightsoil to a guy in the country is socialist, and gettng your water from a system of carefully monitored wells instead of drilling your own well is socialist, too - and so is accepting a tax deduction from the IRS for the business use of your vehicle, that's definitely socialist.
Food for thought.)