OPINION:
Homeless encampments under interstate overpasses and in other public spaces in our cities create the appearance of a new epidemic, but homelessness has been endemic to urban life for nearly two centuries.
After the Civil War, unemployed veterans moved to cities and struggled to find housing. Southern states enacted vagrancy laws that criminalized being broke and homeless, especially for Blacks.
Later in the 19th century, skid rows appeared in New York and other cities. Flophouses sheltered up to 75,000 men each night. Often, these men worked in low-wage, seasonal jobs and moved among cities on freight trains.
Through the 1960s, cities had more decent-paying, low-skilled jobs and affordable housing. Before McDonald’s, people ate in restaurants that required dishwashers and the like, and rooming houses offered inexpensive accommodation.
Paper plates, automation, urban renewal, gentrification and finance, creative industries and technology employment displacing manufacturing in major cities drove up rents relative to wages for low-skilled jobs.
Seventy percent of America’s extremely low-income households spend more than half their income on rent.
Most Americans would be surprised to learn that more than half of the people in homeless shelters and 40% of those living in encampments are employed. They have a work ethic but don’t earn enough to rent an apartment.
Most people who are homeless don’t suffer from debilitating mental health conditions or drug addiction. Those problems are more concentrated among street people, and getting people into detoxification and cleaned up to take a job won’t end homelessness.
Each year, about 900,000 people enter and leave homelessness. It’s a revolving door. Many low-wage workers lose jobs, and after struggling on inadequate unemployment benefits, are evicted from their apartments. Or their leases expire, and rent increases make their dwelling unaffordable.
Federal Section 8 housing can help, but waiting lists average more than two years. That’s not much help when a family must vacate by the end of the month.
Of those receiving eviction notices, many move in with family or friends or find shelter in transitional housing offered by government agencies and nonprofit organizations. But 37.5% end up on the street.
Eviction moratoriums like that in Los Angeles exacerbate problems. Those encourage landlords to be even more careful about credit histories — which can harm low-income workers who went through a rough patch — and discourage the construction of more affordable housing.
President Biden’s all-government strategy to reduce homelessness by 25% by 2025 seeks to allocate to the unsheltered a larger share of already scarce affordable housing and mental-health resources. It targets discrimination — homelessness is particularly visited on racial minorities and LGBTQ people — but obsessing about social justice does not address the fundamental problem.
A worker must earn three times the local minimum wage — about $90,000 a year — to afford the average apartment in Los Angeles.
Young adults leaving foster care are particularly vulnerable.
Few high school graduates who don’t enter college or an apprenticeship program can find a job, pay rent and afford other necessities. They rely on family and friends for housing and general help in easing into an independent adult life.
Children are in foster care because their families are either dysfunctional or missing and enter adult life with little support network. By the age of 26, more than 30% experience homelessness.
Clearly, transitional support for young adults leaving foster care to maintain them in apprenticeship programs would pay high social dividends.
Young people who lack support networks can enlist in the armed forces, but not everyone leaves the military with a skill that is marketable in the private sector. Veterans — especially female veterans — are overrepresented among homeless people.
In contradiction to the president’s bold promises, the National Park Service recently cleared a homeless encampment at McPherson Square in Washington. NIMBYism is a problem in the Biden White House too.
Raising encampments in public spaces simply chases those with mental illness, drug addicts, and those who can’t earn enough to pay rent from one public space to another. We need triage and dormitories, not repurposed hotels — as those are a too expensive.
Those who are mentally ill or addicted beyond redemption — specifically, those who can’t hold down a job or care for themselves in a dormitory setting — should be institutionalized.
Those who could work but require training should be compelled to accept it or be disqualified from government benefits. Along with those who can work now, housing vouchers are intriguing. But where would the people they displace in already scarce low-cost apartments sleep?
Building more affordable housing in major cities faces too many obstacles and takes so much time that it is laughable as a solution to homelessness. Government and nonprofit dormitories and communal shelters for families that become more or less permanent residences would likely be a more viable solution.
Grandiose schemes, as the West Wing is fond of applying, and hectoring about past discrimination are simply not an answer.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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