Systemic Homelessness

I heard a Christian woman remark on needing to work on the systemic homelessness, but within the context of dealing with real human beings who come across your path.  She is correct about the latter. She may be correct about the former as well, though almost certainly not in the way she imagines.  When people think about systemic homelessness, they are likely thinking something about landlords, and apartment prices, and low-income housing, and perhaps livable wage legislation and the like.  This is because many of the stories they read or see about homelessness are stories about single moms who maybe have made some bad decisions, but are well-meaning people in a tough situation, and some bad luck things happened to them that weren't their fault, such as an employer going out of business, a mother who got sick, an irresponsible boyfriend - and now she's up against it.

Those stories are real.  I don't want to suggest otherwise.  But the bulk of homelessness is driven by mental illness and drug addiction.  There are programs that give people rent support and agencies that promise to come in and help, so that landlords don't have to hesitate about taking in difficult tenants. Many landlords are in fact decent people who are willing to rent to people with mental health issues.  they will mention a brother, a nephew, a high school friend who has some illness and their understanding how hard it can be.  But after a few years of this they get more picky, because they have had the experience of property destroyed, the police being called, and/or the rent not being paid too many times. They just can't afford it.  It's just not worth it.

So maybe more forced treatment was the systemic change she was thinking of, d'ya think?  No, once this underlying nature of homelessness is raised, the ground shifts.  There is this idea of more...outreach.  More...programs.  Things like that. Community workers put a lot of energy into having people just come in for treatment.  They are nice people, and make their living by persuasion and trying to help people identify a couple of things which might make their lives better.  By and large, they are pretty good at that, at least in NH. There are certainly ways they could improve what they do, but their skill is not actually the main problem.  Do I want more forced treatment?  Probably a bit more.  Such things come with costs of their own, though, setting up adversarial relationships. Still, our current system is that you can only be forced for reasons of danger, not just because every person who ever knew you and loved you agrees that it would be good for you.  Mental health law is fairly libertarian.

Rents are high in the cities - the people who want systemic changes seldom ask themselves why that is.  They just know it's a bad thing and someone must be being abusive or greedy, and an increase in the minimum wage would fix all that.  But not a lot of employers are willing to put up with someone who only comes in three days out of five, or at least, not at prevailing wages. The minimum wage prevents the existence of a lot of sucky jobs that would actually do impaired people some good, as they could bring in something to go with their meager entitlement checks. Many can't do regular jobs, and irregular jobs would be a boon. Employment security usually has some sort of day labor attached to it, which works well for some people. Some need even more flexibility than that.

Yet I don't think Reducing the minimum wage is one of the systemic changes she had in mind.  Somehow racism and other prejudices must be in there too.  Those are systemic, aren't they?  I think if we fixed those everything else would start to fall into place.

I'm going to hazard a guess that other "systemic" things are actually individual in large part, but people wish they weren't. Feeling that electing the right people would fix things is an easy, comforting thing to think.