Winter is coming and the inevitable rush to “do something for the homeless” is at a fever pitch once again.
Like a Cape south-easter, the hot air is howling around the Cape about “winter readiness” and giving the homeless blankets and shelter. I believe this is the biggest faux intervention that serves to justify poor thinking, poor effort and no solution.
The question is obvious – why not house the homeless permanently so we do not have this song and dance every winter? Whatever the numbers are, housing homeless people should be reasonably straightforward.
Global and local solutions have pointed to permanent housing coupled with appropriate care interventions and work as the three corners of the triangulated solution to homelessness. The Aid Industrial Complex has made billions off the homeless problem – without solving anything on any permanent basis.
There are posters of humans who have completed programmes or left the homeless life behind. The poster human is an aberration – not a success. Unless there are more success stories than failures, success will continue to be an aberration. In any business, if your failure rate is greater than your success rate, your business is not successful.
A question that requires answering is why these agencies are not building houses with the money they are receiving? Care interventions and work without permanent housing inevitably send people back to the streets. We all know that.
We also need to kill the holy cow called shelters. Shelters should become permanent housing. This daily swing-door approach to housing vulnerable humans is a violation of human dignity. At night it’s “first past the post” to get a bed in the shelter.
All the evidence shows that an (in most cases) undereducated, addicted, traumatised, unemployed, poor person would not be able to sort out a life of historic long-term poverty within three months. Or even a year. Yet shelters continue to be a top-of-the pile solution whenever homelessness is discussed. Why? Because that helps us who have homes to dump the guilt we feel. That’s all.
Why are those who work in the sector and the government too scared to say: “Homeless people need permanent housing, not just daily shelter.” We need to see agencies that work with homeless people stand up and say: “We stand for decent, permanent housing and will transform everything we own into such for the homeless. That’s our starting point and nothing less will do.”
The other violation of human dignity is that vulnerable people can lose their bed due to bad behaviour. If that principle was applied to all parenting, several of us would be childless by now. I have walked Cape Town’s streets talking to homeless people. I have walked on San Pedro, San Julian and 5th Street on “Skid Row” in Los Angeles talking to homeless people. If we still cannot see that this is a housing crisis before anything else, we have drunk the Kool-Aid of the Aid Industrial Complex.
My research and interviews have led me to a fairly logical conclusion. If homeless people have been living in a community for 3 to 6 years, that community is where they should be provided with a home. I have driven countless homeless people “home to the townships” only to find them back, weeks later, at the place where they lived as homeless. That’s the place they have found as their new home. And their place of work. And their place of new friendships. And that’s the place their house should be built.
This idea that homeless people must be “taken home and reunited” with their family is archaic. Perhaps they might wish to reconnect with family. Perhaps not. But their new house and home should be in the neighbourhood they have been homeless in. It’s where they have decided to plant their new roots.
Begin with this awareness if you wish to solve the problem.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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