In total numbers, homelessness in America has decreased over the past 10 years. However, what these numbers fail to represent are the startling numbers of people at risk of becoming homeless, and they speak nothing to the rising number of people living on streets of major cities across the U.S. in the face of a worsening pandemic.
Since the advent of human collaboration and civil society, population densities have shifted increasingly to urban and metropolitan areas. Within our lifetime, this movement toward cities has continued to accelerate. Given the limitations of commonly deployed blueprints for urban planning, current approaches to rising populations will inevitably end in a housing market failure more catastrophic than the 2008 financial crisis.
Over the course of my research, I was fortunate to virtually meet with two women who both work professionally to help end homelessness. From my conversations, I was able to gather two large areas of focus in this line of work. Amy Turk is a Pepperdine alumni that currently works for a women’s shelter in Los Angels. Amy had the more classical approach to the issue, and when I questioned her about where improvements could be made to make relatively short-term progress she answered with the age-old response: “it’s a failure of the housing market.” On the other hand, my contact from Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a non-profit out of Austin, works alongside a state-of-the-art micro community and emphasized the need of helping neighbors in rooting out homelessness. At Community First Village, Kourtney is responsible for fostering the development of relationships for recently housed individuals. She expressed to me the importance she sees in her own work and explained how relationship building is often left out of the larger conversation.
As you can see, there is a certain level of tension between these two explanations. Neither fully explains the other, but at the same time, they seem to be related to one another. Without naming the ultimate cause to homelessness–because there is no such thing–I offer a better reason for homelessness, which can be found somewhere in the middle between a failing housing market and an oblivious community.
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A Glance at the Challenge