Treat the causes of homelessness

Preventative measures are good and save a lot of time and money. It’s easy to apply preventative concepts to our own health and home maintenance, yet also easy to stay in denial. Prevention at a societal level can bring another sort of denial, that it merely represents onerous regulation and too much government control. For big, costly social issues, it’s time to break the latter simplistic meme and get pragmatic. As citizens, we need to demand social-costs accountability.

 In the case of homelessness, not helping people up front ends up costing society more later in shelter, health care, law enforcement, public services, and education. Temporary financial assistance to pay rent can save tens of thousands of dollars in social costs per homeless person. If one chronic homeless person costs US taxpayers @ $35,000 a year, and that cost can be halved or more, isn’t it smarter to save the money and take preventative measures up front? 

Lack of prevention also applies to “the war on drugs,” US immigration policy, and to disaster management. The uncomfortable conclusion here is that there is a lot of money to be made on symptom parasitism. At the end of the day, profit-seeking stands counter to health and sustainability. Why are we so beholden to a system that rips us off time after time? Why can’t we change this system? The core problem? Money-making foxes are running the henhouse of society; we all suffer higher costs because only a few people benefit.

All it would take to fix this core problem is a majority of non-fox-sympathizing elected representatives who believe in being proactive, to ensure that social benefits are more widely spread. That’s not an outlandish ask, is it?   

Short of taking capitalism to counseling to make it more benign, the best preventative measures for homelessness center around keeping people housed in the first place. This then points squarely at the provision of median income-level affordable housing, rent stabilization, keeping state rent-gouging laws, tenant protections, short-term rental assistance, and the need for a real living wage. Yet the money system, revolving around low-paying service jobs, market-rate developers, and the real estate industry lobby (landlords), is highly invested in keeping the housing market unhealthy and stuck at levels of symptom management.

We’re supposed to believe, against all evidence, that putting all our eggs in the market-rate housing basket will actually fix outlandish price and rent issues. Well, the first law of parasitism is don’t kill the host because that puts you out of business. If all past civilizational collapses happened because of severe social inequity and over-exploitation of natural resources, maybe we can learn here in California and prevent this from happening again? 

The county’s own Health Action program has identified systemic exploitation of poor people as a serious and lingering problem, one derived from colonialism and Machiavellian conquest. We have a systemic debt to address here, that needs to be paid, not some ethereal opportunity gap that comes out of nowhere.

The “gap” that causes poverty and homelessness derives from the very inequitable system we consent to and make. We need our empowered elected leaders to lead on prevention, to stick their necks out, and work to create a more sane and healthy system overall. 

Being healthy for housing is simple: redirect the benefits stream from the 10% to the 90%, and stop the progression of inequity. The resources are there, they’re just spread out all wrong. 

The simplistic meme for housing is “build, build, build,” as if we have a mere supply and demand problem, and that more market rate housing will lower housing costs and burdens. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Why? Market rate housing costs and rents are unsupportable for anyone who makes a range of the area median income, which today, is about all workers. We don’t have a “housing problem”, we have an Affordable Housing problem where our workforce, especially lower income, can’t afford median rents.

We need a housing system with prices people can bear, not with the highest possible prices the market can bear. It’s the people who keep the system going, treat them right! We need leaders who don’t accept a real estate lobby-framed, business-as-usual system that produces more poverty and homelessness.

 If we as a society want to prevent homelessness and save societal costs overall we need to act and invest up front. First of all we need prevention-centered laws: an adequate minimum living wage, rent stabilization, keeping state rent gouging laws, and tenant protections. Then we need short-term financial aid, and to prioritize housing built by non-profit housing developers who provide the exact kind of housing that keeps our workers from becoming homeless. Public entities need to act now, donate, buy, and annex land, and planning entities need make it easier for non-profit developers to produce the type of housing that prevents homelessness.