There is a piece of Buddhist wisdom that we should run toward what makes us uncomfortable. That, rather than avoiding what scares us, we should embrace and face down our fears. That the way past what paralyzes us is often through rather than around.
In personal terms, this approach takes more courage than most of us can immediately summon. This, I think, is even more true when applied to communities.
This is why I admire Mayor Ed Murray’s recent commitment to extend the tent city model with up to three new encampments on city-owned property.
Not everyone agrees. To many, sanctioned encampments are an admission of failure. Everyone, they say, deserves a real roof and a door that locks. This gets expressed in the truism that “the answer to homelessness is housing.”
Sadly, the reality is seldom so neat.
While Housing First, the policy approach that prioritizes those who often score highest on the risk and vulnerability index for housing and services, has moved a great many families, youth and chronically homeless people out of shelter, homelessness has increased.
Even Utah, the often cited success story for “ending homelessness” through Housing First, has seen its overall numbers of homeless people rise by 4 percent over the past eight years of its 10-year plan.
We are not ending homelessness. We are managing poverty and growing economic vulnerability through a complicated system of human services triage.
This goes to what I think of as The Big Lie.
Within the Big Lie, homelessness can be solved without addressing radical inequality. Within the Big Lie, our society is humane, our values are intact and no one needs to sleep outdoors or in a tent.
Within the Big Lie, those who are outside the shelter system are the “service resistant” and undeserving poor, whose survival strategies may be justifiably met with harsh measures and deepening levels of criminalization.
Within the Big Lie, HUD’s claim that the numbers of unsheltered homeless have fallen since 2010 by 25 percent, and that general homelessness is down by 10 percent, is based upon more than carefully managed definitions and rigged data.
Last year’s One Night Count in King County documented a 14 percent increase in the numbers of unsheltered homeless people after the shelters were filled. Over the past four years in Seattle, that number has risen by more than 30 percent.
Other communities are seeing similar increases.
With rare exception, for more than three decades, through economies good, bad and recovering, the absolute numbers of homeless people and rates of inequality have only risen.
Given the recent news that more than half of American public school children now live in poverty, this should perhaps not be surprising. Public disinvestment in critical services and infrastructure has come at a tremendous cost, and addressing America’s abandonment of the poor and middle-class will take much more than Housing First.
And so, we need to overcome our denial and admit that we are no longer in control.
During the 2014 One Night Count, the roughly 300 King County homeless residing in church-hosted encampments made up less than 10 percent of those counted outside. To double this number by extending encampments to city property will not solve the unsheltered crisis. Not even close.
Seattle’s consideration of city-sanctioned encampments is a mostly symbolic step toward ending homelessness, but a very important one that deserves our support.
Legal encampments legitimize the survival struggles of homeless people themselves and reduce the harm of the unmet need on our streets by providing alternatives to social isolation and vulnerability to violence.
They involve an uncomfortable admission that our efforts thus far have fallen short, and that we have an obligation to meet the needs of the most poor, even if the means currently available fall short of the ideal.
They are a means toward an end, and courageously place the shame of such misery amid such wealth out there for everyone to see. They are a public declaration that there is much, much more to be done.