Summer is officially over, and school is back in session. So here’s some basic math to jog the brain: to end homelessness, the number of people exiting homelessness must be greater than the number of people entering homelessness.
In Los Angeles County, over 10,000 chronically homeless individuals exited homelessness to housing in the past three years—a remarkable feat. And yet, the number of homeless persons continues to grow. So what’s happening in the equation?
September is back-to-school month, so it’s a perfect time to talk about the difficulties facing one group of people who we might not always think about as experiencing homelessness: college students.
Everyone knows how important getting some kind of post-secondary education can be to lifting people out of poverty, but people with low-incomes, including homeless youth, face particular barriers to completing college. And failing to complete college can burden low-income students further by increasing their debt without increasing their income.
At the end of this year we will reach the deadline for a truly historic goal set in 2010: an end to homelessness among all veterans! The clock is ticking.
Since the goal was set in the federal government’s strategic plan Opening Doors, we’ve seen tremendous progress around the country. Just today, the federal government declared Connecticut the first state to end chronic homelessness among veterans. True, chronically homeless veterans make up a fraction of the total homeless veteran population, but this is an important achievement, one we expect to see repeated soon.
Imagine trying to commute to work in a city where each bus makes up its own schedule and route and sets its own prices. You might eventually get where you’re going, but it would be an inefficient, frustrating process. It’s much easier to commute in a city with a coordinated transit system.
So why is it when we think of the response to homelessness in our communities, we often think of programs like shelters or housing programs that operate independently? That’s changing. Across the country a big shift is happening behind the scenes. Rather than a number of programs serving their clients as best they can on their own, whole communities are working together to build effective systems to produce a coordinated response to homelessness.
Say you’re homeless and you live in a city with a growing homeless population. At night, the shelters may be crowded or filled, and during the day the shelters don’t provide a place to sleep. You're exhausted and have to sleep somewhere, but you have no options. What do you do?
Every day and every night, thousands of homeless people find themselves in this very situation. So they find a park or a place on a sidewalk or somewhere else not fit for human habitation. They do the best they can to make themselves comfortable and they fall asleep. Should that be a crime?