Visible homelessness is on the rise in New York City, and I see it every evening on the subway on my journey home from choir rehearsal. It is crushingly sad to see, and an indictment of all of us.
The proximate cause of visible homelessness is a failure of the emergency response of the city. It appears that there are homeless shelters available (despite every neighbourhood trying to push them elsewhere), but the homeless people resist them for some reason.
The next level of failure is within the housing market. Plainly there are not enough homes available at low rents and where desperate people can rebuild their lives without constant threat of eviction or incarceration or sinking deeper into debt. The pandemic went some way to cover up these problems for a time, with temporary bans on eviction and plentiful handouts. Now, as these provisions unwind, it is no surprise that a crisis has exploded in ways we can all witness.
As Matthew Desmond researched in the brilliant book Eviction, there are a series of failures with how US cities regulate housing and how they execute those regulations. Notably, budgets to support struggling families are woefully underfunded, an imbalance that is long standing and well-known to officials at all levels, yet never addressed, probably because politically it is too risky.
It is not necessary to copy the impressive policies of Northern European countries, where a lot of taxpayer money is spent on upgrading and growing public housing stock, though that does seem to be a good use of public funds, considering the likely spin off benefits. More imaginative fixes may be available, perhaps including starting to nudge those families away from subsidised accommodation after a few years.
None of this is likely to be popular. I saw an interview with a Democrat running for state governor yesterday. He represents moderately wealthy areas with the space to grow a housing stock, but he campaigns against it to please his constituents, who of course want to retain their low-rise leafy feel and perhaps to keep poorer people away from their schools. His argument was that such matters should remain local: if there is one problem where that is sure to fail, then housing must surely be it.
Housing policy can surely improve, but there must also be deeper causes of mass homelessness. It is hard to imagine the depths of despair that these people must have reached. They must surely have passed through so much anger and rejection and pride and shame and hopelessness on their depressing journeys that end in the indignity of subway carriages. How can this become the awful fate of so many people?
One place to start looking is within families. Years ago, kids or even adults who were struggling made their way back to their parents or to others within communities where they were brought up. If that became untenable because of mental illness, many people were locked up in institutions. It many parts of the world such formal and informal arrangements still prevail. We should not wish for society to back to this way of functioning. The institutions were cruel and few managed to be healed. Families became insular rather than face the stigma of mental illness. And some family members, almost invariably women, became full time carers at the expense of their own development.
Even if we desired such an outcome, greater mobility would make it tough to replicate nowadays. Young people flood to cities while their parents stay in the suburbs or rural parts. When those young people face struggles, the parents may not notice until it is too late, and the kids will be too prideful to be able to ask for help or return home.
Even so, it is hard to imagine that there are not opportunities to break the negative cycle. Parents will surely try to intervene. Most people are generally kind and generous, and there is plenty of goodwill available. Churches all have help groups and volunteers are ready to help. In the case of somebody sinking as far as homelessness, all of this must have failed along the way. Why?
Addiction must lay at the heart of the challenge. Once somebody has an addiction, it becomes difficult for them to recover, for many reasons. By its nature, addiction requires a massive effort to escape from. People who are addicts are very hard to help, quite unlike the saccharine picture painted by Hollywood. And on the road to recovery, an addict will have many legacy issues to deal with, including broken relationships and stubborn debt. The road to addiction is full of temptations, but the road out is tough indeed. Twelve-step programs remain the bedrock of most interventions, yet these feel somehow old-fashioned and have a mixed track record. I spent a year in a twelve-step program myself, witnessing both the wonderful humanity of the people involved and the uphill struggle faced by addicts.
Given the appalling human and economic cost of homelessness, it follows that a smart society would invest in two areas regarding addiction. The first is to try to provide better means of escape. In the case of opioid addiction, there is emerging good practice is the area of medication. Surely this warrants much more research and programs to enable earlier intervention. There are implications in areas of community structures, incentives for addicts and their families, education to spot warning signs earlier, developing effective pharmaceuticals, treatment programs and campaigns to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness and addiction. When I see Eric Adams focusing effort and resources to these areas, I’ll have more confidence in him.
But the second opportunity must be to reduce the odds of people becoming addicts in the first place. In the US, it sometimes feels as though society conspires to drive people to addiction. We are all told, by Hollywood and elsewhere, that we can be whatever we want to be. Our social media feeds are full of smiling, successful faces, generally exaggerated. Yet in truth we cannot all become NBA stars or millionaire influencers, and many take reckless gambles trying to succeed along highly risky paths, with addiction becoming a likely outcome after failure, especially for those with less education or family support.
Then there are the excesses of capitalism. The consumer business model of banks in the US is explicitly to drive us into debt so great that we struggle to service it. Alcohol is scarcely regulated despite its dominant role in creating addicts. The incentives in the medical world often point in the wrong direction. And I cringe every time I see an advert encourage people to gamble recklessly (despite the unreadable small print at the bottom of the screen). I do a lot of cringing: during sports broadcasts nowadays, such ads seem to constitute 50% or more of the material.
Homeless is a failure of all of us. Each time we are inconvenienced by a lingering odour of urine in the subway or by feeling less safe, we should remind ourselves of the many root causes, and of how a humane society would be able to address many of them.
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