Why Our Efforts to Fight Homelessness Are Hollow, Frustrating and Costly

Imagine for a moment you're standing on a cliff.The cliff hangs over a lake teeming with more than half a million canoes.Each canoe, chock-full of holes, is holding a person waiting to be rescued.Let's pretend the people in those boats represent America's homeless population - about 550,000 give or take in a given year.In time, we can save them all. We can pluck each and every single soul from those troubled waters, perhaps find them a decent place to live, get them the medical help they need and steer those fit for work into job-training programs.That would make the billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars that cities, states and the federal government collectively shell out each year to combat homelessness seem like money well-spent.Problem solved, right?Here's the problem: We're going about it all wrong.We're not looking at or approaching homelessness with clarity or conviction. We're looking for "permanent" solutions that don't exist, practically or existentially.We're casting too many nets after the boats have submerged.We're fishing them out too late.Instead, we must recognize that America's homeless population lives more on a churning river, a steady stream of canoes flowing from Dallas to Seattle to San Francisco to New York and back again.Collectively speaking, they all look the same, meaning all the holes in their boats are familiar ones: substance abuse, mental illness, poverty, joblessness.And as soon as you lift one boat out of the torrent, another one floats downstream.  Continue reading...