Six short essays. Almost everything we believe about why people are homeless is a story about individuals: their addictions, their illnesses, their choices, the hospitals we once emptied. Each piece takes one of those stories seriously, then asks what the evidence actually says.
These six pieces share one idea. Almost every argument about homelessness runs two questions together. Why did this person end up without a home? And why does this place have the number of people it does?
Individual trouble (an addiction, an illness, a hard turn of luck) goes a long way toward answering the first. It says almost nothing about the second. The size of the crowd is set by something else: how many homes the lowest earners can actually afford. One thing decides who. A different thing decides how many.
Build too few homes within reach and the crowd grows; build enough and it shrinks. That is the thread running under all six.
We treat the housing shortage like weather. In Asheville's Southside it was a decision: more than eleven hundred homes cleared by a federal program, and the families who owned them turned into renters.
Read →Why does our town have the number it has? Not the rate of addiction, not the weather, not even poverty. The count is set by how many homes the lowest earners can afford, and that is a number we choose.
Read →We assume the drugs put people on the street. For nearly half of those who use regularly, the street came first and the drugs after. The order changes what actually helps.
Read →The state hospitals emptied a decade before the streets filled. What put people outside was not the closing of the asylums; it was the tearing-down of the cheap rooms that had caught them, and the cutting of the checks that paid for them.
Read →Long before a home is lost, the meals are. Hunger is the early, far wider face of the same shortfall, and the pantry line is where we can still act while there is a home to save.
Read →The reflex when we pass someone on the street is that we are a different kind of person. The line is real, but it is mostly a few months of savings, and far fewer of us have that cushion than imagine we do.
Read →Most of these essays take on a version of the same belief: that homelessness is, at bottom, a story about the people who fall into it. The drugs. The illness. The old decision to close the hospitals. The bad luck. Every one of those is real in a life, and not one of them explains the number on the street. The first essay comes at it from the other side and shows the count being set in plain view: a neighborhood of homes taken by policy, on purpose.
The number is set by what we build and what we fund, and it has come down everywhere a community has chosen to build and fund differently. That is the hopeful part, and it is the reason these pieces exist: not to argue that no one struggles, but to point at the one lever that actually moves the count, so we stop pulling all the others and wondering why nothing changes.