Homelessness and resources

Multnomah County is starting a program to attempt to help the homelessness problem here in Portland, it's an interesting concept, basically building tiny houses on existing properties, moving a homeless family into them, and the owner of the property essentially "leases" the house to families in the program for five years, after which they become the sole owner of the addition, and can choose to continue leasing it or to do whatever they like.

The group behind the program eats the cost of building the house, and an abatement program apparently will prevent property taxes from rising, at least for a while. In the meantime a family doesn't have to worry about where they will sleep and live for a time, not a minor concern I think you will agree.

I think it is a good start and a recipe for encouraging success, I suspect most of you reading this are probably renters and have been for quite some time, how much did having to figure out a living situation set your life back? Do you think you could have done more, gotten a better education, developed skills to a greater extent, hell, simply eaten better and taken care of yourself, if you didn't have to worry about rent? Let alone finding a new place when your current space became unavailable, or dealing with horrible landlords or shitty roommates?

Expand that by quite a lot and I think we might be in the neighborhood a homeless family is in when trying to pull themselves out.

I see some critique of the program saying that just having a roof isn't enough, and social services must be provided as well. I can't say that I agree actually, I mean yeah social services are a good thing, but I think that most people are already aware of what they need to do, there is a concept I was introduced to recently called resilience, in this context it means a persons ability to bounce back from hardship, and in a lot of ways our support services and charity works attempt to increase that quality, which would be fine I guess but the assumption behind that idea is that the person suffering the hardship only needs to somehow do better for them to recover. Programs that work to increase resilience generally educate their client group about resources they might have access to and how they can use them. Which, like I said, is fine, but the corollary to that is an assumption that if someone fails, or rather if someone is failing at recovering from a failure, then the problem is not lack of resources, but rather their own failure to utilize those resources.

The fact is poor people and the homeless tend to be pretty aware of their available resources, when personal resources are non existent you kind of have to find out what others are out there, but you also have to make choices. The homeless mother of two may very well have access to a job training program or what have you, but how can she take advantage of it when she has no place for her children to be? The PTSD stricken veteran has counseling available, but he also needs to eat, and has no transportation, so he has to choose one or the other a lot of times. And every homeless person above all has to figure out where and how they are going to sleep, many cannot stay in the same place for a long time, shelters have time limits sometimes, makeshift camps are easily scattered, and it all requires time and energy to find, time and energy that they cannot use to find a job, or get medical treatment, or, or, or.

You need a base, you need a place to feel safe, to control your environment, to leave your possessions, your children, or your dog for a few hours and know that they will be there when you get back.

Something like this program is a great start, it doesn't hide families away in projects or shelters, but puts them right in a community, I am sure there will be problems, but ideally those families become friends with their landlords and neighbors and gain access to the informal support system of people who they can talk to, exchange favors, or just look out for each other that makes one part of a community. To feel like they deserve to be there and aren't a problem to hide away.

You want someone to stop being homeless? Give them a home, let it be a home, and they will not throw it away.

If you are a homeowner and interested, or know anyone who is, the sign up page is here. Check it out.