“Street Homelessness is the Great Public Safety Crisis of Our Time”: An Interview with Cicero Institute
Homelessness is on the rise in America. With the recent increase of homeless encampments throughout communities, local municipalities are under increased scrutiny on how to address the issue. To promote greater social order and improve public safety – for those in the encampments and the broader community – the recent Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson will greatly impact local policies.
We believe this decision will allow local governments and law enforcement agencies to determine how best to respond to homelessness in their own communities, allowing greater local autonomy in policy decision-making and implementation.
Esther Larson, Philanthropy Roundtable’s senior director of programs, interviewed Devon Kurtz, public safety policy director at Cicero Institute, to better understand this issue. The Cicero Institute is a nonpartisan public policy organization with deep experience in public policy and technology, law and entrepreneurship.
Q: Homeless rates across America are only increasing. What do you see as the key contributing factors to this reality?
Kurtz: When we talk about homelessness, we often refer to it casually as a monolith. But that’s exactly the same problem with the policies most states use to respond to it. Homelessness is very complex with distinct subpopulations with varied needs and challenges. For example, it is important to distinguish between sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations, the latter of which refers to people who live in tents and sleeping bags on the street.
America is not experiencing a homelessness crisis as much as an unsheltered homelessness crisis. All but 12 states have seen the proportion of their homeless population without shelter increase over the last five years, and 22 states have seen unsheltered homelessness increase by more than 50%.
The imprecision of how we talk about homelessness and in how we make policy means that most states are missing the mark. Federal homelessness policies take a one-size-fits-all approach known as Housing First, which prioritizes low-barrier housing interventions that offer people apartments without any requirements for behavioral health treatment or sobriety.
But more importantly, Housing First explicitly moves funding away from other types of programs that might be better suited to help high-risk, high-need individuals. The vast majority of states have moved in this direction, as federal funding decisions tend to drive local policies in the homelessness space. The result has been a growing gap between the capacity of communities to respond to different types of homelessness and the increasingly complex needs of those individuals living on the street.
Q: Policies at the federal, state and local levels have contributed both positively and negatively to homelessness in America today. What policies have had the greatest impact on homelessness – for good or bad?
Kurtz: Federal Housing First policies are at the root of most of the decisions made at every level of government in regard to homelessness. In addition to changing how resources are allocated, Housing First’s philosophy also de-emphasizes any sort of mandatory or coerced interventions, such as involuntary mental health treatment or legal prohibitions against street camping.
Cities well outside of California have followed along the same path in allowing sprawling street encampments to take hold of their downtowns. Austin is a notable example. These policies have good intentions—draw people into services and shelter with care and compassion rather than coercion. The problem is that they neglect service-resistant individuals or people whose conditions improve with personal accountability alongside compassion.
The line between “meeting people where they are at” and enablement is fine. But many homelessness policies lack that nuance out of an aversion to approaches that might be uncomfortable and involve penalties for failure. The results, however, speak for themselves—homeless encampments are toxic environments filled with waste and trash, and are often hotbeds of crime. Unsheltered homeless people have 2.5 times the premature mortality rate of sheltered homeless. The road to desperation was paved with good intentions.
A few states are taking a more nuanced approach with state resources. Florida, Georgia and Utah have all committed millions of dollars in state funding to fill the gaps for high-need individuals created by Housing First. They also take a more proactive approach with street camping that empowers law enforcement to intervene in dangerous encampments.
These policies are often criticized as lacking in compassion. But in many ways, they more effectively approach the situations of the street and the dangers faced by unsheltered homeless people and the communities around them. Most importantly, they take seriously the reality of the human condition in that they present an actionable response to severely addicted or mentally ill individuals who are “service-resistant.”
The policy discussion here is very, very challenging because we are ultimately discussing our society’s level of tolerance for squalor and human suffering.