by Natalie Taffield, The Banshee

“Oh, um. Okay, well. I just don’t know what I can do for you.”
“What’s wrong with you? What happened to you?”
“Is there someplace else you can go?”
For nearly a decade, I have repeatedly heard these and a million other ignorant comments and questions fielded to my clients that are experiencing homelessness. Granted, over the years I have learned that I cannot expect people to understand what it feels like for those that experience homelessness, what homelessness really is, or why it is an issue that warrants our collective empathy.
Homelessness is an incredibly complicated social issue. It is utterly misunderstood, poorly depicted and completely stigmatized in our culture. It is not surprising that most people are not only clueless but also unaware and ill-informed. Though most days I feel that there is still much to learn, here is my attempt to put into words what it feels like (or so I’m told) to experience homelessness.
To experience homelessness is to experience loss. It is the loss of a job, a home, a marriage, a child, a pet. It is the loss of stability, good health, a sane mind. It is the loss of control over an addiction. It is the loss of ability to provide for yourself or your family. It is the loss of friends, of privacy, of shelter, of comfort. It is the absolute loss of hope, the loss of self, and the loss of dignity, self-worth, and pride. It is the loss of all that makes us feel most human._To experience homelessness is to experience loss every second of every day, yet the struggle to simply survive is so unrelenting there is no time to grieve.
To experience homelessness is to experience worry. It is to worry about where to sleep, what the weather will bring, when law enforcement will hassle you, and if your belongings will get stolen in the night. It is to worry about the invasive and aggressive voices in your head and when they might stop telling you to kill yourself. It is to worry about getting stabbed, beaten and/or raped on the streets. It is to worry about where you can find a little something to help you sleep, where your next meal will come from, or how you will pay for the trespassing ticket you are sure to be issued. It is to worry about finding a private enough place to relieve yourself. It is to worry that you may never, ever be able to get off the streets. To experience homelessness is to experience worry every second of every day, yet the struggle to simply survive is so unrelenting there is no time to unwind.
To experience homelessness is to experience dehumanization. It is to watch the disapproving eyes of passersby who refuse to make eye contact with you. It is to feel lesser, insignificant, inhuman. It is to ask for help and be ignored. It is to experience verbal and physical abuse. It is to have your individuality disregarded, your value as a human diminished. It is to elicit abhorrence, disgust and exasperation from others instead of compassion and empathy._To experience homelessness is to experience dehumanization every second of every day, yet the struggle to simply survive is so unrelenting there is no time to feel human.
To experience homelessness is to struggle with insufferable moral choices. It is to question whether the values that you have always held will serve you in the animalistic and dangerous world of the streets. It is to abandon long-held ideals and standards to meet more basic, more primal, more pressing needs. It is to become someone entirely new, not out of desire but out of a necessity that those who have not experienced homelessness cannot even begin to understand. To experience homelessness is to struggle with insufferable moral choices every second of every day, yet the struggle to simply survive is so unrelenting there is no time for choice.
To experience homelessness is to see a perspective not afforded to most. It is to learn that the most valuable piece of our humanity is our connection to others. It is to know the true value of functioning collectively and asking for support. It is to be loyal to and protective of those around us. It is to reach deep within the oldest part of our brains and deepest part of our souls to find the skills, the resources, the courage and the strength to survive. To experience homelessness is to gain this profound perspective every second of every day, yet to express this perspective is fruitless because if you are experiencing homelessness, no one is listening to you.

by The Urban Outdoorsman

    Once upon a time, in city or town just like yours, there lived an addict. You might be the addict...
    You see, all addictions are taught, and learned from our elders and friends at the earliest of our memories. We watch them and mimic those we thought were powerful and all wise.  It's a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of world. We all learn by example.
    As the individual grows, he/she finds other, more interesting people places and things that will divide their short attention spans. Their focus will change and so will their addictions as well as their friends and idols. Everything they will do, will change and so will their addictions as well as their friends and idols.  Everything they will do, will be driven for the approval of others, but especially for themselves.
   They jump from one addiction to another in their life-long quest to define just exactly who “they” are. Most will find more than one thing they are addicted to. They will have a few, or worse, several things to struggle around at one time or another.  
    It's not just about juggling all of the little addictions though, it’s about which addictions are going to drive them and how hard the drive will be. Almost every addiction will drive the person to the point where it will start to consume them to the core and they will start to neglect things that once used to be important to them. Things like family, friends, and work. Sometimes this consuming drive will make them omit or forget to shower or wear clean clothes. They will pawn or sell personal and cherished items in an attempt to “fix” the addiction.
     People who become “addicted” lose their thought processes. They basically forget how to think rationally because the mindset is in the mode of acquire and use. I know of a lady who sold her cozy vacation house in Colorado, just to buy another more expensive Rolls Royce to add to her collection.
    However, it's not the addict's fault. The fault belongs to the addiction. It's just like the smelly, unkempt drunks and addicts begging for spare change to get that bottle of booze or hit of dope.
    You see, they have mortgaged their soul for the addiction in their mind. Usually for those who find themselves at the end of the rope they made from their addictions. Death is the usual way out for them.
    Every single thing that takes control of your life, thought process, and ideals is an addiction!! Whether it be God, Satan, saving trees or whales, or buying that rare coin that your collection just can't do without. All are addictions. So the next time somebody irritates, or makes you mad because they're doing something insane cut them some slack, remember they are not in charge, their addiction is.  :)     

The Urban Outdoorsman.

Wester Regional Advocacy Project Staff/ Coral
July 21, 2016

    Researched in collaboration with the 9 WRAP members: Denver Homeless Out Loud, Los Angeles Community Action Network, St. Mary’s Center, Street Spirit, San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee, Street Roots, Sisters of the Road and Right2Survive. www.wraphhome.org
    It is easy to forget that homelessness was supposed to be temporary. As homeless states of emergency continue to pop up all over the U.S,  as ten-year plans to end homelessness continue to expire and get renamed and as evictions and displacement and the numbers of community members living on the streets continue to increase; homelessness becomes more and more entrenched as a permanent phenomenon.
    Neoliberalism, which started in the 1980s in the U.S., is the current phase of capitalism. Neoliberal policies decimated federal public housing funding and created the contemporary homeless problem. It also has shifted our entire material reality by privatizing formerly public goods including public space, housing, and healthcare, expanding the prison system and criminalizing social behaviors, destroying the welfare state and centralizing wealth for a small few while increasing poverty for most, amongst other hugely influential shifts.
    Instead of addressing the structural reasons, rooted in neoliberalism, that have been forcing people out onto the streets for the past 30 years and fighting to end homelessness entirely, the political discourse has continued to focus on how to manage the increasing population. These management tools include using police to criminalize people for existing in public, creating a multi-billion dollar industry to “help” homeless people and continually cooking up new non-solution solutions to end homelessness.
    In the rush to appear to be doing something about the “homeless problem,” politicians often funnel large amounts of money into projects that do little or nothing to change the material conditions of the lives of homeless people, or are simply harmful. While the intention to be helpful is great, the end result of being deceitful to the broader public and wasting millions and millions of dollars on these solutions is not. Many of the non-solution solutions listed in this article have positive sides that make some people’s lives easier. Although this is great, it does not make it an actual solution towards ending homelessness. The solutions that are most helpful to homeless people actually come from homeless people themselves, foster self-determination for everyone, stress the need for housing and do not involve the police at any step of the project.
    Because WRAP is a coalition of nine organizations working for poor and homeless people’s rights across cities in three different states, we often come in contact with these non-solution solutions. At times we engage with the non-solution solutions that are shortsighted but helpful to a small number of people but we never engage with the solutions that are directly harmful to people living on the streets. In general, we tend to be critical of all these non-solution solutions because we strive for alternatives that actually address the needs of homeless people and move towards systematically eliminating the possibility that anyone would be forced to become homeless.  

An abridged list of WRAP’s “favorite” non-solution solutions to ensure that the status quo remains:

    1) Criminalizing Existence – County Jails and State Prisons Instead of Housing
The favorite go-to response from cities across the country is to force homeless people out of public space by criminalizing basic life-sustaining activities in public space (sitting, lying, sleeping, resting, eating, etc.).  Homeless people are told to move along, ticketed and/or arrested with the goal of removing them from public space.
Under the guise of working for the public good, city politicians are quick to jump on criminalizing everything they possible can. This means criminalizing people for camping when they have nowhere else to protect themselves from the elements.  It also means criminalizing people possessing “camping paraphernalia” with the intent to use.
      Under the guise of public health, cities and police departments are sweeping encampments and displacing people from the place where they live and the community they live with. Often these sweeps involve confiscation of people’s property claiming that it is “garbage.” Other strategies include closing public restrooms, turning off public water sources and denying people the right to wash themselves or their things.  More restrictions on how many belongings homeless people can have include limiting belongings to two square feet or making it illegal to store property in public space.
      Under the guise of public safety, poor and homeless people are funneled into local county jails and state prisons. Most often this happens because people are given bench warrants for accruing many fines for existing while poor in public. Others are locked up in county jails for simply not having the money to pay bail. This creates a sense of safety for wealthy people but is a direct threat to poor people’s safety, as jails and prisons are deeply unsafe for everyone inside.
      All of these strategies for criminalizing homeless people’s existence are meant to make it harder for people with wealth to see homelessness. They do nothing to give people access to housing, to services that people want or to self-determination. In fact, criminalizing existence entrenches people in poverty and creates more and more obstacles for people trying to get off the streets.

    2) Collaborating with Business Improvement Districts – Gentrifying Cities One Neighborhood at a Time
Another solution that excites the minds of business and property owners is to collaborate with the police through Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) to “address homelessness” and gentrify neighborhoods. While it seems obvious that business owners, property owners, police and BIDs are not in an appropriate place to say what homeless people need, this does not stop them from doing so and doing so very loudly.
Business Improvement Districts are the gentrification station. They are deeply non-democratic public-private entities. BIDs were created to give an opportunity for business owners to charge additional fees to property owners in a specific area to supplement parking infrastructure and lighting maintenance.  Nowadays, BIDs charge additional fees to a specific area to fund sanitation services, private security, more police and many anti-homeless initiatives. All of these BID services are meant to make business districts more appealing to wealthy gentrifiers at the expense of the lives of long-term low-income residents and homeless neighbors.
BIDs are known to help solve the “homeless problem” by hiring poor and homeless people as security guards to police other poor and homeless people. They engage in lobbying and public policy in favor of new criminalization efforts and lobby against homeless people fighting criminalization. Sometimes they fund homeless services but this is largely to maintain some amount of control over what those services can do. They also participate in, collaborate with and often initiate sweeps of homeless encampments in addition to supporting the enforcement of anti-homeless ordinances including panhandling, vagrancy, and anti-transient ordinances.

    3) City-Sanctioned Encampments That Deny Self-Determination – An Innovative Idea in Surveillance and Policing
Of course, one of the most obvious non-solution solutions is the shelter system. Shelters were created and were effective as an emergency option for people on the streets. They were never intended to be used as a long-term solution to give people shelter.  Shelters were also absolutely never meant to become a permanent tier of housing because they are not housing. The shelter system is also not a viable or safe solution for many homeless people but that does not stop politicians from promoting them as if they are a real solution.

    An innovative idea, that has been circulating for years but has recently seen a re-investment, is the idea of creating city-sanctioned encampment shelters. These initiatives create legal encampments in large abandoned areas – usually far away from city centers -- that are run by the city or a non-profit and function like outdoor shelters. This is different from encampments that have gained legal exemption from cities but are run by and for their residents and don’t involve criminalizing, surveilling or policing people.
    The formation of encampments does not represent an end to homelessness.  Rather they are an indication of a critical need to create more effective local systems for responding to homelessness. Official strategies should focus on connecting people to permanent long-term housing solutions and not creating and operating city-run encampments. At the very least, official strategies should honor the creative ways that homeless people are housing themselves and their communities, such as building tiny homes and other structures, in response to the lack of housing.
    People sleeping in encampments are diverse and interventions must address a range of needs, challenges, and goals. The forced dispersal of encampments is not an appropriate solution though city-sanctioned encampments have been used as a justification for increased police and sweeps of homeless camps by entrenching the idea of non-city sanctioned encampments as an illegal public safety/health concern. This forces the constant packing up and moving of elders, disabled, and physically injured individuals sleeping in encampments while ignoring reasons why people would choose a non-city sanctioned encampment over a city-sanctioned one. A person’s refusal to enter a city-sanctioned encampment can also be used to justify the criminalization and/or arrest of that person.
    Homeless people who live in encampments use many strategies to keep themselves and their community safe. One of these strategies involves petitioning the city for code waivers, exemptions, or pushing for them to simply ignore that the encampments exist. These solutions are useful so long as they are not used by cities to pitt homeless people against each other by naming some people’s encampments legal while others as illegal. They are also helpful as long as they do not increase the criminalization of these communities. Cities should not be congratulated for doing this most basic work of allowing people to sleep and rest without being criminalized but should be celebrated when they invest in long-term housing that meets the needs of homeless people in their neighborhoods.

   4) Homeless Courts – Using the Criminal Legal System to Fight Problems Created by the Criminal Legal System
As was mentioned earlier, criminalization is not a solution to homelessness. In response to this, there is commonly a push for other criminal legal approaches to address homelessness, like homeless courts. The criminal legal system exacerbates problems for homeless people in all of its iterations and should not be used as a solution.
Homeless courts were created as a way to address homeless issues outside of the regular court system. These courts were created, similar to mental health courts, because the “regular” court systems has become overwhelmed with status crime offenses.
    Homeless courts do not lessen or change the quality of life charges that homeless people are facing. They do create a special court to address the so-called crimes of engaging in basic life-sustaining activities while homeless. Homeless courts further institutionalize homelessness and entrench homelessness in the criminal legal system. These courts do help people access housing services. but only if they have pleaded guilty. Pleading guilty also often forces people into services that they may not want or need including drug treatment, case management and other services.
People should not need to be arrested to access services. People should not be arrested for quality of life crimes. Quality of life crimes are violent, racist, classist and should not exist. The criminal legal system is a violent system based on racism, classism and other oppression and cannot properly address homelessness.

    5) Outreach – A Great Way To Beef Up Your Grant Proposal
      Perhaps the most overused non-solution solution to homelessness is outreach. Outreach can actually be a useful tool in gathering information and creating a connection between people. There are plenty of ways that people are doing outreach that supports real solutions towards ending homelessness. At its best, outreach provides food, blankets, medical supplies, harm reduction materials, access to showers, and cop-watching to people living on the streets. Unfortunately, much of this type of outreach has been criminalized and de-funded.
    Outreach can also be used to perpetuate the myth that people are in the streets and other public spaces because they don’t know where to go for help or are just too dysfunctional to get there. Local, state and federal governments, BID’s, health departments, police and community organizations all conduct street outreach.  At its worst, this outreach is done to “look good,” as a media stunt, to aid in displacing people from encampments with threats of police sweeps or simply to justify increases to funding for organizations coordinating the outreach.
    Often, outreach is a practice of futility. When all the service provider's, treatment centers and housing have massive waitlists, doing outreach to tell people that there is nothing available for them besides a waitlist is not particularly helpful. While new innovative outreach programs pop up periodically in cities and towns all over the U.S. with different uniforms, different people and different names – the end result of nothing changing for homeless people remains the same.  

    6) Case Management, Life-Skills Training and the Homeless Industrial Complex
      An entire industry has been created to “help” homeless people over the past 30 years. This special arm of the non-profit industrial complex is created to come up with new best practices, new experts and new projects to funnel money into. Nowadays, most homeless service providers are required to include case management and life-skills training. While these services are helpful for some, for most they do nothing at all or are directly harmful.
Case managers are assigned to homeless people to provide emotional support and help link people with services that they need. As mentioned earlier, the most helpful services like long-term permanent housing are consistently unavailable. While politicians claim that homeless people are service resistant, the reality is that most services are homeless people resistant by offering nothing particularly helpful.
    Life-skills trainings are given at many of these service provision nonprofits. These trainings are often mandatory and include literacy, numeracy, budgeting, keeping appointments, contacting services, dealing with bills, interpersonal communication, dealing with disputes, self-confidence, building social network skills, etc. While these trainings on how to better participate in capitalism are helpful to some, many find this to be a deeply condescending and harmful practice.
The thing that homeless people need most is a home. Homeless people often have very little in common with each other besides not having a permanent house to live in. Unless the life-skills trainings are about building housing and non-profits are purchasing land for people to put these houses – they are going to continue to be mostly irrelevant.

    7) Navigation Centers, Coordinated Entry Systems, Vulnerability Indexes – The Many Ways to Link Homeless People Up with Housing That Doesn’t Exist
      Under neoliberalism, there are many names for the same thing to make it seem like the idea is new and/or useful. These solutions are the least harmful of all solutions on this list. However, they are included because of how much money they waste on being marginally helpful and mostly useless.
There is a push for new Navigation Centers across the Bay Area in California. Navigation Centers are large centers where homeless people can come to be “navigated” to services in the city. This $3 million solution is meant to create a one-stop shop where people can access all of the services in the city at one place without having to figure out where all of the services are and what they do on their own. This is not a bad idea. Services in large urban cities can be overwhelming and complicated to navigate.
    The problem with the Navigation Center model is that it is not particularly successful in linking homeless people with long-term permanent housing because there is no housing to be linked up with. In San Francisco, there is a small number of temporary shelter beds for people in the Navigation Center. The majority of people who access the Navigation Center receive temporary housing, a bus ticket out of town or they are pushed back onto the streets.
    A similar project in Los Angeles called the Coordinated Entry System (CES) attempts to bring services together in one place for homeless people to access. The CES involves extensive outreach and recruitment of homeless people. Unfortunately, similar to San Francisco, these methods are not particularly helpful because there is no housing to coordinate and make accessible to people living on the streets. The CES measures their success by how many 1,000s of people are on waitlists for housing. It can take years for people to have any movement on those wait lists.
In Sacramento, the Common Cents program is also a project to coordinate services. Common Cents is specifically interested in addressing the needs of homeless people at the highest risk of premature death. They use a vulnerability index to assess severity of need for housing.
    While prioritizing people in the most dire need is a great approach, the reality is that there is not enough housing for even those people. There are over 1,000 people on the waiting list because there is no housing available. This approach also does not address the fact that living on the streets creates a high risk for premature death for all people. People need adequate housing in order to survive. Housing is a human right and everyone in this country, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, should have access to housing that they can afford.
    All of these solutions, almost identical to each other in different cities in the West Coast, merely bring together the services that exist. The problem is that there is not enough housing. These solutions will continue to not address the needs of people living on the streets until there is actually enough housing built in these cities.
 
    Homelessness will end when everyone has a house to live in and can access their basic needs like eating, sleeping, resting, using the bathroom and having contact with other humans. This is not an idealistic and unattainable goal. There is enough money in this country to ensure that everyone has a house. After all, we have no problem funding home ownership for wealthier people and we have no problem building luxury condos in urban cities across the U.S. that are only accessible to the most wealthy. Ending homelessness is a problem of political will and not economics.
    We cannot continue to allow these non-solution solutions to pop up in cities across the U.S. We need housing and we need it now. Homelessness has been a crisis for 30 years. People living on the streets all over the U.S. are experiencing premature death at disturbingly high rates for lacking access to the most basic human things. Poor communities are under attack. The time to be bold and invest in a world where we can all thrive is now.
    The first step is incredibly simple: build housing for every person to live in and abandon the non-solution solutions immediately.

by Billie Bramhall

    As I write this article I can think of many needed protests besides this mysterious “Homeless Industrial Complex”: the passage of the Camping Ban ordinance three years ago that makes it illegal for anyone (read homeless people) to sleep or rest in Public Places in Denver, the police who issued 36 tickets last night to homeless people catching a little much-needed sleep for trespassing and breaking the curfew ban, the banks and mortgage companies that caused a recession that put thousands out for work, the mortgage companies that foreclosed on hundreds of low income people and took their homes, that government that refuses to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour, the Downtown Denver Partnership for trying to make homeless people invisible downtown instead of helping them with housing and shelter, etc.
    I appreciate the hard work that dozens of church groups, working people, veterans' organizations, mental health groups, non-profit organizations (yes and local gov't as well) are doing to provide shelter, food and most importantly housing to thousands of homeless people without shelter every day and every night. Are these groups perfect? No. Do they do their very best? Yes. Do they sometimes make mistakes and not do enough? Yes. I strongly advocate more and better services for the thousands of homeless people in Colorado. I advocate more and more varied shelter opportunities than a bed in a dormitory at night or a comfortable chair in a shelter for the day. For those on the streets, I advocate for more comfortable places to stay during the long days. I advocate for more unlocked bathrooms and rest stops where homeless people can use bathroom facilities, clean themselves up and take care of their appearance while they look for job training, education and employment. I advocate a room with a door with a lock and key where they can keep themselves and their belongings safe and clean. And of course the most important of all, really low cost housing that lets them turn their lives around and join the housed in Denver.
    These desires are shared by all of us who are working with and for the homeless people.  Let's together push harder on our city councils and state legislature to bring this about – and quickly, because with all our prosperity and astounding development, cities are also experiencing a disaster for their lower income and especially homeless people.

by Debbie Brady

    Denver’s Mayor Michael Hancock has declared war on the homeless citizens of Denver. He has not publicly declared this war, but the results are obvious. He has tasked his Deputy Chief of Staff Evan Dryer with sweeping the streets of unhoused citizens. This is a safe policy politically because no one wants to look at homeless folks living on their sidewalks.
    But what happens to these folks when they are swept away. Do they just disappear?  No. They go somewhere else and then the police end up chasing them from one end of the city to the other.
    What has been accomplished here is we have poor people getting chased all over the city and cops wasting their time as real criminals run rampant in the city. Is this what we are paying our hard-earned tax dollars for? Not me. I would like to see some real solutions. No sooner has his honor cleaned up one street and made a grand appearance to the citizens in that neighborhood than he starts getting reports of another neighborhood getting flooded with the folks he just swept away. Must be frustrating. I feel sorry for the poor guy. You would think he would start looking at pursuing some other way to deal with the problem. You would think. But no, politicians have pretty much a one track mind. All they can concentrate on, most of the time, is money and votes.
    One definition of insanity, which I subscribe to, has been attributed to Einstein but that is unproven. It says that if a person keeps doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, that person is insane. By that guideline, in my opinion, most of our government is insane. But that’s just me.  
    So what’s a guy to do, if the people don’t want his services, don’t want to be bent, stapled and mutilated into his tidy system? Punt. Keep on doing what you know doesn’t work and pass the whole problem on to your successor. That is what has been happening since and even before John Stapleton, mayor and grand poobah of the KKK, made his mark in the 19th century. Insanity.  
    There are alternatives, of course, but getting the ear of the powers that be can be very difficult, especially if these alternatives are espoused by the people most affected by the problem: the street people. These are those folks most affected by the so-called problem and also the people with the least input when the subject is discussed, mostly in board rooms and fancy restaurants by the politicians and the tycoons who control them.
    “Nothing about us, without us” they ask. Is that so hard to understand? Who do you know that wants their whole life decided in the 57th floor conference room of some glass and steel tower? Not me.