Biden Admin. Declares Housing A Human Right, Announces Plan To End Homelessness

And newly minted LA mayor Karen Bass has a plan of her own.

On any given night in the United States, there are over half a million unhoused people and only 301,589 shelter beds available . Over a million individuals and families experience homelessness in an average year. Seven-hundred unhoused people die of hypothermia every year. These are not things that should happen in the richest nation in the world.

The Biden-Harris administration is hoping to change that, and on Monday morning released a new plan aimed at reducing the unhoused population by 25 percent by 2025.

While the 104-page plan, developed by the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), will establish more much needed affordable housing, support programs and emergency shelters, it will also focus on preventing people from losing their homes in the first place and addressing the systemic issues that contribute to homelessness. In addition to seeking input from a variety of US agencies, USICH also interviewed hundreds of people who are or had previously been unhoused to find out what would actually be helpful to them.

From All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness :

Homelessness is not inevitable, and it is not unsolvable. At USICH, we envision a future in which no one experiences homelessness—not even for one night.

USICH believes that housing should be treated as a human right, and that housing is health care. We prioritize the use of data and evidence for effective policymaking and know that an evidence informed approach to ending homelessness will require us to address the barriers and disparities that people of color and other marginalized groups too often face. Advancing the most effective policy solutions will require that people who have experienced homelessness firsthand should be in positions of power to shape federal, state, and local policy. We can prevent homelessness before it starts by scaling up housing and supports, —both of which are critical to ending homelessness. The federal government must listen to local needs, support local innovation, and foster collaboration and partnerships. The United States of America can end homelessness by fixing public services and systems—not by blaming the individuals and families who have been left behind by failed policies and economic exclusion.

As much as some people may feel comforted by believing that everyone on the streets is there because they refused to work hard, did drugs or made otherwise "bad decisions," even if that were true (which it's not), that kind of blame is not going to solve the problem. If it were possible to end homelessness by walking up to unhoused people and telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take personal responsibility, we would not have more people living on the streets than live in Wyoming.

We have a pretty big problem in this country. We need people to do low income jobs. If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that the vast majority of the workers most essential to our daily survival are the workers making the least amount of money. At the same time, the cost of housing has increased exponentially, so that there is no way these workers can afford to actually live anywhere. The plan points out that "there are only 37 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters" in the US and that there is no place where someone working full-time, earning the federal minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom or studio in the United States is about $2,000 and 40 hours a week at the federal minimum wage nets only $1,208 before taxes.

It's an impossible situation. And as much as some of those bootstrap people love to yell that "those jobs are not meant to be careers," we still need people to do that labor, and if we need them to do that labor, they have to be able to live somewhere. It's just common sense.

Another one of the plan's important goals is to "strengthen system capacity to address and meet the needs of people with chronic health conditions, including mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders," which would also be very helpful. The fact is, a lot of shelters cannot take people with serious mental health or substance use issues, because they have to worry about the safety of the other people staying there and the workers and volunteers don't have the training or the support to handle those issues. The 1980s purging of mental institutions with no backup plan has led to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people with mental health and substance issues living on the street throughout the years because they have no other option. There need to be other options. You know, besides prisons.

Newly minted LA mayor Karen Bass has also launched her own plan to combat homelessness in her city, where approximately 40,000 people are currently unhoused. The new program, called Inside Safe, will help move people from encampments to motels leased by the city and also speed up the approval process for affordable housing.

"If you build affordable housing under my executive directive, the city will complete the approval process within 60 days. Then, when construction starts, the permit utility and certificate of occupancy process will be completed in just five days," Bass told ABC 7 in Los Angeles. "That's five days for 100% affordable housing projects and in no more than two days for temporary housing. That is the urgency we need at City Hall and that is what we are delivering."

Study after study has shown that the most effective and least expensive way to help the unhoused population is to house them. Preventing them from becoming unhoused in the first place is also pretty helpful.

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