NEWSBYDAVID HENDERSON

Portland State University has a homeless problem. A recent opinion piece in the student newspaper, the Vanguard, laments the intrusion of so-called "transients" into the university's libraries and other buildings. The author of the piece, Janieve Schnabel, fears that "as the weather gets colder and the rains come, the problem is only going to get worse."

Indeed, Portland State has a homeless problem. It seems their student newspaper is grossly insensitive toward the homeless. Tell Portland State's newspaper to retract these stereotypes of the homeless!

Schnabel tries to excuse her bigotry by writing, "Don't get me wrong — this is not about inherent prejudice directed at the homeless."

She's right. Her prejudice is not inherent; it is learned. She probably picked it up from the same sources that so many people do: inaccurate media portrayals of the homeless. The media seems fixated on a stubborn adherence to the misnomer that homelessness is almost exclusively the result of "mental illness or the direct consequence of substance abuse."

Ironically, the author argues positive representation of homelessness in the media paralyzes Portland State University from cracking down on the nefariously unhoused. She writes, "The media has long glorified the plight of the homeless, from such depictions as the 'wise vagabond' character in many shows to the story of Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic cellist who dropped out of Julliard and lived on the streets. These people are portrayed as humble, worldly and misunderstood."

So apparently the homeless are instead arrogant, small-minded and simple?

Back in August the Los Angeles Times ran a story about a formerly homeless man named Steven Schulman who was run over by a semi-truck while sleeping on the streets of skid row in Los Angeles. Schulman lived, sued and was awarded a large cash settlement.

His tale was supposed to be one of triumph. No one wants be the victim of a gruesome accident, but Schulman used it to his advantage and was able to afford a place to live.

Tragically, his story did not end there. Instead, it ended with his untimely passing, when "the 55-year-old was discovered in his Van Nuys apartment among several empty bottles of malt liquor."

As homeless advocates, we advocate for housing. It makes sense that the homeless need homes. But homelessness is a symptom, not a disease. If you are sick, you seek a cure to the cause, not simply a way to alleviate the symptoms.

Homelessness is a complicated social issue for which there are multiple causes. I am not suggesting that all people who experience homelessness do so because of alcoholism, though it was clearly a factor for Steven Schulman. Even though the lawsuit's settlement gave him the means to afford a place to live, housing alone did not address his underlying issues, it just gave him a new place to die too soon.

Recently it seems there has been a proliferation of social enterprises. Indeed, just last week a good friend of mine enthusiastically told me about a new venture an associate of his is working on. After listening patiently to my friend, then checking out this agency’s website, I asked him “so, what makes this a social enterprise?”

To my chagrin, I have found myself asking this question a lot lately.

Grammatically, the word social modifies entrepreneur, indicating a social entrepreneur is one whose entrepreneurial activity is social in nature. I think about the word social as referring to social welfare, be it poverty alleviation, environmental protection, or any type of intervention that benefits humanity in what has traditionally been thought of as a charitable way.

With so many new ventures founded every day, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for me to decipher what the social purposes of some initiatives are. This is a significant problem for the social enterprise movement.

There is tremendous good will associated with an agency identifying itself as a social enterprise, as well there should be. At its best, social enterprise is the harmonious marriage of free market principles and charitable values. But as social entrepreneurship grows in popularity it is imperative that the concept of social entrepreneurship not get oversaturated and rendered meaningless.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is great for profit-seeking organizations that choose to augment their profit-based mission with a goal of marginal social impact, or at least a commitment to doing less harm. I have no problem with CSR. But it seems some of these new so-called social enterprises are really just companies like any other with a CSR scheme baked in from the get-go. In my book, a CSR policy does not make a venture a social enterprise.

My approach to social enterprise is heavy on the societal impact. Social entrepreneurship is a strategy to do more good on a large scale on an ongoing basis. It is the social that modifies the entrepreneur, not the other way around.

I am not arguing that social entrepreneurs should not aim to profit from their work. Indeed, profits can be a positive externality of a social enterprise. But for social entrepreneurship to truly be a world changing platform, it is essential that the social enterprise community insist new social ventures provide a clearly discernable public value.

Just as for-profits focus on profit first, a social enterprise must primarily focus on social value. A social enterprise that is profitable but provides dubious social impact is simply a for-profit corporation.

The sustainability and growth potential of free-market corporate financial structures can scale effective social interventions in a way traditional charity models have failed. But as social entrepreneurship continues to grow in popularity, the social enterprise community needs to be wary of the small “s” big “E” companies polluting the social enterprise space, risking sullying the long-term viability of the social enterprise concept and the good will associated with it.

Photo credit: claudiogennari

All this week, End Homelessness is highlighting the negative policies of various cities and the perceptions of their residents when it comes to coexisting with people struggling with homelessness. All too often, the consensus is simply, "NIMBY," or "not in my backyard." Be sure to check out the previous posts about Sylmar, California, Nashville, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., St. Petersburg, Florida, Grand Junction, Colorado and New York City.

A few years ago I was deeply involved in advocating for the development of a small affordable housing unit in an affluent Southern California community. The people in the city I was advocating in are good, caring people. They care not only about their own families, but about the lives of others, including the poor and homeless.

They are the type of people who give generously to food pantries and shelters, and donate their time around the holidays. But when the city proposed building a small low-income housing development in the place they live, near their homes and families, these good people were overcome by irrational fear, which brought out a nastiness they likely did not realize they were capable of.

Terrified by the idea of low-income kids attending their own children's schools, and counting as neighbors people whose life hardships they only saw on TV, the residents of this community created a nasty coalition to derail the affordable housing project, propagating lies about what affordable housing would do to their neighborhoods.

I say they propagated lies not because my personal politics were at odds with their own. I am someone who tries to listen to the data above all else. The fact is that low-income housing does not decrease property values or raise crime levels in and of itself. In fact, in many cases, properly implemented affordable housing has actually been found to be a community asset.

We write a lot about housing on this blog, as well we should. Securing housing for those who are unhoused is, logically, a part of the answer to ending homelessness. However, it is not the definitive answer. Homelessness is a complex issue. I would venture to say it is a more complex issue than most homeless advocates admit. By failing to appreciate the true complexities of the reasons individuals and families fall into, and sometimes persist in, homelessness, we do those we aim to serve a massive disservice.

In the comment sections on this blog, often on my own pieces, again and again I read people arguing that housing is the essential, conclusive answer to ending homelessness. Indeed, one being domiciled is antithetical to the homeless state. But this reductionist approach wrongly simplifies homelessness into a binary situation whereby there are those who are housed, and those who are not.

This thinking is wrong. While it is plainly true that providing people homes will momentarily resolve the homeless state, homelessness is the result of myriad social ills. One of those ills is in part a dearth of affordable housing, as noted in the Economist: "Expanding the supply of affordable housing would be a good first step. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of 3.1 million low-cost rental units."

However, if we actually want to end homelessness, we must move past "a good first step" and address the causes, rather than simply the consequences, of homelessness.

The mayor of Fresno, California is calling on residents to donate one dollar a month to help the city end homelessness. The donated funds will be directed to Fresno First Steps Home, a non-profit organization that plans to allocate the donations to agencies implementing the city's 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness.

Using the clout of the mayor's office to solicit community support for ending homelessness is more uncommon than it should be, and Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin deserves credit for bringing the issue of homelessness to the forefront of Fresno politics. I am certainly not going to argue against more funding for homeless services, although I might question our ability to put donated funds to best use.

While homelessness is rightly framed in economic terms, the fact is that there is more to ending homelessness than raising funds. There is still a lot we don't understand about homelessness, and what strategies to pursue to end it. Homelessness is a social malady that effects different people in different ways. What works for homeless youth, for example, is quite different from the needs of a family experiencing episodic homelessness. In order to target homeless sub-populations, and deliver the interventions that work best to lift people out of poverty, we have to understand people's particular needs better.

Swearengin has shown a willingness to bring the plight of the homeless out of the shadows and into the political light. Raising funds is part of the equation to ending homelessness, and hopefully the people of Fresno are up to the mayor's challenge. But perhaps more important than raising funds for homeless services is increasing research that advances our understanding of homelessness, and discovering innovative ways to combat it.

Being low-income is hard. Facing homelessness is harder. Applying for affordable housing is damn near impossible. Recognizing the unnecessary complexity and bureaucratic vastness of its affordable housing programs, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing a bill to Congress that will, among other things, streamline the agency's affordable housing offerings.

The introduction to the bill, titled the Preservation, Enhancement and Transformation of Rental Assistance Act (PETRA), states that "The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) currently provides rental assistance to more than 4.6 million households through at least 13 different programs ... "

Wait, did you catch that? There are at least 13 different programs. HUD's affordable housing behemoth is so complex that HUD, which authored the PETRA Act, is unsure as to the exact number of housing programs the agency offers.

Indeed, U.S. Secretary for Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan wrote a piece in the Huffington Post last week in which he argues that when it comes to getting low-income families into affordable housing, "the complexity of HUD's programs is part of the problem. Today, families are required to fill out dozens of applications processed by scores of administrators simply to have a decent chance of receiving the assistance they need. ... By creating a more coherent set of tenant rights and nondiscrimination and fair housing requirements, this legislation will ensure that our programs are fairer, easier for families to access, less costly to operate and more efficiently administered."

Panera Bread Co., the national restaurant franchise, has established a non-profit Panera Bread store in the affluent City of Clayton, Missouri. The new store is like any other Panera, except there are no food prices. Instead, patrons pay what they want as a donation for the items they receive.

The idea of a pay what you can restaurant is not new, other non-profits have tried the model before, some to reasonable success and sustainability. However, this move is notable because it is a social entrepreneurial effort spearheaded by a corporation that on face seems to risk cannibalizing its for-profit's core business.

In the social enterprise space, most corporate initiatives have been focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which I view as corporations minimizing harm in pursuit of profits. I do not mean to slight CSR with this definition. Indeed imbuing a sense of social responsibility in business is essential, especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the financial sector at the hands of unscrupulous profit pirates. But Panera's efforts go beyond simple corporate social responsibility. What Panera is doing is proactive, creating a a full on social enterprise.

While the pro-action is impressive, the question becomes, like with many social enterprises, what is the point? It is significant that Panera is conducing their experiment in an affluent community. On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense, the model is predicated on the idea of consumers not only being able to but feeling social pressure to pay for the food they eat. But social enterprises should be rooted in achieving social outcomes. What is the social mission of this venture?

Even if the non-profit Panera is able to generate the revenue it needs to sustain itself, the social value of this venture is less clear than it might seem on face.

Is hunger a significant problem in the community Panera is targeting? And if it is, is a free Panera the best way to combat food insecurity? Probably not. Social enterprises need to be more than self sustaining, they must be designed to produce social value. The City of Clayton, where Panera is piloting its experiment, is a small city of 16,000 people, 85% of whom are white with a median family income of $107,356 per year (487% of the poverty line for a family of four). This hardly sounds like a distressed community.

While Panera's experiment might function in a community that doesn't necessarily need the service, I have serious doubts about whether it wold work in a low-income area where food insecurity is a significant issue. So while the non-profit Panera sounds like an interesting idea, especially for someone like myself who frequents Paneras, the target demographic for this new venture are people who don't need a free lunch, which is exactly the point.

Photo credit: Tobyotter

There are two steps to enacting public policy: the legislative formulation and the executive implementation. The polices that impact daily life, whether specifically affecting homelessness or otherwise, are shaped both at the point where a legislative body writes a particular law, and in how (and when and whether) implementing agencies decide to interpret and carry out policies.

Last May Congress passed the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act which, among other things, made some modifications to the definition of homelessness used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). I have been critical of the definition of homelessness HUD has used in the past, and have highlighted some of the reasons why how we define homelessness impacts our ability to end it.

Although it has been a year since Congress passed the law modifying HUD's definition of homelessness, the changes have yet to be implemented. In fact, it was not until last week that we got some insight into how the new definition will impact how HUD addresses homelessness.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) does a nice job of explaining HUD's proposed changes and the implications thereof on its website. Therefore, I will focus my analysis of HUD's definitional changes on the aspect I have criticized it for most in the past, namely that the previous definition fails to count people in motels and families double and triple occupied in housing due to economic hardship as homeless.

The advent of social entrepreneurship as a model for innovating social solutions is fast growing and powerful. However, there is danger in getting caught up in our momentary love affair with social enterprise and forgetting our time-tested, steady partner in social improvements: the government.

Just as my fellow blogger on this site eloquently argued that we should not abandon the traditional non-profit sector during the present social sector age of enlightenment, so too should we not ignore the tremendous power of (non-corrupted, non-bankrupted) governments to fund and bring to scale important social programs.

Here in the United States, most of the programs aimed at improving low-income neighborhoods are funded by the government, not private sources. The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University published a report in 2007 that cites "...a study of youth-serving organizations [that]...found that organizations in low-income neighborhoods had a high percentage of government funding and almost no philanthropic support."

In international development aid, private philanthropic contributions account for only about half of what governments contribute annually. Of course, there are those who argue that despite its enormity, governmental international development aid has done little. Nonetheless, governments are capable of a scale thus far unmatched by private social entrepreneurial efforts.

Despite the criticism of government bureaucracies as agents of change, the purchasing power and sizable infrastructure of governments makes them a significant force for good. The future of social progress is in the interaction between private innovation and government scale, rather than in a misguided notion that social entreprenures will supplant government interventions all together. Social enterprises benefit from nimble, resourceful thinking that is geared toward sustainability, a thinking that should be infused in our government programs. However, innovation and sustainability does not necessarily beget scale.