Extreme Makeover: Home(lessness) Edition

Take out your bulldozers, hammers, and paintbrushes: low-income housing and homelessness are in need of a serious political makeover. That is, if we want these issues to remain in the public discourse once the foreclosure crisis, and accompanying media storm, have passed.

Homelessness has plagued this country since the 1980s. Yet, when times were good, like in the late 1990s, nobody was talking about it. When the economy stinks, like it does now, it's all over the news. The thing is, homelessness was still an issue during the late '90s. So why didn't anyone care?

Randy Shaw of San Francisco's Beyond Chron thinks this has a lot to do with the perceived vulnerability of the middle class:

When one examines public attitudes toward homelessness and the affordable rental housing crisis over the past nearly three decades, a pattern is clear: when the economy is buzzing and good times predominate, public concern over those "left out" of the boom is at its highest. But in down times, like today, focus is on the struggling middle-class homeowner, not on the housing problems of the longstanding ill-housed population.

He argues that housing activists were able to successfully increase federal grants for affordable housing at the state and local level during the Bush years because of their strategic framing of the issue. Housing is more politically sexy when it benefits the working and middle class rather than the poorest of the poor.

Similarly, nearly all of the chatter about the housing crisis has focused on homeowners (with a few notable exceptions) even though renters have also fallen victim to the foreclosure crisis. It is no accident that renters also tend to be low-income in comparison to homeowners.

This is no surprise. Given that homeownership is a core tenet of this country, right up there with apple pie and the Hummer, it's no wonder that the needs of homeowners during the housing crisis are trumping the long-ignored struggles of renters.

Shaw argues that we need to give homelessness a political makeover in order to gain long-term public support. So now, while the glare of the media spotlight is on homelessness, we should not focus on how the shelters are packed and the food pantries are empty. Over-emphasizing the need, he says, and the problem may seem insurmountable. He offers a different approach to gain long-term political support:

It has become politically irrelevant that San Francisco has created more permanent housing for homeless single adults than any city in the United States ever has over a five year period. Instead, advocates ignore what has been accomplished and focus on the families or other populations not housed, helping to lead key portions of the electorate to conclude is that homelessness is too intractable problem to justify additional funds.

Housing activists need to follow the lead of school advocates by promoting a message that affirms the successes of the past without implying a lack of ongoing need. High test scores are not attacked out of fear that they will reduce school funding, but instead build public support for more money -- affordable housing can be similarly reframed once advocates feel comfortable acknowledging that public funds have brought real gains.

Seems like a somewhat risky approach to me. If the public does not know that an immediate need exists, will they support adding more programs? And how can we be sure that public funds have brought real gains if the homelessness crisis has worsened?

In any case, his point is well taken. Homelessness seems to disappear from the public discourse when the economy is booming, even though low-income people are still hurting. And the needs of low-income renters will likely be ignored once the housing crisis passes unless we take steps to reframe the issue and drum up broad public support.

Where's Ty Pennington when you need him?