Fresno Puts Ending Homelessness on the Dollar Menu

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.

Those who argue that we already know how to end homelessness, and that research is a distraction from the real issue of getting people off the streets, ignore the fact that Housing First, while now part of the general repertoire of knowledge any homeless advocates has, is actually a recent innovation borne from research and analysis, not common sense and anecdotes.

So yes, let's all follow Swearengin's lead in trying to raise funds, but let us not fall victim to the idea that we have the answers to end homelessness. If we want to get the most for our money, we have to think beyond funding the same simplistic interventions we have bankrolled for decades. We need to learn more about why people fall into and persist in homelessness, and which interventions are most effective and why.

Ultimately, in order to end homelessness, we not only need to do more, we need to learn more, too. Anyone with student debt knows that learning costs money, but it is often money well spent. The same holds true in combating homelessness. The Fresno mayor's dollar plan is a great start. Perhaps if we can get ten cents on the dollar going toward evaluating the work we are doing, and laying the groundwork for what we should be doing, ending homelessness would be attainable.

Photo credit: Packmatt