Why Ending Homelessness Is Impossible and How We Can Do It

In the year 2000, the National Alliance to End Homelessness introduced a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, a strategy to address homelessness systematically through initiatives like improving homeless services with better data collection and analysis, building affordable housing and stabilizing households at risk of homelessness before they end up on the streets. More than 300 communities have written their own localized Ten Year Plans, using NAEH's plan as a guide.

A decade has passed since the introduction of the first Ten Year Plan, and homelessness still exists. So is the Ten Year Plan a failure? By its stated goal, definitely, although Nan Roman, the executive director of NAEH, argues the Ten Year Plan has done a lot of good, even if it has not ended homelessness.

We cannot end homelessness if we define the end of homelessness as no person, no time, nowhere, experiencing homelessness. What we can do is reduce the number of people who fall into homelessness by improving our anti-poverty programs and reaching people before they lose their housing to foreclosure or eviction. For those who fall into homelessness, we can reduce the duration of homeless spells by increasing our housing stock and providing more effective outreach programs that provide transitional supportive services to people in need.

So if I don't believe we can end homelessness, why am I writing on a blog named End Homelessness?

I believe in ending homelessness, and I believe it is possible, so long as we adhere to an alternative definition of what ending homelessness means. Doug Schenkelberg, associate director of policy and advocacy at Heartland Alliance offers an achievable alternative definition of ending homelessness: "Pretending that ending homelessness means no one will ever experience homelessness again is not realistic. What ending homelessness means to me is that everyone has a real opportunity to not be on the streets."

Schenkelberg's definition shifts away from defining the end of homelessness based on the absolute count of instances of homelessness. Instead, his definition focuses on the systemic dysfunction of an economic system that relegates people to homelessness on account of social inequality, rather that individual ineptitude. While the NAEH's Ten Year Plan has not, and will not, lead to the literal eradication of homelessness, Roman is right that the Ten Year Plan has been a powerful tool in organizing local initiatives to provide people a "real opportunity to not be on the streets."

Photo credit: Zach Klein