Five short essays. Almost everything we believe about why people are homeless is a story about individuals: their addictions, their illnesses, their choices, the hospitals we once emptied. Each piece takes one of those stories seriously, then asks what the evidence actually says.
These five pieces share one idea, and it is worth stating plainly before you start. There are two different questions tangled together in almost every argument about homelessness. The first is why a particular person ended up without a home. The second is why a particular place has the number of people it does.
Individual trouble (an addiction, an illness, a hard turn of luck) goes a long way toward answering the first. It says almost nothing about the second. The size of the crowd is set by something else: how many homes the lowest earners can actually afford. One thing decides who. A different thing decides how many.
A crisis built by policy can be unbuilt by policy. That is the thread running under all five.
We treat the housing shortage like weather. In Asheville's Southside it was a decision: more than eleven hundred homes cleared by a federal program, and the families who owned them turned into renters.
Read →Why does our town have the number it has? Not the rate of addiction, not the weather, not even poverty. The count is set by how many homes the lowest earners can afford, and that is a number we choose.
Read →We assume the drugs put people on the street. For nearly half of those who use regularly, the street came first and the drugs after. The order changes what actually helps.
Read →The state hospitals emptied a decade before the streets filled. What put people outside was not the closing of the asylums; it was the tearing-down of the cheap rooms that had caught them, and the cutting of the checks that paid for them.
Read →Long before a home is lost, the meals are. Hunger is the early, far wider face of the same squeeze, and the pantry line is where we can still act while there is a home to save.
Read →Most of these essays take on a version of the same belief: that homelessness is, at bottom, a story about the people who fall into it. The drugs. The illness. The old decision to close the hospitals. The bad luck. Every one of those is real in a life, and not one of them explains the number on the street. The first essay comes at it from the other side and shows the count being set in plain view: a neighborhood of homes taken by policy, on purpose.
The number is set by what we build and what we fund, and it has come down everywhere a community has chosen to build and fund differently. That is the hopeful part, and it is the reason these pieces exist: not to argue that no one struggles, but to point at the one lever that actually moves the count, so we stop pulling all the others and wondering why nothing changes.