Homelessness & Personal Responsibility

For the seven plus years that we’ve lived here I’ve seen this same guy begging for money outside of our building. He stations himself outside of a grocery store, which occupies the ground floor of our building in the heart of the affluent, uber-liberal west side of Madison.

And he does very well.

I had assumed he was homeless. Turns out he has an apartment in the neighborhood. I had assumed that at some point the grocery store or other businesses on the street would have offered him a job. Turns out they have, but he’s turned them down. He makes more begging.

He doesn’t have a real job, but that’s not to say that he does’t have a purpose. I often see liberal west siders engaging him in conversation and glancing out the corner of their eye to see if other liberals are taking note of their virtue. There but for the grace of the tenure committee go I. That sort of thing.

But there’s nothing virtuous about any of this. There’s nothing good about begging on the street. It’s a humiliating existence. And when liberals enable it they’re not being compassionate.

If we really lived in compassionate society there’d be somebody in an official capacity who would confront this guy. Tell him he can’t do this. Get him help with job placement if he really needed it. Or, better yet, tell him he has to walk into the grocery store and accept the job on offer. But, no matter what, it should not be acceptable to earn your living through begging.

And no, at least in this case but I suspect in many others, it’s not a question of a big, bad society that turns its back on the problem. Actually, we pour tons of resources into the problem of homelessness. In fact, this spring Madison will open a new 250 bed shelter with a $4.2 million operating budget. It’s time we allowed just a little bit of personal responsibility to enter into the equation.

On the winter solstice, a group of liberal organizations and churches organized q gathering on the Capitol Square to remember homeless people who had died during the year. A reporter interviewed a homeless man who said he had access to a shelter but he just didn’t like the rules.

He just didn’t like the rules? He didn’t like which rules? The rule about not showing up drunk? The rule about not fighting? The rules have to do with respecting your fellow guests. That’s not a failure of society. If you refuse to follow sensible rules that’s a failure of the individual. If you don’t like the rules at the free homeless shelter, well then get a job and an apartment. But don’t hang around on the street and then complain about how hard life is. You don’t get to complain that you should be given free accommodations without any responsibility.

The other day, the New York Times ran a well-balanced article exploring the effectiveness of the “housing first” model which has dominated homeless policy for a couple of decades. The experience is long and the studies are numerous and the conclusion is that we still really don’t know what works. Housing first does, as you would expect, get people into housing as it simply provides free shelter, with no questions asked and no responsibility on the part of the homeless person.

But long-term outcomes are no better than any other model. Under housing first, people don’t get treatment for mental health or other issues at a higher rate, their physical health doesn’t improve and, over the course of a decade, they don’t die at a lower rate.

But liberals hang onto housing first because it fits their overall narrative. Nobody’s personally responsible for anything so there should be no requirements for anything. If people fail to take advantage of available treatment or do nothing to work to improve their own lot in life, well, that is somehow on society.

Conservatives push back. They don’t necessarily want to abandon housing first, but they want interventions to be mandated. The Times article points out that there’s scant evidence that their approach will work any better, but it’s also true that the liberals’ preferred model has been much more studied. The conservative approach of going back to expecting some effort on the part of the homeless person has the advantage of not having been studied to death.

There’s also some evidence that housing prices play a role. One study suggests that when rents exceed a third of average area incomes homelessness goes up.

So, here are some ideas that combine both approaches.

• Keep housing first. Get people off the street. The new, expensive shelter in Madison is fine — but only if residents are required to move toward a job and their own place.
• So, mandate interventions. If the problem is that the person doesn’t have a job, get them one. If they don’t have basic job skills, teach those. If it’s a mental health or addiction issue, require treatment. If it’s like the guy in front of my building who just doesn’t want to work, make it illegal to beg for money.
• Build more housing so that supply and demand come into sync. Remove NYMBY barriers. Build, baby, build.
• We do come down to the really tough cases. Addictions are extremely hard to cure, even with elaborate and expensive treatment — see Nick Reiner. Mental health issues can also be tough. What do we do with people who keep landing back on the street? We need to make it easier to involuntarily commit people to mental health institutions or treatment facilities.

The bottom line is that it should never, ever be acceptable for people to live on the street — even if they seemingly want to live there. Living on the street is not a human right.