Decentralization

When it comes to mounting a response to homelessness, there is a shockingly ironic refrain echoed in local communities all across the country - our challenges are unique, homelessness is different here.

• "It’s our weather."
• "If you only you knew about our local politics."
• "No, we have the most challenging housing market."
• "It's [insert name of neighboring community]'s fault."

Federal and state government agencies have made this dynamic even worse.

Even though we are now 40 years into this crisis, there has never been a binding, accountability-driven national strategy aligning local efforts around proven cost and effectiveness benchmarks. This applies to most states too, especially California.

In the absence of a shared strategy or framework, for the last four decades every city and county in our country has essentially been left to their own devices to respond to this crisis however they want.

As the head of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the federal agency tasked with spearheading a national strategy, put it in 2023:

"There is no national landscape. There are just local efforts."

In systems thinking, a feedback loop is a mechanism that creates a predictable pattern of behavior over time. The pattern might be "balancing," such as a thermostat keeping a room the same temperature. Alternatively, it could be reinforcing, such as the proverbial snowball rolling down a hill getting bigger and bigger.

Decentralizing our response to homelessness has produced six extremely powerful feedback loops that have made it nearly impossible to mount an effective response to this crisis.

#1 Reluctance from Local Governments

Because of insufficiently coordinated and enforced state and federal strategies for ending homelessness, the thousands of city, town, and county governments across our country are each independently responsible for addressing homelessness in their own local way.

To dramatically oversimplify, each government agency essentially has two options:

• Option A - Attempt to house and provide services for everyone who is homeless
• Option B - Do not provide housing and services and instead redirect people to other communities

There are two big reasons why local leaders do not pursue Option A:

1. The cost of providing housing and services is substantial (especially without sufficient state and federal support).
2. There is a pervasive and pernicious belief that most people experiencing homelessness are not "local" (i.e., they became homeless somewhere else and then moved to the community). This belief signals an assumption that other communities have already selected Option B.

These findings have been further corroborated by long-term data from the State of California, which has shown that 96% of people experiencing homelessness throughout the state only access services in one community.

(If anything, the relatively higher rates of homelessness in Coastal California communities like the Bay Area are the result of a particularly strong concentration of the systemic forces detailed in "A Crisis We Didn't Create")

Given these statistics, I am always surprised by how certain community members are that the revolving faces they see on the street are people from other communities.

In reality, rather than people moving across communities, it is much more common to see movement within a community.  

#2 "The Homeless Industrial Complex"

Over time, the term “[insert industry] industrial complex” has come to connote nefarious and self-serving tendencies within a given economic sector. It is:

A socioeconomic concept wherein businesses become entwined in social or political systems or institutions, creating or bolstering a profit economy from these systems. Such a complex is said to pursue its own financial interests regardless of, and often at the expense of, the best interests of society and individuals. Businesses within an industrial complex may have been created to advance a social or political goal, but mostly profit when the goal is not reached. The industrial complex may profit financially from maintaining socially detrimental or inefficient systems.

To be very clear, in all of the time I have been working to end homelessness, collaborating with hundreds if not thousands of colleagues, I have not once met a person who is “pro-homelessness.” There is no grand, corrupt conspiracy to perpetuate homelessness for the enrichment of those working in this space. Every person I have met in this field is genuine in their desire to help people and make a difference. And frankly, I think social workers and care providers should be more highly compensated, given the stress, demands, and importance of this work.

Nonetheless, it is common to hear frustrated community members claim that the people working to solve homelessness are in fact part of the “homeless industrial complex.”

While this insinuation certainly stings, in all fairness, the social service sector as an “industry” is not above reproach.

No one wants homelessness, but over time, because society has failed to take the necessary steps to prevent it from happening in the first place, a large and robust homeless service system has emerged to try to help people regain housing.

Unfortunately, as anyone who has worked in this field will know all too well, structural inefficiencies often emerge as these social service systems grow, which makes solving homelessness even harder than it already is. This is primarily driven by a lack of coordination.

#3 Chronic Homelessness

It's important to recognize that the unnecessary complexity of our social service systems impacts the most vulnerable people the worst. 

When people experience homelessness for long periods of time, we often make them the subject of the problem.

• "It's a choice."
• "They're service resistant."
• "They're just too sick to help."

While there are of course people who can be very hard to engage, we must recognize the ways in which our siloed and decentralized systems make it harder for people to access the help they need. 

#4 The Leadership Tide

As our systems become more complex and disorganized, it becomes extremely difficult for any one person or organization to gain perspective on how all of the pieces actually fit together.

This is exacerbated by the fact that our movement does not have a shared story describing how we got here or a shared framework / strategy guiding our efforts moving forward.

Instead, individual human beings come into homeless systems of care with preconceived ideas and assumptions about how we should be responding. 

The result, as concisely stated by Nithya Raman, Los Angeles City Councilmember and Chair of the City’s Homelessness Taskforce, is that:

"We have 15 different Council Districts and 15 different approaches to homelessness."

Unfortunately, as leaders and practitioners do gain more knowledge and understanding, the inevitable - life itself - happens. People move on to other jobs or projects. They get burned out and quit. Some simply retire.

Because of the way we have decentralized our response, this leadership turnover means we are constantly losing hard earned institutional knowledge rather than absorbing it into our broader collective strategy and efforts.

#5 Short-Termism

In an important way, the leadership tide actually helps to drive our first feedback loop - local government disinvestment.

Local leaders, particularly political leaders, who know they will only be working on this issue for a relatively short period of time before moving on to something else, are not incentivized to make hard, long-term investments.

#6 Hopelessness

Given all of these dynamics, it's easy to lose hope.

As San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown famously declared in the early 2000s:

"Homelessness in unsolvable."