Crime-Free Housing Ordinances and the Criminalization of Homelessness
Lakisha Briggs is a certified nurse assistant who lives in Norristown, Pennsylvania. When her former boyfriend was released from jail after an earlier episode of domestic violence, she faced a lose-lose situation. Norristown had what was called a nuisance property ordinance, which gave its police department the authority to demand that a landlord evict a tenant who calls 911 three times in four months, in effect criminalizing a person’s right to call the police. Briggs had one strike from the earlier domestic violence and had stopped calling the police for fear she would be evicted. Well-meaning neighbors called the police at least twice, which only resulted in the police revoking protection for her altogether. “I had no choice but to let him stay,” Briggs said to a reporter. Just days later he cut her head and stabbed her neck with a broken ashtray. She begged her neighbor not to call the police, but the neighbor called anyway, and Briggs was taken by helicopter to Philadelphia for emergency care. The city told the landlord to evict her within ten days or he would lose his license.1
Things got better, fortunately. A Legal Aid lawyer to whom Briggs was referred connected her to Sandra Park of the ACLU. The ACLU of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia law firm of Pepper Hamilton LLP joined as well. Briggs had a lot of law on her side—the Federal Housing Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the First Amendment, the due process clause of the Constitution of the United States, and similar state laws. Even so, Norristown kept pushing back. Finally, though, it settled, and Briggs received $495,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. The city repealed its ordinance totally and committed itself never to pass another version, and the state passed a law banning municipalities from penalizing tenants who exercise their right to contact the police.2 The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development filed a complaint of its own after the ACLU sued, which was helpful in the case and put the issue on HUD’s map for the future. The outcome was a quadrifecta: a big win for Briggs, a new law in the state as a whole, the involvement of HUD, and national press attention for a practice that disproportionately affects low-income women.
Nancy Markham is another person who was victimized first by her ex-boyfriend and then by the city of Surprise, Arizona, which invoked its nuisance ordinance to get her evicted because she had called the police too often. Between March and September 2014, the ex-boyfriend choked her, punched her, and threatened her with weapons. When she called the police more often than they liked, they retaliated by telling her landlord to evict her. She too found her way to Sandra Park, who in turn brought in the state ACLU and a private law firm that handled the case pro bono. The suit was brought in federal court in August 2015, arguing that the city had violated Markham’s First Amendment right to seek police assistance and the Fair Housing Act’s ban on gender discrimination in housing. In March 2016, the city entered into a settlement providing $40,000 for Markham and causing repeal of the ordinance.3
These problems are illustrative of what is really a national crisis—the surprising number across the country of chronic or “crime-free” nuisance ordinances like the ones that victimized Briggs and Markham. Briggs and Markham are lucky to have found legal help. They are also unusual given the great shortage of lawyers for low-income people. This scarcity affects not just those who qualify for free legal services but also people with somewhat higher incomes who cannot possibly pay market rates for legal help. Briggs and Markham found the needles in the legal haystack and were fortunate enough to get help not only from the ACLU but also from law firms that took on the cases on a pro bono basis. More often low-income people who violate chronic nuisance laws lose their housing even though they have legal rights, because the rights are useless without a lawyer.
The crime of “public nuisance” has been with us from the days of the Pilgrims. It came via the common law of our English forebears and now exists in statutory form in every state. Like disturbing the peace, disruptive conduct, loitering, loafing, and vagrancy, it is a catchall that is limited, if at all, only by previous precedent.
Starting in the 1980s, police forces felt besieged with the crack cocaine epidemic and began looking for third-party help. Municipalities started enacting chronic nuisance ordinances and disorderly housing ordinances focused particularly on getting rid of crack houses, including conscription of landlords as vigilante deputies. Catchall low-level misdemeanors had moved from the street to the private space of the home. As time passed and police forces found themselves understaffed due to budget cuts, the interest in third-party policing increased even more. Shortages in 911 staffing were a particular challenge and became a centerpiece of many of the ordinances.
Beginning in 1992 in Mesa, Arizona, a new version of the concept came into being—the crime-free housing ordinance. Proponents described a seemingly harmless application of the idea of community policing, which was then becoming popular. They laid out three phases of activity. One, get property managers, police, and tenants to work cooperatively on crime problems. Two, work jointly to provide a safe environment for tenants. And three, get information to tenants so they can help maintain a safe place to live.4
Crime-free ordinances and chronic nuisance ordinances caught on and swept across the country. There is no precise count, but observers estimate that around 2,000 municipalities in 44 states have enacted some kind of such ordinance, with more than 130 in Illinois alone, which is the largest number in a single state.5 And they are not the innocent-sounding idea that was described at the beginning.
Implementation begins with classes for landlords that indoctrinate them in their often unwanted vigilante role. Someone complains to the police about something a tenant is doing. Possibly the landlord complains, but more frequently a neighbor is the complainant, or the tenant herself calls 911. The police get in touch with the landlord. They say, “The neighbors say, ‘Your tenant is selling or manufacturing or using drugs.’ ‘Your tenant or his dog is too loud.’ ‘There is trash in the yard.’ ‘Your tenant’s kids are skateboarding or playing basketball outside at night.’ Your tenant calls 911 too often. We haven’t got time to fix the problem. You fix it. You have to abate the nuisance.”
Meanwhile, the tenant does not know she is the subject of the “nuisance” complaint. Or worse, she gets wind of it, panics, and leaves on her own, or decides not to chance calling for police or emergency assistance at all anymore. If she stays, “abating the nuisance” generally means evicting the tenant. The landlord does what he is told because he can be fined, jailed, lose his license, have a lien placed on the property, or even see his building condemned or shuttered. There is no due process for the landlord unless he wants to get himself arrested and then try to defend himself in court. It is much easier for the landlord to evict the tenant in a summary way, so the tenant receives no due process, either; the landlord may offer to refund the tenant’s deposit if she will leave, or may just change the lock. For the most part, landlords oppose these ordinances as strongly as do the tenants.
Kate Walz of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law says, “Nuisance ordinances are criminalizing non-criminal activity. They are creating dire consequences for tenants. Many of the ordinances say essentially, ‘anything can be deemed a nuisance.’ ”
In a surprising number of localities, the law says calling 911 three times in a certain period of time for any reason at all constitutes being a chronic nuisance. Walz says even if the tenant calling is a “victim of domestic violence, has a loved one threatening to commit suicide, or has a kid trying to run away,” calling 911 too many times can and does end in eviction. In many places, women (and children) are being evicted by order of the police conveyed to the landlord to implement, because the tenant has made “too many” calls to protect herself from domestic violence. And “too many is as few as one.”
Sandra Park of the ACLU describes these laws as victimizing the victim twice: the abuse itself and the eviction for reaching out to get help. For fear of losing their homes, many low-income women endure more violence rather than call the police. Walz goes on to say that landlords in Illinois “are up in arms” about the ordinances and that the Shriver Center “has forged a partnership” with them, although the landlords are understandably more interested in due process for themselves than for tenants. But she says it is hard to find tenant plaintiffs because (apart from the paucity of lawyers) most of the time they do not even understand why they are being evicted.
When lawyers do get involved, they send demand letters to local governments, which usually succeed in evoking immediate rescission of the eviction notices, followed by working with the Shriver Center to change the ordinances. The lawyers find, though, that the municipalities are unwilling to repeal the ordinances wholesale or, if newly considering an ordinance, are unwilling to refrain completely from having one. Instead, as a compromise for now, the Shriver Center asks the jurisdictions to consider factors such as domestic violence, disability, due process, confidentiality rights of minors, and the possibility of homelessness. It will continue to push city councils and states for full protection of the rights of people with emergency needs and beyond that to full repeal. Meanwhile, the Shriver Center’s Walz points out that those hit with the ordinances are protected by multiple constitutional and statutory provisions, as was the case with Lakisha Briggs.
The best (and really quite remarkable) research on the incidence of crime-free ordinances was done by Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez. Desmond is the author of the powerful book Evicted, which follows the housing travails of low-income families in Milwaukee. In working on the book, he encountered the Milwaukee chronic nuisance ordinance. He and Valdez then studied its administration locally and compiled a list of fifty-nine such ordinances around the country, including in the twenty largest cities.
They found that some of the fifty-nine ordinances were quite specific and others were quite vague. Either can be bad. For example, Chicago defines a chronic nuisance property as one that has made three calls for public services within ninety days. On the other hand, several large cities use vague definitions such as that of Dallas: “Whenever a nuisance is found to exist within the city, the city manager has the right to order the owner to abate the nuisance.” And fines and other penalties on landlords can be tough. In Seattle, for instance, fines can go up to $500 a day until the chief of police certifies that the property is no longer a nuisance.
The approach to domestic violence in the fifty-nine ordinances is even worse. Only four explicitly exclude domestic violence from the list of nuisance activities for 911 calls, and thirty-nine explicitly include assault, sexual abuse, battery, or domestic violence as nuisances on their list. The other sixteen are open-ended. Desmond and Valdez’s findings in Milwaukee itself are revealing as well. Nearly a third of the citations in the two years studied were for “excessive” use of 911 to report domestic violence. And 57 percent of those citations resulted in eviction, with another 26 percent resulting in threats of eviction by the landlord if there is any further problem. Each of these facts is illustrative of how deeply troubling these ordinances are, over and above the inherent faults in the nuisance idea itself.6
Milwaukee revised its ordinance in 2013 to specify that domestic violence cannot be grounds for eviction, almost certainly because of the research of Desmond and Valdez and the public attention it received.7 And when the Illinois legislature finally got around to it in 2015 due to advocacy from the Shriver Center and its coalition partners, both houses voted unanimously in a compromise to ban counties and municipalities from having limits on 911 calls regarding domestic violence or from people with disabilities (but leaving the rest in place).
The ACLU and the Shriver Center point out that these domestic-violence-specific exemptions are not a solution. They do not adequately protect domestic violence victims, because domestic violence incidents are often not categorized as such in police records. The ACLU and Shriver emphasize that all people in need of emergency assistance should be protected, and Shriver will continue to press for that at the state level in Illinois and throughout the state. Currently, only three states—Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Iowa—have laws that expressly prohibit municipalities from imposing penalties on tenants who exercise their right to call for any reason.8
Meanwhile, litigation continues. An exceptionally ugly ordinance in Maplewood, Missouri, drew two lawsuits in the spring of 2017, the first brought by Washington, D.C., civil rights lawyer John Relman and colleagues and the other by the ACLU’s Sandra Park and colleagues from the Missouri ACLU. Maplewood requires an “occupancy permit” to live in the community, and it is a crime not to have such a permit. The city calls it a chronic nuisance if a household makes two or more police calls of any nature—including domestic violence or being a victim of any other crime—and revokes the people’s occupancy permit for six months.
The plaintiff in Relman’s case, which was brought first, is the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council. The important point of that was that there was no individual complainant plaintiff as of then and the willingness of the Equal Housing Council to be the plaintiff made it possible to sue without having to wait for a victim. Sad to say, there is now a case with a victim. Rosetta Watson, the plaintiff in the ACLU suit, experienced exactly what the ordinance threatens, and she was far from the first. She called the police several times to ask for protection to keep her safe from her former boyfriend. They did not protect her and she was attacked by the man, and then she was literally banished from the city for six months (as if she would ever want to come back).
An investigation revealed that 55 percent of those banished in Maplewood were African American even though they constituted just 17 percent of the population. And victims of domestic violence or those with disabilities were also disproportionately sanctioned. Not that these facts are surprising. The whole idea is designed to prey on people who in the city’s mind are marginal and not wanted in the community.
Beyond the truly awful ordinance, the participation of the Equal Housing Council as a plaintiff establishes a potentially valuable precedent for suits brought by government entities with the authority to sue in that they need not wait for a plaintiff who has suffered serious injury.
DETERRING DESEGREGATION
City officials also use the police to push out people of color who have moved into majority-white neighborhoods. This is a contemporary version of burning a cross in the lawn of the new resident, sending a message to both them and others that they are not welcome.
Kate Walz sees this firsthand. “With the demolition of a lot of public housing in Chicago, we continue to hear all over the state this perception that all these tenants have moved to their town and they need to regulate their rental housing stock as a result. Skokie had a PowerPoint on its website that said, ‘Why are we doing this?’ Answer: there was a picture of a partially demolished Cabrini Green high-rise. Except there was no evidence that families from there had moved outside the city. The new residents just represented changing demographics, but the Skokie people perceived they were coming from Chicago public housing.”
Walz continues, “Some jurisdictions see that every town around them has a crime-free ordinance, so they’re afraid that if they don’t have one then they’ll get all the ‘criminals.’ The Illinois Municipal League says this is just good governance, but if you look through the minutes of city council sessions or at the Skokie PowerPoint, you see the perception that they’ve had an influx from Chicago public housing. The local governments focus on their federally subsidized housing stock. We don’t think that’s an accident.” This is the reason why localities are reluctant to repeal their ordinances completely.
Criminalizing schoolchildren is another method of deterring desegregation. One example comes from Chesterfield County, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond that has been becoming more racially diverse. Police data showed 1,499 students sent to court in a single year, more than half the 2,548 in all of New York City, which is itself a target of civil-rights complaints about school discipline. More than 50 percent of the referrals to court in Chesterfield County were for simple assault or disorderly conduct. More than half of the students arrested were black, while black students constituted just 26 percent of the student body. And almost half of the students sent to court were fourteen years old or younger. Twenty-seven children under ten were charged with assault, and five under age ten were accused of making bomb threats. One school in the county, Falling Creek Middle School, had a referral rate of 228 children per 1,000, thirty-nine times the national rate. It is difficult not to infer that the push to arrest African American students in school is a message that their families are not welcome in the area.
Antioch, California, a city of about 100,000 people discussed earlier, combined pushing residents out with criminalization of schoolchildren. After the housing crash of 2008, a new cadre of African American residents moved in because affordable housing (and federal housing vouchers) became available in Antioch. The city was already quite diverse—about half white with a mixture of minorities, including Hispanics, Asians, and an already present African American contingent. Nonetheless, the new residents were seen by many as low-income and undesirable, and the city let them know. The city pressured landlords to evict a number of the new residents based on made-up or rumor-based accounts of illegal or inappropriate behavior and pressured the local housing authority to take steps to revoke the housing vouchers of the new residents. The ACLU and a blue-ribbon group of public-interest law firms and private law firms, acting pro bono, sued the city in a class action, which was ultimately settled in 2010.9
The criminalization of students went along with the pressure on residents. In 2009 and 2010, the Antioch school district had entered into agreements with the U.S. Department of Education and the ACLU to straighten out the district’s disproportionate suspensions and use of the courts for African American students. Lack of compliance in 2015 led to a new lawsuit by the NAACP and others that resulted in yet another agreement, and in 2016 the plaintiffs in that matter then sued the school district for not living up to the last agreement.
Beginning in 2015, John Relman began looking at the racial use of the chronic nuisance ordinances from the perspective of the Fair Housing Act. In June 2015, the Supreme Court somewhat surprisingly restated its support for the disparate-impact provisions of the act—the idea that even without proof of intent to discriminate, a law or policy covered by the act could nonetheless be held unconstitutional if it had a disparate impact on a protected group.10 Relman saw an opportunity: disparate impact was much easier to prove than intent. Relman had been talking with the Shriver Center and Matthew Desmond and others already, and he asked Desmond to identify a city where the conditions would be conducive to proving that a chronic nuisance was unconstitutional because of its disparate impact.
They selected Peoria. Divided by Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the city is still highly segregated, with an ugly past and a not-so-great present. For example, the police department bought a retired military tank-like vehicle that the locals call “The Armadillo,” and they leave it in black neighborhoods overnight, saying they are watching for crimes or nuisances. Not surprisingly, the residents find it intimidating.
Most of the federally subsidized (so-called Section 8) housing in the city is in isolated minority neighborhoods with no services, but some landlords in mostly white neighborhoods have rented to African Americans with housing vouchers. A white city council member has pressed to push the Section 8 tenants out. Among other things, the city created an 8:00 p.m. curfew and then selectively used violations of the curfew to invoke the nuisance ordinance and pressure the landlords to evict the tenants.
Relman used the Freedom of Information Act to get public records on police reports and citations relating to the administration of the nuisance ordinance. The city stonewalled for six months. Meanwhile, Relman and partners met with landlords, the NAACP, other community leaders, and especially the HOPE Fair Housing Center in Wheaton, Illinois. Tired of the city’s lack of response, Relman and the Shriver Center made two moves: a federal lawsuit and a complaint to the federal government. Both complaints allege that Peoria is deliberately perpetuating segregation in the city by driving African Americans out of the neighborhood. The lawsuit is the first federal case challenging this kind of housing segregation policy and the Department of Justice investigation is the first of its kind as well. Just as important, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a nationally applicable guidance that laid out constitutional and federal statutory issues with crime-free ordinances, citing Shriver’s work.
HOMELESSNESS
Crime-free ordinances are ways to push people away from their homes and neighborhoods. The homeless, already without a place to live, are increasingly the targets of ordinances and policies to push them out of entire cities.
A surge in new municipal policies concerning homelessness in recent years has had the effect of further criminalizing the poor, people of color, and people with disabilities. Citywide bans have risen significantly on camping in public, begging in public, loitering, loafing, and vagrancy, sitting or lying down in particular public places, and sleeping in vehicles.11 Breaking any of these laws can result in a stint in jail. Over the last decade, citywide bans on camping in public space have increased by 69 percent, on loitering, loafing, and vagrancy by 88 percent, and on living in vehicles by 143 percent.12
No sleeping, no sitting, no eating in public spaces—add these together and it’s clear that many cities just want homeless people to go away. Needless to say, criminalization does nothing to reduce homelessness. The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness said in a 2012 report that “criminalization creates a costly revolving door that circulates individuals experiencing homelessness from the street to the criminal justice system and back.” It is not only costly, it is a “vicious cycle,” says the Center for American Progress. “If an individual convicted of one of these status offenses is unable to pay fines and fees levied as punishment, he can wind up back in jail for nonpayment. And he ends up with a criminal record, which can make it even harder for him to obtain housing and employment and to get back on his feet. As a result, more than half of the homeless population has a history of incarceration.”13 Homeless people are eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than the population as a whole.14
Russell Bartholow epitomized the criminalization of being homeless. During the fifteen years he lived under a bridge in Sacramento, California, he received 190 citations from police, was the defendant in 132 cases, spent 104 days in jail, and was assessed $104,000 in fines. Native American and in foster care as a child and then adopted by his foster mother, Bartholow was a bright student until he sustained a brain injury in a racially motivated attack at school. He was never the same after that. He married and fathered a child but gradually succumbed to drug addiction and paranoia. His wife and son moved away, his mother died, and he ended up living under a bridge. He sought government help from time to time, always unsuccessfully, but was regularly harassed by the police leading to the repeated arrests and incarcerations when he could not pay the assessed fines. It was a vicious cycle.
In 2013 he saw his niece’s name—by then she was a legislative advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty—in the local newspaper. They had lost track of each other and were ecstatic to reunite. Jessica Bartholow said, “All his teeth were gone. He’d been set on fire and spent months in the burn unit. He had been beat to a pulp several times. He had scars all over this body. And not just like little scars. Big scars. Here’s a man who’s really no threat. For the most part, his warrants were related to sleeping and camping. He wanted them cleared up. But there was really no feasible way for him to accomplish that.” He died of cancer in 2016. There were still thirty-seven warrants for his arrest.15
How many people are homeless is not clear, except to say it is too many. According to the annual January Point-in-Time survey, the national number has gone down from 647,258 people in 2007 to 549,928 people in 2016. But Maria Foscarinis of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty says that is a serious undercount. The annual total is considerably larger because some homeless people come and go in the course of a year. Experts think the January figures themselves are undercounts, especially with regard to youth disconnected from their families. The experts also estimate that five times the number actually homeless are at risk of homelessness, living in unstable housing situations. Using that definition, for example, the U.S. Department of Education counts 1.36 million children as homeless or in unstable situations.
And the survey itself causes undercounting. It is done by volunteers, and the cities do it in varying ways. The basic protocol prescribes doing a count of people who are sleeping outside in the middle of the night (as well as those who are in shelters), but the volunteers are told not to venture into any area where they might be at risk. Pervasive criminalization plays a role in the undercounting, too. It keeps the count down because the people who sleep outside tend to locate themselves in places where they will not be seen and arrested.
How we came to where we are now is a long and much-told story. Beginning with the end of World War II, the quality of housing for most Americans improved markedly—but not for all even then. When I was a child in Minneapolis, there were men, largely Native American, who lived mainly outside, huddled in the entrances to office buildings near the train stations. People called them winos. Now we say they are homeless and there are many more of them. They are of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and all ages, although disproportionately people of color. And in too many places, Minneapolis and others, we are not doing as well as we should to help address their needs.
The story of the homeless is a story of what happened to our economy and our public policies. We all know that mental hospitals were closed and community-based mental health services did not follow in sufficiency. But that is only one factor. There used to be affordable single-room occupancy hotels in downtowns—the YMCAs, YWCAs, and the like, including the not-so-nice flophouses—but they are long gone. Downtown development pushed them out and they weren’t replaced. Especially with the ascendancy of President Reagan, affordable housing began to disappear and the rent for the depleted inventory shot up. The kind of good jobs that didn’t require a high school diploma went away and too many of the new jobs paid awful wages, in many instances not enough to live on. Many among the homeless have such jobs. All of that was the beginning of the homelessness that we now know.
The anti-tax revolution made things worse. Even decent leaders who privately know they should be investing in housing and mental health services but lack the requisite resources have instead taken to punishing the homeless—pushing in multiple ways to make them go away.
Cities have different approaches to the dilemma. Among the bad ones is Orlando, Florida, which simply bans all “sleeping out-of-doors” in a city where 34 percent of the homeless in the area lack shelter beds. Manchester, New Hampshire, makes it illegal to “lounge or sleep in or upon any of the commons or squares of the city” but 12 percent of homeless people there have no housing or shelter options. In Santa Cruz, California, 83 percent of homeless people in the area lack housing and shelter possibilities, but the city nonetheless bans camping in public, sitting or lying down on public sidewalks, and sleeping in vehicles.16 Dallas issued more than eleven thousand citations to its estimated 600 unsheltered people over a four-year period from 2012 to 2015. Honolulu out-lawed sitting or lying in public places and then issued 16,215 warnings and 534 summonses in just two years. In Denver, 73 percent of people seeking emergency shelter were turned away.17
According to Teresa Nelson of the Minnesota ACLU, Minneapolis police keep a list of a hundred people who have been convicted of “quality of life” offenses and have been ordered to stay out of downtown. Among other things, this means a person on the exclusion list cannot transfer from one bus to another to get to the other side of the city. Eighty percent of those on the list are homeless and most are African American. The city government clearly wants to keep the city center clear of homeless people (as do many cities). Judge Kevin Burke of the Hennepin County District Court, who was outspoken in his criticism of the city’s police practices in a number of areas, pointed out that the system is ill-equipped to deal with the mental health issues involved. “We need to do something radically different,” he said.18 Given all of that, it is not surprising that Minneapolis forbids use of a “camp car, house trailer, automobile, tent or other temporary structure” as temporary housing throughout the city.19
The ACLU and others have fought back with lawsuits attacking the constitutionality of the anti-panhandling and anti-camping ordinances and the seizure of the belongings of homeless people, with mixed success. The ACLU in Hawaii pushed back against Honolulu’s punitive laws and achieved a promise from the city to give homeless people forty-five days to retrieve seized belongings and twenty-four hours’ notice before clearing sidewalks and parks, and to videotape all seized items.20 Litigation challenging overly broad anti-panhandling ordinances has succeeded in multiple cities on the ground that they violate freedom of speech. On the other hand, even with the Department of Justice filing a brief, a trial judge upheld an anti-panhandling ordinance in Boise, Idaho. Even though the plaintiffs lost in Boise, opponents of the punitive measures all over the country took heart from the Justice Department’s involvement, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it would disfavor funding of homeless assistance for cities that punish homelessness.21 It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will continue this stance.
The opposite of criminalizing poverty is ending homelessness. “What we’ve learned about homelessness over many, many years,” says Steve Berg of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “is that you have to provide housing, and criminalizing the homeless doesn’t keep people off the streets at all.”22
The Housing First initiative, or supportive housing, changed everything in getting homeless people into permanent housing. Instead of requiring people to demonstrate their sobriety and stability, the insight was to put them into housing first. The goal was always to get people into homes and apartments, but Housing First achieved phenomenal outcomes. Even with the support services that are critical to success, the approach is far cheaper than homelessness with its shelters and hospitals and jails, to say nothing of the pain and sadness of being homeless. City after city has adopted Housing First. Salt Lake City, Utah, is perhaps the highest achiever. Under its ten-year plan beginning in 2005, Salt Lake City reduced chronic homelessness by 74 percent by creating hundreds of permanent supportive housing units and using streamlined assessment and placement at the outset to provide needed services to each person. A national campaign led by the Obama administration to end homelessness among veterans was impressively effective. And Community Solutions, an organization led by Rosanne Haggerty, reported in 2015 that it and its partner organizations had met the goal of their four-year 100,000 Homes campaign of supportive housing for medically vulnerable and chronically homeless people in 186 communities across the country.
The biggest cities—New York and Los Angeles (city and county)—are stories in themselves. New York spends more than $1 billion on homelessness, including $870 million on shelters alone. It spends $34 million on legal services to prevent evictions and $180 million to keep people from being evicted. Its homelessness prevention program provides intensive case management and multiple services, and it both keeps thousands in their homes and saves money for the city.23 Another consequence is the city’s low number of unsheltered people. But it is fair to say that no one is satisfied.
The City and County of Los Angeles spend more than $250 million on emergency housing and services but have not made much headway in reducing homelessness. As of the 2016 January survey, 46,874 people were homeless in LA, and about 31,000 were sleeping in the parks and on sidewalks. Over 167,000 experience homelessness over the course of a year. The contrast with New York City is palpable. Something like a third of people returning from incarceration to Los Angeles become homeless and almost 50 percent of young people aging out of foster care become homeless within six months.24
There is movement in the city and the county. City residents voted $1.2 billion in 2016 for funding permanent supportive housing and county voters voted a ten-year quarter-cent sales tax toward ending homelessness, although advocates say that some of the new money is simply replacing funding already in place. Another bright spot is the Inner City Law Center (New York City and other Legal Aid lawyers around the country have counterparts). Led by Adam Murray, in 2016 the center helped more than 3,100 low-income tenants to avoid homelessness and recover more than $1.5 million in rent or relocation benefits, and also represented hundreds of people with other housing issues.25
The good things that have been accomplished did not just happen. Responsible public officials, advocates, civic leaders, judges, and others made them happen. They have taken a path that eschews criminalization of the homeless. They know that, as former attorney general Eric Holder said, “the criminalization of the homeless . . . is costly, unjust, and not a solution to homelessness.”26
A test looms, though. After eight years of strong support from Washington, we have a man running the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, who knows absolutely nothing about the importance of the agency he heads. The challenge for the cities that are pushing ahead to create more housing and decriminalize homelessness is to sustain their momentum until a better day. We shall see.