I've recently come to a counterintuitive conclusion - what if the key to “solving” homelessness is to stop trying?

Last year, thanks to Community Solutions, Inc., I had the chance to join a discussion with Houston's former Mayor Annise Parker.

Despite nearly 15 years working on homelessness in California, seeing the numbers get worse almost every year, examples like Houston sustain my belief that homelessness IS solvable (a 33% unsheltered drop since 2020, a 61% overall drop since 2011). 

But here's the thing - what if framing our efforts as trying to "solve" homelessness is actually hurting us? For example:

• We set ambitious milestones, which come and go, hurting credibility and morale.
• We celebrate "quantitative” successes that don't match the “emotional” truth experienced by frustrated community members and people in our systems.
• We point to the need for "solving" upstream causes, which at times results in taking ownership for systems we don't control and didn't break.
  

May...

One of the biggest problems with the way we have localized the response to homelessness in this country is that as a sector / industry / movement, we have failed to create a common understanding of how the parts of a homeless system of care typically fit together.

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.

Rather than being a constant and unchanging phenomenon, homelessness has emerged, disappeared, and returned many different times, for many different reasons throughout our nation's history. Most recently, that has looked like: