I sometimes think about my career in two distinct phases:

1. Pre-Iain De Jong.
2. Post-Iain De Jong. 

I joined the movement to end homelessness in 2010. 

In 2016, after six years working in direct services, I shifted to a role in local government in Marin County, CA (the affluent suburban county and CoC north of San Francisco).  

At that time, homelessness in Marin had become centered around challenges with unsheltered homelessness in the downtown of the county's largest city - my new employer. 

A few months into the job, partners in a neighboring county invited a group of local leaders from Marin to come join a day-long training they were hosting with Iain. 

Nowadays, I tend to take for granted that everyone who works in homelessness knows who Iain is, but at that time, I had absolutely no idea that I was about to witness one of the titans in our sector.

Iain has been working to end homelessness for 20+ years. He is the president and CEO of OrgCode Consulting and the author of ...

One of the biggest problems with the way we have hyper-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. 

Worse, we often use inconsistent terminology or even attempt to rebrand what are essentially the  same interventions, thus making it even harder for both policymakers AND people experiencing homelessness to understand how our systems operate. 

This isn't just a thought experiment.

As we saw last week, this fragmentation fuels extremely harmful feedback loops that prevent us from making more progress as a sector. 

Instead of aligning and standardizing, we seem 

to have a bias towards creating new programs and efforts,

which then make it even harder to see the bigger picture.

This complexity is hardest on the most vulnerable, who

can get lost in or burned by our systems, understandably

disengage, and...

After 15 years of working on the frontlines of the movement to end homelessness, I have gradually come to believe that our sector's biggest challenge is something we almost never talk about, yet when I describe it to colleagues, there is near universal agreement about its role and impact.

Our biggest issue is NOT:

• NIMBYs
• BANANAs (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone)
• The Trump Administration
• The Cicero Institute
• Sensationalized content on social media 
• Frustrated community members 
• Funding (and the perceived lack thereof)
• A lack of heart and good intentions
• A lack of great ideas and innovation
• A lack of smart, talented and dedicated people 

Instead, to quote the great systems theorist Donella Meadows: 

• The destruction [systems] cause is often blamed on particular actors or events, although it is actually a consequence of system structure. Blaming, disciplining, firing, twisting policy levers harder, hoping for a more favorable sequence of driving events, tin...

This website is premised on two simple “truths,” which have taken the better part of 15 years to learn and accept. 

#1 - Modern homelessness is a symptom. 

Despite our best efforts to advance a simple explanation of what’s driving this crisis, the truth is that there is no singular cause of modern homelessness. Instead, modern homelessness is the result of a portfolio of interconnected and reinforcing challenges. 

Beginning in the early 1980s and accelerating to the present, a number of long-term societal and socioeconomic trends have converged:

• Rising rental housing costs
• Declining real wages
• The racial wealth gap
• Broken behavioral health systems
• Domestic violence and household instability
• America's loneliness crisis and declining levels of social capital
• Exits to homelessness from healthcare, justice, and foster care systems
• The erosion of broader social safety nets and assistance

The cumulative impact of these combined issues has been the reduction of economic capaci...

When I think back to the early years of this work, above all else, I remember how simple I thought the solution to homelessness was. The answer is in the name itself. People just need homes. 

Despite this obvious truth, within a few short months of joining this movement, I began to notice a certain realism, dare I say cynicism, from colleagues who had been doing this work a lot longer than me. To them, homelessness wasn’t simple at all. In fact, it was extremely challenging and complex.  

Gradually, I joined their ranks, writing the following in an op-ed in 2013:

• Homelessness is the most complex social challenge we face. The causes are varied, the prescriptions are polarizing, and our perceptions of the issues and those experiencing them are shaped by profoundly personal worldviews.

This perspective was only reinforced when shifting from working within systems as a direct service provider to working on systems in government. 

In many ways, helping someone secure housing is f...

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: