What If the Key to Ending Homelessness Is to Stop Trying to Solve It?

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.
  

Mayor Parker offered a completely different perspective. 

In short, Houston stopped trying to "solve" homelessness and instead got excellent at managing it.

She analogized this strategy to infrastructure.

Every city has a certain level of annual infrastructure need (e.g., roads, bridges, sewers). As a result, every city has a dedicated division that is sufficiently resourced with staff and funding to meet this ongoing need. If this department is consistently under-resourced and/or mismanaged, the city literally crumbles. 

From this point of view, our nation's “housing emergency room” is truly unlike every other sustained government operation, from public safety to schools to healthcare, which each have:

• A generally consistent organizational structure across communities
• A predictable level of resources to meet an ongoing need (which is based on the logic of the organizational structure - that's key)
  

Homelessness is not like this. 

We have overly localized our response to homelessness, which has resulted in wildly different system designs, even across neighboring communities.

We endlessly rebrand and use inconsistent terminology for what are essentially a handful of basic building blocks common to all systems of care (e.g., shelter, outreach), preventing "standardization."

Because of this fragmentation, it is nearly impossible to create coherent projections about the level of resources actually required to meet the need.

So here's the paradox. By letting go of “solving,” the path to real progress becomes clearer.

• If we accept we can’t control the upstream causes
• If we accept that the only thing we can control is the nature of our response 
• And if we then use that agency to create a standard model for the ongoing management of our housing emergency rooms, which then leads to alignment around what "sufficiently resourced" really means ... 
  

Then maybe what’s happened in Houston could become the norm - not the exception.

Would love your thoughts!