And as George Mason professor Craig Willse shows in his book, The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States, that industry is designed to manage costs rather than challenge the mechanisms that create and maintain homelessness.

As someone who has spent eight years working in nonprofit homeless services and studying homelessness, Willse’s book struck a nerve. It also confirmed the hypocrisy of my situation—of my desire to help those most vulnerable due to their extreme poverty, and my knowledge that I’m part of an industry dependent on the existence of extreme poverty.

Homeless services don’t end homelessness; they manage it. While the industry is dominated by nonprofits, there is money to be made, and we have accepted the reality that homeless services are professionalized, and offer career opportunities and—sadly—a certain security.

Homelessness is not routine—it’s a deeply personal experience of suffering, and its causes are largely systemic. Many of the folks that I’ve met through my work became homeless because of the way their life and choices were constrained by forces outside their control.

Larry (I’m required to use a pseudonym as a condition of my work and research with homeless people) grew up in a poor neighborhood in South Los Angeles. His father left before he was 9, and his mother struggled to provide for him and his siblings. He learned to cook and hustled for the family, but, bitter with what he saw as few options, he got into gang life, and started robbing and dealing. He was in and out of prison for nearly three decades. Out of prison, he wound up on the streets or in homeless shelters. He told me he about his aspirations to go to college and get a good job. Larry hoped to overcome the bad decisions he had made, he said, but the economy didn’t have a place for people with his record and background, and the legal system termed him a failure and pulled him back in after every slip or relapse.

In my work, I have observed common themes in narratives such as Larry’s—families without resources, life-long struggles with poverty, neighborhoods with limited economic opportunities and experiences of deep trauma. Of course, many people I serve also have high psychiatric needs and chronic health conditions, but I don’t buy into the notion—common in popular, policy, and academic interpretations of homelessness—that these conditions are the primary cause of homelessness.

Through false interpretations, I fear we have constructed an imaginary chronically homeless person—mentally ill, with substance abuse and other issues. That hides the life experiences and structures behind their troubles—everything from lesser education for those who are poor and have special needs, to an economy that limits social mobility, to a criminal justice system that swallows up poor people, to health care systems that underserve the poor and mentally ill, to housing markets that don’t provide enough safe and affordable options. Framing homelessness as a pathology reinforces the legitimacy of the industry and places the blame for housing deprivation on the individual.

Herein lies the dilemma—I am one of many who work to support individuals to better meet those needs, but in the context of an industry that presents no challenge to the realities that largely create and exacerbate those needs.

In my research as a graduate student in applied anthropology at California State University, Long Beach, I explored some of the limitations of supportive housing as a response to homelessness. I completed the research at Lamp Community, a nonprofit homeless services organization in the city of Los Angeles. I did life history interviews with people in the housing program, interviewed staff and administrators, all the while documenting my observations. I found that life-long courses of trauma and poverty caused housing insecurity that led people to become homeless. I also found that housing insecurity remains even once a person makes it from the streets to supportive housing. Of course, the committed work of staff in providing services and intervention can sometimes help them keep their housing, even in tenuous situations. But all such efforts are temporary, since supportive housing, like the rest of the homeless industry, fails to confront the inequality, poverty, health care, and other systems through which homelessness exists.

In exploring and describing these limitations, I hoped that my research would be read as a challenge to the assumption that these programs exist solely to do good. Rather, these programs are not simply a humanitarian response to deprived populations. They are also economic endeavors, as Willse suggests, that are part of a system of homeless management. My hope was that such an analysis would inspire a rethinking of how we confront homelessness. But I also questioned whether my research would simply amount to a step forward in my professional and academic career, to be buried on a bookshelf.

When the city of Los Angeles declared a state of emergency in October 2015 and committed $100 million to address homelessness, I couldn’t help but see it through this more skeptical lens. Of course there will be folks who benefit from the infusion of millions of dollars into the homeless services industry. But if we accept Willse’s thesis, then expanding the industry doesn’t bring us any closer to ending homelessness. So the state of emergency and funds appear less humanitarian and more aimed at masking the visible reminders of our disparate economic and social systems.

As downtown Los Angeles gentrifies and a palpable tension between the newer tenants and those living on the streets grows, the pressure to better manage the homeless population mounts. What has been an ongoing issue for decades is suddenly framed as an emergency due to the proximity of visible poverty to idyllic housing development.

Many advocates have argued that housing should be considered a human right, but in our society it is first and foremost a commodity—a commodity increasingly unaffordable for most. Still many advocates adopt the argument that housing the homeless is cheaper than leaving them on the street, as a way of getting new policies and more funding. This demonstrates how effectively economics dominates the discourse of homelessness. Take the logic to the extreme, and you understand the horror of such thinking: If homelessness and costs shift so that abandoning homeless to the streets is cheaper, should we stop trying to find them housing?

There will be people who get housing and maybe enough of the much needed support to retain it as result of Los Angeles’ decision to take some action, but most individuals will continue to live in vulnerable places and without stable housing. Warehousing visible poverty in the limited pool of subsidized housing may create the appearance of a reduction in homelessness, but that’s just an appearance.

Of course I want to make a difference. That’s what drew me to the field of homeless services in the first place. But the poverty and trauma I’ve seen have convinced me that we are failing. The nonprofit industry and all our emergencies will not end homeless.

What will? Real advocacy that isn’t compromised by the funding of an industry. Advocacy that produces deep changes in how our economic system creates and responds to poverty, how we create housing, how people get the health care they need.

While I can focus on the day-to-day work—the great team I collaborate with, the amazing people I’ve met during my time in the field, and the ways we exercise compassion and, in a small way, attempt to lessen the harshness of our broader system of violence—I’d rather simultaneously confront the hypocrite that I’ve become. I can’t help but encourage others caught in the web—advocates, case managers, clinicians, administrators, academics, politicians—to do the same.

The post Homeless Services Don’t End Homelessness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know this isn’t true. For the past two years, I have been working with archivists Michael Dolgushkin and Shelby Kendrick, sifting through old files and records on employment from the 1970s and 1980s. The work is part of a California State Library research effort to catalogue employment-training strategies in California. I have worked in and with local job-training projects in California since 1979, and the archival project involved my papers on job training and employment programs and the papers of other practitioners and researchers over the past four decades. For the 1970s and 1980s, we collected hundreds of reports and articles about specific projects aimed at youth illiteracy and unemployment, retraining laid off workers, and welfare-to-work approaches.

That era feels very familiar, since people were worried about the same big issues that we are now—growing wage inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, chronic unemployment. But it’s also encouraging, since our responses to those big problems back then actually made a difference.

The 1970s and 1980s are a peculiar and urgent time to visit via an archival time machine. Government and academic papers were being written about the elimination of middle-class jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs available to workers without college degrees. Rising teenage pregnancy rates and welfare rolls fueled predictions of increased urban violence and a growing “underclass.” “Deindustrialization” was a popular topic, with essays such as “America’s Changing Economic Landscape” and “The Declining Middle.”

And so was the fear that technology was eliminating a wide swatch of jobs in all sectors, leaving a mismatch of too many workers for not enough jobs. In a 1984 report, “Forecasting the Impact of New Technologies on the Future Job Market,” Stanford researchers Russell Rumberger and Henry Levin warned that the high-tech sector, seen as a font of replacement jobs, was actually creating a relatively small number of jobs, and was unlikely to be a major employer in the future.

None of the specters of those days have materialized, though. To the contrary, we have seen improvements. Welfare rolls have dropped dramatically, as have teen pregnancy rates. Job growth has outpaced job loss due to technology and other forces. The middle class has shrunk by some indicators, but remains robust, and new mid-level jobs are being created.

Where did we go right? There is no one answer. Success came as a result of a complex mix of influences: government, private sector, and volunteer education and training programs; demographic shifts; macro-economic policies. But that’s not enough of an explanation. All the improvements are linked in ways to a dynamic that too rarely gets mentioned in policy discussions: the willingness of people (policymakers, practitioners, and ordinary citizens) to stand up to then-dominant ideologies and refuse to be paralyzed when problems are described as intractable. Below is a very brief sketch of this dynamic in California.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the consensus on welfare held that expanding government benefit programs was inevitable, that entrepreneurship would be replaced by the collaboration of big government and big private-sector companies, and that the country’s employment future lay in a model of big government, big labor, and big private sector companies. It was a consensus adopted by top officials in government, private foundations, large non-profits, and the prominent think tanks of the time. Welfare rights organizations and advocacy agencies, with funding by private foundations and government, opposed any attempts to rethink the welfare system (they sought to expand it), and they and others dictated to the Democratic-controlled state legislature what to do.

How was this consensus broken? Slowly, by people on the left and the right challenging the establishment. Welfare reform only began its first steps when a few elected Democratic officials in Sacramento, such as then-State Senator John Garamendi, were willing to break ranks and join with Republicans, national thinkers such as Lawrence Mead, and local practitioners to establish welfare time limits and redirect welfare agencies to become job placement agencies. Eventually, a different way of approaching welfare took hold—one that aggressively pushed welfare recipients into the work world. Caseloads, which reached a high of more than 900,000 cases by July 1996, started a steady drop over the next eight years to fewer than 500,000 cases by July 2004. (During the Great Recession, the number of cases rose, but has leveled in the past few years, at around 560,000.) Whereas previously welfare caseworkers looked at welfare recipients and asked, “How can we take care of these people?” after the implementation of welfare reform, the caseworkers began to ask, “How can we build on the strengths these people possess and help them become more self-sufficient?”

Welfare reform had many other moving parts, and the case reduction had greater complexity. But at core it was the rejection of a liberal ideology of expanding government benefits.

Similarly, teen pregnancy rates went down sharply. The California teen pregnancy rate, following the nation’s rate, rose through the 1980s until reaching 72.9 births per thousand in 1991. It then began a steady decline down to 45.2 births per thousand in 2001, and further on to a low of under 30 births per thousand today. Part of the teen pregnancy reduction resulted from programs of additional services and opportunities—at my job training agency, San Francisco Renaissance Center, we had a “Parents of Success” program for many years, assisting teen mothers in obtaining GEDs and job placement. But a main driver of reduced teen pregnancy involved breaking a consensus that it was a “cultural norm.”

Regarding job numbers, deindustrialization and technological advances did produce the envisioned job losses in California. But they also produced unexpected job gains that replaced the losses. In September 1980, payroll employment stood at 9,829,000 jobs in California. This September, payroll employment was up to 16,199,000 jobs. California had over 1.2 million manufacturing jobs this year.

The main driver of this job growth has been entrepreneurship, that supposedly disappearing value. Its promotion came not from the federal government or other elites connected with employment strategies, but from outside practitioners and thinkers—again, on both the left and right. Non-profits such as the Corporation for Enterprise Development, minority business development groups, and local community development corporations pushed forward strategies on local levels emphasizing entrepreneurship such as the expansion of inner-city loan funds, and purchasing networks for fledgling businesses. The developing market-oriented think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, identified the tax changes and culture changes necessary for entrepreneurship to expand. George Gilder’s 1981 best-seller Wealth and Poverty was also crucial in creating an argument and language to explain the value of entrepreneurship.

The history of the past three decades in California shows that in the areas of welfare, teen pregnancy, job growth, and new business generation, improvement is possible. But there is no room for complacency. Today, California’s foundations, social welfare non-profits, and government entities continue to be led by persons who see their role as expanding government benefit programs or adding free community college or other free goods to reduce income inequality or poverty. These approaches, not anchored to employment, business growth, or entrepreneurship, won’t have any more success than similar programs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today’s job training and anti-poverty practitioners and policymakers rarely study the efforts of previous decades. That’s unfortunate, and the California State Library archival project is aimed at showing how much there is to learn from the past. We will need to keep to true to the values that drove our social and economic successes of the past three decades. If we do so, in another 30 years we’ll be able to revisit our current employment approaches, and see that, once again, we made progress.

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