Houseless in 2008

This town of mine has always cared about the homeless. I feel I can say that with confidence after 35 years of working with volunteers, donors, and our faith communities who help the homeless daily.

I’ve talked about the city’s homeless with congressmen, City managers, police chiefs, mayors and at rotary, Church groups, at the country Club, the Town and Country. I’ve gone anywhere people would listen. And my listeners all care a lot about a problem that is now more than 40 years old and not much has changed.

Despite all of our conversations, one remark by one resident John Rasmussen sticks in my mind. Short, red-headed and always carrying a walking stick, John, who slept next to the heating vents at the main library in the winter said to me, “Frank, I’m not homeless, I’m houseless.”

Despite all of our conversations, one remark by a Pasadena resident John Rasmussen sticks in my mind. Short, red-headed and always carrying a walking stick, John, who slept next to the heating vents at the main library in the winter said to me, “Frank, I’m not homeless, I’m houseless.”

John’s words came back to me at this month’s meeting of the community Coalition. The Coalition’s members represent our faith-based non-profits and churches with the primary aim to assist the homeless. In the middle of that meeting I heard an Executive Director say his agency was applying for a “Housing First” grant.

“Stop,” I said. “What does ‘Housing First’ mean?”

“It’s an approach to ending homelessness that is centered on getting homeless people into permanent housing and THEN providing then with services.” he replied.
That stunned me. The philosophy I worked within emphasized emergency and transition housing and supportive services first -- a kind of education model. If you worked your way though the “lower” levels, a service provider would then find housing. The Housing First strategy stresses finding permanent housing quickly and providing services if and when they are needed.

Shortly after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, various social service groups and government agencies set up emergency centers to assist displaced persons. When John heard that he went to Northridge. He came back and told me, “They didn’t help me because I was ‘really’ homeless.” That is about the closest I’ve heard of a similar program, but John was not its target population.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness coordinates a network of agencies dedicated to the Housing First concept. There are several critical elements:

• Focus on helping individuals and families access and sustain permanent rental housing as quickly as possible;
• Services are delivered primarily following a housing placement to promote housing stability and individual well-being. Such services are time-limited or long-term, depending upon individual need; and
• Housing is not contingent on compliance with services. Instead, participants must comply with a standard lease agreement and are provided with the services and supports that are necessary to help them do so successfully.

While Housing First programs share these common elements, new emerging program models vary significantly depending upon the population served, says the Alliance.

I used to have an old saying, “If you were homeless for one month, it took year to ‘get over it’; if you were homeless for a year, it took five years; if you were homeless for five years you were homeless for a lifetime. But most folks are only homeless for a month or two.”

Unless they were too sick to comprehend it, I never meet a homeless person that did not want housing. And not housing in a church basement, housing that separated families, housing in a downtown Los Angeles mission, housing that can not accept men and/or teenage boys, housing that puts two families in a single room with everyone in bunk beds … or housing in jail.

Most people, especially families, are homeless due to a personal crisis and are not chronically homeless like John for whom emergency shelters would have been a life-long reality. But our system of care that developed as an honest attempt to address a social phenomenon 40 years ago, has failed to address the basic underlying issue: the availability of permanent, affordable housing.

John had it right all those years ago, he wasn’t homeless, he was houseless. That is where our caring energy should focus today.