No Place To Go
Since 2010 advocates and activists have claimed October 10 as World Homeless Day to raise awareness about the global problem of people living without shelter. That was last Thursday, so this week’s Rent Free is a special homeless edition.
All types of housing are regulated too much in America and housing for the most vulnerable is the most regulated of all. This week’s stories focus on a couple of recent examples of governments thwarting people’s efforts to provide the homeless with shelter, or the homeless to provide shelter for themselves, including:
- The city of Kalispell, Montana, shutting down the local warming shelter just as it was preparing to open for its winter season.
- San Francisco’s success at reducing the number of tents on the street by seizing homeless people’s tents.
But first, our lead item is a quick overview of national homeless situation. The problem of people living on the streets is a big one and it’s only growing bigger.
A Record Number of People Are Living on the Streets
There are roughly 653,104 homeless people in the United States and 256,610 of those people are “unsheltered”—meaning they either live on the streets, in abandoned buildings, or other areas not fit for human habitation.
That’s according to the latest annual Point-In-Time survey performed in January 2023 and published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in December 2023.
The 2023 PIT numbers show a 12 percent nationwide increase in the homeless population from 2022.
The Biden administration has blamed that jump on COVID-era eviction protections and housing assistance expiring. HUD itself cautions that its 2022 and 2021 PIT counts of the homeless population might have been artificially reduced because of the pandemic since some jurisdictions only did partial counts during COVID. So, it’s possible some of the 12 percent jump in 2023 is explained by more comprehensive surveys being done.
Nevertheless, the trend line is clearly going up. The last pre-pandemic PIT survey from January 2020 reported an overall homeless population of 580,466 and roughly 230,000 unsheltered homeless.
Data from early reporting jurisdictions suggests we can expect another bump in the homeless population in the 2024 PIT.
The number of beds in temporary shelters has grown over the years, but not by enough to serve the growing homeless population. The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) notes in its annual report that there’s 218,000 more homeless individuals than there are temporary shelter beds.
Beds in permanent supportive housing settings have grown 250 percent since 2007, reports NAEH. That reflects a shift in policy among federal, state, and local governments to a “housing first” model.
That model has come under criticism for being both expensive and ineffective at ending homelessness. Whether you agree or not with the critics, it’s true that the construction of new supportive housing units is not keeping up with the rising homeless population either.
One reason might be that local governments make it incredibly difficult for even private parties to build shelters on their own property.
A Montana City Closes a Warming Center Right as Temperatures Start to DropÂ
In September, the city council of Kalispell, Montana, took the unusual, and likely unprecedented, step of revoking a permit it had given to a local shelter that had allowed it to offer warm beds to the rural community’s homeless during the winter months.
City councilmembers blame the privately funded Flathead Warming Center for attracting out-of-town homeless people to the community, who they say have caused an uptick in crime and disorder in the surrounding neighborhood.
The Flathead Warming Center says those accusations are unfounded and the revocation of its permit was done via an ad hoc, illegal process.
The center is now suing to reclaim its permit and open the shelter again. For Warming Center Director Tonya Horn, time is of the essence.
“We have people show up at the door hoping to have shelter and we’re able to give them a blanket, feed folks, and send them out the door,” says Horn. Temperatures are already falling below freezing at night. “The most urgent need is for life and limb,” she says.
The city of Kalispell declined Reason‘s request for comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
The History
Horn and co-founder Luke Heffernan opened the Flat
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