Housing First Didn't Fail Us
But we are failing housing first
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I want you to imagine you’re at a giant festival in the middle of the desert. Think Coachella or Burning Man or (God help you) Fyre Festival. Thousands of people are roughing it to varying degrees outside or in campers or tents. Now imagine that, due to a major mistake by the organizers, there are only two bathrooms for the thousands of attendees.
The event leaders come to you and deputize you to help. Your job, they say, is to do everything you can to make sure that everyone gets to use the bathroom and to minimize issues. You accept the esteemed position and get to work.
Your first act: let’s put some rules in place! You give users a time limit, and strictly enforce a no-cutting rule for the two lines that have formed. First come, first serve! Eventually you decide that having two lines is needlessly messy, so you consolidate everyone into one line. You experiment with deputizing one bathroom male and one female, but quickly backtrack.
After a few hours, things are moving a bit faster, but people are still anxious. The line keeps bottle-necking at the front when people use the full allotment of their time doing what nature calls them to do. You have an idea! You return to the two-line approach, but with new criteria: Line 1 is for people who only need to go #1, and Line 2 for #2. This alleviates a lot of pressure, with one line moving much faster, even if the other slows down dramatically.
You hear a rumor that a couple trailers are allowing people to use their bathroom. You go and investigate to discover that it’s true! But the trailer owners beg you not to tell anyone. “There’s no way we can handle the crowd if everyone hears about it. We’re just trying to do our part to help.” You understand, and you keep their secret.
A while later, you start to hear more grumbling. People at all parts of the line are agonizing and asking for accommodation: “I’m pregnant!” says one, “I have a bladder infection” says another. Some people at the front of the line seem to need it less, and even offer to switch places, but you don’t want the whole thing to dissolve to chaos. Being a compassionate soul, you think, “I’ll make a system!”
When people enter the bathroom line, you ask them to fill out a brief survey. It asks a few key questions designed to determine who needs to use the bathroom the most urgently, on a scale of 1-10. 10’s, being the most desperate, go straight to the front of the line while the lower numbers get placed in the back. Many people are upset when new arrivals jump ahead of them, feeling that the system is unfair, but you notice it’s making a difference. Fewer people are soiling themselves, defecating in the living area, or leaving the festival altogether. It doesn’t feel altogether fair, but it’s working. It’s making it better, at least.
At the end of the festival, with a line still a mile long, the festival leaders come to you enraged, “How could you let so many people down?” they ask you. “The systems you created didn’t work! Look at all the people still in line, and look at all the excrement laying around! You should be ashamed of yourself.”
By now, dear reader, you’re thinking one of two things:
Kevin, you are COOKING with this metaphor
Kevin, what the #&$% are you talking about?
I use this analogy to demonstrate a way that we utterly miss the point when we’re looking at a problem. Being in charge of the bathrooms and the line gives you a lot of opportunity (and risk!) to make things better or worse. Along the way, a lot of the ideas you had were very good, leading to more efficiency and less suffering. Some were controversial, but you held your ground and let the results speak for themselves. But still, the need remained unmet, and you took the blame.
But the problem wasn’t the system, the organization, the planning, or the rules—even though tinkering with those things and responding to emergent needs allowed for better access and less suffering. The fundamental problem was there just weren’t enough bathrooms.
So it with affordable housing.
I’m a big proponent of Housing First, as you likely know. If you’re new to this conversation or need a brush-up, see the video below this paragraph on that Housing First is.
It’s evidence-based, and reproduces results over and over wherever it is used to full-effect* (we will address this asterisk in a minute.) I could get in the weeds about things like Coordinated Entry and the equitability it does and does not create, but none of that is the point right now (and would likely only be interesting for those of us in the weeds of this stuff.) The fact of the matter is there just isn’t enough affordable housing.
Housing First can’t work if we don’t have units to put people in. Everything that is great about HF goes out the window when housing is as scarce as it is. The places where HF has been “unsuccessful” are places where affordable housing is extra scarce, where NIMBYism is high, and where construction costs and zoning make building prohibitively expensive or impossible. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and New York City come to top of mind. I have read Op-Eds in each of these cities decrying Housing First as a failure, or even blaming Housing First for the homelessness crisis.
And each time I read them, all I hear is the festival leaders blaming you for your bathroom systems, instead of admitted that they blew it by not providing enough bathrooms for their attendees.
Housing First doesn’t fail when we give it enough housing to be successful. In fact, when you have enough and you have the efficient systems that place people well and promote equity, things click into place. It’s beautiful. It works!
But unfortunately, we live in a country run by festival leaders who have their own private bathrooms, and allow the wealthiest to buy VIP access, and leave everyone else waiting in line for what’s left. And thousands of people (nonprofits, mutual aid groups, churches and coalitions) spend countless hours and dollars helping to move the line along and to make it more fair and equitable, and still coming up short.
And what’s worse, they blame it on the attendees. “Maybe you shouldn’t have drank so much water,” they say. “Why don’t you go get a better job so you can afford VIP access next year?” It’s twisted and maniacal… and it’s the daily reality of housing and homelessness in America.
So the next time you hear someone say “Housing First is a failure,” you’ll know better.
And to those of you out there who, like me, have to spend thousands of hours working to make the system more fair and equitable even as we know it’ll still leave people behind, know that I see you. And we’ll keep pushing until we solve the actual problem and make our jobs manageable—the way they should be.
If you need a brush-up on what Housing First is, or are new here, here’s a great video:
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Beautifully written! Thank you.
I think that’s a clear and powerful analogy. Thank you for this piece.