The Role of "Rules" in Homelessness Programs

Bypassing Bias and Enshrining Safety

As most of you are aware, I’ve been writing and talking a lot about programs for people experiencing homelessness that are “high barrier,” meaning that there are lots of rules for entry and continuation. Often I’m talking about shelter programs (usually Rescue Missions), but this scheme is in place in many housing programs, drop-in centers, and really all kinds of services. The emphasis is on particular rules, theoretically designed for safety.

Some of these rules are entirely nonsensical—the same organizations that say that homelessness is drug and mental illness problem will then reject people for being addicted or unwell. But I do understand how it happens. Not any one program can serve everybody, and when we get a lot of vulnerable people into shared spaces, things can happen. And making sweeping rules is an easy answer to this problem, and even if you exclude large amounts of people, there’s still plenty to serve.

What they end up doing, though, is creating discriminatory qualifications that screen more people out than they screen in; effectively curating an “easier” group of people to serve and damning the rest to the streets—often with a new label: “service-resistant,” “non-compliant,” “difficult.” And in the end the people with the least barriers get the most help and the people with the most need get continuously rejected and harmed by the organizations that are intended (and funded!) to help them.

As you can clearly tell, this is one of my soapboxes.

When I write or talk about this, I very often get a response like, “If you have no rules, the program will be chaos!” This is of course a strawman argument; I have never said that programs shouldn’t have rules. The point is this:

Rules should be designed to reduce the specific harms that *actually* harm people, and create a culture of safety rather than security.

Let’s break this down with some examples.

Many programs have a rule against people coming in high or drunk. What are these rules meant to get at? Let’s assume that the program isn’t intentionally just trying to exclude people who drink and use (though there are many such programs.) For programs aren’t trying to do that, it’s rooted in a fear that people who are high or drunk will act erratically, violently, or uncontrollably and cause harm.

But let’s wonder what this looks like in practice. How do you know the difference between someone who is intoxicated and someone who is exhibiting symptoms of a mental health flare-up? Even if you did know, there isn’t a direct causal link between drugs/alcohol and violence. Alcohol makes some people aggressive, but for a lot of people it just makes them sleepy. When it comes to “harder” drugs, meth can amp people up, but opioids tend to bring people down. Isn’t everyone safer if the sleepy, intoxicated person is in their bed rather than an alley?

Having a rule against intoxication is a bad rule—it’s built on a myth and prejudice around substance use, it’s not really enforceable in a precise way, and it puts people in less safe circumstances more often than it protects anyone.

Here’s another example, and one I’ve spent a lot of time on recently: guest policies in supportive housing. Anyone who works in any kind of low-income housing knows that the #1 thing that causes people to lose their home is guest issues. I was tasked with creating a guest policy that (1) allows adults who have signed leases the dignity of having guests, (2) keeps the building safe, and (3) minimizes the incidents where people’s housing is jeopardized based on guest behaviors.

I won’t go into everything we did, but one of the questions we had to answer, and debated a lot on, was how many guests should a resident be able to have at one time? The easy thing to do would be to set a low maximum of two or three; this would accomplish goals (2) and (3) in one swoop, at the expense of (1).

And yet, we knew from experience that one problematic guest could put the whole building on alert, but someone could have 10 guests over to eat dinner and watch a movie and cause no issues. By making a rule like this, we would be punishing everyone for our inability to create and enforce precise rules around what actually causes issues: things like guests not be accompanied in the building, being loud and disruptive, or causing property damage. We refocused our efforts into designing rules and protocols that kept the main thing the main thing, rather than trying to make our lives easier by restricting people’s rights and freedoms.

When I worked in Hollywood, we referred to this as our prioritization of safety. We opened our gates every morning, and anyone could come in as long as they were safe. This allowed us to welcome in drunk and high people who presented no problems and allowed us to restrict people who were completely sober but had intentions to harm, were escalated beyond a point of mitigating, or were maybe noticeably ill and potentially contagious. (And we would offer them separate resources, not just send them packing.) By focusing on what actually mattered, we screened people in rather than screening them out.

And by and large, people were safe! It turns out, when you don’t greet people with a shake-down, interrogating gaze, and suspicion, they feel more at ease and poised to have a good time. Generosity is met with generosity. When you treat people like prisoners and act like cops, don’t be surprised when you get a riot.

Telling people deep in addiction to be sober cold turkey isn’t a rule, it’s a discrimination against people with addiction. Telling people with mental illness they can’t have outbursts isn’t a rule, it’s a discrimination against people with mental illness. Telling people without reliable transportation and control of their lives to be in and out by certain times isn’t a rule, it’s a discrimination against the very population you’re purporting to serve.

If the goal is safety, make the rules about safety. If you’re worried about drug use/trafficking on site, then prohibit it, but make allowances for those who are working through their addiction to have places to go and use and come back and be safe. Create spaces for people who are having symptoms of their mental health to do so safely and without disturbing others. Let people come and go freely like adults, but enforce quiet hours in sleeping areas. This actually isn’t that hard if you understand it as a method of managing people in a shared space instead of seeing it as a group of “difficult people” you have to control.

I’m not anti-rules. But I will always speak out against rules that ultimately discriminate against and harm the people meant to be served, in the name of making things easier for us. Practicing harm reduction in community is hard. I get it. But it’s what we sign up for. It’s what we’re called to.

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