Why Shelters Don't End Homelessness

And why Bill Maher is wrong (and a jerk)

Happy Thursday everyone! We’ll get right into the stuff about shelters and Bill Maher, but first I wanted to put out a call for questions.

Next week’s newsletter will be a Q&A assembled from your comments here and from social media. I know that homelessness and its many intersections can be a complicated and nuanced topic. My favorite part of traveling around is doing Q&A’s, and getting to connect dots for people who genuinely want to understand.

So, send me your questions! They can be general or specific. I will do my best to answer them in the newsletter. If I get a big response, I will make this a more regular segment. You can ask in the comments section, by replying via email, or contacting me any other way. I will keep you anonymous, so feel free to ask even if you worry about how you might be perceived for asking. (Judgment-free from me!)

Looking forward to your questions! Until then, here’s what you came for:

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You may have seen this clip circulating Twitter:

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If you haven’t, and don’t want to watch (which I fully understand, given the people involved,) I will summarize.

Maher is essentially arguing that the country is not in crisis because when he rides around, he mostly sees people living their lives and seeming happy. Williamson questions if he ever rides through Skid Row, and Maher responds, “Why would I go to Skid Row?”

A lot has already been said, and said well, about the audacity of Maher’s position here: that his extremely limited and curated tour of Los Angeles should somehow be indicative of the state of the country. So I don’t need to say that (even though I did.)

What I actually want to talk about is shelters, and why they don’t end homelessness.

(I promise, this will make sense in the end.)

First, we need to recognize what role shelters ought to play in a city/county/state homelessness response. In a perfect world, we would have enough permanent housing options, a vast menu that included supportive housing and group living and homeownership that allowed for agency and choice and dignity to permanently end the homelessness of everyone who experiences it.

However, since we obviously don’t have that, we need shelters to keep people safe from the elements and the unpredictability of sleeping outdoors. And it’s important to say that while we should be prioritizing our investments in long term, permanent housing, we do also need enough shelter for people who want it. (Let me emphasize that again: we need enough for the people who want it. Shelters belong in the continuum as an emergency response for those who request them, NOT as a solution to street homelessness, and NOT as the required stepping-stone to housing.

Why is the point so important? Because in many places, shelters play an outsized role in the continuum. It isn’t that beds are just sitting empty and unused, but it’s outsized in terms of how shelter is prioritized over permanent solutions in proposals and political agendas to address homelessness. One thing that we all need to get clear on is language. Moving someone into shelter—and I don’t care if it’s a congregate shelter, tiny homes, or one of these fancy Pallets—they have not been housed.

And this isn’t just me making a point about the inadequacy of shelters (though I certainly could.) I mean literally. If someone is living in a shelter, they are still homeless in a very real and legal sense. They still meet the HUD definition of homelessness. This language is important, because you will hear all the time from people in positions of power saying that they “housed” everyone in an encampment before they closed it, but it turns out that 90% of them went into shelter. That’s not housing. That’s not ending homelessness. That’s moving homelessness. It does nothing to help the people experiencing the homelessness.

The only thing it accomplishes is hiding homelessness. And that’s where we get back to Bill Maher.

Because there is a very strong and powerful and vocal and “liberal” class that includes Maher and the mayors of nearly every major liberal city that feign concern around homelessness but what they really want is to get homelessness out of sight. And so you see these cities like Los Angeles, Portland, New York City, and so on, proposing and building new mass shelters and then mandating that people go into them.

This is what Skid Row in LA started as. It used to be in LA that if you were unhoused in any other part of the city, you would get a one-way ride to Skid Row in the back of a police car. But when the 2008 recession hit right in the middle of Downtown LA’s gentrification, homelessness exploded across the city—Skid Row was full, and boxed in on every side from expanding.

So when Bill Maher says that everyone is doing fine when he rides around, and admits that he won’t go to the places he knows people are suffering—he’s showing his whole neoliberal ass. He and those like him don’t actually want a transformed world where homelessness doesn’t exist. (They would have such a harder time getting rich in that world.) They want a world where any appearance of poverty or suffering is contained, concealed, and, most importantly, elsewhere.

We have to fight this world. For those of my readers who are people of faith, this is why solidarity and communion with the marginalized is such a key tenet of faith. We can’t live in silos like Bill Maher, pretending the world is fine because our carefully crafted world is fine. We have to seek out those who are and would be considered disposable and made invisible, and stand with them long enough and loud enough to not be ignored. It’s what Jesus would do.

Heck, it’s what Jesus did.