A concern is not that every nonprofit, city worker, or provider lacks compassion. Many are deeply committed and work under impossible pressure. The concern is structural. The system depends on temporary solutions because they are easier to fund, easier to count, and easier to expand than permanent affordable housing.
Meanwhile, the human cost keeps rising.
Every return to the streets deepens trauma within the minds of the homeless, whose time is up for their stay in interim housing. It disrupts medical care, employment efforts, mental stability, trust, and hope. People are asked to start over and again inside programs that were never truly designed to get enough people all the way out. They must grow their adaptability for living on the street. The fears grow as they must sleep without protection.
For me, this is not an abstract policy debate. This is the reality of our system of interim housing. My own son lived for a year in a condo provided through Good Samaritan Housing. As that year drew to a close, fear began to creep into his every conversation with me. The deadline was coming, and there was no permanent housing waiting on the other side. He tried, he jumped through so many hoops, he became exhausted by the block walls his head was rammed into.
Like so many families caught in this impossible gap, we did what we could. I purchased him a motorhome so he would at least have a roof, a bed, and some measure of safety. That motorhome became the only form of permanent stability available to him, even if it meant parking it on the streets.
Now the cruel irony is that cities are increasingly considering new ordinances that would make it illegal for people to live in the very vehicles that have become their last shelter. Individuals and families are pushed toward self-made survival solutions, only to watch those solutions be criminalized.
This is the deeper wound inside the homeless industrial complex. Even when families create an alternative outside the expensive interim housing cycle, the system often responds not with support but with prohibition.
Communities are told millions are being spent, yet residents continue to see the same men and women pushed from one temporary arrangement to another, or out of the very vehicles that keep them from sleeping completely exposed.
This is why cities can no longer rely on cycles of interim housing paired with enforcement-based rules that take away any self-preservation. Dependency on a program (gag) takes away any sense of oneself. This makes it harder to readapt to living on the streets.
Do we really care?
