DIRECTOR’S DESK | The homeless numbers are big. The geographic scope of the crisis is big. And the investment required of us is big. Our vision must be, too.
How might we envision a future where there is housing for everyone in this region? The new report by Portland State University professor Marisa Zapata and colleagues is a wake-up call to broaden our civic imagination, aspiring to be a place where this is possible.
Seeing only with a narrow focus, we swivel rapidly from crisis to crisis to crisis, because they are all around us and always in need of resources. The city has – necessarily – declared and renewed a housing emergency since 2015, attending to some immediate crises, but leaving plenty others unattended and smoldering.
Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative and the Northwest Economic Research Center took a different approach in assessing what’s going on around us. Their report, released this week , challenges us to also look out over the horizon, envisioning a more just region with stable housing for everyone.
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And in order to do this, it is time to think big. Think big enough to count the numbers that boggle the brain. In just our tri-county area, 38,000 people experienced homelessness in 2017, with many more on the precipice: 107,000 households were burdened by rents too high for their income that same year.
And it’s time to think bigger in terms of the region, Zapata argues, not just a view through binoculars trained on one problem at a time, but as a panoramic view that takes in Washington, Clackamas and Multnomah counties. People don’t stop at county lines. As a community, we took steps in this direction last year by passing the Metro housing bond. We need to continue to organize as a region around the provision of housing.
And we need to think big in terms of ongoing revenue sources, finding the abundance in a region with wealth. We’ve passed two housing bonds, but these can’t be positioned as ends in themselves. We need to invest in a vision for a housing-just region if we are going to slow the widening gaps in wealth and racial disparity.
At Street Roots, we are launching a reporting initiative on the next generation facing homelessness and poverty. Our aim is to look for solutions: How can we prevent repeating the past? How can we write a different future?
Zapata’s approach with this report was to start looking at how we might do this, getting an honest understanding of the numbers of people who don’t have housing – visible and invisible – and who are on the brink of losing that housing. While some of the higher numbers of invisible homelessness are because the report counts people who were doubled up, sleeping many people to a room and on couches and in garages, even that number runs short. The researchers relied on state Department of Education data, which includes families with children. But it does not include adults without children. And because the doubled-up figures, as well as the numbers of people who are burdened by their rents, disproportionately represent communities of color, this report casts a vision of housing with greater racial equity.
So to think about our region in terms of the next generation of homeless, we need to think about people who are unstably housed now. When people are burdened by rent, they have to make brutal choices, neglecting health care or other necessities, one catastrophe away from homelessness. Often at Street Roots, people recount a health problem or a family death as preceding their own homelessness. Our lives are so interdependent, and all the more so when individual resources are scant. And when people are doubled up, these stressful conditions easily collapse.
So fragile is everything held together, until it’s not.
Let’s not be bashful about saying that the aim is big and that it is just. Let’s be thoroughgoing in our aspiration to be a region where we say that education, health care and – yes – housing are rights. Let’s be a region where runaway wealth is not the goal, but where we are distinguished by a quality of life that includes safe stable housing for everyone. This isn’t about just solving crises, but about recasting our vision for the region. And it’s a hopeful one.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org . Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand .
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