The SREHUP Story
The Power of Community
Possibly the greatest adventure of all is the one in which we dive into each other’s lives, and recognize our own interconnectedness. In our first decade of operation, our capacity to love and to connect grew exponentially. With each resident, we learned something new about the world, about each other, and about ourselves. Jason was one resident who taught us so much. He had a law degree from Yale, and a face that lights up a room. My students are always amazed when they met Jason that he was so educated and smart, but also homeless. SREHUP teaches students to challenge their own stereotypes of who is homeless, and why.
My students always gravitated towards Jason. So did I.
The first thing I noticed about Jason was his smile. It radiated. When his lips curled up, his eyes sparkled. And when he spoke, his voice sounded like velvet feels.
He was interested in talking about systems of oppression, economic and racial inequality, and how to have a revolution for peace, justice, and love.
He was speaking to our souls.
We returned to the shelter nightly to hear his lessons, and his audience quickly expanded. SREHUP volunteers would crowd around him hoping to learn, to be inspired. His lessons became my course supplements.
Weeks passed and I still didn’t understand what Jason was doing homeless.
It took me much longer to determine that Jason struggled with mental illness. It must have been easier, in bygone years, to identify someone with paranoid schizophrenia. An afflicted individual might whisper, “the government is listening to our calls.” But now we know that the government is, in fact, invading our privacy- tapping into our on-line and phone correspondence. It becomes harder today to differentiate between who is paranoid- and who is just well informed.
Because Jason was so informed, it took me longer to be assured of his paranoia.
It wasn’t until Jason explained his theory that the government was responsible for my illnesses, and that Pete, our security guard was responsible for his earphones shorting, that I started to understand his paranoia went beyond rationality.
During his stay at SREHUP Jason’s social workers had been trying to convince him to medicate. But he was concerned that psychotropic medication would numb him to the harsh reality of our unjust society. And he did not want to be okay with injustice. His outlook reminded me of the quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
While I respected Jason’s honesty and conviction, Jason’s resistance had actual implications for funding because donors want measurable outcomes. Donors support non-profits based on success rates- and success to donors depended on our ability to move people rapidly from street to housing. Jason was pulling down our success rates.
But the community that is necessary to solve homelessness is not built overnight.
I measured success differently. Jason’s life had been changed by his stay at SREHUP. In our shelter he was seen, he was validated, he was loved. And the loneliness he faced on the streets had been banished while he was with us.
But the real lives that were changed were ours. In the end, we will never know how many minds he expanded, how many hearts he softened.
And so, I refused to give up on Jason.
Year after year Jason returned to us in November. Seemingly no closer to achieving housing than he was on the first night he stayed with us.
We are often impatient.
We want immediate results.
But results don’t work like that.
Jason was a study on patience.
On sitting with discomfort.
On persistence, on practicing the pause, on taking the breath.
On trusting intuition.
On not giving up on people. Or on ourselves
So we trusted in Jason, and trusted in the power of community.
Every year when we closed in April, Jason would go back on the streets and wait until November for us to open again. I would spend the off season worried about him.
We would keep in touch via email, and I would occasionally take him lunch in Love Park.
And then on November 11th 2015 we opened our doors for the 5th shelter season.
And there was no Jason.
I panicked.
It was the first opening day in SREHUP’s history that Jason was not waiting to be let in.
Every day I emailed Jason.
Every day no response
My anxious thoughts often went to the statistics on Homeless mortality rates. People living on the streets have a mortality rate that is four to nine times higher than those who are not homeless. And suicide rates amongst the homeless are 10 times higher. The social isolation that Jason would be experiencing on the streets could lead to depression and suicidal thinking.
My worry grew as the days shortened and the night temperatures dropped. It would soon be too cold to sleep outside.
With mounting unease, I showed up on Thanksgiving night- weighed down by my shelter offerings of Turkey and all the stuffing’s.
And then it happened.
The moment that was years in the making.
As I was carving the turkey, I felt a tap on the shoulder.
I pivoted to see a stunning Jason in his tailored shirt and slacks. He came, not as a resident, but as a volunteer.
In the time since I’d seen him last, Jason had been working, sleeping inside, and taking medication that quieted his inner voices.
And here he was to surprise me by volunteering.
This was what patience and persistence had gifted us.
This is why we put community first.
And why we focus on people and not a timeline.
Jason taught me that homeless solutions must come on a continuum.
And Jason taught me that when we hope to change lives, it is usually our own lives that are the most profoundly changed.
He is an example of the hidden lives and rich culture of people experiencing homelessness in shelter, who are along the continuum of care. We often think of people in shelter as being divorced from the rest of society. But in reality, most people in shelters have developed a web of connections that are responsible for keeping them alive. They have innovative and beautiful networks that only few of us within the non-homeless community have been lucky enough to witness.
The story of my transitional housing program is essentially about relationships, like the one Jason developed with our volunteers. And relationships cannot be quantified. The relationships that develop in our space are indicative of the rich, layered, and often secret culture within the homeless community, and have been life saving for those who are the most vulnerable.
Jason’s experiences in the Philadelphia Homeless Shelter System, was shaped by forces decades in the making. Homelessness has not always been an epidemic in the US. The Reagan Administration was responsible for taking a set of sewing shears to the safety net that our government had once built to catch those in poverty. White supremacy ensured that the net was primarily knit for white women and children. Nonetheless, the US did once have have robust social services and public housing, albeit segregated and disproportionately benefiting white people. The conservative government of the Reagan administration slashed entitlement spending, cut HUD spending dramatically, and propagated the myth of the welfare queen. Two decades later, the US was in peak neo-liberalism era, with its belief in the omnipotence of the market. Market-driven, data-obsessed policies shaped the experiences of those whose housing had been displaced by growing gentrification, stagnant wages, rising rents, and deeper wealth stratification. The number of people on the streets would increase or decrease based on booms and busts in the economy. Starting in the 1908s, the homeless crisis became status-quo, numbers rising each year, regardless of upturns or downturns in the market. Advocates had long called on moral-driven solutions to homelessness that prioritized public housing for those who could not otherwise afford the rising cost of rents. The dominant lense through which both advocates and policies makers came to conceptualize homelessness shifted in the early 2000’s from a moral question to an economic question. The advocate's call for humane housing practices morphed into a call for economically prudent housing practices, inspired by a shift in neo-liberal ideology. The market and data are the gods of neoliberalism. A 2001, a homelessness study from the University of Pennsylvania worshipped both. Dennis Culhane’s study compared 5,000 people with mental illness who were homeless and living on the streets of NYC with 5,000 people in the same condition who had been provided with housing. Culhane’s findings revealed that it is less expensive to give a person an apartment, case manager, and wrap-around services then to allow people to live and die on the streets. Suddenly, advocates were using this study to make an economic argument in defence of the need to house the homeless. In the era of neoliberalism, government policy is conditional on, above all else, data and economics.
The study triggered a series of policy changes that identified certain groups of people whose homelessness was longer and more costly for government (as a result of shelter stays, hospital visits, and jail stints) as “chronically homeless.” Categorizing the unhoused into groups based on certain conditions such as length of time on the streets obscures the real cause of homelessness- lack of affordable housing, and pushes the focus onto the individual. Mayor Rudy Giuliani coined the term “chronically homeless” when he was mayor of New York. Culhane’s study helped popularize the term. Most people working in homeless services now accept the term “chronically homeless” without questioning the assumptions and premises behind the term. An alternate way to understand homelessness is that there are no “chronically homeless people,” rather, there are people who are harder to house because we have too many barriers to housing. Shifting the language we use to describe homelessness also shifts the focus of homelessness from housing to the individual who is unhoused. What we we call a “chronic homelessness crisis,” is actually a “community’s chronic unaffordability crisis.”
The Clinton Administration passed laws mandating that all new public housing developments be “mixed income,” meaning, all new housing units are for those making 30 to 80 percent of the median income. This median income barrier makes public housing inaccessible for most families trying to exit homelessness. This change has provided a legal means to evict poor residents in favor of more affluent residents. While public housing has been demolished in favor of mixed use housing, new affordable housing is not built to replace the loss. Less than 12% of those displaced in this process end up in affordable subsidized housing. Many end up homeless. As a result of public disinvestment in housing, Philadelphia has lost almost half of its public housing units.
The last few decades have also seen housing projects being awarded to private developers who make promises of building low income housing, but find loopholes that allow them to maximize profits and short the number of affordable housing units for sale. This has allowed private developers to grow richers off of the demolition of poor people’s housing. The US has demolished over 100,000 public housing units since 2006.
The 2005 Supreme Court decision Kelo versus New London, gave county councils nationwide the authority to acquire people’s private homes, sometimes through force, and give it to private corporations for profit. In this case, the court ruled in favor of New London City Council in their bid to take homes from the poor and give to the rich- in this case the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. WHile eminent domain was once practiced as a way for the government to claim private property for the “public good”, US citizens were told that public good now included corporate profit, poor homeowners be damned. The outcome of this case is the same as it is all across the country: Pfizer took the land, demolished homes, took $80 million in taxpayer money, and as soon as the tax breaks were set to expire, abandoned the project and the town of New London. They profited off the deal but never even started construction. Now the land that once held people’s homes sits barren and overrun with weeds and trash. Despite the failure of this project, the supreme court has given cities total authority to take over people’s housing and give it to other private corporations. And in anti-Peterpan fashion, cities have been taking homes from the poor and giving them to the rich at breakneck pace ever since.
In 2015, Philadelphia’s city council gave PHA permission to take eminent domain over 1,300 properties in North Philadelphia. Most of these properties were somebody’s home. Somebody like Arthur Deleaver, and his wife Betsy. Arthur Deleaver’s parents bought the home in the 1930s. This enabled the Deleaver family to transition from renting the first floor to owning the two-story, 900-square-foot rowhouse. Deleaver hoped to pass the home on to his own children, but that dream was dashed when the PHA took over the home and displaced the Deleaver family. PHA offered the family $22,000 for its family home even though the city had assessed the value at $53,000. The deleavers had been paying taxes to the city based on that value. WHile the Deleaver family continued to fight for fair compensation, the home sat vacant, a new home for vandals who returned frequently to strip the home for parts. The Deleavers were not the family to not receive full compensation for their homes. PHA compensated most homeowners half of the value of their homes, some homeowners had to wait years before a payment was even made. Only 10% of parcels seized were paid for.
Meanwhile, seized properties sit vacant and 5 years later the neighborhood is more vacant.
Rapid Rehousing is the term used to refer to the solution of placing homeless individuals and families into housing quickly- usually within 30 days of entering a homeless shelter. The people priortized for this housing are those who are the most costly to a city when they remain unhoused. Housing assistance- which at one point in US history meant public housing- now comes in the form of housing vouchers- a rent subsidy that uses government money to partially pay for a share of rent and utilities from landlords. There are three main components of the rapid-rehousing model: housing identification assistance, rent and move-in assistance, and case management and services.
While the rapid rehousing model was successful for many, it failed to achieve full housing stability for all its participants and usher in the end of homelessness. The reasons for this are varied. Many landlords don’t accept tenants who pay part of their rent with housing vouchers. In addition, the voucher’s financial assistance is short term- between four and six months, sometimes as long as 2 years, but seldom longer than that. The program does not provide housing for all, but only those considered the most vulnerable. It also pushes people from substandard living into the shelter, because it makes the shelter the main gateway to accessing the voucher. A HUD study that examined 2,307 families in 12 communities depending on the rapid rehousing model reported that the rapid rehousing was actually causing more homelessness. This is because the voucher system increases shelter demand, since shelter is the primary avenue to receiving a housing voucher. Many people who had been doubled up in rooming homes- which is illegal in most US cities, as well as people living in substandard living quarters, were pushed into the shelter with the promise of a housing voucher. But the housing vouchers they received did not lead to an end to their homelessness. In fact, recidivism rates climbed. This puts a strain on shelters, which are already underfunded, and over utilized.
Rapid rehousing will sever solve homelessness when the twin crises of lack of affordable housing and low wages go unaddressed. Once vouchers run out, there is still a gap between average wage of a city and average rent in that city. Further, housing that is “scatter-site” and is not coupled with wrap-around services and community, we take a knife and cut through the social ties that had kept people afloat in their shelter experiences. We substitute a roof for a culture of support. The support and the roof’s subsidies tend to run out too soon. Studies on social integration in rapid rehousing found that once housed, people experienced decreased support from clergy, friends, and neighbors, and a decrease in volunteerism. Many housing voucher recipients are thrown back into the social isolation they experienced on the streets- returning to the time in which their names were not spoken.
If we want to solve the problem of homelessness, we can’t just rapidly-rehouse our way out of it, and then cut off funding for that system a few months in. We must care for people holistically and put community on the forefront of any solution. Social integration is necessary in all of our lives and is one of the key factors in keeping someone from returning to homelessness. But robust public housing, accessible to those without shelter, and in community support, is the real solution to homelessness.
In order to solve homelessness, we need to think constellationally- and connect the dots among the various systems that create poverty, and connect the dots between ourselves and our neighbors.
With a public housing and community-first model to solving homelessness, the relationships in the continuum of care matter. The community that develops has the power to change our minds. To drive us into each other’s hearts, and closer to ourselves.
We are more than a shelter. We are a movement. Come with us on our journey, or start your own initiatives for creating a more fearlessly compassionate world.
