“ It is time to unleash recent discoveries in the fields of personal motivation theory and incentive theory to positively equip the homeless to believe they can successfully take steps of personal responsibility again.”
It is time to move beyond the limits of our national “Housing First” policy approach to homelessness and work towards real individual healing and life transformation amongst our nation’s homeless community. This is the most aspirational, humane, and financially sustainable response to our national homeless crisis.
We appropriately celebrate the tens of thousands of individual lives that have been successfully transitioned off the streets and into safe and supportive housing through “Housing First” efforts over the past three decades. But our national conscious is convicted that too many of these lives are now confined to a future in a studio apartment unit and entirely reliant on direct government assistance for their foreseeable future. We can do better.
Tucked away in a quiet, semi-industrial area of Anaheim, California sits the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center. The ARC has provided free drug and alcohol substance abuse recovery to the Orange County, California community since 1985. This six-month program has achieved an astonishing 38% rehabilitation success rate amongst program participants. What is more, most of these participants come from broken homes, drug courts or prison re-entry circumstances that would have led too many to be counted amongst the homeless of their day. Instead, they are provided safe housing, nourishing meals and comprehensive recovery therapy while participating in a work-based rehabilitation program. Those individuals that complete the program experience both freedom from substance abuse addiction and effective equipping to participate in society again through future gainful employment.
There are breakthrough takeaways from this success that can be leveraged in revolutionary new ways in the homeless services space. What if 38% of our nation’s chronically homeless were able to be both successfully rehabilitated and reintegrated as contributors to society at large? What if “Joe Homeless” could experience holistic life transformation and become “Joseph…Community Contributor”? The impact could change the story arc of homelessness in the Unites States today.
We have set our collective sights too low. Ever since the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued the Boise ruling in 2019, cities have raced to setup shelter beds to enforce “no camping ordinances.” The Court ruled that unless a city has an equivalent amount of shelter beds available for the homeless, the homeless could not be threatened with police enforcement of the ordinances aimed at clearing tent communities. Shelters can help. But they are first step response, not a final step.
But the same must be said for the heralded “Golden Ticket” of our national homeless strategy, a HUD-provided voucher for permanent supportive housing. Voucher-supported housing is an important second step, but not a final step. Dependence upon this alone can devolve into afront to personal dignity while also becoming fiscally unsustainable for our local communities.
It is time to rediscovery what is hidden in our own backyard. It is time to unlock the transformative power of advanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy applications that can bring healing to broken mindsets. It is time to unleash recent discoveries in the fields of personal motivation theory and incentive theory to positively equip the homeless to believe they can successfully take steps of personal responsibility again.
Is a fractured and divided America still capable of great things? Perhaps we need an aspirational challenge to unite us again. Ending chronic homelessness in the United States could be this generation’s equivalent of John F. Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon. Let us come together and see extraordinary things happen.
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