Nobody blames firefighters for the fact that we still have fires.

Nobody blames healthcare workers for the fact that people still get sick.

And yet, we blame housers and supportive service providers for the fact that we still have unhoused people.

At an unconscious level, we understand fire and disease as endemic and stochastically inevitable.  A bunch of big words to say that we know that fires and disease will always be us, though somewhat unpredictable in how and when they occur.

This doesn’t mean that we let the world burn down or that we surrender to disease.  There are preventative measures that individuals take to make sure we don’t get sick as often (eat healthy foods, exercise, have a regular sleep schedule, get vaccines, etc.) or that our home doesn’t burn down (make sure the stove is off before you leave your home, install smoke detectors in your house).  There are structural and policy considerations like building and safety codes, food and drug regulations, etc.  There are ways that we socialize risk through private markets and public action (health insurance, fire insurance, disaster relief).  We take a wide diversity of measures to avoid fires and sickness – some big and expensive, some small and cheap.

Included in the ways in which we address sickness and fire are that we hire, build facilities for, and celebrate the heroic people whose jobs are to help us when we are in the midst of the crises that will be predictably unpredictable.  We respect and appreciate the contributions of firefighters and healthcare workers and expect that they are a normal, on-going part of what it takes for society to function.

When we see that there’s a fire, we don’t shake our fist in the air and say, “over the years, we have spent billions of dollars on the Fire Department!  How come we still have fires!”

And yet, in the current policy debates around homelessness, I hear this type of sentiment all the time.  “We have spent billions of dollars on homelessness in California, how come we haven’t solved the problem?”

The thing is, we solve homelessness everyday.  Everyday, there are people who are unhoused who find a home, who receive some form of helping hand and who, with this helping hand and their own grit and determination, move on with their lives.  The problem is that – like fires and sickness – homelessness keeps happening.  Homelessness is an ongoing stream of people, not just the folks you see on the street at any given moment.  People leave the streets all the time (in the best case scenarios, they find a new home; in the worst case scenarios, they die on the streets) and other people become unhoused to replace them.  And because of broader social and economic factors (mostly because of our high housing costs), we live in a region of the country where people become unhoused at an unconscionably high rate.  

So, despite the fact that we solve individuals’ homelessness everyday, homelessness – like fires and sickness – continues as a societal-level problem.  And, for homelessness, when we’re not busy wrongfully blaming victims, we wrongfully blame housers and Housing Departments for failing to solve the larger, society-wide set of problems that continue to push everyday people into homelessness.  Similarly, we wrongfully blame housers for our society-wide failure to adequately invest in housing.

At any rate, the bottom line of this piece is that we should see and talk about housers and supportive service providers more like firefighters and healthcare workers – heroic frontline workers who solve important, endemic problems everyday.  The bottom line of this piece is to say to housers, supportive service providers, housing department bureaucrats, community activists, housing policy advocates – to say that we see you.   
With RM-4 pulled from the ballot and Prop 5 losing, 2024 was a tough year for the community of housers.  But, we still see everybody doing the difficult, important work of housing the most vulnerable.  So, at SV@Home, we want to take this moment to celebrate the entire ecosystem of people who, everyday, make our communities healthier, happier, and safer.  And you can join us too.  We may not have calendars like the firefighters, but we do throw a pretty good party.