EDITORIAL

Paying it forward

Posted 1/15/15

We are always pleased when our elected officials and the people they appoint to execute policy visit places that really do need an immediate and meaningful policy to address the issues they …

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EDITORIAL

Paying it forward

Posted

We are always pleased when our elected officials and the people they appoint to execute policy visit places that really do need an immediate and meaningful policy to address the issues they face.

On Tuesday, for instance, the new governor and other freshly minted public servants went to Harrington Hall in Cranston. It was a rally of sorts, the sort where everyone is a cheerleader, but the coach and the team haven’t laid out a game plan that can win on the field.

Homelessness is one of the real embarrassments for a so-called civilized nation, and it’s an embarrassment found almost everywhere in the civilized world. Very few societies have eliminated it, but an enlightened approach to homelessness being implemented in cities across the nation deserves the attention and consideration of social policy-makers here in Rhode Island. It’s call Housing First, and its basic premise is that no family or individual can be “prepared” for permanent housing before they have permanent housing.

In cities as diverse as New Orleans, Anchorage, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Atlanta and Salt Lake City, programs like Housing First are proving to be practical alternatives to homeless shelters for even the most troubled people in the homeless population. It sounds radical. It sounds like a give-away to people whom have not “earned” it, but it has so far proved to be very effective at getting chronically homeless people off the streets.

It is devilishly simple: give homeless people a place to live. Not a halfway house, not a crowded shelter, not a hospital or barracks or a hyper-regulated residence camp, but a place of their own.

Where the programs have worked, the cities and towns have actually saved money by giving the chronically homeless a home. People living on the street cost a city or state much more in the attention they get when they crash at a hospital or jail than they do with their own places. Social workers can visit people who have homes of their own, find out what’s troubling them and head off problems before they spill out into the street. They can deliver health care outside of an emergency room.

People who have a place of their won can give an address to an employer, they can build their lives securely around “a place of their own.” Eliza Doolittle sings, “All I want is a place somewhere,” and we immediately know what she means.

Just give them a home and ask questions later. Actuaries have found that Housing First programs pay for themselves with several years and they save lives, offer hope and give us an opportunity to “pay it forward.”

No more cheerleading. Let’s go with Housing First and save the pep talk for our newly sheltered neighbors as they rebuild their lives.

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  • Justanidiot

    You want to end homelessness in Rhode Island? Easy. Give every homeless person a one way bus ticket to Salt Lake. Problem solved.

    Thursday, January 15, 2015 Report this