I was first introduced to homelessness by befriending a middle-aged man called Earnest who was living on the streets of Nashville. Earnest would have been considered as a person experiencing chronic homelessness. All I knew at that time was that he was sleeping in places not meant for human habitation, sold pencils on the streets and heard voices in his head.
At one opportunity, I went to church with Earnest. He sent me inside, so he could sell his pencils as parishioners who knew him entered the Cathedral. I obliged and sat in a pew until Earnest joined me. Earnest had a habit of grunting and whipping slightly back and forth. The looks I received from people clearly wondering what I was doing sitting with him in this place of worship were eye-opening to me.
May is National Mental Health Awareness Month, which aims to confront the stigma around mental illness.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, stigma is “a set of negative and unfair beliefs that a society or group of people have about something.”
When we talk about homelessness, one widespread belief is the assumption that people living on the streets all suffer from mental illness, have a substance use disorder — or both. While it is certainly true that some people, like Earnest, suffer from severe and persistent mental illness, a fact is that when you are in survival mode 24/7 for months or years, the likelihood of developing mental health issues is extremely high — if not to say likely.
But what we also have to consider is that the majority of Americans who struggle with a mental health issue are housed, have jobs, and raise families. They are not living on the streets or in an emergency shelter.
When you are without a home, it becomes extremely hard to address a mental health crisis, which is likely to worsen the longer someone is on the streets or in shelters where access to individualized care, maintenance of a healthy diet and continuation of needed medication are hard to secure and maintain.
The stigma and stereotyping that people on the streets encounter poses an additional barrier. Earnest, for example, did not drink alcohol as long as I knew him. He did not abuse drugs. He had many complex health issues, and one of the things that stood out was his mental illness. But, he could teach all of us, who came together to help move him into permanent housing, when it came to knowing how to survive on the streets. Earnest struggled, but he was creative, funny and he brought people together. Once you got to know him, you could not help but love Earnest.
Earnest is why I am still involved in trying to convince government folks, business people, nonprofit leaders and anyone willing to listen that we can make a difference if we invest in long-term solutions that include access to proper mental health care even for people who are still on the streets. Instead, the current political will focuses on already tried and failed quick-fixes promoted by government administrators who are focused on making homelessness invisible rather than solving it.
The Earnests of this world deserve better than being holed up and put away wherever they can be stashed indoors (made invisible) with nice propaganda slogans along the way. They deserve someone who listens to them and hears what their goals are and how we can come together to achieve certain milestones along the way.
Ultimately, we all have the same goal. “I don’t want to see homelessness anymore either.” But my priority is to do it in a way where all of our neighbors are part of a community and have a place that they feel is their home.
What I am saying is that we need to learn to listen to people like Earnest rather than take the easy option and dismiss their own wishes and dreams. We love to solve issues with a cookie-cutter approach that is predictable and ideally time-limited. I have heard too many so-called experts say they know better what “these people” need. They may think so because someone does show signs of or has a diagnosed mental illness. To prove that they are doing the right thing, cities like Nashville keep bringing in big-name consultants from out of town. They bring great messaging and somewhat cookie-cutter approaches that they can take on the road from city to city.
I once spoke with a veteran experiencing homelessness. He had a campsite he shared with a buddy. He opened up to me and asked if the city could help clean up an encampment across from his where the trash was piling up, attracting rats that then spilled over to his campsite. During the conversation I asked what kind of housing would be ideal for him. What was he truly looking for?
This veteran was very clear that he needed to have his own place, a trailer or something small in nature, away from people. That’s how he could handle his mental health issues due to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). What stood out to me is that he knew exactly what type of housing would work for him and how much he could afford based on his benefits and current budget. He also was willing to share a place with his camp buddy since they were already used to each other.
Unfortunately, those were not the options that the government (neither the at the federal nor local levels) had available at that time. It did not fit into the funded solutions. And it was not what the consultants from out of town were promoting either.
Government folks frequently use terms like best practices and “evidence-based.” However, they don’t seem to stick with any of those practices long-term. The solutions governments promote seem to follow certain patterns, like a pendulum on a clock. But long-term funding for subsidized housing with the right wraparound supports are not high on any government’s wish list because they take time to build and seem to be too expensive. Politicians want to see high housing placement rates. They are less interested in paying for the same 100 people for 10 years, even though research shows that it does not cost more than keeping people with severe and persistent mental illness fending for themselves on the streets.
That cost of living on the streets for people with severe mental health issues often includes frequent emergency department, hospital, and jail stays. That’s costly — about as much as it would cost to subsidize their rent, pay for the medications, health care, and support services.
Currently the pendulum has swung to the right, where the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has made it clear that they want to invest in temporary housing and force people into accepting treatment that they may not even want or need. Prior to the Trump administration, the pendulum swung to the left where HUD promoted a Housing First philosophy and took away funding from temporary programs that offered intensive services for people who wanted recovery housing.
What we need is a system that focuses on our neighbors at the local level and listens to what they think they need at the moment, so that they can choose to go directly into permanent housing with support or into a temporary recovery program that actually leads to permanent housing. We need truly individualized approaches and investments in a system with options that are not dictated by administrators and incompetent leaders who prefer to listen to politicians rather than people with lived experience.
And these systems need to lead to accessible housing for everyone. For that, the federal government has to be on board and invest in its own citizens — either by creating policies that allow for everyone to have living income and/or subsidize housing to where people are no longer pushed onto the street by our own governments lack of investing in safety nets.
This government has already proven that this is doable.
Between 2010 and 2016, street and sheltered homelessness in this country decreased by roughly 14 percent. When we look at homelessness among veterans, the decrease since 2010 to the present has been around 55 percent — regardless of where the partisan pendulum swung.
Why is that? Because when it came to Veteran homelessness, Congress decided that a focus on permanent housing with the right support was needed, and politicians actually invested the money for programs that focused on ending Veteran homelessness.
In other words, when the federal government is willing to invest long-term into housing and support services, including those that address mental health and substance use issues, we see results.
Unfortunately, the pendulum has swung in an extremely conservative position where powerful think tanks like the Cicero Institute live. Their lobbyists moved from state to state, mainly focusing on Republican-led governments, to convince lawmakers to:
- Outlaw the existence of folks like Earnest (being homeless in a public space is essentially illegal in Tennessee, even if a person has no place to go); and
- Lock people up in institutions that are touted as comprehensive services centers (like the one proposed in Salt Lake City, Utah).
The Salt Lake City proposal is highly controversial and concerning. In essence, it closely resembles an internment camp where some people will be on lock-down once they are given the choice to go either to this proposed service center or to jail. While the rhetoric around the Utah campus proposal that would stash away 1,300 people in one location may sound convincing, we already know it won’t work with one exception: it certainly would make 1,300 people who were living on Salt Lake City’s streets invisible.
If Earnest were still alive today, he would likely be scooped up from the streets and given a choice between jail or temporary housing, where due to his severe and persistent mental illness, he would be restricted from leaving.
The sad truth is that Nashville leaders are not far from endorsing this type of approach. They are too focused on making the numbers work and homelessness invisible rather than listening to the local community, including people like Earnest and the Veteran who wanted a trailer in nature.
What can you do?
One way to start paying attention is to read some of the articles written by The Contributor vendors in this paper. I also encourage you to sign up for Unseen Nashville (email unseen@thecontributor.org), our new street tour led by vendors with lived experience and get into conversations with them. And however you get involved, keep asking the question, “What do we really do as a government, as nonprofit providers, as churches, and as businesses to ensure that everyone has access to housing, health, and mental health care?”