This is Democracy – Episode 19: Homelessness

Speaker 1: This-
Speaker 2: Is Democracy.
Speaker 3: A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s-
Speaker 4: Most influential democracy.
Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of “This is Democracy”. Today we’re going to talk about probably the most appropriate topic for the holiday season, which is the topic of homelessness. So many of us during this holiday season will be spending time with family and loved ones in warm home environments, home environments filled with love, filled with all kinds of activities, and all kinds of possessions. It’s a time of year when I think all of us think about those who are less fortunate.
Jeremi: We’re very lucky today. We are fortunate to have with us Ann Howard. Ann is the executive director of the Community Homeless Foundation. What she does more than anyone I know is think about these issues and really help bring people together to address what is, I think, a growing problem of homelessness. Ann, nice to have you here.
Ann Howard: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jeremi: Before we turn to Ann, we have a poem from Zachary, of course. Zachary.
Zachary: Okay. It’s titled “Trees, Sleep, and a Cold Christmas”. “Reindeer, colorful trees, people lined trees dotting the many rivers of dreams. Moonlight in the Arizona desert, loud sirens, dead of night, sleeping cold alone against the Austin frost. Holding onto the sidewalk like it can bring back everyone you’ve lost, and you can’t forget the trees, the old gas station parking lots, the flashlight’s fluorescence, bonfire, and mountain tents. Cold nights on sheltered cots remembered after the dogs, hands and knees [inaudible 00:01:52], the blizzards, the fogs. Nights drowning among frogs, waking up with cold palm pressed against the bottom of the highway overpass because you didn’t get the medicine they knew you needed.
Zachary: Next day spent staring out jail windows, watching the train tracks, drowning in the water of rainfall flowing down the street, drowning you in a river like the one you woke up with two years ago. Fish guts freezing in your hair, reaching up for a breath in the sea of Christmas lights. Holding a sign in the icy median, well below the median. For all the times you fell asleep with holiday color in your eyes and woke up among trash heaps and cold bus rides. Punch this guy. And homeless, you wander among homes on Christmas and New Year’s Day, chimney smoke seen under your cigarette, Texas snow. And you fall asleep again, dreaming of a cold Christmas, walking into the church to pray, falling in love with the winter sunsets. And you’re alone, forgotten for the holiday.”
Jeremi: Wow. That’s very evocative Zachary. What is your poem about?
Zachary: Well, my poem is about trying to understand what it feels like to be homeless during the holidays. Of course, it’s something I’ve fortunately never had to experience, but I was imagining what it would be like during this time of year, when it’s so festive, to not have the things that other people have.
Jeremi: Well, I think it’s a good spot to turn to Ann. Ann, why does it seem that there are so many homeless people now in our society? What’s going on?
Ann Howard: Well, the experts tell us that homelessness happens when crisis meets a lack of affordable housing, and we know affordability is different for all of us, right? It’s whatever you can afford. When you hit a crisis that could be a personal crisis with a relationship, and it kicks you out. It could be a health crisis, or a death, or just job loss. I mean, it’s a crisis to the individual, and it creates the inability to afford their housing.
Jeremi: I see.
Ann Howard: It’s when those two things come together. Historians tell us that it has not always been like this in the United States of America. We’re seeing now decades of a variety of policies that perhaps are what’s creating this sort of tsunami across our country. I think HUD just released numbers from the 2018 January count, and homelessness is up across the country about 3%.
Jeremi: Wow.
Ann Howard: It’s not a drastic increase, but it’s going the wrong way.
Jeremi: Right. It’s such a paradox to see those numbers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development because some of our cities, like Austin, are growing wealthier and wealthier. Why are we not able to provide shelter for everyone?
Ann Howard: I think in Austin, we’re feeling the crunch. We’ve got the … It’s a cliché, but just let me use it to get the [inaudible 00:04:50]. The have and the have nots-
Jeremi: Right. Right, of course.
Ann Howard: … now living just right on top of each other. It used to be downtown Austin was this sleepy thing, and there were people sleeping in the alleys, and nobody cared. Now you can’t sleep in the alley because somebody’s driving their fancy car down the alley because they live there. A lot of the green space is being developed, and so I think we’re just really pushing the people who’ve been able to hide into the open. That’s not to say the number’s maybe not increased, but none of our data shows an explosion. In fact, the number of people we identify who are experiencing homelessness does not equal the rate of population growth in Austin. We’re really holding our own.
Jeremi: So it’s not as big a problem as some make it out to be, right?
Ann Howard: It’s not as new, big. It’s really the number of folks we’ve been experiencing, we’re just now seeing them and trying to do something about it. Whereas before, [inaudible 00:05:54].
Jeremi: Right. What have with traditionally done with homeless populations?
Ann Howard: We’ve let them linger in shelter. We built our downtown shelter for 100 folks to sleep there a night, and over the last decade we’ve asked it to accommodate 230 people.
Jeremi: Oh my gosh.
Ann Howard: Yet we didn’t fund it to provide services but for about 100, 120. So there’s been this unmet need that’s been okay. I’m being facetious, right?
Jeremi: Right. Right, that we’ve just allowed to fester.
Ann Howard: We’ve allowed to fester. I think we also, we’ve got a drug problem in Austin that infiltrates and hides among the homeless population. We’ve also allowed that to be okay.
Jeremi: Sure, and we have a mental health issue too, right?
Ann Howard: We do. I think self-reporting, about half the clients will tell us that they’ve either been diagnosed with a mental health problem or have one. We’re fortunate that the crisis response system around mental health and criminal justice, those stakeholders, have been working together well over the last few years and increased crisis response. It’s still not enough, but there’s a good focus these days on mental health issues and the interplay between mental health, and criminal justice, and homelessness.
Jeremi: More awareness of these issues, obviously.
Ann Howard: More awareness, yeah.
Jeremi: What do you say to people who look at the homeless and see them as a threat? That’s often a reaction I see in people.
Ann Howard: I think fear is a natural thing. I can tell you in the eight years I’ve been amongst the homeless population here in Austin, I’ve had nobody threaten me or hurt me.
Jeremi: Not a single time?
Ann Howard: Not a single time.
Jeremi: Wow.
Ann Howard: Every January we send out about 600 volunteers to do the annual census of the homeless-
Jeremi: And on the website there’s information about this, if you’d like to get involved.
Ann Howard: Yeah, we need volunteers. Knock on wood, grace of God, whatever you want to say, we’ve never had a problem waking up people in the night, unsheltered homeless. That’s not to say there is not crime amongst people sleeping outside, but the threat … I think a lot of folks are scary looking to people. We really need to turn any fear or threat into action to help get folks off the street. They’ve got more fears than we do.
Jeremi: What are they fearful of?
Ann Howard: Their possessions being stolen. Them being beaten, raped, attacked in the night. One of the first things that motivated Austin to provide more shelter for women was the attack and death of a woman on the streets downtown.
Jeremi: Oh my gosh.
Ann Howard: You think about that, just all the vulnerabilities, either people who are sick, whether that’s physically or mentally, women, the elderly. The average age in our homeless population is about … The people are in their, I think, late 40s and 50s. They’re only going to get older, right, if we don’t house them. I think I heard doctors say that when you’re … been outside, it adds 10 years onto your … it takes away 10 to 20 years. It ages you faster.
Jeremi: Of course.
Ann Howard: We also see a lot of people that have been exited from hospitals that are told to go rest, but they’re experiencing homelessness.
Jeremi: Right. So they’re not resting in any way.
Ann Howard: No. No.
Jeremi: Ann, what do you see in most of the interactions from citizens with the homeless? Hopefully most of these interactions are not violent and threatening.
Ann Howard: Yeah, no, I think most people would love to help, but they don’t know … I heard it say that, “What is the solution? What am I supposed to do when I encounter somebody?” First, we ask that you just be human. Look someone in the eye and greet them as you would anybody else that you’re passing on the street. For most of us, you’d keep going. We don’t have to feel like we have to stop and have a conversation with everybody we see, but I think if you see somebody who looks sick, or you’re concerned about their safety, call 311. Let the police handle the situation and make the decision if this person needs attention.
Ann Howard: Then when you get home, what can you do? There’s a lot of good nonprofits that are working hard on this issue.
Jeremi: Right, including Ending Community Homelessness, your organization.
Ann Howard: Yeah, that’s right. You can name one in Austin. There’s a bunch of them, right? Caritas-
Jeremi: Right, in every city.
Ann Howard: … LifeWorks, Salvation Army, Goodwill, Integral Care. They’ll get upset when I don’t name them, but we have a dozen nonprofits working super hard and in a very collaborative fashion.
Jeremi: I would imagine that’s true anywhere.
Ann Howard: I think that’s right. I think the other thing that … Austin just passed the affordable housing bonds. I went to a meeting yesterday, there were like 80 developers in the room. Like, housing is coming, right? We’re-
Jeremi: Yeah, that worries me though, also.
Ann Howard: Yeah, but it’s going to be all over Austin. There’s goals for each community, each city council district, to have more affordable housing in their neighborhoods. So we as the voters who elected to have this affordable housing money available now have to welcome affordable housing in our neighborhoods.
Jeremi: Right. Now, this has been one of the real historical problems, right, because so many of these urban projects, and we have these images of these dense high rises. For instance, the part of New York where Amazon is moving into, right?
Ann Howard: Yeah.
Jeremi: Our image, at least, is that they breed crime. They breed violence, and also our image is that people really don’t want to live there. Right? So is that the solution?
Ann Howard: Well, that’s not the situation in Austin, Texas. Our first affordable housing bond was in 2006, and the apartment buildings that have been brought to scale, put on the ground, are beautiful places to live. Glistening swimming pools, and gone into some areas where maybe it was an old hotel, and converted it into small apartments. The crime rate has gone down in those communities. This affordable housing is nothing to be afraid of. It is the thing that lots of employees, and veterans, and school teachers need to be able to work in Austin.
Jeremi: Right. Those are the places where homeless people can move?
Ann Howard: Absolutely, and thrive.
Jeremi: How do they afford it?
Ann Howard: Yes. So we have programs that offer just enough subsidy for individuals to get into housing, and then either stabilize and pay their own way, or get in and be able to rely on a subsidy until they don’t need it anymore. We’re housing folks today all over Austin with really good success rates for folks to be able to maintain that housing.
Jeremi: That’s wonderful. Is there job training as well?
Ann Howard: Sure. So once you help people get into an apartment, they’ve got to stabilize with income, and that can look different for different people. It could either mean jobs, or it can mean making sure they’re accessing every program we have in the US of A, whether that’s social security, disability. We want to give everybody the strongest start they can when they’re regaining their life.
Jeremi: Zachary, you wanted to [crosstalk 00:13:44]-
Zachary: What kind of role do the police play, not just in Austin, but around the country? Are there mostly helpful interactions, or there are many negative? Because I’ve seen people being told that they can’t sit here, or they can’t be sleeping there. Told by the police.
Ann Howard: That’s a great question. I think they’re just enforcing our city ordinances that might say you can’t block a sidewalk, or we don’t have camping in this part of downtown. This is very timely across the country because we have a movement, thankfully, to not criminalize homelessness. Right? You got to sleep somewhere, right? The problem is when we hit loggerheads with people sleeping right in front of a new business, or right downtown when we’re about to do south by southwest. It doesn’t feel right to Austin to have all of this camping going on.
Jeremi: Or sleeping in front of a school-
Ann Howard: Or sleeping in front of a school-
Jeremi: … where people dropping off their kids.
Ann Howard: … or where they’re dropping off their kids. So this is a difficult situation we’re dealing with right now, and we certainly want to get ahold of it before we have a bigger challenge like some of our cities on the West Coast or the East-
Jeremi: Right, Portland, for example, is notorious in this sense.
Ann Howard: Right.
Jeremi: Right, [crosstalk 00:15:03]-
Ann Howard: The police in Austin, for one, they’re enforcing ordinances when they’re asking people to move. Right? They’re doing their job. Two, I need to partner with the police to keep the client safe. I mentioned early on this infiltration of a drug problem. There are very vulnerable people experiencing homelessness who might be trying, let’s say, to get into the ARCH for services, but they’re afraid to go there because of the milieu on the sidewalk that you have to cross through to get into the ARCH.
Jeremi: Right. So they’re concerned that the shelter is actually not a safe place or getting to the shelter is not safe.
Ann Howard: Getting to the shelter is not the experience people who work there or need the services to get in there. It’s a little messy right now to figure out what are the ordinances we should have, and do we want them enforced or not. There’s a panhandling ordinance that designates some places as off limits for panhandling, in front of an ATM, in front of a bank. We’ve been concerned about death on the streets here, pedestrian fatalities, and yet you’ve got freedom of speech rules about where you can panhandle, and where you can’t.
Jeremi: Of course.
Ann Howard: Yet, is it safe to be panhandling on the I-35 intersection with Cesar Chavez where people come barreling off of I-35, and there’s people right there in the streets asking for money? It’s complicated. I think that’s one thing I’ve learned about working on homeless issues. It’s complex, right?
Jeremi: Right. Right, like all policy issues.
Ann Howard: Oh, yeah.
Jeremi: That’s why we need smart people like you working on it.
Ann Howard: And Jeremi. Get on it, you know?
Jeremi: One of the historical struggles we’ve had as a society is figuring out, just on this topic, how much freedom and how much requirements should there be. For a time, cities like New York in the 1970s started actually forcing people inside, not allowing them to stay outside overnight. Traditionally parks in London have closed their gates and not allowed people to stay in the parks overnight. Then another perspective, which seems to be the perspective of more recent years, has been to allow people to make choices. Where do you come down on that? How should we think about that?
Ann Howard: Well, we’re all about choice because we believe, I think, the human spirit was made for choices. Back in the day, people required Sunday school, savings accounts, and sobriety-
Jeremi: I like that.
Ann Howard: … the three S’s, before you could get into housing. You sort of had to earn it. In many ways, that’s sort of how we’ve got what we’ve got. Right? Today we employ a housing first philosophy where we want to meet the client where they’re at. We want to be able to offer them choices of places to live and service packages because the data tells us that if we can get folks off the street and into a safe and stable housing, other good things will happen, right? There will be less cycling in and out of jail. There will be less use of the emergency department at a hospital. We’d rather replace all of that with appointments at doctor offices, and job training programs, and opportunities for treatment for addiction.
Ann Howard: Now that’s offering housing, or that’s offering shelter with some choices. Right now Austin’s a little bit limited on what we have to offer. The very first time I did the point-in-time count when I … I was hired in end of October, and it occurred in January. My husband and I dutifully set out into the bushes, and we encountered a couple of gentlemen around a campfire. They offered us some fried potatoes. I immediately started saying, “Do you ever go down to the ARCH for help? Why are you out here in the woods?” He said, “Oh lady,” not old lady, but just, “Oh, lady, you don’t want me going down there. I have an explosive personality disorder. I’ve been to prison, and I’m safer out here.” We were offering him a crowded, messy opportunity that he knew was not right for him, and he was living secluded.
Jeremi: Sure. Sure, and one could understand why he’d prefer to be on his own and to be free.
Ann Howard: Yeah, but the problem was he then went on to tell me how EMS knows his name. They know his health condition, and they make regular visits when he calls them.
Jeremi: Wow.
Ann Howard: So living in the woods, not very far out of town, but needing to rely on EMS for his healthcare, is very expensive.
Jeremi: Sure.
Ann Howard: We would do much better by him and by our taxpayers if we could create an opportunity, say, for him to live inside and have regular access to manage his chronic disease.
Jeremi: That seems very persuasive, but I’m imagining the argument on the other side being, “Well, it’s very costly to do this. Why should we create dependency? Why should the state have to do that?” It was really striking. You referred to the people you work with us as clients. I think that’s a great thing to do to show that you care about their needs and demands, but I can imagine many tax payers saying, “Why should we be supporting them?”
Ann Howard: The taxpayers need to wake up because what we’re doing right now is wasteful. When you spend money on someone going to the emergency room, and they get a prescription, and you provide them a few pills, and that costs a whole lot of money. In fact, our Austin data, using data from Seton Hospital, and the Integrated Care Collaboration, which is local health information data, and sheriff’s office data, the folks that are cycling in and out of emergency rooms and jail, the top 250, the most expensive, are costing us over $220,000 a year per person.
Jeremi: Per person?
Ann Howard: So do some math. That’s millions of dollars.
Zachary: You could buy a house for them for that.
Ann Howard: You could buy lots of houses. I’m very proud of the city, and the county, and the hospital groups, and some foundations were coming together to say, “Well, let’s target that top 250 and get them into supportive housing, because we can do that for like $25,000 a year per person.” If you think of paying rent in market rate apartments, plus support services, and access to healthcare, oh my gosh. We can do this, Austin, Texas.
Jeremi: That makes so much sense if you think about how much it costs us. It’s the same argument that’s made about prisons, how much we spend to put people in prisons versus actually educating them. Why is it so hard to get that done?
Ann Howard: Well, what we’ve seen is that all these social programs, really, nobody funds them well and over time upfront. It’s all this quilting together of little pieces of money, which is exhausting for the leadership. It means you have to go with the whim of the funder. I can get some from you and some from you, but both of you all want me doing a little bit different things, so I have to have three different reporting systems. At the end of the day, what do we do tomorrow? So one thing we’re working on is a new type of funding model where we’re going to take private investment to scale up these support services for the 250 clients. Then we’re going to use third party evaluation and prove to our local leadership that we made the difference. That we cut down on jail, that we cut down on hospitalization, and then we’re going to ask, this as new and different, but our local governments to pay back the private investors.
Jeremi: Interesting.
Ann Howard: This is called a pay for success or social impact bond.
Jeremi: Right. Right, and your argument is that that’s in the interest of the community, and they’ll get the money back actually.
Ann Howard: And we shift the risk. If we don’t move the needle, the government doesn’t pay. The investors are taking the risk of losing it all or getting a very small return.
Jeremi: Sure. I think something we don’t take account of that you pointed out so well is the cost of doing nothing, right? When people go to an emergency room, we as taxpayers are paying for that. When the police have to pick them up or the EMS, we’re paying for that.
Ann Howard: Right. Secretary Shaun Donovan, he was a couple of Housing and Urban Development secretaries ago, the number he put out was $40,000 per person experiencing homelessness per year. That that was the cost to a community for doing nothing, whether that’s in police, and social services-
Jeremi: Sure, makes sense.
Ann Howard: … and emergency medicine. That number, that was a decade ago. Yeah, there’s nothing free. It costs-
Jeremi: Right, doing nothing-
Ann Howard: … to do nothing.
Jeremi: … is potentially more costly than doing something that actually helps people.
Ann Howard: And Austin doesn’t like what we’ve got, right? The business community doesn’t like what they see. The people experiencing homelessness need something better. The healthcare folks are telling us this is a waste of time and energy to have people cycling in. Travis County’s concerned. The jail numbers hit too close to the top too often. So let’s do something different-
Jeremi: Exactly.
Ann Howard: … better and smarter.
Jeremi: That is so persuasive. I think what’s wonderful about the way you’re talking about this, Ann, and the way you’re working on this, is that we have a lot of good solutions ready. This is not a problem without solutions. There are solutions out there. There’s no silver bullet, but there are a lot of positive things we could do if we could just mobilize our energy.
Ann Howard: When we were working on an initiative to house homeless veterans, Austin stepped up with the City Council, and under the real championship of Mayor Steve Adler, to say, “Let’s find the homes. Let’s get the business community involved to help back the landlords that welcome the leases to the veterans. Let’s make sure the social service community is collaborating as best as possible.”
Jeremi: Right, let’s coordinate all of this.
Ann Howard: Yeah, and so he likes to say, “We have the menu or the recipe. We know what to do.” We’ve just got to do more of it, and it takes money.
Jeremi: So what we’d like to close on with every episode, Ann, is just that topic, what we can do. One of the points of our show, of course, is that there’s history. History we’ve talked about today of homelessness offers pathways forward for us to do positive things, all of us as citizens in our democracy. What do you want listeners to do, especially during the holiday season. What should they be thinking about? What should they be doing?
Ann Howard: Well, if you’re a renter, I’d love for you to talk to your property management company about renting to people who have been experiencing homelessness. Right? The property management company can call ECHO, can look at austinecho.org, or talk to any of the other nonprofits about how they can partner with them to make some of their units available. The clients would become tenants. They would pay their lease and abide by that lease. We’re not asking for anything for free. We’re just asking that you partner with us and make units available.
Jeremi: And avoid the prejudice toward homelessness that many [crosstalk 00:26:50].
Ann Howard: Yeah. Don’t screen them out. Give them a chance to be renters. A second one is, as we mentioned, the affordable housing. To be listening to a housing development that’s going to come to our neighborhoods and to figure out how to make sure it’s good. We don’t want too much development too fast, but we need to welcome that density into our communities. Right now you can always give money to these nonprofits. It helps us pay those security deposits for people trying to get off the street and make rents affordable.
Jeremi: Is that better than giving things to people when you see them on the street?
Ann Howard: I’d rather you hand a water bottle, or a pair of socks, or some cheese crackers to somebody who’s panhandling, and give your money through the nonprofit community. We need volunteers right now to sign up to do the annual census of people experiencing homelessness. On our website, austinecho.org, you can sign up to volunteer for the … It’s called the PIT Count, the Point In Time Count, of the homeless population.
Jeremi: This is linked up to the website of our podcast.
Ann Howard: Perfect.
Jeremi: If go to the website there you can find the Austin ECHO website and information about the census. Last question, Ann. In terms of public policy, what should we be arguing for from our leaders at the local level, at the state level, at the national level? When this comes up, as it should, what should we be looking for leaders to say and do?
Ann Howard: Yeah, so any investments in affordable housing need to be intentional about making sure it welcomes people who have been experiencing homelessness. So with affordable housing, we often just focus on income levels because of affordable, so it must be accessible. It can’t screen people out because of, let’s say, a prior eviction, or because their income isn’t some exact number, three times the rent, or something.
Jeremi: Or because they went to prison [crosstalk 00:28:50]-
Ann Howard: Or because they’ve had a criminal history. We need to be smart, but we can’t be just … We can’t screen people out. We need to open the doors.
Jeremi: This seems to be a recurring theme, that we have to work harder to make all of our institutions, housing, voting, health-
Ann Howard: Yes.
Jeremi: … all more accessible to people who have had unfortunate experiences, or even have made mistakes earlier in their lives, but are looking to improve themselves. Right?
Ann Howard: I appreciate that. That’s good.
Jeremi: Zachary, you encounter the homeless issue in many ways in our city and elsewhere when we travel, and I know we’ve talked about this. What do you feel young people like yourself can do right now? What do you want to see?
Zachary: I think that there’s a lot of interest in volunteering for community organizations, for those who help with food shortages and things like that, but I do think there’s still a lot of prejudice against homeless people. When things are mentioned, people often, not just students, but teachers often assume that homeless people are homeless because something bad they’ve done. I think that that’s a negative image we all have in our mind. I think there’s hope, but I do think that it requires more education about what leads to homelessness, and what we can do to fix it.
Jeremi: Right. Well, and I think what today’s show has really illustrated is that there are a lot of myths around these issues. Myths about who the homeless are. Myths about why they’re homeless, and myths about what we can and cannot do. I love, Ann, the way you speak with such humanity about this issue and referring to those who are unfortunate enough to be homeless at this time of year, referring to them as clients, and citizens, and individuals who have rights just like all of us, and for all of us to think about the ways in which we can appreciate the good fortune we’ve had, and share it with others, and help others to have an opportunity. This has been a real education today. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for thinking about these issues. As we go into the end of the year, and we look at the future of our society, the end of the year is a time really to think about what is it that makes our democracy better?
Jeremi: Thank you for joining us on This is Democracy.
Ann Howard: Thank you.
Speaker 2: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 6: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.
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