The latest cold snap and the opening of inclement weather shelters have caused some to ask if Dallas needs more homeless shelters. If you remember our President and CEO, Carl Falconer’s State of the Homeless Address, this last March, you know that the answer is no. What we do need is a lot more housing, particularly, Rapid Rehousing and affordable housing. We have already taken steps through the CoC NOFA process to correct this, the City of Dallas and other local municipalities are following suit, and even some private funders are getting into this space.
Pretty early on in the modern homelessness crisis, scholars and practitioners were able to document the fact that shelters on their own could not end a person’s homelessness. That could be accomplished only through housing. As scholarship grew and more data was collected, the consensus of researchers in the field recognized that the best way to do this was through Permanent Supportive Housing, Rapid Rehousing, and affordable housing, using a Housing First approach.
Shelters still have an extremely important role in an effective homeless response system, but only if they operate under a “shelter as process,” rather than “shelter as place” approach. They must be low-barrier, and constantly and relentlessly seek to get folks out of the shelter and into housing as soon as possible.
Dr. Iain De Jong, one of the premier world experts on ending homelessness, counsels communities to be extremely wary of adding shelter beds, unless they know that for each shelter bad added, they will have six available housing beds. If a community gets this ratio wrong, they may just end up warehousing people.
Systems thinking tends to be abstract, and not everyone can be expected to have digested decades of scholarship on what works and doesn’t work in the fight to end homelessness. That is why we are always looking for easy analogies to quickly explain issues we ponder. The following is one such attempt.
(Courtesy of DART)
Imagine a bus route, for which DART uses a bus that can fit 40 seated passengers, as well as 10 more passengers standing. The bus runs once every hour and its route is about 40 minutes long, so DART can use one bus for this route.
There is only one problem. Even with passengers getting on and off, halfway through the route the bus is chockful. They can’t let anyone else on the bus. That means that the folks waiting anywhere along the second half of the route are stuck. Many of them will wait for the next bus. It’s not like they have a choice.
The problem is that, once again, even with passengers getting on and off, halfway through the route the bus is chockful. They can’t let anyone else on the bus. That means that the folks waiting anywhere on the second half of the route are stuck. And, yes, I did lazily just copy and paste that, because, waiting for the next bus does not help or change anything, if it fills up halfway through the route.
You need not have studied public transportation in depth to understand the solution to this problem. It’s quite simple. DART would need to add at least one more bus to this route. Scholarship and data that you and I do not know an inkling of would heavily figure into the details, but that simple fact is inescapable.
What if I suggested that the real solution was to build well-appointed bus shelters with comfortable benches all along the second half of the route. Likely, your response would be that well-appointed bus shelters with comfortable benches are not just a fine amenity; they can be extremely helpful to those waiting for the bus. However, you would tell me, they do not address the problem at hand. There is not enough room on the bus, folks can’t get on it, they can’t reach their destinations, and they are stuck. This problem cannot be solved by bus shelters. We need another bus.
By this point, you have probably figured out where I am going with this. The bus stands in for housing, and the bus shelters stand in for homeless shelters. We need more housing in Dallas; we don’t need more shelters. QED.
