This Actually Might Work

I try not to think about the likelihood of something.
That’s simply because I see “impossible” things happen all the time.
There is a rover running around Mars right now.
We’ve landed on the moon 6 times.
A convertible is on its way to start an orbit around Mars

Crazy things happen all the time.
So it’s silly to talk about how this or that isn’t going to work.
But a tent city? Come on. How is that ever going to work?
And yet… I think there is a slight possibility that we can make this happen.

The Government requires tents and other not-meant-for-human-habitation solutions.

The reality of the situation is: Tents are part of the entire system created by our homeless system in America.
There is an amazing rapid rehousing program in Akron called Home Again. It is run through Info Line.
We’ve had many people at Second Chance Village use Home Again to get into housing. I’ve seen people get into a house in as little as 2 days. It’s amazing!
But there are requirements in order to qualify for the Home Again program.
In order to qualify you must either:
Be an Individual/family is sleeping in an emergency shelter
OR
Be Sleeping in a place not meant for human habitation (cars, parks, abandoned buildings or tents)
They require that I write a letter verifying that the person applying for Home Again is actually sleeping in a tent at Second Chance Village. In fact, they often come here to look at the tent.
I just wrote 26 of these letters for our residents last week.
And get this: if you start staying on a friend’s couch for any time during the application process you lose your Home Again qualification.
So, tents aren’t just something that are a bizarre bi-product of homelessness in America. You actually need to be living in places not meant for human habitation, such as a tent.
It would seem to me that if making people live in less than human conditions is a required part of the system we should probably actually build it into the system.

We need more options.

Just this morning I was working with a person that got kicked out of Second Chance Village for fighting.
I nearly begged him to go to our one and only shelter for men in Akron: Haven of Rest. He refused to go. He said he couldn’t handle the 8:00pm lights out bedtime and mandatory religious services 3 times a day. He would rather sleep shelterless on the street than go there. The human spirit is a funny thing. We as a species need more than just food and shelter. It appears that we need dignity. And apparently we’re willing to die for it.
(While I was writing this, Community Support Services did a conference call with our tri-council. We’ve all agreed to give this person one more chance. See: this is yet another example of how we fit into the program. This person has significant mental and physical health issues. If he doesn’t stay with us he has nowhere else to go. There is nothing else out there for him. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he’ll die on the street.)
It is undeniable that we need something else for these people. Second Chance Village is a low barrier, low cost solution for these people. If Second Chance Village shuts down where will these people go? And how long will it be before we build another facility for them? Where will that money come from? How hard will it be to build up a similar amount of public good will that Second Chance Village has created?
We are so close here. All the city has to do is say “yes.”

Akron Might Actually Be Open To Second Chance Village

This is the craziest part of the story of them all.
Going into this I knew full well a tent city is asking a lot for a city. Imagination, creativity and vision are not the strengths of a city. Following rules and doing what every other city is doing are the strengths of cities. This is especially true in the Midwest.
It almost doesn’t even count that Seattle had 6 city approved tent encampments. You can read about them on the actual city site here.
On that page they write:

Currently, there is insufficient supply of low-barrier shelter beds for any given night and outreach workers often find that the City’s emergency shelter system does not meet the needs of people living unsheltered.

This is like going to an AA meeting and saying: “Hi, my name is Sage and I’m an alcoholic.”
They straight up admit that their “emergency shelter system does not meet the needs of people living unsheltered.”
It’s easy for a Midwestern rustbelt city to say: “You know how those liberal West Coast cities are. They’re crazy.”
But the fact the matter is: tent cities, sanctioned and unsanctioned, are all over America. This isn’t a “liberal city” problem. This is an American city problem.
And if I didn’t know any better I am starting to think that some in the City of Akron are starting to see that reality.
This past Friday I got a visit from a woman from the Health Department. Someone from the city asked her to come by to help me fill our our conditional use paperwork. An unknown person from the city told her to come by and told her exactly how the paperwork needed filled out.
She also mentioned that Hepatitis A is getting closer to Ohio. It’s spread in homeless encampments that don’t have hand washing  facilities. We provide showers, bathrooms and hand sanitizer everywhere. We work very closely with the Health Department to keep our villagers healthy. You simply can’t provide those services in random campsites that aren’t organized.
We’ve also had about 8 city council leaders come by our facility.
In particular, Tara Samples, Ward 5 council leader, has been bringing food multiple times a week. She is running with Dennis Kucinich for governor of Ohio so she has a lot of leftover food from fundraisers.

Akron City Councilwoman Tara Samples joins hands with former U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich after he announced Samples as his running mate for Ohio governor at the Burning Bush church. (Karen Schiely/Beacon Journal/Ohio.com)

My instinct is that we have shown them that we offer a safe place for men and women that have nowhere else to go.

And then there’s the Community

More than any other word describing Second Chance Village, I hear the word: Community.
Other homeless leaders, community leaders, supporters and villagers all say the same thing: We excel at creating a sense of community for these people.
This is critical because these people usually come to us completely broken. They have absolutely nowhere else to turn.
We then show them love and support and immediately get them involved in the community. Each villager is required to volunteer one hour a day to help keep our center operating. And there is a LOT to do. Security, laundry, clothing room, cleaning, the store, food pantry, feeding the villagers, maintenance. It’s a huge operation.
The people we help become the people that help others. It immediately fills them with a sense of purpose, meaning and integrity.
It reminds them that they aren’t useless. They have a place in society. We need them and we are thankful for them.

I had my doubts

As a leader you don’t want to admit you think something you are creating isn’t going to work. That’s deflating for all involved. In my head I basically just say to myself: “I’ve seen crazier things work.”
But I was, and still am, unsure if city leaders have the vision and bravery to accept something so new and innovative as Second Chance Village.
We have a recording of a zoning official at a Ward meeting publicly saying they are not going to recommend approval of Second Chance Village. So, I’m still highly suspicious.
But this ultimately goes to City Council for a vote. They decide whether or not it stays or goes.
We will be submitting our conditional use paperwork in early April and city council will likely vote on it in May.
It seems incredibly brutal that a dozen people have the ability to say: Get out of those tents and go somewhere else. We don’t care where you go as long as it’s not Second Chance Village.
And while I won’t quit, the reality is that getting to this point cannot be underestimated. We have had a massive swell of community support and publicity. I simply can’t imagine that we’ll be able to build that kind of momentum again.
Our day center should continue to thrive and grow regardless of what happens to the village. But the elephant in the room is coming up with a solution for where these people are going to sleep.
If Second Chance Village gets shut down they will just go back to the woods. Alone. In danger. Isolated.
There isn’t a better solution just around the corner.
I am telling myself that we have a greater than zero percent chance of this succeeding. But I don’t know how much greater.
The possibility of us getting to stay is there. That’s all I need. A possibility, no matter how small, is still a possibility. So I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic.
My approach to this has always been to come at it with endless faith, love and hope. We don’t need any more anger and hate in America right now.
I believe that faith, love and hope are the best tools to climb this mountain. We can do it. We just have to believe that we are better than letting our fellow Americans rot and whither in our ditches, under bridges and on our streets.
We just have to be brave enough to find the love these people need.
 

Get A House Or Stay On The Street

We are in an era at the moment where the super trendy homeless strategy is “Housing First.”
Get people the stability of housing. And then they have the safety, security and mental space to think about their mental health issues, physical health issues and addiction issues.
This makes a lot of sense.
But now we’re so invested in Housing First that there is nothing else discussed.
You are either in a house or…
There is no “or”. You just need to get in a house.
This causes endless issues.
In places like California there simply is not enough housing.
In places like Akron Ohio there is simply not enough housing.
And this is the problem. There is not enough housing anywhere.
Whether your city has 60,000 homeless or 600 homeless the issue is the same: there is not enough housing.
Housing First advocates will say that all resources need to be focused on getting more housing. If we spend money on anything other than housing we are simply wasting time and money.
This is theoretically interesting. But in the meantime there are people (real, live men, women and children) stranded on the streets. They are American born refugees.
The people who care about the homeless look at them in bewilderment. And the people who don’t care about them look at them in disgust.
But very few people look at them with a plan.
The Catholic Worker Movement has an innovative plan. They move the homeless into their houses. Anyone can start a Catholic Worker House. You can learn more about setting one up here.
L.A. county is offering up to $75,000 to put a “granny flat” in your backyard as long as you rent it to homeless people.
Seattle now has 6 city-sanctioned tent cities.
But then the ideas quickly fall off the cliff. We just start scratching our heads. And most cities in America aren’t thinking about this at all.
If 500,000 refugees flooded into America tomorrow we would be setting up FEMA trailers and the Red Cross would be on the spot immediately. But America’s 500,000 homeless people don’t get that kind of treatment. We focus on all the problems of helping the homeless instead.
You see stories like this one over and over again. Some good Samaritan builds a shelter for a homeless person. And then the city comes along and either tears it down or confiscates it because “it’s not safe.”
What is not safe is living on the street. 
You sleep with one eye open all the time. You are vulnerable from every angle. You are out there alone with thieves and murderers. And in the winter you are living exposed to brutal cold and wind.
Telling a homeless person that a wooden shelter is not safe would be like telling you your car is not safe and therefore we must take it away from you.
You can read about LA taking away shelters here: LA Officials Bring The Hammer Down On Tiny Houses For Homeless.
We know very well how many people in America feel about guns. Can you imagine the uprising if a city official came by and took all your guns because they weren’t safe?
But wooden shelters are taken away from homeless people every single day in America “because they aren’t safe.”
This strategy also means that they are therefore saying the street is safe.
That is an ignorance that defies even the most basic common sense.

If you have a building inspector declare a shelter unsafe then a social worker should be able to follow immediately behind and declare the street unsafe. Those two people should then come to a conclusion of where this person can safely go.
But that’s not the way it works. There are merely laws about the safety of a structure. We have no laws about the safety of the street. So therefore they are sent to the street and everyone feels satisfied that they have done their job.
We cannot be satisfied with people living on the street because we don’t have the creativity, vision or even moral compass to say “this isn’t right. We can do better.”
We wouldn’t allow children to be sent out onto the street because we couldn’t find a foster home for them.
We wouldn’t allow stray dogs to be sent out onto the street because we are out of cages at the dog pound for them.
We wouldn’t allow immigrants to be sent out onto the street because we don’t have housing for them.
We wouldn’t allow dementia patients to be sent out onto the street because we don’t have a facility for them.
But yet somehow we find it completely acceptable to take our most poor, our most down and out, our most downtrodden and send them out onto the street.
How did we get here? How did we bend our moral judgement to find this acceptable because we are perplexed by the complication of this issue?
Human morality can easily be tricked.
Germany in World War II. Japanese internment camps in America in World War II.  The Native American Trail of Tears in the 1800s. Slavery.
We repeatedly allow bad things to happen to other humans and rationalize it as some sort of necessary evil.
Homelessness in America today is one of these rationalized falsehoods. There is no moral justification in any imaginable scenario that this could ever possibly be acceptable.
I guarantee you that people will look back at the 1980s to 202os as an era of great embarrassment for America.
This is not an impossible problem. It is 500,000 people out of 325 million people. I guarantee it’s not exactly 325 million people either. It’s probably give or take 500,000 people.
500,000 people showed up for the Women’s March on January 20 2018 in L.A. 
From 1990 to 1995, an average of about 112,000 refugees arrived in the U.S. each year.
So, in 5 years we managed to handle well over 500,000 refugees. Yet somehow we still have 500,000 homeless people. And don’t get me wrong, we can handle refugees AND we can handle our homeless.
We are just choosing NOT to handle our homeless.
This is not right.
Ethiopia is hosting 847,200 refugees. Ethiopia has a $72.37 billion gross domestic product. USA has $18.57 trillion gross domestic product.
If Ethiopia has somehow managed to host over 800,000 refugees, America should be able to somehow fix its 500,000 homeless person issue.
The people of America just have to decide we are better than this.
We can’t allow ourselves to fall into an intellectual trap that these people either get a house or they get on the street. That is a false premise. To believe this issue is binary, black or white, yes or no, is a logical fallacy. It’s a clever trick meant to fool people.
“Since we can’t get these people into houses we have no solution for them.” That’s simply incorrect and ridiculous.
This is not a black and white issue. We’ve only made it black and white. There is plenty of gray that can be explored.
We, as a society, have to tell our homeless advocates and our political leaders that we must look for creative alternatives for the homeless of America. We cannot stand by as our brothers and sisters rot on the street while the rest of us scratch our heads.
 

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