The national dialogue on homelessness is painfully off-base in how it incorrectly places the blame for continued high levels of homelessness on agencies and coalitions, which are actually doing a good job. Let me explain.
There are two completely different issues in understanding homelessness. First, how to help people who are homeless return to housing, and second, how to stop the flow of new people becoming homeless. The first part we know how to do quite well. For more than 30 years, agencies in Baltimore and across the country have done a good job rehousing people. Whether it’s Housing First, Housing Second, subsidized housing, transitional and emergency housing, reunification with family (which we should do more of), and even hotel rooms, all can work fine, and a discussion of fine-tuning these programs is secondary.
If no new people were to become unhoused in Baltimore, the city would have few homeless people to worry about in three or four years. However, stopping the flow of new unhoused people has little to do with solving an individual’s bout of homelessness. Hospitals can mend broken bones from car accidents very efficiently, but a surgeon’s skill cannot reduce the number of collisions. Abating the flow is beyond the scope of what any agency, coalition, government or the free market can do. And the solution has little to do with affordable housing. Affordable housing is needed for homeless service staff, teachers, police and lots of ordinary people, but it is not a true linkage to a bout of homelessness. If it were, our country would have a magnitude of homelessness 10 to 20 times higher than we do. Affordable housing comes up when trying to re-house people in their own individual unit, which is only one of many options.
A better approach to understanding homelessness must focus on key societal characteristics, anti-family policies and government definitions. There are three primary forces. The first, and most important, is the tremendous rise in single adult households fueled by a relaxation of previous rigid norms since the 1960s. The more single adult households, the more people will fall into homelessness. It’s simple math. Be it from divorce, never marrying or leaving the family without a stable source of income, people do not stay together as they once did. The smaller the household, the smaller the social support network and the fewer people available to help when help is needed. Even the norm to accept help from the family has frayed in our atomized society. Cultural groups that still hold fast to old family norms, like Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Filipino populations, among others, have homeless rates that are three to 10 times lower than other groups.
The rise of single adult households has worked to increase the number of people untethered from traditional anchors such as spouses (of any gender), parents or large families. Too many one-adult households eventually weaken and collapse into homelessness. These “deformed” households lack strong girders and solidly welded joists to natural social supports. Relaxed norms like loose building codes have given freedom to build too many untenable households.
These new norms have been further exacerbated by anti-family regulations governing subsidized housing that serve over 10 million persons in 5 million households by preventing families from extending housing to kin and kith when needed. The ability of a household to expand and shrink as the family needs has been stolen by federal regulations, which link rent to income and hence provide great disincentives and barriers for low-income families to use their house as a resource for their family and friends. This is why poor countries don’t have homelessness, because people still live together in the family home.
As for the continued high numbers of homelessness, this is due primarily to the federal definition of homelessness, which confuses the public as to who has some type of housing and who is still living unprotected on the streets. While homeless housing called emergency shelter, transitional housing and safe havens may not be perfect modern housing, they represent housing options that were specifically built for people experiencing homelessness and provide more amenities than rental apartments, save one, that of ample privacy. Is a lack of privacy then the definition of homelessness? We can still count “sheltered” persons as formerly homeless, but this 60% of the U.S. homeless count (over 450,000) is housed and is given many amenities. In Baltimore, the homeless count hovers around 1,600 persons as of 2024, but over 90% of this total have housing provided by agencies, including Helping Up Mission, Project PLASE, House of Ruth, TIME and many others. If these housing facilities are not satisfactory to the middle-class values of what is a proper place to sleep, then improve them a little. The true number of unhoused homeless in Baltimore is about 120 on any given day — those living on the streets — not 1,600.
Today, more people end up “on the street” and need housing services primarily due to the significant norm changes since the 1960s. The family is no longer always the housing provider of last resort, just like it is no longer the employer of last resort. One must remember that in a society with civil rights and freedom from rigid norms, there will always be homelessness. So don’t blame the Baltimore homeless coalition or the hard-working agencies for the continued high numbers. Blame societal changes that have given people freedom from previous rigid gender and family roles. Blame anti-family housing subsidy regulations and a value-laden federal definition of homelessness. And, finally, blame the Constitution, if you want, for protecting rights for citizens that people in autocratic states only wish they had. Or maybe, don’t blame anyone and be happy for your own personal freedoms.
Michael D. Ullman, a Baltimore resident, is the author of the new book “Household Deformation: The Rise and Permanence of Modern Homelessness.” He is publisher of the National Homeless Information Project (www.nhipdata.org) and has worked nationally in homeless services for over 25 years.