In the years that followed, the word home completely disappeared from my vocabulary. Even as I dove into my textbooks, yearning for escape, I worried that I had no future. The challenges of homelessness were too great.
This month, however, I will graduate from law school. But I will have with me more than just a cap, gown, and a diploma: I will be carrying the memory of homelessness, poverty, and of the people I left behind.
Each day, thousands of individuals, families, and children are without stable shelter. These invisible, cast-out communities are largely shunned and forgotten by society. Instead of placing blame at the feet of policy makers who create and allow poverty to exist, our society prosecutes people who are homeless.
Across the United States, rental prices have risen to unprecedented levels. These housing costs have outpaced wages, leaving millions of people on the edge of homelessness. What few public alternatives there are to the rental market, in the form of public or subsidized housing opportunities, have yearslong wait-lists. Further, with little guarantee of emergency shelter, there is often no safety net available to catch people when they fall into homelessness.
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Worse, many local policy makers have criminalized street homelessness, corralling people into prisons instead of placing them in homes or apartments. In fact, the Supreme Court is soon set to rule whether cities can arrest homeless people for sleeping or camping outside even when there is no shelter available. Under such hostile conditions, it’s no surprise that there are few long-term survivors of homelessness and that the average life expectancy of a person experiencing homelessness is nearly 30 years less than someone who is housed.
But as I have learned in my time through and beyond homelessness and to the graduation stage, a better world is possible, one where homelessness is viewed not as natural law but as a consequence of our collective failure to care for the most vulnerable among us.
Toward this end, Congress must expand its funding for programs that improve access to safe and affordable housing. Members should invest in the Housing Choice Voucher program, which subsidizes market-rate housing for qualifying low-income persons, while enacting federal source-of-income discrimination protections to prevent landlords from refusing to rent on the basis of voucher status.
More broadly, Congress should strengthen public alternatives to private housing. Since 1999, with the passage of the Faircloth Amendment, Congress has capped the construction of federally subsidized public housing units. Further, after decades of inadequate federal funding, the number of available public housing units has decreased, contributing to a wider housing shortage. By repealing the Faircloth Amendment and making strong investments in public housing, policy makers could reverse this trend and provide an accessible cushion for those who cannot access private rental housing.
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Thinking more boldly, Congress should attack the very foundations of our commodified housing system. Members should launch a federal social housing pilot program, in which housing is developed that is guaranteed for everyone, not just for the poorest among us. Doing so would establish a universal safety net for those who find themselves at risk of homelessness, no matter their income level.
Where the federal government fails to take appropriate action, however, states and localities should step in to provide stop-gap solutions that mitigate the damage of the homelessness crisis. They should follow the example of Massachusetts and New York City, which provide emergency shelter guarantees to all families and all city residents respectively. But they should go further, ensuring that there is a right to emergency shelter for all adult individuals, families, and children to prevent the vicious cycle of homelessness before it begins.
Furthermore, states and localities should reject and repeal laws that criminalize sleeping, sitting, and even eating in public spaces. Instead of investing precious local funding into policing and arresting those experiencing homelessness for practices they need to do to survive, that same funding could be allocated to social service programs and much-needed housing development. The research is clear: Incarcerating people who are homeless does nothing to address the root causes of homelessness. It only exacerbates it.
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My experience with homelessness robbed me of my childhood and threatened my future — but it did not steal my dreams of a world free of homelessness, poverty, and destitution.
I know that this can be done. But it won’t be achieved by ignoring or criminalizing homeless people. Instead, policy makers must pursue strategic investments in housing, shelter programs, and supportive resources that recognize the humanity of our poor and homeless communities. Each of us has a right to survive, live, and thrive — and graduate to a better life.
Timothy Scalona is a Suffolk University Law School graduate and board member of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.
