https://lnkd.in/gDkxNy_F
I am grateful and beyond privileged to announce I have been selected to receive an all-expense paid trip to San Francisco next March to attend the National Alliance to End Homelessness Innovations and Solutions Conference. All travel arrangements, lodging, registration, food expenses, and transportation provided!
I wrote an essay about homelessness. It basically explained that Arizona(after the 2008 foreclosure crisis) failed to build single-family homes to match population growth. Then we promoted a tax-break system to attract revenue through corporate interest development. Population doubled in ten years. That created a society too expensive to live in, while economists’ voices were drowned out by petty politics and political powergrabs focused on the velocity of money. We caused homelessness by being short-sighted yet drive around and look down upon it as a behavior problem. Meanwhile, grandma is on the sidewalk with her walker because she got priced out of her apartment(for the first time in her life).
We task police to target homeless people when we should be solving homelessness. Add in a pandemic and a $30B fentanyl industry at the southern border and we have in Maricopa County 12,000 homeless people, rampant overdoses, 765 heat-related deaths every year, a 25% annual increase in the unsheltered population & 290,000 single-family homes short of what we need while we run out of water! THE POLICY DOESN’T MATCH THE PROBLEM!
Maricopa County houses 1200 people a year with HUD subsidies while 700+ die in the sweltering heat. It’s a legislative problem causing a “stick” without a “carrot” situation and suppressing peoples’ intrinsic motivations…😞
Top it off with a billion-dollar AHCCCS FBI fraud investigation, and you have the fastest growing homeless crisis in the United States alongside the worst massive billing-fraud in Arizona history.
#disposablepeople #housingfirst #SUDtreatment #Structuralviolence
Director Townsend in Washington D.C. sends a letter saying, “Congratulations- you’re going to San Francisco!”… 😳
Creating & Clearing Paths to Stability with the Chronically Homeless | Executive Director of Anything Helps
11moThe concern I have with the term "moved inside" is that it's very ambiguous by design. I must admit that I often use it myself for the same purpose - to demonstrate impact through data. But do shelter referrals truly demonstrate impact if only 18% of the shelter population stays the length of time required to enter permanent housing and end their homelessness? Is it something to celebrate when that duration of stay is 250 days on average, almost the length of a regular lease?