I’d like to offer a bit of consolation and clarification.
While I believe a majority of the public holds genuine sympathy for the hardship of homelessness, there remain those who are put off by the unhoused. It’s understandable to the extent that it is misunderstood.
To say it's a “poorly painted picture” is untrue; the painting is accurate. There exists drug abuse and poor hygiene, petty crime and a bad attitude, and a plethora of factors that would give most sensible people a good reason to point and warn their children not to end up like that.
Our nation is changing; it is no longer 1990 or even 2010, for that matter. This is important to emphasize because we all silently cling to better times, but they are gone. A poverty-stricken nation with a huge political divide has urged us to ignore how close so many of us are to being unhoused.
The efforts of those willing and able to work two jobs just to stay above water are commendable, but it is tiresome and shouldn’t be necessary just to survive. There’s a common argument of “just get a job,” but no business would be eager to hire anyone who can't show up to work clean and rested. We all have appearances to maintain.
The chance we need is the risk you have to take. I see why you aren’t too keen to embrace that, just as we see no point in asking.
We are begging for a sunrise. We have, for the most part, given up, not because we aspire to sleep outside and pursue our vices without regard, but because we are given no opportunity to aspire.
“A chance” is not something we are familiar with. Because of social stigma and a very narrow outlook on the demographic of the impoverished, we are typically only able to dream within the borders of your beliefs. If you believe we are addicts, we can be no more than that. If you believe we are a wasted cause, we can be no more than that.
It’s far easier to demonize the poor than the economy. Far easier to cast blame and fear than to accept how close your children are to this fate. I’ve seen more than a few high school graduates sleep under the bridge.
To act as if housing assistance and SNAP are the most significant burdens on the state budget is to ignore the current systems that recycle and criminalize the poor.
The burden on the budget could be ignored, so long as you don’t mind wasting money. If, however, you do care about how your tax dollars are spent, let me provide some simple numbers.
The average stay in a rehabilitation facility costs just shy of $10,000 per person per month. A night in jail costs about $900, or $21,000 a month, per person. An affordable housing voucher can cover around $1,500 a month, but we’ll triple that to offset the costs of social workers and outreach agencies, so $4,500 a month per person.
You can check my numbers if you’d like, but the argument isn’t about defunding the police, nor is it about criminalizing the poor; it is about housing being the crucial step to avoid the waste and abuse of funding for these programs.
Incarceration or rehab could be precisely what someone needs to get their life back on track, but if they are released without a place to maintain that positive direction, it will end in failure, more time in jail, more time in rehab, more money wasted and more people broken.
Antonio Espinoza separated from the military in 2019 and spent five years homeless in Durango. He writes from lived experience and is now an advocate for the unhoused.
