everyone deserves housing
and i do mean everyone
Most of you know by this point that a lot of the work I do in my day job involves navigating housing systems and supporting people who are forced to live unsheltered or bouncing between shelters and random couches or abandoned buildings. It’s really hard not to be pessimistic and disheartened at the state of housing and homelessness in both the city where I live and across the country. There are anti-homelessness laws in many cities, and it feels like things are going to get more hostile before they get better. Just last week the mayor of Minneapolis announced a new “crackdown” on what he calls “open air drug markets” that targets the unhoused population in the city.
As the tension rises around Minneapolis, stress levels and trauma among unhoused residents also rises. Pair that with the extreme heat we have been experiencing, and you have the perfect storm- it’s been a tough few weeks.
Over the course of my work in housing, I have sat knee to knee with countless people who are sobbing, asking me why they can’t seem to get off the streets. There is a certain kind of desperation in this question, an end-of-the-rope pleading that accompanies this ask. Commonplace among these conversations are sentiments trying to make sense of what’s happening to them.
“I’m doing everything right.”
“I’m trying so hard.”
“I’m doing everything they want.”
“What am I doing wrong?”
In this, I always hear the echoes of what they’re not saying explicitly:
“Why don’t I deserve safety and stability?”
There isn’t an easy response to any of this because there is no good reason. The truth is, we have built a system that is rigid and unforgiving, choosing arbitrary goalposts that are racist, classist, and ableist to determine whether or not someone is deserving of being housed.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the system is how it requires meticulous compliance and damn near perfection from people who are seeking accessible housing, and the level of adherence it asks for would never be asked of those who are lucky enough to have non-government funded housing. You need to maintain sobriety, you need to get your mental health “managed”, you need to hold onto vital documents that the police regularly throw away, you need to maintain and attend appointments with no phone, no transportation, and no sleep - you need to jump through hoop after hoop to have even the slightest chance at accessing housing. And, even then, it might not happen for years. In fact, it might not happen at all.
Though I am practiced at navigating these systems and have tricks to move things along, I still come up empty more often than not.
To me, this begs the question, is this really who we want to be?
None of us individually can change this enormous, complex system, but we can do things to challenge it. We can take actions to meet the basic needs of people who live unsheltered. We can give money to mutual aid and organizations that do housing work. We can be intentional about who we vote for, what bills we support, and make efforts to support ones that look out for unhoused residents. We can talk to the people in our lives and challenge stigmas about homelessness, substance use, and poverty. We can build community with our neighbors who live outside and let them know that their deservedness is not measured by the broken system they are being crushed by.
okay I love you, go out there and love hard and fight the good fight.