Emma: This is a content warning. This podcast episode includes discussion of the mistreatment of people and cultures, including terms used at various times in history that we know today to be harmful and derogatory. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Please take this into consideration and listen responsibly.

-Introduction music-

Emma: My name is Emma Hughes. I'm the Director of Outreach and Recruitment at Family Promise of Spokane, and I am so excited to welcome you to our first episode, titled “On the Corner of Homelessness and the History of Poverty in the United States of America.”

Today, we're really going to ask ourselves the question: does homelessness have an essential role to play in society? Can we actually live in a community without people experiencing homelessness? Because we know, in fact, the scale of homelessness is a modern problem, but [homelessness] does have historic roots. In 2022, there were more homeless children in America today than there were homeless people during the entirety of the American Great Depression.

So why has it come this far? And what do we need to do as a community to change that trajectory? 

We're lucky enough today to have Joe Ader, Executive Director of Family Promise of Spokane, here to jump in and to walk through this conversation together. Let's jump into our conversation.

Before we jump in too much, we do also want to just set a disclaimer. Homelessness is a complex issue, which we're attempting to dissect and understand through the entirety of this podcast. This is not going to happen in a single episode, but it is important to know that even though we may not completely explore an element of homelessness, our hope is that it has a greater impact on the issue as a whole as we are talking and engaging with one another.

Please keep an open, curious mind when you listen and seek to learn just as we are.

Welcome to the very first episode of “On the Corner of Homelessness And.” We are exploring the intersection of homelessness with a lot of other cultural, social, systemic, personal reasons, and I'm really excited to welcome Joe Ader, Executive Director of Family Promise of Spokane to the studio. Welcome, Joe.

Joe: All right, I'm so excited to be here for our first episode of “On the Intersection of Homelessness And.” I'm excited about the topic today because the history of homelessness is something that's unique and it's hard to define. We've done a lot of research on this, walking through different things, so we're going to go back and forth on this today with this topic-- but really the history of homelessness in the United States really draws us into this conversation of “Is homelessness necessary?”

Is it a required thing in our culture to have homelessness or is it not, and therefore what do we do about it? Which sets up the whole rest of what we're going to be talking about over several episodes here, so I'm excited to be here.

Emma: I'm really excited to have you. I think this is going to be an amazing conversation. Before we get too far in, I'm going to ask you, spur of the moment, why do you care about homelessness?

Joe: That's a great question. This is a topic that has really been put on my heart from the time I was a child. Really folks that were living in generational poverty, that concept resonated with me and I had friends and even my spouse who grew up in generational poverty and in and out of homelessness-- that just gives me this desire to find out more and is there ways that we can address these issues better? 

And that really was what drives me. And then for the work that we do here, we work with families with children that are experiencing homelessness and I mean every time I see these kids, it just drives me to “Let's do better.” We can do better than this and so that is what brought me to this area and this topic.

Emma: Well, let's jump in. We have some amazing information to cover today. So, we're just going to start. Some say that the first people to experience homelessness in America were displaced people in the 1670s who became displaced during King Philip's War, which was an attempt made by the Native Americans to expel colonists from New England. The displaced people were both English colonists and indigenous people. Now, this is where that kind of historical debate starts to happen because others say that the opening of the first poor houses in the 1730s was really where homelessness began. The doors opened in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and really functioned as homeless shelters, jails, alms houses, which is a term I had never heard until this exact moment, and de facto mental health institutions. And then in the 1820s, here comes the Industrial Revolution, which had an incredible impact on homelessness as we know it.

Cities in the Northeast became true magnets for people and so populations grew very quickly. The mass influx of people resulted in many wandering the streets looking for work and otherwise identified as homeless.

Joe: Every time we see migration happen throughout history of our culture and other cultures, there's people that are displaced. There's people that are moving into an area and can't find housing.

There's also people that are already existing in those areas and then they become too expensive to live in. And this is no different today, but we're seeing this even back, this is 1820s we're talking about right now, but as the Industrial Revolution started happening and you start moving from farms into cities, you start seeing more and more concentrated issues of poverty and homelessness.

Emma: Well, and that's really, I mean, when the cities began to respond with laws, trying to--probably the intention was— to corral, to support, to funnel these people, but what really it did is it banned loitering and panhandling and then newly formed police departments-- which it's kind of funny for me to think police departments were formed at one point, you know, in the 1820s-- they actually rounded up people at the end of the day and put them in jails overnight to get them off of the streets. This was back in the 1820s and so really among the urban homeless, in addition to those moving into cities for the, you know, the working factories, were a lot of free people of color and runaway slaves at that time who were looking for freedom within those bigger urban hubs.

Joe: I mean, some of the first solutions that were tried to be made about homelessness in the United States involved police forces, involved arresting people out of homelessness. And I mean, that's an idea that has not let go. I mean, this was 1820s, we are now in the 2020s. And so, we're 200 years on with this concept of really arresting our way out of homelessness.

And so, we'll talk about that in other episodes, we'll definitely do an episode on law enforcement and homelessness later on in this series. But I just want to point out, like, that's kind of the first thought. That's the first, “What do we do? Okay, let's get rid of this issue by locking folks up.”

Emma: You're hitting on something that we're going to explore and have been exploring is the complexity of the nature of homelessness. I think it's so easy to jump into, oh, homeless solve through, insert solution ABC in this order, it's simple, it's going to work, you know, across the board. But what we're going to see and what we even are seeing 200 years ago is that simple solutions generally are not full solutions.

If it's a simple solution, it's not going to be robust enough to navigate the complex issues that happen in homelessness. So it's interesting. Yeah, you're right to see those threads.

Well, let's fast forward a little bit. So now it's 1830. President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act. This displaced tens of thousands of Native people, forcing them to migrate. There's their theme of migration west, through extreme suffering, threats of death, we often remember this as the Trail of Tears. This is really the first major American legislation that creates and results in mass homelessness.

Joe: And you see a concept here that starts back then of folks of color, indigenous people being overrepresented in homelessness because of legislation. And it doesn't just end there. This is one of the things, and we'll cover lots of those. And I hope to do an episode later on about people of color and the impacts of homelessness on people of color.

We'll definitely talk about that throughout this series. But I mean, even today in the shelters that we run, people of color are way overrepresented in homelessness. I'm talking for African Americans, we're looking at four times greater percentage in homelessness than in the general population in our community. Native Americans were at almost six times the percentage of population in our community versus those that are experiencing homelessness.

Emma: Well, and that's in 2023. So clearly, I mean, these issues have deep, really deep roots. And it's interesting because here we go again into another kind of set of legislation in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was passed. And now free Blacks were left homeless on the edges of Union Army camps in Northern cities. This later evolved into the Great Migration during the 1880s and really through the 1970s. And this long stretch of time is really where Black individuals and families from former slave states in the South moved to large cities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. And so, these people often are pushed into these overcrowded segregated neighborhoods. And here we go, strong into the 1870s.

Joe: It's at this point in time coming out of the Civil War that nonprofits that serve the homeless are created. That wasn't a thing. Before that, there were, you mentioned them earlier, kind of churches that would do some work and some feeding or there were some almshouses where, yeah, people would give alms or ask alms, you know, that we were staying there. But I mean, in 1865, you have the creation of the Salvation Army. Kind of the first major player on the stage, as far as a nonprofit that is going to focus on homelessness. And then right after that, 1887, you've got United Way starting. So really in that very short time period coming out of the Civil War, you have multiple nonprofits, all starting at the same time. American Red Cross is another example of that 1881. So, we're all in the late 1800s when these nonprofits start popping up to address these societal issues.

Emma: Well, and that is exactly reflected too in the notes we have, which say that some experts claim that homelessness was actually not this national issue until about the 1870s. They claimed that all of the homelessness issues and the challenges with homelessness before were not really the nation's problem or responsibility, which kind of makes me think there was a mindset of this as temporary. You know, this is just kind of a natural symptom of migration. Once that settles down, this won't be an issue.

Joe: Yeah, and there's a scale, right? There's a level of homelessness that increases during this time. I mean, you had entire cities burned down during the [Civil War]. You had many, many people displaced. And so, there's this internal turmoil of displacement. It's not just the freed slaves that are migrating.

It's a lot of people that are moving around. Their communities were burnt down or destroyed, or their family units were murdered during that time. And so where do they go? Where do those kids go? They go to orphanages; they go out on the streets.

What's going to happen with them? And this is kind of the first thing, the first time that you see this massive amount of homelessness in the United States prior to that. I mean, we’d existed almost 100 years at this point. So, 1776 to the 1870s, we're 100 years into our country before this was a national problem.

Emma: Yeah. I mean, you're right. That's super interesting. I haven't thought about it like that before. Interesting. Well, and that's exactly where we start to see the push and pull, I think, of the question, “Who is responsible?”

We've now had the introduction of these nonprofits. There's still that push and pull to the government. What does the government need to do? And really, local and state authorities were kind of held responsible until the late 19th century. There was a kind of a position that argued that young men riding the rails looking for work as a result of the Industrial Revolution resulted in an alarming number of-- love this term-- vagabonds, which were put in lodging rooms located in police stations, essentially serving as the equivalent of major homeless shelter systems today. I think this is also where you begin to see the urban slums, which, I mean, if you think back to the late 1800s, there's not a lot of like, indoor plumbing. There's not a lot of urban planning to remove human waste. And so, outbreaks of those major infectious diseases really start to become iconic in that urban core setting. Yeah.

Joe: And you've got to look at it like what also is happening at that time is major advancements in transportation. So you mentioned it [there], we've got the railroad system that all of a sudden is building up. It's connecting the country. People are able to travel long distances. Before that, you lived how far you could walk. Most people lived within 60 miles of the place they were born their entire life.

We've got a war, then we have railroads coming in, we start moving around, and the more movement that you have, you have both homelessness, but you also have movement of illnesses and infectious disease. And we often hear those things as equated together. I'm not so sure that they are the same thing.

They may correspond, but they are not causality.

Emma: Yeah, tell me what you mean.

Joe: I mean, we still hear this today that, you know, those folks that are homeless or in poverty, they're spreading disease. They're moving into this area and bringing infections with them, which in some instances is true, but everybody that's moving is bringing whatever bacteria and illnesses. We know that now. We know that now because we know, you know, a lot more about medical science and bacterias and viruses.

But back then it was, well, these whatever people group that's moving in and whether that's the Blacks coming out of the South or the Irish coming from Ireland or, you know, later on Vietnamese boat people, whatever it is, there's often this [attitude of] “Well, they're bringing these illnesses with them that's going to cause these problems.”

Emma: That mindset actually has infused even how we view homelessness today of if you are clean, if you present well, then you must be a good person. You must have it all together, which is an assumption because that's that almost starts to begin to equate homelessness, dirtiness, bad, cleanliness, stability, good, which I don't know-- that's a tricky assumption.

Joe: And this is where those intersections happen. So we've already talked about multiple intersections of homelessness with the police. We've talked about homelessness with nonprofits. Now we're talking about homelessness with transportation, homelessness with illnesses or disease or the medical field. We'll definitely do a topic later on with those that are representing the healthcare field in the intersection with homelessness, which we definitely hear about all the time today and see.

And if you walk into an emergency room in any major city, particularly in the evening, you can very much see that there's an intersection between homelessness in the medical system. But why that exists is something we're going to dig into later on.

Emma: Well, let's keep going. So now it's 1892. Imagine 1892. Congress allocates $20,000 to the Department of Labor to investigate these urban slums in cities with at least 200,000 residents. To me, $20,000 today, I am very curious how much that is in modern terms. But really, it's that first initiative of how do we solve, how do we address this challenge? Then in 1908, President Teddy Roosevelt formed a formal housing commission to continue these investigations. But the stock market crash in 1929 really stopped a lot of these investigations.

Joe: I mean, this is interesting. It's an interesting time period in our country. We've got all of this going on. We've got Teddy Roosevelt, so one of the Rough Riders that's here that explores the West, right? So this is somebody that's like, you know, President on horseback leading the troops.

Emma: You know how I know that? How do you know this? “Night at the Museum.”

Joe: There you go. Thank you Hollywood, for teaching some history there. But yeah, it wasn't a lot of money, but it was the first investment into that. And so that would be equivalent to about $62,000 today. It's $20,000 back then, $62,000 today. But it was something to investigate the issue and to start to develop a plan.

But then, yes, stock market crashes. And the country's got to divert focus. But also, what does that do to homelessness?

Emma: Well, it kind of starts to open up where things get a 

little bit more confusing, a little bit less linear, because it's really over that next 50-year timeframe between 1918 and 1968 that we start putting forward what can kind of broadly be categorized as institutionalized housing discrimination. So, this includes things like restrictive covenants, which we'll talk a little bit about; redlining, which again, we'll talk a little bit about; as well as the federal housing administration, GI Bill loans and a lot of other things that really start to try to address portions of homelessness, but don't really seem to be unified. They seem to be a little plan over here, a little plan over there, that sort of thing.

Joe: Yeah. And it's this conflict between either solving the problem or just separating the problem. And what we see a lot with what's happening then is separating the problem. Okay, there's a lot of people that are in poverty, a lot of people that are homeless, and often they are a different color than the majority. Let's separate them into their own communities.

This is where you get two sides of the tracks. I remember being in Dallas and looking at city maps from the 1930s, the city maps in Dallas from the 1930s had ‘Negro’ areas written on their map.

Emma: That is literally what it had written on their maps.

Joe: Yes, ‘Negro area of town’, ‘Mexican area of town’. So, it was segregated and this is that period of segregation. And we'll talk a lot more about redlining later on, but I just want to mention that here because I think it's super important to what we see even today. In the 1920s and 30s, banks and investment institutions became, rather than being local for a community, they started to become regional or national and they needed to know where to invest their money, where was safe to invest their money, where wasn't safe to invest their money. And so the federal government started creating these maps of communities [in] every city in the United States. And on those maps, they would list areas that were hazardous, they would list areas that were moderately safe, they were list areas that were very safe to invest in. And we still have these types of maps today, there's areas that are hazardous because of the flood plains or fire risk or earthquake risk or things like that. For all of those reasons, yeah.

But from the 1920s to the late 1960s, one of the reasons that was included on those maps for listing an area hazardous was the presence of Blacks in that community, which they didn't call Blacks, they’d actually call them Negroes on the maps. And so, if there was that presence of ‘Negroes’, then that area would, in many communities, would just be outlined with a red line and considered hazardous, which meant that banks wouldn't invest in that area, you couldn't get insurance in those areas. And we're talking a good portion of 40 years that there was just not investment in these minority communities. And you see the results of that even today.

Emma: Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's that exclusion of people of color, really from home ownership, from improvements in their community. It really eliminated, stunted the potential of this multi-generational wealth accumulation that has lasted-- is lasting-- for generations. 

Joe: Absolutely.

Emma: And so yeah, you've kind of teed up to that. In the middle of the timeframe is the Great Depression of the 1930s, which really was just, I mean, an absolutely devastating epidemic of poverty, hunger, homelessness. During that time, there were actually 2 million people living in homelessness across the country. Many were staying in ‘shantytowns’, is what they were kind of referred to, similar to kind of tent camps of our modern era, except they called their shantytowns ‘Hoovervilles’. You may have heard that term historically.

Joe: Yeah. And this is what when people think of homelessness and massive homelessness in the United States, they think of the Great Depression. Like this is the image that comes to their mind. There's soup lines, there's people lined up in cities, there's, you know, folks asking for others to take their children because they can't afford to care for their own children. The Dust Bowl also happened during this time. So crops in the South were not growing because of the heat wave, and people are migrating across the country.

You get books like The Grapes of Wrath out of this time period, out of the Great Depression, out of the Dust Bowl. And an interesting side note that I think is really important, and you mentioned it in your lead off here, but there were more homeless children in the United States last year than there were homeless people all together during the entire Great Depression.

And I don't think we recognize that. There are, you know, over two and a half million homeless children,-- not all homeless [adults], just homeless children-- in the United States last year, even though we think of the Great Depression as being the major time period where we experience homelessness. It's not. Today is.

Emma: That's powerful. Really, I mean, as we start to address the gravity and the quantity of people experiencing homelessness, I think the government during that time period is trying to do the same thing. I think the government was trying to think of that same, you know, how do we address this on a broad scale? And so in 1932, we see the passing of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, which allowed the Public Works Administration to use federal funding to clear out these shanty towns, and thankfully, to also build low cost housing and what they called Substitutes Homesteads, which were pieces of property that included a dwelling home, essentially, and sufficient land for raising food for a family that was not primarily dependent on the land for livelihood. So essentially, it gave them the ability to work for themselves to produce an income to move out of poverty is really what it looks like to me. In that year about 40,000 housing units were produced. So definitely a commitment in the right direction, I would say.

Joe: Yeah, I mean, that's just so interesting to see, you know, 40,000 housing units built in one year of the first year of that act is pretty impressive. Like it was a, we're going to focus some effort, we're going to get this done type of an idea. And that started and that was picking up steam during the Great Depression and then continued afterwards until we move into war.

Emma: Right. Well, and that's exactly what does happen. World War II, I mean, again, here we go with migration. There's kind of a unifying nature to war, I suppose. And then now all of these soldiers are coming back from war. And there's a whole question of, well, where do they live? Where is their housing? And that really prompted the federal government to lay the cornerstone of what is today our kind of affordable housing system. So the housing acts of 1949 of 1954 and 1956 were quickly instated. And the final act was giving relocation payments to individuals and families who were actually displaced by the process of urban removal.

Joe: Yeah, this time period, I mean, coming out of war, again, we're talking about war and displacement and migration all happening again. The other thing that I think is really important here is on a mass level coming out of World War II, we started to recognize mental health and how the traumatic experiences of war started to cause this intersection between veterans and veteran homelessness and how we were seeing so many more of these former soldiers now living on our street and living in encampments and having mental health and substance abuse issues on a mass scale that we really didn't know what to do with as a society-- and in a lot of ways, we still don't.

Emma: Totally true. And what we're seeing through this walk through history is that push-pull between a growing, more nuanced need and the government's attempt to try to meet parts of that need. And we see that here in the Housing and Urban Renewal Act of 1965, which actually provided supplemented rent for low income, disabled, and elderly individuals. In 1965, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was also formally created, which is a really important key player in the discussion around homelessness at large.

Joe: And when we're talking about the history of homelessness and the history of poverty, this time period is actually critical in our country. November 22nd, 1963, a huge event happens in our country. Our president is assassinated, John F. Kennedy. So yeah, November 22nd, 1963, he's assassinated and his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who's from the South, who's from Texas, who voted against a lot of legislation about integration, becomes president. And then just less than two months later, he's got to give this State of the Union address. And in his State of the Union address, he declares war on poverty.

So that's 1963. And here we are in the United States, we just declared war on an enemy we don't know how to define. So we didn't have a definition for poverty before this point. And now the president says we're going to war with this. And so the United States has to create a definition of what is poverty.

At this point, that's actually challenging, because how do you know you're winning the war if you don't measure what that looks like? And so they searched around to try to find that definition. They came across a woman that was working in the Social Security Administration [who] had come up with this formula. And the reason why she came up with this formula prior to the Social Security Administration [is that] she had worked in the Agriculture Department.

And in the Agriculture Department, she ran across two studies. There was one study that said how much food families need of different sizes to survive. And then she had another study that said, typically, families in that time period spent three times more than they spend on food on everything else. So she created this formula, (her name's Molly Orsanski, by the way), but she created this formula that is this: the amount of food by family size times three equals the poverty line. And this is where we get the federal poverty line definition. It is the amount of food by family size times three.

Emma: Well, what's really interesting is it's based off of food. But we think of homelessness as a loss of, I mean, of other things, housing.

Joe: Well, and it's really, we gave it this monetary definition. There's some significant problems with that. One of those being since the early 1960s, food prices have gone up a little bit. But everything else, housing, transportation, communication, utilities, childcare, all of those areas have gone up astronomically. So that formula of three times the price of food doesn't work anymore, but we still use this same definition to define the poverty line.

Emma: So you're telling me that that math, that formula is still in effect today?

Joe: Correct. So, like when you see on the news how many people are living below the poverty line in the United States, that is the formula that's being used. And so it's not adequate at all for today's environment.

I mean, I'll just give you an example of this. The current poverty line for a family of four is just over $26,000 a year. So what we're saying there is you make $27,000 a year and you have a family of four, then you're not in poverty in the United States according to that definition. There is not a single community in the United States that you can afford housing and food and transportation and communications and your utilities on that amount of money.

Emma: Well, and I just did some quick math here. If it's $27,000 and you are paying 30% of your $27,000 towards housing, you're paying $750 a month for a family of four for housing.

Joe: Yeah, that doesn't exist in the United States. You can't find a three bedroom house or a two bedroom for that in the United States right now, especially not on scale that would be needed. And so, this is where that definition happens is in the 1960s. Coming back to that time period though, you see massive amounts of government legislation happening between 1964 and the end of the 1960s. We have entire departments created like you're talking about. [The] Department of Housing and Urban Development is created. We have massive programs on food, particularly food for kids in school. So we get Free and Reduced Lunch during this time period. We get increases in Social Security Administration and how much they can do to serve the community. And so all these things are happening in the 1960s.

Emma: Well, and not to mention, too, that 1968 Fair Housing Act, which becomes a part of the Civil Rights Act. So, we're dealing with this poverty issue and we're dealing with these racial rights issues as well.

And so really that legislation, that Fair Housing Act, established fair housing provisions that prohibit discrimination and access to housing. But we can argue all day long about if we feel like that has fully been realized. I mean, we talked a little bit about redlining and truly we're still seeing the impacts of that.

Joe: Yeah. And there's lawsuits brought all the time on Fair Housing and fair housing discrimination. We saw several of those even during COVID. And just in the past couple of years that were massive disputes about fair housing and how you pay for your housing [while] being discriminated against.

So it may not be your race, but if you're using a Section 8 voucher versus privately paying from your job, then we saw discrimination, a lot of lawsuits coming against that where states are even like, you know, having to create additional legislation around, “OK, landlords can't discriminate based off of what the source of payment is.”

Emma: Right. Well, and you're hitting on something that actually is right in line with the historical creation of things, which is exactly that. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 kind of consolidates many of these different programs into what becomes the Community Development Block Grant or CDBG program. And that's actually what creates this Housing Choice Voucher, which at least here in Washington we call the Section 8 program.

Section 8 is a really important thing to understand because it does key up to that poverty line discussion we were just having. Really, what Section 8 is it says because of the disparity in housing costs, the government will subsidize the difference between a renter's 30 percent income with the actual cost of the apartment. So let's say your apartment costs $1,000 a month and you make $2,000 a month, well, your housing is 50 percent of your income, which is too high.

You can't-- you know, that's not sustainable for truly making ends meet in our community. And so what the Section 8 voucher does is it kind of sits in between that gap and says, well, for you, your 30 percent is what is that, $750, but your apartment is $1,000. So we're going to pay the difference between that to your landlord to make sure that you don't get above 30 percent in your payment. Yeah.

Joe: So that's what you're speaking of there is a subsidized housing choice voucher, which is actually a newer concept. When you're back here in the 60s and the 70s, they're actually building projects.

That's what we're doing then. We're building massive skyscrapers of low-income housing. You saw this in Chicago. You saw this in St. Louis. There's a place called Igoe-Pruitt, which was the original massive low-income housing development in St. Louis. And since that time, we've been moving away from these project buildings because over time, what you realize is, okay, we just put everybody that has limited resources all in the same place.

Emma: Just a modern day Hooverville.

Joe: There you go. Yeah. So we see a long history of this where [there were] great intentions, but the long-term execution of those intentions creates actually more problems for the community. More problems for schools, more problems for police forces, more problems for fire departments, more problems for hospitals, because you are consolidating these issues into one place.

What we've been doing more recently is providing more and more housing-choice vouchers, which allows people to live wherever they can, find a place rather than in the government-owned facility. And those tend to be better for the community, but we're also seeing now, and this is something that just in the past decade, we're seeing this flip back to government-owned high density or government invested in high density, all low income developments.

Here in the state of Washington, where we're broadcasting from right now, it's actually incentivized to build these high density, low income developments because we're trying to solve the housing problem, but we're not looking back at the history in a really good way to recognize this has been done before. And there's challenges with this that we're going to see that are going to come up over and over and over again if we don't adjust how we do this.

Emma: Yeah. I think that's really important. We can learn from our history if we're paying attention, which is why it's so important that we're doing this episode to kind of lay that foundation. Yeah.

Joe: I mean, we're at a point right now in this discussion where our folks that aren't history people may be like, “Oh, come on guys.” Right? Like, “What this is just, this is going on and on about the history of this topic.” But I think it is key because you have to figure out how did we get here? How do we get here? Cause you can't create adequate solutions if you don't know how we got here and what has been tried before, what worked, what didn't.

And then really, where do we go from here? And that's why I do think history is important. I get super excited about history if you haven't noticed. This is just one of the topics that I love, but I think it is important to set the stage for all that is to come in the other topics that we're going to be talking about throughout the series.

Emma: I totally agree. We do have kind of one, I would say key component that we still need to address in our history. And that is what happens in 1977. We have a very important act that is passed called the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. It often is kind of shortened to the McKinney-Vento Act of 1977. And Joe, talk to us a little bit about what that was and why is that so important specifically to us and to family promise of Spokane?

Joe: That act creates a bunch of legislation around homelessness and homeless discrimination, as well as the areas that I think are the most important parts of it that, that we see today is the way that homeless children interact with their schools and how schools have to treat them, how they have to provide transportation for homeless students. So before this time period, and this is something that was revised later on within this act, but before this time period and even well after this time period, it took a while for this to really be fully recognized in the community-- but a teacher would have a child in their classroom that was experiencing homelessness and they'd be there for three weeks and then they would leave and be gone for two months because they'd go to a different school or they'd move and then they'd come back for a couple of weeks and then they’d be gone.  That wasn't a major issues for those teachers and for those schools until we started standardized testing. And now the schools and teachers are like, “Well, now I'm being tested on this child that I've had in my class for two months out of this entire year.”

This is one part of that legislation and that's what it allows kids to stay in the schools that they were coming from when they became homeless and requires the school districts to give them transportation from wherever they're at to their home school so that becomes a stable environment.

There's a whole bunch of other stuff that happened within that act. It really required that families who lack adequate housing, that there's resources provided to them, [that] there's targeted staff members at school districts that are focused on them that are trying to help stabilize that family in that environment.

Emma: Well, and we start to see, too, the actual defining of the term of homelessness, which over the course of our discussion thus far is funny because we haven't even defined homelessness, which is exactly what history says we would do, which is that we didn't define homelessness to begin with. And so in the McKinney-Vento Act, we actually start to see the first written definition of what homelessness is.

Joe: And this causes problems and it's still causing problems today. And here's why: because there's two definitions in the federal government for homelessness. There's the housing and urban development definition, which has its own definition of homelessness, which is actually you are living on the streets or in a shelter or in a car. 

But if you are couch surfing, if you're in a motel, if you are moving around from place to place, [they] do not consider you homeless. So they don't provide resources for you unless you are actually on the streets or living in a shelter. The McKinney-Vento definition of homelessness involves anybody that doesn't have secure, adequate housing meant for human habitation. And so their definition would include moving around from place to place.

It would include staying in a motel until your money runs out as not being permanent stable housing. And because of that, what happens is we've got two different definitions. That means that there's two different sets of resources in that some of those resources won't work for some populations that would really benefit from them.

Emma: Well, and I think it's important too. I mean, this is a very intellectual episode, but in future episodes, we're going to have people on here with lived experience sharing about what that means. And I have heard many a story about how those two definitions invalidate the lived experience of so many families, because according to HUD, they're not homeless. They don't qualify for resources. So what does that mean when they are on the very worst day of their lives looking for resources and all of a sudden they are told by all the people that are meant to help them, “You don't qualify. You're not actually homeless.”

But then on the other side, there's a different definition that does validate and does say, yeah, that's, we want better for you. And so I think there's, there's definitely a tension there. I'm excited to kind of dive into that and what that means on a human level in future episodes, but I think we can plant that seed. So kind of following that McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, we start to see more investment into this. We've now defined the problem. Now let's continue to consolidate and continue to grow what that looks like in practicality.

So we see the HEART Act. It's an acronym that happened in 2009, which really just renewed the McKinsey-Vento Act of 1977. And this really consolidated existing programs and continued to define vocabulary, which as you can imagine, I mean, the world was a very different place in 1977 versus 2009. And so redefining those terms, I mean, incredibly important, incredibly helpful. Yeah.

Joe: And you also had, you know, during that time period, you had the US Interagency Council on Homelessness created, which they're still trying to figure out what their role is between all of these different things. And the reason why is because of the exact reason why we're doing this podcast, homelessness intersects with so many different areas. And that is kind of the charge of the Interagency Council on Homelessness is what are all the areas that it's intersecting with and how do we work together to do that? And then you also have, you know, the Chronic Homeless Initiative that's built out of that. And so we've been talking a lot about government with this.

And this is kind of a history of government and homelessness. I want to just shift a little bit of the conversation here because there's other threads of folks that are working on this issue. And we are seeing more and more where there's a rub between the government initiatives that are working on this issue and particularly the faith-based community that works on this issue. And so all throughout this, this time period, you know, going all the way back to Civil War and before we've got churches and faith-based groups that are out of their mission, serving the poor and serving the homeless and starting shelters. And so this is also where you see most of the nonprofits that work in this area were birthed out of congregations or some type of faith background.

So we talked to Salvation Army, kind of the original nonprofit. It is literally its own Christian denomination. That is its own denomination. We have Catholic Charities being created. We have Union Gospel Mission. We have many, many other faith-based traditions that are working on this issue and this subject.

And in the United States, we've got that separation of church and state. And so there's consistent, there's a consistent rub on, “Okay, do we take government money? Do we not take government money? If we take government money, then is that going to cause us to have problems with the way that we want to live out our faith background in this area?” And so what you see is you see not only denominations creating their own nonprofits, but you see them spinning off those nonprofits from the denomination or trying to do this kind of dual control where there's, you know, government and archdiocese that are engaging and interacting in a pretty big tension. And most recently in the past, really in the past decade, we've seen a lot of tension when it comes to homelessness because of the increased homelessness between those two groups in the way that they communicate about each other that impacts not only politics, but impacts the ways that we serve those that are experiencing homelessness.

Emma: I think you're hitting on something so important, which really is that question of who is responsible? Who's responsible to solve this? And I have learned from you that the answer is yes, honestly, right? It's easy to say, like, is it government or should it be the nonprofit sector? Should it be the faith?

And the answer is, yeah, I mean, it's and not or. And that's something that I think you have encouraged in our community as well is how do we address that question of responsibility? Because at the end of the day, the people that are impacted the most are those that are currently experiencing homelessness.

Joe: And we missed one key thing that I think is important kind of in our history. And I think it's being overlooked way too much right now. In 2008, we had a housing meltdown. We had a housing crisis and crash. You could not get a mortgage for two years, right? House building stopped for two years, 2008 to 2010.

You just couldn't get financing to build stuff. And then we start building again. We start doing construction, but a lot of the smaller home builders, like they're gone. They couldn't last two years without, without working. And so there's limited labor. There's limited skilled labor. And now even now, I mean, we did not hit pre-2008 construction levels until 2022.

So, we went over a decade, almost a decade and a half without getting back to the levels that we were then. And that is a major thing that we're seeing right now in homelessness that I think gets overlooked. So we hear a lot about, well, it's mental health and it's substance abuse. We've had mental health and substance abuse issues.

We talked about it. I mean, going way back to the World War II, we definitely had it in the 1960s and the Vietnam War era. I mean, those things have existed, but we haven't seen homelessness like this until now.

Let me give you an example of that. In our community here in Spokane County, Washington, there was about 8,800 homes built or housing units built between 2010 and 2020. During that same time period, 64,000 people moved into the county. So unless everybody is living eight people to a housing unit, we don't have enough housing.

Emma: One of my favorite lines is the math doesn't math. Like that's what that is. Right? It just, you can cut it any kind of which way, but it doesn't math. Yeah.

Joe: And that's what we're experiencing across the country. We've got this lag from the housing crash that is not really fully being recognized. We have skilled labor that doesn't exist to build new housing. So even if we put tons and tons of money into it, we are talking decades before we get back to level or get to levels that we really need to be at. And so we're talking about counties all over the country that are 30,000, 40,000 units short on housing.

And so we're in a major crisis right now. We don't have the housing. We also don't have the mental health facilities. We also don't have the shelter facilities. And we're debating on can we lock everybody up or not?

I mean, we're still back on that argument that we saw. 1670s. Yeah. Way back hundreds of years ago. And so we really need to progress the conversation to make some serious solutions.

Emma: When you're hitting on something that I think is really, really important, which is that mental health, drug use, job competency, all of those things are incredibly important factors to this conversation.

And “is there enough actual housing?” is also an important factor in this conversation. And you're right that we've kind of, I mean, there are tons of different camps on when you need to do it in this order for it to be effective. And this is really where you go back to the and concept. Well, we need to do mental health support and drug support and build housing and build housing quickly and-and-and-and, because it's not a simple problem. And that I think is the pitfall that many of us fall into when we are engaging this conversation is we're debating the order of operations. We're not necessarily looking big enough at what it's going to take on that big scale.

Joe: Sure. And that's where, you know, we get legislation or focuses like housing first, which has, you know, come out of HUD, move people into housing first and then work on the other issues that's been studied. It's actually been super successful, but you got to have to available housing to have housing first.

Emma: Well, when you put all of this together, this whole conversation, I think it's easy to be like, this is a really hopeless thing. But we know that it's not. There is actually hope because we've been able to figure out kind of an effective response. We as a community, we as a nation, there are successes happening. We just haven't fully executed them to their fullest potential. And so we want to end the episode today by really sharing some of these proven solutions with you.

Joe: I think some of the things that we, we need to broaden our perspective on homelessness from away from tonight to how do you prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place and then getting those that need a bed tonight in the housing of their own so they don't need a bed tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that and weeks and months and years. And we've got people that are living on our streets that are years and years in homelessness. So I think there's a, there's a time period here where we have the opportunity to switch from just focused on “a shelter bed tonight” to “How do we prevent people from becoming homeless and how do we get them back into housing and stabilize them in that housing?” And that's the equation that currently isn't being tracked in our country.

We're tracking how many beds do we need tonight? Not how can we prevent people from becoming homeless and how do we stabilize those that we're getting into housing and how we do that better and faster?

Emma: When you're hitting on that idea of really it's going to be a broad, holistic approach that probably includes mental health support does include some rental assistance to kind of bridge that gap between, you know, making the budget math, you know, making the math math, as well as legal services, systematic reform when it comes to equity and access to building wealth, as well as adequate public benefits for people, I mean, that are living with disabilities, that have been veterans, all of that is just such an important component to this conversation.

Joe: And then also, like, we really need to define as a country is housing a human right? Do we consider it a human right or do we not? It's a basic human need, but do we consider it a human right or are we going to invest in that?

Or are we going to just say, “Okay, we'll provide food to the people that are on the streets?” And that's a big discussion. We haven't defined that as a country. If we are, if we really know if housing is a human right, if we really say it that way. And so that's a, that's a change in our thought processes that needs to be addressed.

Emma: Having this conversation today, it's very clear that this issue is complex. It is incredibly clear that we have plenty of content for our future episodes, which is why I'm so excited to continue to dive into that question. Different forms of housing, does it work? Does it not work? How well does it work in future episodes? Today though, Joe, where do you find hope in this conversation?

Joe: That's a great question. You know, I find hope in that this conversation is developing into the conversation in our country, in major communities all across the country. This is the conversation, which it has been backburnered for a long time. It hasn't been the predominant thing that, that needs to be discussed and solved. And so I'm seeing more and more focus on it. When you get more and more focus, you get more and more attention, you get more and more resources.

The other thing that I'm seeing with this is we are at a crisis point. That is clear. It's clear if you go into any major city in the US, you see homeless. And you see it on a large scale, particularly on the coasts, particularly on the West Coast. There's massive amounts of homeless individuals and families and immigrants and veterans and seniors, which is becoming an increasing population as the baby boomers age here.

We're seeing more and more seniors experiencing homelessness. I think the hope that I see is there are solutions. We can measure those solutions. We can track them. We can do a better job if we do that, if we actually focus on solutions rather than opinions. And so I'm hopeful for that.

I'm hopeful for that change. One other thing that I want to mention here, because this whole conversation is about intersections. Intersections of homelessness with other areas.

I get asked all the time, what's the cause of homelessness? And we've talked about all these different intersections. And so I can't say that there's one thing, but what I can say is there's one common denominator. There's one thing that all homelessness has in common.

And that is a loss of community. Whether it's because you've done bad things and so people broke relationships with you, or other people did bad things to you and so you had to break relationships with them. Or you just never had community. You never had anybody that you could lean on. And so when crisis happens, you end up on the street. It doesn't matter if you're talking about veterans or seniors or teenagers or families with children or single individuals.

All of them have that one same common denominator. I've got nobody else I can lean on, so I end up here. And so, whatever the solutions that we're talking about, when we're trying to solve this problem, there's not only an intersection with healthcare or an intersection with mental health or an intersection with housing. There is always an intersection with community. Community needs to be involved in these solutions.

And it's going to take all of us as communities to solve this problem. And we're excited about you becoming part of the history of solving homelessness in our communities. Looking forward to seeing you at the next episode.

Emma: Exactly as you said, Joe, this podcast is an intersection of homelessness and community. And that's why we're inviting you to not only tune in for our next episode, but also subscribe, get involved and make it a priority to sit down and listen because your attention does make a difference. Thank you for listening and being here for our very first podcast episode. You are an essential part of our community. And we're so thankful.