Also, from “s–thole countries” to “s–thole cities.”

Now that my Google feed has been trained to fetch stories about the unhoused in cities around the world, two themes are emerging: first, despite all the voluminous evidence to the contrary, rounding up the homeless, throwing away their possessions and shoveling them into shelters and jails–or just leaving them to start another community elsewhere–continues to be the modus operandi of cities and communities. Second, usually around the middle of each article, a housing advocate will cite housing First as a better and cheaper solution. Which leads me to wonder: do the people doing the evicting ever read these articles? Does anyone in these numerous City Halls ever sit and ponder the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and over again, with no change in result?

One more once for those in the back: Housing First, as the name implies, involves getting the unhoused into housing as a first step. Once the new home is established, and the new resident is comfortably settled, then the issues of financial insecurity, food insecurity and mental/physical disorders (e.g., drug addiction) are addressed by on-site teams of financial advisors, social workers, doctors, psychologists and therapists. This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking: it has been tried in cities too numerous to list here and found to be more successful–and less expensive than warehousing in shelters, jails and psych wards–by a factor of 2 to 1.

Housing First is not a “magic bullet,” not a one-size-fits-all-cure-all. But it does work and is life-changing for a majority of the homeless, with the exception of those whose addictions and mental disorders are too severe and require a purely therapeutic setting. So the question remains: why aren’t all US cities with unhoused citizens doing this?

The reasons are simple, though not entirely rational. In our largely Western Protestant way of thinking, everything has to be earned: money, jobs, cars, homes. The notion that anyone should be given anything, rather than earning it by the sweat of their brow, is seen as unnatural, un-Christian. Arising from this is the notion that the writer Robert Heinlein expressed in the acronym TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

This reveals an ignorance of how Housing First works. Yes, the homeless are given homes, but there is equity involved. In most but not all HF programs, the unhoused initially pay 20-30 percent of the rent, based on what assets they have, while the state or the city picks up the lion’s share of the cost. Over a period of years, the amount paid by the resident increases while the government contribution decreases. Success is measured by the residents who are paying their rent and bills unaided. And in Finland, those chosen for the program are not required to be sober or employed. Their success rate is eighty percent, with most participants getting jobs, keeping their housing and rebuilding their lives.

The second reason Housing First is not widespread is this notion, completely unfounded on the facts, that It’s Too Good To Be True and therefore It Can’t Possibly Work. That reveals a deep skepticism about human nature. Something will go wrong. Scofflaws will turn their new housing into drug dens, or renege on payments until evictions become necessary. Yes, there will be recidivism. Yes, some of the unhoused will have to be evicted. Humans are like that. But for everyone who fails, there will be–and have been–numerous documented success stories.

The third reason is the lack of available housing, which is at its lowest point since the pandemic began. Simply put, it’s a case of too many dollars chasing too few available properties, plus foreign investors jacking up housing prices by up bidding on properties to put them beyond the financial resources of American buyers. The tiny homes movement presents a partial solution: Housing the most people on the least amount of land available. And tiny homes have the advantage of being relatively inexpensive and easy to assemble. Programs like Habitat for Humanity also give a pathway to housing, but as with tiny house startups, they need more funding from private and public sources.

In the meantime, Dear Leader is accelerating his pogrom against the homeless, the mentally ill, and other residents of “s–thole cities”: LA, Oakland, DC, Chicago, New York City and Baltimore. This is a two-pronged attack: round up all “undesirables” in these places and throw them into human warehouses, while assuming control of America’s cities as a means to take over states–namely, blue ones. This power grab could not possibly be more naked.

Thankfully, the residents of these cities are not bending over for Trump and his stormtroopers. The Governors of the affected states–Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and JB Pritzker, chief among them–have made it crystal clear that they won’t tolerate this cheap-jack fascism that Trump is promulgating. And, most importantly, they’re backing their words with actions, often employing the same tactics that Herr Trump has been using.

It’s at moments like these that I find myself amazed at the words I am putting on the screen, as if I were writing a dystopian novel about the fascist takeover of America. No wonder Sinclair Lewis titled his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. It would be another quarter-century before Stanley Milgram conducted his pioneering research, which demonstrated that any country could become a fascist theocracy. Frank Zappa predicted this in 1986 and was roundly mocked for doing so. Nobody’s laughing now.

As with all good fiction, however, the ending is not yet written. May the odds ever be in our favor.