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Why haven’t we ended veteran’s homelessness?

(June 20, 2025) It’s time to finish this job. Veterans homelessness is declining, but not gone. Getting the fine points right will be what allows us to succeed.

Homelessness among veterans has, of course, declined substantially since modestly reliable data became available in the early 2010s. But there are still too many veterans who are homeless. When President Trump ran in 2024, he called strongly for an end to veterans homelessness. The video where he does it, being a Trump campaign video, spends a lot more time criticizing President Biden than describing his own plans, ignoring the fact that the numbers went down during the Biden years, like they went down during the first Trump term. But why are there any homeless veterans? This blogpost will review why I think that’s a fair question, then give my answer, with some ideas for bringing veterans homelessness to an end. If President Trump wants to be the president who accomplishes that, it’s within his grasp, and I’ll help.

When he first ran for president in 2008, President Obama was the first to call for an end to veterans homelessness as a candidate. There had already been important work done before that, but Obama’s election cranked up the intensity. Permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing were linked to specific funding streams and the details of implementation spelled out. Local examples grew of tight coordination between healthcare, housing, employment, and supportive services, resulting in a strong systematic approach to the issue, recognizing and filling gaps. Resources for housing expanded, through Congress increasing HUD-VASH funding, housing development targeted to veterans, and increased funding at the Department of Veterans Affairs for housing-related services.

The reduction in veterans homelessness since 2010, 55.6 percent through early 2024, is well earned. But there is still a ways to go. The steps in the preceding paragraph, particular the investments in housing, are what we usually think are what’s needed to end homelessness. Which is why the question implicit in the President’s campaign video is worth considering. So, why haven’t we ended veterans homelessness?

One reason is, there’s still not enough help with housing. For veterans, there are substantially more resources available for housing, but still not enough.

It will be important to keep working on that, but at the same time to address other things that are interfering with the impact of the funding that’s available. To organize my thinking about this, I often turn to a schema about how big changes get made, laid out in a blogpost I wrote several years ago.

A goal linked to a clear strategy.

The goal of ending homelessness is clear, widely agreed upon, and inspiring. For a goal to drive change, it needs to be linked to a strategy that’s easy to understand and obviously effective, so that the goal will be widely perceived as capable of fulfillment.

There are questions of strategy that need to be resolved. The big piece that isn’t as clear as it probably needs to be is the role of prevention of homelessness. As with homelessness more generally, moving people from homelessness into housing is more cost-effective at reducing homelessness than preventing people from becoming homeless. So if there’s not enough money to house everyone who’s homeless, which there isn’t, spending money on prevention that could be spent on rehousing means more homelessness.

There may be reasons to consider prevention. One is that it may be easier to get money for prevention. Politicians that make decisions about government spending, as well as people making large charitable donations, may be able to relate better to people who are in housing, struggling to afford rent, than to people who are living in shelters or on the streets. There is some evidence that the trauma of a spell of homelessness is greatest just at the point of losing housing, so that if the goal is reducing trauma rather than reducing homelessness, prevention, if effective, may be a better investment, and certainly is attractive. There may be resources that are available for prevention but not for rehousing: not only funding sources, but landlords’ willingness to rent to people, medical providers’ willingness to treat them—although overcoming prejudice against people experiencing homelessness may be a better approach to this. And it may be important to begin work on prevention, in order to build know-how for the day when no one is homeless and our work is about keeping homelessness from coming back. Whatever one’s reason may be, it’s important to focus prevention efforts on veterans who are most likely to become homeless if they don’t get help: those with the lowest incomes, with severe disabilities, whose family supports may be disappearing.

Resources

Leadership - Leadership is an important resource for accomplishing big things, and leadership on veterans homelessness has not been consistent. At the level of President and VA Secretary, it’s come and gone as a top-priority issue. At the local level, most people expect the local VA Medical Center to take the lead, but the directors of those Centers have more things on their to-do lists than they can accomplish so homelessness doesn’t always make it to the top of the list.

Know-how - VA has been one of the stronger institutions in articulating the most effective approaches to homelessness, a strength that has been undermined by staff departures. The coordination between VA, housing authorities and nonprofit providers is not happening everywhere. As noted above, not all Medical Centers are completely on board. Landlords, including nonprofits who run subsidized housing for veterans, don’t always know of the services VA has available.

Money - Again, Congress has funded programs for veterans homelessness more realistically than programs to address homelessness more broadly, especially HUD-VASH, but it’s still not enough to move every veteran who’s homeless quickly in to housing, let alone preventing veterans from losing their housing.

Alliances

Bringing about an end to veterans homelessness has the potential to draw allies from all over. Not all of this potential has been realized. We need to do a better job of reaching out to a range of interested parties and getting them on board. Some that I think of include mainstream veterans organizations, high-ranking military leaders, business organizations, military families, hospitals. These are all groups that have expressed some level of interest in the past. Maybe they thought the job was done.

These are fine points but real, and we’re at the point where getting the fine points right is important.

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Why I don’t like block grants

(June 6, 2025) Block grants as proposed by the Trump Administration’s HUD budget mean less accountability for results, and less funding (or zero funding) over time.

The Administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 includes turning several HUD programs related to homelessness and affordable housing into block grants. This blogpost explains why advocates like me, seeking better housing for Americans with the lowest incomes, oppose turning programs into block grants.

First, what is a block grant? In general, it’s federal funding distributed to state and/or local governments, based on a formula rather than a competition (hence the alternative term, formula grant). Typically, a broad range of activities are eligible for funding, with priorities determined by the recipients.

The Administration’s HUD budget proposals fit this definition. The budget request would overhaul and expand one block grant to replace other current programs to deal with homelessness, and create a new block grant replacing mainstream housing programs. The homelessness proposal would eliminate the Continuum of Care program and the Housing Opportunity for Persons with AIDS program, and increase funding for the Emergency Solutions Grants program. There are many problems with this proposal besides block granting - the Alliance lays them out.

The new housing block grant at HUD would replace current voucher funding for tenant-based rental assistance, as well as project-based rental assistance, public housing, and programs for seniors and people with disabilities. This larger block grant would encompass nearly all funding that would remain at HUD.

So why am I against these ideas? The specific proposals would provide substantially less funding than is necessary for current services in the next year is one thing, but this blogpost is about longer term structural issues that should doom these proposals even if short-term funding was maintained.

The first long-term issue, shared by block grants more generally, is the lack of accountability for outcomes. Funding does not rely in any way on whether the recipient is achieving the goals of the program (assuming the block grant articulates goals) or funding interventions that are research-based or proven to be cost-effective.

Homelessness programs illustrate this. For the Continuum of Care, the small amount of funding available each year for new programs is awarded based on degree of community input, use of evidence-based practices, and overall performance of the community’s homelessness system. Under the Administration’s proposal, funding would be distributed based on an unknown formula, with only general guidelines about the activities that could be funded.

One result would be that communities that do worst on homelessness now would do even worse. Perhaps of greater concern, places that do effective work with CoC funds now will face pressure from others in their communities to use the money for other, less effective or even harmful interventions like criminalization.

Of course, some communities that care about results for homelessness would do good things, presumably with less administrative burden. Probably not enough less to make up for the cut in short-term funding. And without the technical assistance and data that HUD currently provides.

But these leave out the biggest concern about block granting: the long-term reduction in funding that has always accompanied block granting, and is indeed the point of it for small-government conservatives.

A thorough analysis of this trend was published by our friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities eight years ago, with updating just this week specific to block grants at HUD (about halfway through, under “Extending MTW Block Grant Funding Formulas Would Pave Way for Deep Future Funding Cuts.”) These block grants have failed to keep up with the overall cost of living, let alone the cost of rent, which historically goes up faster.

The Housing Choice Voucher program illustrates the dynamics. In Congress there has been a strong bipartisan consensus, dating back to the beginning of the program in the 1970s, that enough money would be appropriated to pay the rent for all tenants currently housed by the program, even if that requires increased funding to cover increased rent. With block grants, on the other hand, there would be no expectation of housing a certain number of people. Being regarded as keeping up requires only level funding, not increases.

And block grants are easier to get rid of. Since the purpose is less specific, it become money for local government for loosely defined purposes, not apartments or food for low-income families. The Trump budget proposal for HUD illustrates this. The same HUD budget that block-grants the homelessness programs and HOPWA, and the larger HUD housing programs, also deals with the two largest block grants at the agency by zeroing out their funding. Is the President mocking his supporters in Congress, who will be the ones who have to explain this to constituents?

The Alliance calls for a substantial increase in funding for HUD’s homelessness programs, while maintaining the current structure! See details here.

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The consensus

May 23, 2025. This blogpost is a high-level review of what communities need to reduce the number of people who are homeless. The bigger picture, beyond the specific interventions I wrote about two weeks ago. Among people who have worked in this field for a long time, it is a matter of near-universal agreement.

In the Grants Pass case, the U.S. Supreme Court found nothing in federal law, including the Constitution, that prevents states from making it a crime to sleep outside even when the state or its subdivisions provide no place inside for destitute people to sleep. Our Supreme Court goes along with Anatole France, holding that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” I don’t think they get that he was being sarcastic.

That isn’t the most disappointing thing about Grants Pass. That honor goes to state and local officials who participated in amicus briefs supporting Grants Pass in its desire to criminalize unsheltered homelessness. These officials, including some from places that in the not-too-distant past had made progress, used their briefs to wallow in learned helplessness. For decades, we’ve known how a community can reduce homelessness the most with a given amount of money, i.e. what is the most cost-effective solution, but these officials denied that there was anything helpful they could do, other than put people in jail.

The cost-effective solution is certainly not to make homelessness a crime. In fact, that’s perhaps the most expensive and least effective thing a city could possibly do, far more expensive than providing housing and needed services. The costs, to the communities and the people incarcerated, are long-term, since a criminal record makes it less likely that a person will be able to find an employer who will hire them, or a landlord who will rent to them, meaning more homelessness. Policies of criminalizing homelessness have created political conflict, while political cooperation is one of the primary things needed to make progress on homelessness. There’s a certain meanness to putting defenseless people in jail, that is antithetical to making the community better.

Of course, the public doesn’t want people living on the streets, almost as much as the people don’t want to be living there. There is a solution. It entails three things at the local level, and the more you do, the less homelessness you’ll have:

A homelessness system, consisting of a set of programs that ensure that if someone loses their housing they’ll be engaged, kept safe, and helped move into housing that’s available, with the services they need to remain stably housed. Nationwide, this is the one where, although far from universal, coordination is most common, that’s accomplishing it’s objectives most effectively, but is often getting blamed the most when politicians want to point the finger at someone other than themselves.

A crisis response system that will help prevent people at risk from becoming homeless. In some places it’s run by the same people who run the homelessness system. The services provided are similar to those provided in the homelessness system, plus mediation with landlords, roommates, or anyone else, with the goal of keeping people in the housing they’re in.

A housing system that will make sufficient housing available and affordable. Using federal housing money in the most efficient way, building public support for more housing for people with the lowest incomes, coordinating housing with healthcare and other service people may need: these are the tasks. Of the three, this is the one where federal and other funding, and local leadership and commitment, come up the shortest. It’s up to local leaders to have a plan for making enough housing available in communities, affordable to everyone.

Will local leaders make it a priority to get those systems up and running? An end to homelessness requires they step up and get it right.

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Not going back

May 9, 2025. People working on homelessness around the country, and around the world, have accomplished important moves forward over the last three decades, especially in the past few years. Big progress. Homelessness is growing, due to lack of commitment by politicians to affordable housing. It would be a lot worse if not for our progress. For this next period, the place to move is forward, not back.

Specific interventions. People have developed, tested and increased the scale of interventions, targeted to specific groups of people experiencing homelessness:

Permanent supportive housing provides long-term rent subsidies combined with medical care and other supportive services to end homelessness for people with severe disabilities including serious mental illness and substance use disorder, getting people off the streets who have been there for years, and saving money for communities.

Rapid re-housing provides short-to-medium term rent subsidies, combined with help finding housing and other services concentrating on improving employment and/or accessing benefits to be able to afford housing without a subsidy. This has demonstrated success at lower cost for people with potential for accessing income, including many families with children - family homelessness declined substantially in communities like Washington DC that implemented rapid re-housing to scale.

Housing-focused shelters, that provide safety and help to move people into their own homes, through landlord outreach, employment assistance, and family reunification. An essential objective for a successful shelter system is moving people out of shelter and into housing quickly, to free up beds. People living on the streets are more likely to use a shelter if they’re confident that moving into the shelter will quickly lead to housing.

Problem-solving/diversion: working with people to resolve a housing crisis by using natural supports and community resources, before the crisis leads to an extended spell of homelessness.

A systemic approach. Communities have developed, and federal policy has promoted, systematic coordination to make the best use of scarce resources and match people with what they need. Local homelessness systems leverage many billions of dollars every year to improve results.

Systemic coordination includes the involvement of “mainstream” services, that are not targeted specifically to people experiencing homelessness but are important to ending homelessness. Healthcare, subsidized housing, and employment programs are examples. People working on those mainstream systems have recognized, often through data developed by homelessness systems, that widespread homelessness is making their outcomes worse, and they have brought their resources to the table, seeking solutions.

COVID presented new challenges, and people working on homelessness in many communities stepped up, finding new ways to shelter people, securing and using new federal funds, for things like making deals with desperate hotel owners when congregate shelters became unsafe while business and tourist travel nearly stopped.

Federal agencies that support veterans have worked with Congress to create a separate system of care for veterans who are homeless, funded at a better scale and with better coordination between housing and healthcare. When nationwide data on homelessness first became available in the late 1990s, it showed that veterans were overrepresented in the homeless population. This is no longer the case, as many thousands of homeless veterans have been housed.

Stop doing things that make it worse. During these same decades, we stopped doing things that didn’t work, like criminalization. The widespread practice of jailing “vagrants” was disapproved of by some courts, and shown by research to be extremely expensive, to make it even harder for individuals to escape homelessness, and to create conflict when cooperation is what’s needed to solve the problem. The Supreme Court’s recent off-hand rejection of any constitutional protection from imprisonment for being homeless has not led to widespread resumption of this inept practice - some states and cities have adopted such laws, some politicians who think it makes them look tough are calling for more, but so far few are implementing them comprehensively. Cities rejected people who thought they could make money by promoting concentration camps for people who can’t afford housing.

Clarity about what’s still needed. Over those same decades there has been increasing clarity, led by people working to end homelessness, on what is missing, why the decreases in homelessness from the mid-zeroes to the mid-teens were unlikely to be maintained, and what it would take to actually solve the problem: stop treating housing strictly as a commodity, and start treating it like schooling, roads, or fire protection, something everyone, even those with the least income, can count on the government to provide; and ensure that the services that some people require to maintain stable housing, especially people with severe disabilities like serious mental illness and substance use disorder, are easily available. That clarity has helped improve the usual underfunding of federal housing programs and lack of coordination with healthcare, but not nearly enough.

* * * * *

That’s all under attack now, an attack that at least to me is so familiar as to be a little boring. Politicians who don’t want to be responsible for coming up with the money to do something that the public clearly wants done are blaming the victim: blaming people who are homeless for not wanting to work (even though most people who are homeless do work), for succumbing to drugs and alcohol, for the fear that their mental illness evokes in others. And they are blaming people who work and advocate in the field for failing to demand higher standards. All this blame is tediously similar to what I heard when I started this kind of work in the Reagan years, 40 years ago, and indeed what I read about when I had occasion to study the enactment of the Elizabethan Poor Laws in England, more than 400 years ago.

Fortunately, with 400 years of practice we know how to make progress even in the face of victim-blaming. We know what’s inaccurate or even absurd about the victim-blaming, and we’ll certainly overcome the tedium of pointing these things out. But the far more important thing is to be clear about what has worked and indeed is working today all over the country. We have done amazing work to make good things happen, and we’re not going back. We will continue to do those good, humane things.

And we will continue to advocate for elected officials to do their part: to make resources available to scale, with a priority on housing, the essential resource that’s in the shortest supply; to incentivize practices that get the best results, based on the best available evidence; and to foster cooperation with necessary mainstream services, so that people have a chance to overcome conditions that made them vulnerable to homelessness.

We can end homelessness, and we’re going to do it. We’re not going back.

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February 28, 2025: What I said at yesterday’s plenary at the Alliance’s conference on unsheltered homelessness:

Good morning! I’m Steve Berg, the Chief Policy Officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, and I’m here to welcome you to the day 2 plenary, focusing on tactics.

First, I want to say we know many people who are part of this big community are seeing their lives disrupted right now, and that we are with you, you are fantastic people.

So tactics. By “tactics,” I’m talking about concrete tools for making specific, immediate changes happen. These are tools that people working on the issue can use on a daily basis.

We start our work by setting a goal that would clearly make the world a better place, that’s based in love and an understanding that all people are essentially one, that brings people together. Like ending homelessness. We articulate a strategy, that shows the big pieces of how the goal can be achieved over time, showing that it’s possible and even likely, building know-how, making money available, developing leadership, bringing together an Alliance of people who will work with us. And then we use tactics to move closer every day to getting those pieces done.

We’ll include tactical tools to engage policymakers, to get them to see that ending homelessness is something they should take on, and that they should start by listening to you! One tool is the message that many of them are getting loud and clear: lots of people want homelessness ended. People who are homeless now, and the larger group with lived experience of homelessness are speaking out more and more. There are people like most in this room who are mission driven to care, including church leaders, people in the field, political activists. But there are others who may be unexpected: leaders in healthcare, because homelessness costs healthcare systems tremendous amounts of money; local government officials, elected or not; business owners; police, who don’t believe dealing with homelessness is their mission; and, increasingly, the “general public.”

These days, more policymakers get this part, that there’s a demand for a solution. But the more important tool to engage them is the message that there’s a proven way to do this, that’s achieved good results and that brings people together rather than driving them apart, the way so-called “solutions” based on criminalization drive people apart. Policymakers who have to run for reelection often try to avoid issues that are going to involve lots of fighting. Consensus makes them more likely to be on board. We’ve seen people who demonstrated at city hall to keep supportive housing out of the neighborhoods where the lived, and who a year after the housing was occupied had become the residents’ biggest supporters. That’s the kind of story that will get policymakers on board.

Another piece of tactics this conference talks about is tools that policymakers can use to develop the right policies, to build understanding for themselves and others about what goes into those proven solutions: Making sure sufficient modest rental housing exists, by allocating different funding streams and building public support; having rent or operating subsidies to make housing affordable to people with the lowest incomes, often through the Housing Choice Voucher program; targeting supportive services so that people can be stable in their housing, including intensive medical treatment, because it’s no surprise to us that many people with serious mental illness or addiction or cancer or heart failure end up on the streets, or that living on the streets brings on or exacerbates those conditions; and including services to help secure better income or simply help dealing with complicated bureaucracies that challenge everyone.

And a third piece of tactics we’ll talk about is tools for providers to get and keep people housed, including help making the process simpler and more respectful for people who may have faced all kinds of discrimination; and tools to get mainstream systems on board, systems with bigger budgets and expertise to provide housing and services, in a manner that aligns with our commitment to simplicity and respect

Tactics. It’s what we do every day to make good things happen.

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On reading Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom

(February 17, 2025) If we want real freedom, we have to choose it. Unlike the fake freedom that many flee from, real freedom is work but also bigger than we know; and choosing not to have it is a real choice that’s available and easy and bad.

Erich Fromm was a renowned social psychologist, beginning in the secular Jewish academic community in Germany in the 1920s. He studied psychoanalysis, and characterized Freud as one of the "architects of the modern age" while criticizing many aspects of Freud’s work including his patriarchal assumptions. Fromm became part of what was known as the Frankfort School, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, an interdisciplinary group of scholars brought together by the observation that existing justifications of social and political order require surrender of individual authority to define right and wrong, a surrender that is morally unjustifiable.

After the Institute was shut down by the Gestapo in 1933 (“The professors are the enemy!” is hardly a new exclamation) and Fromm escaped and came to the United States, he wrote Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, reflecting on the rise of Nazism in Germany that led to World War II. In this book, Fromm suggests one attraction for a system based on unquestioning obedience to authoritarian hierarchy: it meets desperate needs of people who are terrified by the solitude and pointlessness they were left with when earlier ideas of the community or tribe as the most important expression of humanity disappeared.

The ultimate conclusion is that people give up what they think is freedom, in order to escape the terrible loneliness that comes with that negative freedom. There is, however, a positive and more profound freedom, based in love, that is a choice available to us, that doesn’t require that surrender.

His argument

Fromm starts by explaining how humans got to a point, maybe around the time of the development of stable villages and the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era, or maybe in the European Renaissance and similar movements in other cultures, when we came to experience ourselves as radically separate and individual, severing primary ties of identification with a clan, a church, a community. That changed human self-regard in many ways, including ways that we regard as positive. But it included a deeply distressing loneliness.

Freud also talked about this split of the individual consciousness from the community. In Civilization and its Discontents, published in 1930 as his career was coming to a close and while Fromm was developing the ideas that formed the basis for Escape from Freedom, Freud compared the adult understanding of alienation or separation from the community with the development of a young child first experiencing separation from the child’s mother, and how the resulting loneliness drives the search for some replacement.

In all societies, for Fromm, once that separation as an individual was experienced, there was no going back. But societies that people developed needed things to be done, and they developed around an idea of freedom, consistent perhaps with the primacy of the individual, but also consistent with hierarchy: a negative freedom that is, for many people, the limit of the imagination as to what freedom might entail.

Negative freedom, for Fromm, is the state of not being involuntarily subject to anyone’s direction or orders - “freedom from.” This is distinct from positive freedom, “freedom to” join with others as independent individuals to achieve goals in a spirit of love. More on that below. The negative freedom is more common, and it leaves people with a desperate loneliness, that few can handle. So people take jobs where they surrender their freedom; or succumb to strongmen of various types. Fromm, as a psychologist in the Freudian tradition, adds an awareness of sadomasochism to the analysis. He believes that both dominating and being dominated by another provide a human contact that many weak people long for.

When the Right (and when he was writing, “the Right” meant fascists and Nazis like Mussolini and Hitler) promises freedom, it means that weak, negative freedom, creating justifications for allowing the rich and powerful to do what they want, and creating for others that awful loneliness that will drive them to seek some human connection, subjugating themselves in order to get it. Fromm clearly believed that this need would cause people, much more effectively and completely than the need for food and someplace to live, to hand right back the small measure of weak freedom that the Right promised.

Fromm wrote about another kind of freedom, though, a positive freedom to come together with others, motivated by deep compassion and the joy of doing productive work, to create what the community needs. This will allow the kinds of societal structures that are open to constant reinvention. That kind of working together, in service to goals that arise from love and the certainty that every human being is steeped in greatness, is essential for the kind of world we need and want. Us versus Them, we can let go of that easily enough in those circumstances.

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December 21, 2024 - Here’s what I said at the DC Homeless Persons Memorial Day commemoration yesterday:

Tonight is the longest night, the winter solstice, when the time between the sun going down and coming up in the morning is the greatest all year.

Cultures all over the world and throughout history have quietly celebrated the winter solstice as the transition, the return of the light beginning, while understanding that the dark, too, has its holiness.

The solstice is usually celebrated as a time to renew hope. That’s hard right now. We have seen for years and years, we take a step or two forward, and then we slide back. We pass the civil rights and fair housing acts, then we start a war on drugs. We adopt full employment as national policy, then we fire striking air traffic controllers and slash the federal budget and start a recession. The federal government commits to ending homelessness with housing and services, then we hear from politicians who’d like to point the finger elsewhere that people living on the streets need to be prosecuted. Hope is hard.

But we see the basis for hope to continue. We see that people working to end homelessness are more united and mutually supportive than at any time since modern mass homelessness arose. We see that despite what some people who think they’re important say, the public sees homelessness as a problem that can and should be solved, and that housing and services are the basis for the solution. We see powerful systems like health care desperate to find those solutions and ready and willing to help. And we see each other, here, ready to do the work.

We can look to our ancestors who kept going despite how hard any fight for justice is. We can take care of each other, and mourn those who died before we could provide them with the things like housing that every human deserves. And we can know that the work, while it might take a long time, will ultimately prevail, because it’s right both empirically and morally, because we tell the truth, and because we care for each other and honor those who came before us.

Thank you.

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Plenary Day 2 lead-off

July 9, 2024 - Welcome everyone to the Day Two Plenary, where the theme is Leading with love, equity and respect for our unhoused neighbors. I’m Steve Berg, and I’m happy you’re all here. One reminder: the lived experience lounge is on the terrace level.

I started preparing for this session by looking up “love” in Wikipedia. The second I typed the word on my phone, the screen was flooded with hearts. My phone was directing me to one kind of love: romance, the kind that makes a lot of money and a lot of joy and is certainly related to our work. But when we say, in our work we’re leading with love equity and respect, we’re talking about something more profound, and something each of us can share more broadly, arising out of an understanding that at a deep level, we are not separate, we are one. This kind of love the Ancient Greeks called Agape, the love that flows from embracing the inherent value and greatness of each person. Buddhists refer to it as lovingkindness, leading toward a direct experience of oneness.

Musicians know about this. Musicians, although they sing often about the hearts kind of love, can tell us about this oneness as well:

• Louis Armstrong telling us about the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night in What a Wonderful World

• Aretha Franklin in Think, singing that without each other there ain’t nothing people can do

• Stevie Wonder about hate knowing love’s the cure in his song As

• Tina Turner singing the brutal takedown of the hearts kind in What’s Love Got to Do With It, but then in the bridge it’s about taking on a new direction.

• Bob Marley singing that love has come to bloom again in Hallelujah Time

• Marvin Gaye about finding a way to bring some loving here today in What’s Going On

This kind of love that’s synonymous with oneness with others: it’s essential but it’s not easy. It means confronting and overcoming racism and other kinds of prejudice and stuck thinking about things like gender that are engrained in the systems that affected our upbringing and affect our work. It means letting go of power over others while finding the power that’s within each of us and available to share with others, and that others, if we’re open to it, will share with us, in service of a goal like ending homelessness

The Alliance is working to make sure that communities understand how to come together like this, how people with lived experience of homelessness can wield power needed to find answers, how people working on homelessness can use our expertise and our knowledge of how to make things happen in order to improve availability and fairness of housing, and coordination with systems like health care, in solidarity with others who have been fighting for decades to make those systems respond better to people who are Black or Latino, or who have disabilities.

We are working with elected officials to make sure they know how people will come together around real solutions, long-term like permanent housing and services as well as short-term like using some of the 35 percent of American hotel rooms that still sit empty every night. And insisting on abandoning dehumanizing practices like criminalizing homelessness – we’re circulating a letter from members of Congress to the President, asking him to discourage communities from doing what the Supreme Court Grants Pass decision allows them to do. You can see those who have already signed on, and we’re hopeful this list will be a lot longer once Capitol Hill Day is over.

We’re happy to be able to present at this plenary some of our favorite people who can help us inspire this kind of work, starting with the Alliance’s Vice President of Research and Evidence, Joy Moses

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2023: the Beginning?

February 4, 2024 - In the year just completed the news was full of big stories about war, greed and hatred. At the same time, there were quieter developments that showed the potential for more sharing and problem-solving, a countervailing aspect of humanity throughout history. If the human race makes real progress in the coming decades or centuries, it could be because some things started to change in 2023.

A livable climate

Much of the change has been in response to global warming. There is a lot to do, in fact we’ve barely begun, with stakes that could include the survival of human civilization. Big stories included that 2023 was the hottest year worldwide since such records were kept, and that there is still insufficient commitment to any realistic worldwide plan to head off disaster. Quiet news included increasing acceptance that climate change is happening, that it’s caused by humans burning carbon, that work on a worldwide plan continues, and, in all kinds of big and small ways, people were figuring out how to make things better:

Policies changed as reported by the League of Conservation Voters in 29 states, including commitments to clean energy that now cover 40 percent of the U.S. population. Candidates for office in other states pledged to do more.

Research showed how money made by climate polluting companies flowed largely to the richest households, and that the public supported tax policies to collect much of that money to pay for interventions.

Huge deposits of lithium, used to manufacture batteries that are part of solar energy systems, were discovered in Oregon and Nevada, making it easier for solar to spread in the U.S.

European rail systems introduced a new generation of sleeping cars, improving the prospects for rail, the most climate-friendly means of long-range overland travel.

A worldwide review indicated that a tipping point has been reached, and that solar energy is on its way to dominating world energy supplies.

The European Parliament set strict limits on carbon-fueled cars.

Research demonstrated the efficacy of personal carbon allowances, a policy that’s relatively easy to implement.

Advances continued in battery technology and resulting lowering of costs for solar power applications.

Still a lot to do, but lots being done.

Sharing

In order to rectify maldistribution of wealth and income, it’s necessary that people insist that it happen. Karl Marx wrote that feudalistic economies develop into capitalistic, improving production and living standards of many people. Recent decades and world-wide experience have born him out, as the incidence of severe poverty has declined markedly in many countries.

Workers demanded a better share of this bounty in 2023. U.S. labor activism unlike any in recent decades produced good results. The whole country of France exploded into demonstrations and strikes when the government moved to reduce pensions. More nuanced, a study provided evidence for elements of the theory of “Bullshit Jobs,” a theory that was formalized and popularized in a book of that name in 2018, showing that many workers consider their jobs to be objectively useless to society, demonstrating that there is no widespread commitment to the current system.

Equity

True equity around race remains unfulfilled. There was plenty of news in 2023 about Black people facing discrimination. But organizing continued, and recognition continued in some quarters. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a draft rule requiring communities that receive HUD money to use it to affirmatively further fair housing, to undo damage done by housing practices that kept (and keep) Black people in limited neighborhoods without quality services and conditions. This requirement was included in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (that’s right, 1968) but never implemented or enforced by the federal government. Next steps for HUD are to issue the rule in final form, enforce it universally, and provide the know-how that communities will need.

Food, water and housing

In places where Marx’s transition to capitalism took place long ago, inequality and poverty remain. But food, water, housing, the basic human needs - things happened in 2023 that could make it more likely that they’ll be achieved for everyone. Threats to water, exacerbated by global warming, received quiet attention, as did the point of view that indigenous people have a relationship with land and water that makes them the best leaders in fights to preserve it, a role many of them appear willing to take on, for which I am so, so grateful. A new process of water desalination, solar powered, promises inexpensive fresh water anywhere near an ocean.

Congress provided incrementally more housing for people with the the lowest incomes, and more people are asking why only a quarter of those eligible for federal housing assistance actually receive it. Meanwhile the technology of food production advanced in many small ways.

Health

Advancements in technology led to better understanding of the human body and new ways to maintain it. There were new studies of evolution, from the earliest emergence of living cells to the development of modern humans. Medical advances in the treatment of atrial fibrillation, a heart arrhythmia affecting millions of Americans, made it less debilitating, warding off hospital stays for people like me (thank you, Dr. O’Donoghue). The “cancer moonshot” announced by Joe Biden as Vice President in 2016 was reignited and continued to provide federal funding for research, producing many large and small advances in prevention and treatment. More down to earth, a company developed BPClip, a low-cost smartphone attachment that allows constant monitoring of blood pressure, a key to preventing and controlling a number of dangerous health conditions.

The percent of Americans covered by health insurance remained at the high rate it skyrocketed to after the advent of Obamacare, and the number of states that haven’t expanded Medicaid dropped below twenty percent. (Politicians in AL, FL, GA, KS, MS, SC, TN, TX, WI, WY - What is your problem??)

Tech

Artificial intelligence was in the news a lot, including writing some of the news. What got less coverage was promising international agreements to control artificial intelligence, so that nightmare science fiction scenarios would not occur. Meanwhile massive expansions in computing power and speed were attained.

The universe

New understandings of the beginnings of the universe, its current state, and how it might end continued to come out. This showed the potential to develop new materials, inspire our imagination, and maybe write better science fiction.

What does it mean?

People are endlessly curious, driven to solve problems. That’s always been the case. What might be a new thing, or at least a thing that’s been covered up by a dominant narrative of hierarchy to maintain order, is a hint of a new era, based on mutual respect and love, where nobody, nobody has to worry about starving or dying of hypo- or hyperthermia or thirst, or about the trauma of discrimination, and we can concentrate on building a shared culture that is worth surviving for. Will that be where humanity is when our great-great-grandchildren are writing the history of the time we’re in now? If so, there’ll be plenty to write about.

[sberg0]

[sberg0]

Getting Congress on our side

Steve Berg plenary talk July 19, 2023

Thank you to everyone, and welcome to the closing plenary for this conference. It has been so great to be together and see and talk to all of you, thank you for being here.

This session is about the policies and overall approaches that will bring about more progress, including how important it is to center racial justice. Speakers are some amazing people who I’m happy to know.

First, though, I’m happy to celebrate that at this conference, this afternoon, we are returning to a live, in-person Capitol Hill Day. It couldn’t come at a more important time, with conflicts and controversy in Congress, and the need for robust responses from the federal government.

So thank you to the Alliance staff and contractors who helped put Hill Day together, especially Jerry Jones, Samantha Wood, and John Threlkeld, all of whom I hope you got a chance to meet at our advocacy hub.

Our message on the Hill, today and throughout the year, is pretty simple, and I can summarize it in three points:

One: Ending homelessness is good for everyone in our communities

Two: We know what the solutions are

And three: We need to take funding to scale and policy to the next level

Let me spend a couple minutes on the details of what we’re encouraging you to ask Congress about.

First is funding, through the Appropriations process, for homeless assistance from HUD. This funding for the Continuum of Care and ESG pays for building and maintaining systems that engage people who are homeless, keep them safe, and help them get into housing. We need a $200 million increase, in a year when money is tight, so we need to make a strong case. And the timing is excellent, since the Senate Appropriations Committee is meeting to vote on this bill tomorrow.

A specific thing we’re advocating for is funding within those programs to pay front line workers better, by building in cost-of-living increases for staff, the way funding for increased rents is built in.

Another detail is a 2-year Notice of Funding Opportunity, so that you only need to go through that NOFO process that you’re going through right now every two years instead of every year.

And finally, we need better funding for mainstream housing programs. Homeless systems have made amazing progress over the past 15 years at moving people quickly out of homelessness. New data from HUD and from groups like the Urban Institute with their new Women’s Needs Assessment Report shows that continues, but also shows that we need to have systems of housing stability that are equally effective at preventing homelessness. Of course the Housing Choice Voucher program is the most important and most underfunded component of such systems.

There are many other issues, including specific proposals about supportive services and health care. You can find out more at the advocacy hub.

The other ask at these Hill meetings, besides support for specific funding and policy proposals, is for your Members of Congress to become partners with you in reducing and ending homelessness in your communities. Your Members of Congress can help work out problems with federal agencies, convince local leaders to do the right things, and persuade other Members of Congress. They want to be part of something good that’s happening in the places they represent, and you can help them with that.

Earlier in this conference Ann and others talked about making the case, in a way that decades of research and practice have shown to be effective. We hope you’ll be able to use the principles of strategic casemaking as part of Capitol Hill Day.

Connect to people’s aspirations – helping build communities where everyone has what they need

Naming the power of the moment -- More attention than ever to homelessness, greater understanding of its roots in systemic racism and injustice, and greater know-how about what it will take to solve.

Talking about what people can lose by sitting on the sidelines – there are too many bad ideas out there, and we need to make sure that the good ideas are what decisionmakers understand.

Navigating the dominant narratives – Polls show that a solid majority of Americans think that homelessness exists because housing is too expensive. Good! But what’s getting airplay is mental illness and drugs. We know that addressing those things is part of the solution, and Housing First is what’s proven to work

Emphasizing solutions, not problems – and fortunately, we understand the solutions

We can remake the systems that are causing this problem to be systems that bring about solutions, with our communities joyfully coming together to ensure that nobody needs to worry about where they’re going to sleep at night

We know the solutions. We know what we need to turn the solutions into reality.  Our elected Representatives and Senators need to be part of that. We need to give them that opportunity, on Hill Day and throughout every year. That starts today. We’ll have many hundreds of people up there letting them know: We are back, we are here, we are advocating for justice as we are making justice happen in our communities. Thank you!

[sberg0]

People’s Park

August 15, 2019 - The park was a city block near the Cal campus that had been acquired for future athletic fields, and the buildings about half demolished before the University ran out of money for the project. As the site filled with abandoned cars, impatient local residents and student activists made a plan: get hundreds of local people involved in finishing the demolition and making it a real park, where free speech would be welcome and the antiwar spirit could have a home.

Negotiations between the university and the park activists went well, with plenty of local support for the idea that at least part of the property would be a public park. But without any warning other than his ugly statements over many years, on May 15 at 4:30 a.m. Governor Ronald Reagan sent state police to take over the land. They cleared the area, uprooted new plantings, and put up an 8-foot fence.

By early afternoon thousands of demonstrators marched from the campus to the park. A battle with police began, rocks and bottles on one side, nightsticks, tear gas, and ultimately shotguns on the other. One student, watching from a rooftop, was killed by buckshot fired by police, another was permanently blinded, and many dozens more injured. Reagan called in the National Guard to occupy the area, over the objection of the Berkeley City Council. The occupation of Berkeley by Reagan’s troops went on for weeks, including tear gas spread by helicopter over large parts of the city, continual conflict, and more injuries and arrests.

The story was in papers in Seattle and in Time, but the most enduring image was two weeks later, when organizers obtained a permit for a march and 30,000 people demonstrated. Young women walked up to National Guard troops barricading the park, and slipped individual flowers stem-first into the upturned barrels of their rifles.

[sberg0]

Big Changes

Dec. 23, 2017 - I was asked recently to reflect on the broad outlines of how progress on homelessness is occurring, in a way that might be generalizable to other issues.

Big changes. People bring them about by coming together to learn from and support each other. An example is the headway that many communities have made on homelessness. While we are a long way from finished, we’ve seen enough to be able to talk about what the ingredients are, in a way that suggests applicability to other problems.

There are three kinds of work that need to be done, three categories of undertakings:

1. Put it out there! 

People who want to have big impacts must first boldly state their goal, in a manner that will allow people to imagine a better world with the goal achieved. The goal must be evidently significant - something that will make a difference in the world that most observers will grasp easily. It must be clear, measurable, and concrete, so that people will see when there is progress and then success. At the same time, it must be feasible. Supporters must be able to help people understand the basics of a strategy that will work.

Americans view ending homelessness as obviously desirable - opinion polling has shown that for years. For just as many years, however, most viewed it as not, in fact, achievable. Recently the articulation of the Housing First approach, simple enough to understand and demonstrably effective, and the results in communities that wholeheartedly adopted it, have opened many minds to the potential for success.

2. Get your tools together

For large-scale social change, it is crucial to understand and build three essential assets:

- Know-how: Progress on homelessness has come as understanding and capacity has improved at operating different kinds of direct interventions; at coordinating local systems around a workable strategy; at developing state and federal policies that incentivize and support the best work in communities; and at building enthusiasm on the part of the public and important sectors. Challenges remain around spreading the know-how more broadly. 

- Money, to pay people, to buy things: Spending needs to be used the right way, paying people to do precisely the things that need doing, in order to maximize the impact. It’s important to be upfront about what these solutions cost; but also the cost of not solving the problems or seizing the opportunities. The other thing about money is to remain aware of who's making money off the status quo

- Leadership, persuading people that it's worth doing and doable, persuading people that there's a right and a wrong way to do it and they should do it the right way even if it's hard: Policy has a role, incentivizing results and good practice. Who is going to own this venture? Leaders keep their constituencies focused - they are needed everywhere and at all levels.

3. Build alliances

To find allies, ask: Who is paying the price for this problem? Whose outcomes would improve from solving the problem, or even parts of the problem? Who might become passionate about wanting the problem solved, simply because it’s the right thing to do? America is full of people who want to get things done and will come together around a worthwhile course of action. 

- What alliances do: recruit, educate and set loose the leaders; raise and target the money; develop and spread the know-how; and do the rest of the work to implement a plan/strategy that everyone accepts.

- How they do it: people learn from each other (what to do and how), hold each other accountable, celebrate success.

- How they're built: by being open to alliance possibilities everywhere, finding good things that potential allies care about that align, and leaning into what's joyful about working together – it’s ultimately driven not just by desire to achieve the goal, but by people wanting to belong, be one with each other.

[sberg0]

[sberg0]

No War...

Angry fat man on the radio

Wants to keep his taxes way down low

Says there oughta be a law

Angriest man you ever saw

- from Welfare Music by the Bottle Rockets

July 2, 2016 - Maybe I’m rising to some dangerous bait, but I get offended when people quote Reagan about losing the war on poverty.

Here it is: anybody who thinks we’ve had a war on poverty in this country any time since the 1968 election is not familiar with war.

When there’s a war, it’s considered unpatriotic to question whatever people on the ground need.

When there’s a war, we talk about it and think about it every day.

When there’s a war, winning is top priority.

When there’s a war, politicians who want to spend less get voted out of office.

When there’s a war, the victims don’t get blamed.

In the ‘60s, it was a little bit like that. And the poverty rate went down, fast. We were winning. Then we stopped. And we haven’t really taken it back up since.

There’s been more talk about poverty lately than there has been for a long time. But if we start with the idea that we gave it an honest try but nothing works, well, that’s fine if our goal is to feel better about the problem. But if we want to solve it, then a different mindset is required.

This is the richest country in the history of humanity. There’s no reason we can’t afford to make sure that basic human needs are met for everyone. Unless all those riches have given rise to too much greed. I’m not ready to go there yet.

[sberg0]

Muhammad Ali, 1942-2016

June 12, 2016 - As a kid I sort of knew that he was the boxing champion, and that he was good, from the way my dad talked about him, but the first concrete thing I remember about Muhammad Ali was the reporting about what no Vietcong had ever called him.

I had just turned 10 then, in 1966, coming to the end of 4th grade, beginning to be aware of the larger world. I knew there was a war in Vietnam that people argued about, that some older kids in the neighborhood had signed up for. I also knew that black people in America didn't always get fair treatment. Ali's simple statement brought both issues to life.

Opposition to U.S. involvement was a minority opinion then, and Ali paid for his decision a year later, at age 25, to refuse induction. State officials around the country refused to allow him to fight professionally. The State Department cancelled his passport so he couldn't fight overseas. His draft board rejected his petition for conscientious objector status. His appeal was denied, despite findings of a hearing officer in his favor, after the U.S. Justice Department sent a letter opposing it. A federal court convicted him and sentenced him to five years in prison. Hatred for him spewed from every corner of the country. But he refused to back down.

After news of his death a couple weeks ago, I went on YouTube and watched some of his fights. I haven't watched boxing for a long time, and the brutality of it made me stop. Ali was frighteningly good, but a lot of people think that he was so good that he never got hit, never got hurt. It's not true. His work required a degree of physical courage that's hard to comprehend.

Partly because of that, people came around. In 1971 the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction, and the Nixon Administration let the case drop. Starting with Georgia, states began allowing him to fight, his passport was renewed, and for a few years, when I was in high school, he was the star of a show that brought millions of fans to boxing.

Meanwhile opinions about the war changed, and U.S. troops were brought home and the draft ended in 1973. Led by veterans of the war from both countries, the people of the U.S. and Vietnam are reconciled. Love for Ali, and grief at his passing, were world-wide.

I thank Muhammad Ali. And I thank a lot of others who, as young, young men had to make life-changing decisions about what to do in the face of that war. Great courage led to very different choices, as did courage that was less than perfect. When I was the age to try to figure out what it means to be a man, they were there as examples. I hope people remember them all for a long time.

[sberg0]

Why I Tweet

I’m tweeting regularly starting Monday June 6, 2016. My hope is that Twitter will be a place I can join with a group of people as we help each other in a number of different ways, by sharing stories, reactions, ideas, data, observations, in close to real time.

From what I can see, Twitter is a place for immediate impressions, the raw stuff that we develop over time and in other contexts into carefully crafted ideas, strategies, and plans. In the short run, though, it’s important to get that stuff out there and widely shared, before it gets buried by the next minute’s news. This process relies on intuition - “this seems important” so away it goes. Of course some things get tweeted that turn out to be unimportant or wrong in different ways, and those things are soon ignored or forgotten - it’s by nature a tentative medium.

More rigorous development of ideas and strategies comes later, but I’m hoping the steps in that will be shared, examined and critiqued on Twitter as well.

I’ll be tweeting mostly about things directly related to ending homelessness, since that’s mostly what I’m working on and thinking about. What you get from me will differ from the regular and excellent Alliance Twitter feed @naehomelessness by having more details about policy, and more about bigger-picture strategic issues. I’m also more likely to connect with related but distinct issues - affordable housing, poverty, and others. There will be some reporting on things I’m doing or seeing first hand. And I’m sure I’ll veer off once in a while into interests whose relationship to homelessness isn’t necessarily apparent.

We’ll see how this goes. I’m happy to receive feedback, about how what I’m tweeting can be more useful to you. Follow me if you’d like. If I’m not yet following you, tweet at me @sberg0 to let me know what you’re thinking!