Homeward Pikes Peak’s office is tucked into a drab, nondescript brick building just south of downtown Colorado Springs. The inside of HPP, a nonprofit that provides counseling and housing services to homeless people and substance addicts, is unassuming. There are six cubicles that serve as workspaces for case managers. Baskets filled with a hodgepodge of travel-sized toiletries sit on small tables throughout the office. Filling the rest of the empty space are dozens of brochures and posters advertising government welfare programs and homelessness resources throughout Colorado Springs.
I meet Jessica, a client of HPP, in the office on a snowy day in April. Jessica comes in wearing a T-shirt and shorts, rubbing her hands for warmth and joking about how stupid she must look for being so underdressed. I talk to her in the basement, which holds a few racks of clothing for the clients, as well as a large wooden table. She peppered many of her responses with caveats of uncertainty, often asking questions like, “Did I answer that right?” Still, she answered all my questions with remarkable verve, often falling back on an arsenal of witty aphorisms.
Jessica is 25 years old and has spent nearly a fifth of her life in prison. Prior to incarceration, she cared for her two children, but admits that she “pretty much sucked” as a parent. “I was a menace,” she says. Jessica is currently on parole and probation. May 28 will mark one year of sobriety for her. Pregnant in prison, she sought out a source of housing stability and sobriety for once she got out, with the help of a lawyer her mother paid for. He helped Jessica find Bloom Recovery Home, HPP’s sobriety house for mothers and children.
Bloom teaches newly-sober mothers basic life skills. They offer cooking classes and psychological training classes, which, Jessica explains, teach you to use your “brain in ways that you couldn’t before.” As with most organizations that offer housing-first solutions to homelessness, Bloom and HPP have a set of basic conditions that clients must meet to keep their place in the program. They must stay sober, maintain a basic level of cleanliness, and always meet their curfew.
These requirements speak to an idea that appeared throughout my time with HPP employees and clients. Executive Director Beth Roalstad and case manager Rachel Brown both explicitly debunked the idea that housing-first approaches to homelessness are “handouts”—that they gift people something that they should have to earn. This line of logic is characteristic of a different approach to the homelessness crisis, known as the “work-first” approach, in which a person is offered a job, not a home, as a means of achieving health and stability. The thinking is that holding down a job is a necessary lesson in the importance of self-sufficiency. Likewise, an advocate of work-first might argue that someone who is given something they did not earn will be unable to learn the tough lesson: you must earn what you get. They are deprived, supposedly, of the connection between cause and effect, work and reward.
Beth brings up El Paso County Commissioner Stan Vanderwerf as an example of a staunch supporter of “work-first” ideals. She did add, though, that after many prolonged conversations with him, she was able to help him see the value of housing-first approaches.
Homelessness in the U.S. was on the rise in the 1980s, in part because of cuts to social services. Many cities were staring down quickly increasing rents and costs of living (a trend that has only worsened since). In the face of public pressure, President Reagan signed the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act in 1987, which allocated money to build homeless shelters around the country.
One year later, entrepreneur Tanya Tull initiated a starkly different approach: the first significant housing-first program, organized by Beyond Shelter in Los Angeles. The idea remained fairly unpopular until the early 2000s, when stubbornly high homelessness numbers forced advocates and policymakers to realize that while it was necessary to respond to the symptoms of homelessness (by offering shelters, soup kitchens, and counseling), these kind of “quick fixes” weren’t solving the problem.
Data gathered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that in 1970, there were 6.5 million low-cost housing units nationwide and 6.2 million low-income renters. But 40 years later, there were 9.9 million low-income renters battling for only 4.8 million affordable units. No number of shelters and soup kitchens were going to solve that problem, especially because median rent in the United States has risen in sync: $571 in 1990, $602 in 2000, and $934 in 2014. While policymakers may be slow to notice the value of housing-first projects, it’s become clear that housing-first is the best shot at a stable living situation for the three million Americans who spend nights without shelter every year, and especially the 1.3 million children among them.
Advocates of housing-first, like HPP, consider a home to be the primary building block for leading a responsible and healthy life. Proponents argue that providing a home to the homeless is not only the right thing to do but also the pragmatic solution because it lightens the financial burden that a large homeless population exerts on a community. In fact, HPP claims that its services can save taxpayers over $2 million a year in emergency room visits, 911 calls, and detox stays.
Perhaps in recognition of these potential cost reductions, the Bush administration started housing-first programs in over 60 cities. These programs uncovered the yearly cost of a typical homeless individual on the U.S. as a whole: between $35,000 and $150,000. They also discovered that those homeless individuals could be housed at a yearly cost to the government and taxpayers of $13,000 to $25,000 per person.
Beth shrugs off work-first proposals, explaining that they betray an insufficient understanding of the issues. She believes it is entirely wrong to think that “if we give everyone a job, that will solve their problems” because, according to Beth, you can’t pay rent in Colorado Springs with a job that pays less than $21 an hour. “So [that] model doesn’t work,” she said. Beth situates anti-homeless sentiment in Colorado Springs as part of a classism in America that “we’ve had forever—we love simple answers.”
But complex problems rarely have simple solutions, and the questions surrounding homelessness are no exception. Looking for better answers, Beth pointed to a 1998 investigation called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. It analyzed some of the more insidious, cyclical patterns of homelessness and health instability. The study looked at unpropitious childhood circumstances, like the presence of substance or physical abuse in the home, and found a remarkably strong correlation between the existence of these variables early in life and low levels of wellbeing later in life.
Many Americans might think that homeless people, convicts, or addicts condemn themselves to a dire situation out of which no one should help them but themselves. But the truth is that a range of external variables exert significant pressure on a homeless person’s ability to be healthy and happy. Sometimes assistance, like that which HPP provides, is a necessary catalyst for addressing and compensating for those variables.
Inextricably intertwined with those adverse childhood experiences is mental health. Beth told me that “if [she] had a magic wand,” she would create “as many mental health and substance treatment places as we have Starbucks … Let’s normalize it.” She acknowledged the pervasiveness of mental health problems everywhere. “Even for those with a roof over their head and three meals a day, it’s hard to take care of their mental illness. Imagine if you’re doing that when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep and you don’t know if you can pay the copay for your medication. It’s really hard stuff.”
Contrary to what many expect, people’s ability to identify the importance of earning—of working for what they need and want—does not just disintegrate when you give them a home where they can build a life. In my conversation with Jessica, I bring up work-first ideas—widely considered a counterpoint to housing-first. I am surprised when she, herself a client and benefactor of housing-first, agrees wholeheartedly with the idea that people should work first before they can obtain basic necessities like shelter. She repeatedly brings up the necessity for someone in her position to take the initiative, do the work, and pull oneself forward. “To not would be insanity,” she adds unequivocally. “I don’t think anyone should get handed [anything] for free.” People should get a “hand up but not a hand out.”
Jessica’s case reveals that housing-first doesn’t absolve its beneficiaries of responsibility or the need to earn a living. On the contrary, having a house is what enabled Jessica to start taking control of her life. She mentions that she’s started to utilize welfare and childcare programs, and that she looks forward to continuing to take advantage of opportunities that avail themselves to her. She’s stayed sober, and started being a responsible parent—all of which she attributes to “having a stable place.”
It seems inconceivable that HPP has nothing to do with Jessica’s turnaround, given her transition from being a woman whose only idea of how to get by was to “sell some drugs, do some drugs,” to being a sober, responsible parent. Jessica dreams of one day playing the clarinet for her child, supporting her family just by herself, and maybe even helping pay for her mother’s bone cancer treatment. When I ask her if she’s optimistic about reaching these goals, she responds quickly, “yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m going to complete this program because there’s no other option … Normal life isn’t hard, you know. It’s simple.”
At points, our conversation seems like a recollection of the string of horrible events that threw Jessica’s life off track: the ways in which someone or something had failed her or she had failed herself. So, what strikes me most about our conversation is the unfailing positivity she projects. As we talk casually about the weather, Jessica remarks that I look a lot like her brother. He’s been on her mind a lot; just recently, at a party, he walked into a room alone and hung himself with his shoelaces. She shares her brother’s suicide as she does every other part of her story: it might be sad, but it’s in the past.
Jessica doesn’t take for granted the “hand ups” she’s been offered; there is no doubt in her mind that a home and a happy, healthy life must be earned. That conviction did not evaporate once she discovered support systems like HPP. In fact, that very discovery enabled her to change her perspective and gather momentum toward a new kind of life. She became a client at HPP and found a bedrock on which she can build that life. “Every day, I can go home and …” Jessica trails off and then meets my eyes. “And go home,” she says, before letting her eyes drift to the floor once more.