https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/homeless-tent-housing-fight-17301118.php

>The Houston area started systematically closing camps by offering those living there permanent housing — then clearing the site, usually with fencing to prevent the camp from reforming — in early 2021, as the city and county bookmarked tens of thousands of COVID-related funding sent down from Congress to address homelessness.
>
>But when the rental market began to boom as social distancing mandates thawed, fewer landlords opted to participate in the program, choosing instead to rent to the market. The pace at which the city, county and their partners could move people out of camps slowed.

You will not fix homelessness so long as housing is a commodity first and a human right second.

>“It was my first time in the hospital for a while!” he said. “And they were nice. When you’re stabbed, they’re nice to you. When you OD, they’re like — let him die.”

Healthcare workers should have better a better understanding of substance use and its intersections with systems of oppression. Attitudes like this betray an ignorance that instead thinks of substance use as a purely personal failing.

#homelessness #healthcare #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle #MentalHealth

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/houston-closes-homeless-encampment-minute-maid-17762851.php

>The camp near Minute Maid was actually the reason the navigation center existed in the first place. In 2019, the city, county and partner organizations tried to close it by offering those living there housing. But instead of moving everyone out at the same time – there was no way to line up that many empty apartments at once – they moved people out as units became available. After six months, they’d moved more than 100 people into housing, but the camp showed little sign of diminishing. Word of what they were doing had gotten out, and new people were moving in.
>
>That’s why the city, county and their partners decided to create a navigation center, a place where people moved out of an encampment can live, along with pets and loved ones, while they await their permanent housing. (San Francisco pioneered this idea in 2019.) Housing an entire camp at once would drastically cut down the time it took to “decommission” a camp, which they hoped would prevent the process from attracting new people. During the pandemic, hotels emptied out as people sheltered in place, and the Coalition leased one to use as a pilot navigation center.

This has liberalism written all over it. "Our housing-first approach is too effective! We need to hide what we're doing!" No surprise the idea came from San Francisco.

>He was particularly worried about sleeping arrangements. He’d heard there were four beds in a room. It reminded him of prison, or of shelters with so many rules that they had felt, to him, like prison.

The similarity is intentional and inescapable.

>She lived across the street, in a cluster of trees known as the Grove. She liked it there because it was quieter. But the grove was not part of the area authorities were closing down, so she wasn’t approved to move to the navigation center. Lindley intended to come back every day to visit her.

Just. Build. Houses. For fuck's sake.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Frustration-mounts-over-Houston-rules-on-sitting-16925040.php

>Working on the issues
>
>After complaints and a community meeting hosted by the Beacon late last year, the Beacon partnered with Christ Church Cathedral and the Episcopal Diocese to hire two more full-time security guards (the three groups annually spend $400,000 in safety and security efforts around the Beacon), and the Downtown Management District moved an array of cameras to the nonprofit’s grounds. The Downtown Management District works with the Beacon to pressure wash the sidewalks outside the nonprofit daily, a routine that forces people to move out of the way.

That's not "working on the issues." That's intentionally making someone's life miserable in an effort to get them to move along.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/whitmire-homelessness-plan-end-street-homelessness-19932177.php

>Houston's homelessness strategy, hailed as a success story by other cities, is changing. Here's how.
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>"In Mayor Whitmire's first term, Houston can be the first major city to end street homelessness," it read. The word "can" was crossed out and replaced with the word "will," in italics.
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>He had gathered with city officials, law enforcement officers and nonprofit leaders to outline his plan for how to do so.
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>The press conference was simultaneously a lofty vision statement, a fundraising pitch and a call for legislative changes that could create sustainable sources of funding and make it easier to commit people with mental illnesses who are living on the street.

Translation: housing the homeless is expensive and not profitable. Incarcerating them, either in jail or in involuntary mental institutions, is profitable. So that's what we'll be doing.

>Whitmire twice characterized the plan as involving both compassion and enforcement for individuals who may resist housing, citing a recent Supreme Court decision ruling. The nation's highest court ruled that homeless people can be fined and arrested for sleeping in public, even if there isn't a shelter where they could sleep instead.

The idea that there's an epidemic of homeless people resisting housing is absurd. They're resisting disingenuous efforts that would rather see them disappeared than helped. Also, that SCOTUS ruling will one day be as reviled as Dred Scott.

>Houston has for years been viewed as a rare success story in the face of growing homeless populations across the country — since 2011, it has cut its annual count of people sleeping in shelters or on the street or in other places not meant for human habitation by more than two thirds. (The count does not include people who lack a home but are staying with friends or in hotels.)
>
>But even as officials from other major cities around the nation have made pilgrimages to Houston in the hopes of finding a solution to their soaring homeless populations, many Houstonians have felt frustration with the number of people they see on the streets.

It's capitalism, you dummies. Or at least, it's treating housing as a commodity first and a human right second. You can't have both. No amount of funding or non-profits or NGO help will ever address the root cause of this problem.

>"I'm here to declare today, you help the homeless by getting them off the street and reclaiming our public spaces," Whitmire said.

You help them by housing them.

>The declaration marked a departure from the strategy taken by the city and its partners for over a decade, which focused limited funds on permanent housing, coupled with caseworkers. Mike Nichols, the city's director of housing and community development, estimated that it cost $23,000 a year to provide such housing, compared with $35,000 a year for each spot provided by the city's navigation center, a place where people stay between when their encampment is shut down and they secure housing.

So... you're stopping what works, because it's working too well and the capitalists want to get back to business as usual.

>Houston's homelessness strategy has long depended on influxes of federal disaster funding, such as the funds unleashed by Hurricane Harvey and the pandemic.
>
>Now that $150 million of COVID-related funding that had channeled into the region's homelessness response is winding down — at the same time that a budget crunch has caused the Houston Housing Authority to temporarily stop issuing vouchers used to pay for permanent supportive housing — the pace at which people can be moved off the street into housing has slowed.

I'm happy that they're noticing that you cannot spend your way out of homelessness. I'm unhappy that they don't recognize why: it's not a "lack of funding." It's not "not focusing on mental health." It is, fundamentally, that housing is a commodity rather than a human right. So long as that remains the case, homelessness will not be solved.

>Satterwhite spoke of people who may refuse housing because "they simply lack the awareness because they suffer from mental health."
>
>"We need some law changes to give us more tools," he said. Such a legislative change would be a significant change from current policy, which only allows individuals to be involuntarily committed if they are a risk to their own safety or that of others.
>
>Whitmire also said that legislative changes might be needed to create sustainable sources of funding. He pointed to the Harris County Flood Control District, a special purpose district created by the Texas Legislature, and the Harris Health System, created by a voter referendum. Both entities have taxing authority.
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>"Can we imagine maybe having a mental health/homeless (district)?" Whitmire asked.

So this is where the #anosognosia canard came from. And, as we know from the top of the thread, the #txlege gave cops expanded power to involuntarily detain people. It gave no funding to housing or mental health.

#homelessness #scotus #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/coalition-homeless-outreach-plan-covid-funds-end-19919325.php

>Early that year, Young gave slide presentations to the Houston Rotary Club and other groups with a picture of a cliff at the end, making it clear that, for the coalition’s continued success, it was in dire need of funding. By summer, the coalition calculated that unless it filled the $50 million-a-year budget hole, homelessness would spike by 60% by the end of 2026.

Capitalism. Capitalism. The problem is capitalism!

>At the same time the coalition was raising concerns, Mayor John Whitmire, who had campaigned on finding a site outside the public eye where people without homes could get connected with shelter and resources, was looking for a way to do so.
>
>He tapped Mike Nichols, who had retired from his position as chief executive of the coalition just weeks before, as his housing director.
>
>Nichols quickly began talks with Young and the Downtown Management District. This fall he also began discussing the issue with Larry Satterwhite, who had come to the mayor’s office from the Houston Police Department and was very familiar with how residents were repeatedly calling for help dealing with homelessness.

So Whitmire is representing the NIMBYs, and Nichols has decided to trade in his credibility with a housing-first approach to instead rub shoulders with the cops at HPD and sweep the camps out of sight.

>This has long been a holy grail of homelessness intervention: showing that helping people stay housed actually saves systems money, and getting those systems that benefit to chip in.
>
>For example, sometimes people are discharged after a surgery even though they don’t have a place to live. If the coalition and their partners could show that the cost of housing someone in that situation is less than the costs borne by the hospital or insurance system when the individual is repeatedly hospitalized, maybe there would be a world in which those systems would help pay for housing as preventative care.

Solving homelessness is not profitable. It will never be profitable. Housing must cease to be a commodity. Full stop.

>The ultimate goal is what Young called “equilibrium.” While it’s impossible to end homelessness, it is possible to make it rare and brief. Equilibrium, by her definition, would mean moving the people who fall into homelessness into housing at a pace such that no one stayed homeless or in a shelter for longer than 30 days.

"While it's impossible to end homelessness." Bollocks. You can ask former and current societies that already have done so what they did. (decommodify housing).

====================

I'm starting to get repetitive here, as I dig through a couple years worth of reporting from the Houston Chronicle on its city's successful housing-first approach that, it seems, has been winding down this year in favor of institutionalization and incarceration.

So... please. Just read this damn book already:

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-will-not-be-funded

#homelessness #houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle