Help the homeless
The whole Houston delegation must work on mental health and drug treatment services.
No law prevents Houstonians from being down on their luck and needing a place to go.
No law can stop folks in their Audis and Lexuses from driving past Midtown’s tent cities and wishing it would all go away.
Every city from Marathon to Manhattan has to deal with its own share of derelicts, panhandlers and the homeless. The vexing challenge at Houston’s City Hall is finding a humane and effective way to address this cohesive problem — given limited resources and the restraint of the law.
Mayor Sylvester Turner Thursday released a multi-part plan that combines new housing and shelters with city initiatives to end camping and discourage panhandling. Responsibility also falls on Houstonians to direct their efforts away from the individual giving that makes it easier to live on the streets and toward the structural charities that help people restart their lives. State and federal governments have to play a role in funding drug treatment and mental health services, too.
One of Turner’s more innovative ideas has the city exploring new, useful purposes for spaces under freeway overpasses. Houstonians should hope the urban design experts at Rice University and the University of Houston join that effort.
The mayor deserves commendation for addressing the problem head-on. But looking at the statistics, Houston has already done an admirable job bringing down numbers. Harris and Fort Bend counties saw the homeless population fall by 57 percent between 2011 and 2016. The count currently sits at around 3,600, Turner told the editorial board in a meeting this week.
The problem now is one of perception. Even if Houston is objectively better, City Council is hearing that homelessness is a growing problem. Maybe it stems from gentrifying neighborhoods that build upper-class townhomes in lowincome areas.
Maybe folks have been pushed out of city parks and into more conspicuous locations. Like squeezing a balloon, problems tackled in one place have a way of poking out somewhere else.
Maybe big-hearted Houstonians, willing to give a few bucks, inadvertently attract panhandlers to street corners. Marc Eichenbaum, special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives, told the editorial board that plenty of panhandlers aren’t actually homeless. The charitable nature of our Gulf Coast city can simply be incentive enough to stand out in public and pass the hat.
The long-term challenge is keeping up this focus after constituents stop writing angry letters and downtown commuters stop complaining about eyesores. Our city is filled with people who live one missed paycheck, or a car accident, or a medical emergency away from being homeless. Harris County jails remain our largest de facto mental health hospital. Drug treatment services are lacking, especially after Riverside Hospital ended its program in 2014.
Instead of getting support from other governmental partners, however, Houston has had to deal with a Texas Legislature that refuses to expand Medicaid coverage and a Congress that now threatens to end the mental-health parity that Obamacare imposed on insurance companies.
Mayor Turner threads a narrow path by refusing to simply point to the successful drop in homeless numbers and call it a day, or just tell the Houston Police Department to scatter the camps. He’s taken on a big challenge. The average Houstonian might be tempted to declare mission accomplished once things are out of sight, out of mind. But that’s just the beginning of a solution, one that will require focus and deserves support from the entire Houston delegation.