THREE THINGS THAT MUST CHANGE TO TRULY ADDRESS HOMELESSNESS
The nonprofit Lucky Duck Foundation’s call last month for the city of San Diego to put up two tent shelters at Inspiration Point in Balboa Park — that could house about 500 homeless people, mostly seniors and youth — reflects a larger public debate: Should we focus on helping the people suffering on our streets today or invest in longer-term systemic solutions as the homelessness crisis continues to grow?
Even that difficult question misses the biggest point: Solving homelessness here requires that we all do our part.
We cannot solve this crisis while we make it someone else’s problem. What does that mean in practice? Three things:
First, we need to move beyond blaming homelessness on “drugs and mental health” and saying things like, “They don’t want help.” These are stories we tell ourselves to explain away the suffering we see. If we dehumanize people experiencing homelessness, we absolve ourselves of the need to help them. But those views, while understandable, are based on anecdotal observations, not data.
In “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” scholar Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate why homelessness is caused by a shortage of housing, not individual failings. They found that many places with high drug usage problems (e.g., West Virginia and Arkansas) or high rates of severe mental illness (e.g., Kansas, Wyoming and Arizona) have relatively low rates of homelessness. As important as these issues are, they do not cause, or correlate with, homelessness.
Homelessness is rampant in areas like the West Coast and the Northeast with their high rent, limited available housing and constraints on growth. In San Diego, for every 10 people moved off the streets last year, 13 more became homeless for the first time. That’s caused not by individuals making bad decisions but by economic factors beyond any one person’s control.
Second, we all tend to support more housing, so long as it’s in someone else’s neighborhood. That mentality must change. Some people contend that more housing will “change the character” of their neighborhood, seemingly ignoring how much the character of San Diego is changing with increasing thousands living unhoused.
Third, just as every part of San Diego must shoulder its share of responsibility, each of us must do our part — to donate, volunteer or provide clean water or food to people in need. Or to focus on the longer-term supply issues by petitioning our elected officials to eliminate as many regulatory barriers to housing construction as possible.
If this still sounds too abstract or hard, at the Jewish
Community Foundation San Diego, we created the giv4 homelessness initiative as the simplest way to learn about and begin supporting local solutions to homelessness. One of San Diego’s largest philanthropic funders, the Jewish Community Foundation curated giv4 homelessness to support 12 vetted local nonprofits taking on different aspects of homelessness.
We brought together organizations that try to address immediate needs, prevent people on the verge of homelessness from losing their homes and bring about systemic change. Working to curate the fund with people who have lived experience in homelessness, the Lucky Duck Foundation (the proponents of the Inspiration Point shelter) and Funders Together to End Homelessness (which is focused on long-term solutions), we have demonstrated how an all-of-the-above approach can work to combat homelessness.
The giv4 nonprofits such as PATH (which provides a variety of local homelessness services including outreach to unhoused people along the San Diego River) greatly benefit from this collaborative approach to fundraising.
PATH officials have told us they appreciate the financial support but are even more grateful for the ability to work collectively as homelessness providers to help more donors and community members come together. They say focusing on homelessness as a cause rather than as individual organizations is having an impact.
Since launching in late 2021, giv4 homelessness has raised over $1.4 million on behalf of nonprofits that are trying to make a real difference. But giv4 homelessness serves a much deeper purpose: To help anyone interested understand the causes of homelessness and its solutions.
Through short videos, in-person site visits, volunteer opportunities and educational webinars, we are committed to elevating awareness and proactivity around homelessness. Donors receive the same access whether they contribute a few dollars a month or tens of thousands of dollars because our goals are both educational and philanthropic.
Visit giv4.org to see the educational resources of giv4 homelessness. And join us at a happy hour on Feb. 22 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Cafe Coyote in Old Town to meet representatives from all 12 nonprofits involved with our program.
The most important thing is just to start helping, however you can.
We have to be in this together.
We all tend to support more housing, in someone else’s neighborhood. That mentality must change.
Benn is director of philanthropy and social impact at the Jewish Community Foundation San Diego, and a board member of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness. He lives in Kensington. is president and CEO of the Jewish Community Foundation and lives in La Jolla.