Houston Cut Homelessness by 60%: How the U.S Can Follow

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Yes. Turning now to a problem that the United States and communities around the world have long struggled with, and that is homelessness. But according to our next guest, the City of Houston may have a solution. Nicholas Kristof is an opinion columnist for “The New York Times,” and for his latest piece, he visited Houston and Dallas to compare how both are addressing the issue, as he tells Hari Sreenivasan.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Nick Kristof, thanks so much for joining us. Nick, your recent reporting for “The New York Times,” an op-ed contribution, looked at homelessness. And what was interesting to me is most of the news around homelessness today is pretty hopeless. And I want to first start off with asking you why you chose to focus on these two cities in Texas.

NICK KRISTOF, OPINION COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, I’m on the West Coast and, you know, frankly, up and down the West Coast in the cities, it really does feel pretty despairing. And I’ve been told that Dallas and Houston were a great microcosm of what works and what doesn’t work. That, you know, Dallas and Houston are both blue cities. They both cared about homelessness. They both had homelessness problems, and both tried to address it quite seriously. And the upshot was that in Dallas, the problem got worse. And in Houston, they managed to reduce homelessness by more than 60 percent since 2011. And so, I thought, look, most of the country is Dallas, but Houston has figured out how to make progress. We should learn from it. So, I went to the two cities and tried to learn something.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Let’s look at the positive first. What was or what is Houston doing right to drop their homeless numbers so significantly?

KRISTOF: So, you know, there’s no secret sauce and Houston still has a homelessness problem, just they’ve done better than others, but it’s not perfect. But, you know, I think they did a few things really well. They had really strong political leadership. They have a strong mayor system, and that mayor use the — those powers to — maybe above all, to herd the nonprofits who are in this area, to herd them so they’re all pulling in the same direction so that they coordinate their efforts. You know, in a lot of cities, you know, different outreach organizations will reach one homeless person, you know, five times and won’t reach another at all. They — in Houston, they were very, very good about coordinating and about execution. They also did, I think, a — the backdrop is that in Houston, it’s cheap and easy to build housing. And so, you know, in Houston, you can build a one-bedroom apartment for, say, $200,000. You know, meanwhile, in San Francisco, it is cost, in some cases, more than a million dollars to provide a single housing unit for people or homeless. And I guess finally that — you know, in Houston, they really focused not just on general help for people who were on the streets, like giving out jackets or counseling, but above all, just relentlessly on moving people into housing and then on keeping them there.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we hear in — on “The Times” you walking around watching someone that’s on the streets get interviewed. What was — what worked in that compared to how different nonprofits are trying to do intake in different cities?

KRISTOF: So, in a lot of cities that intake process is not coordinated in contrast in Houston, there is a central database. So, all the nonprofits, there are about a hundred nonprofits in Houston that work with people who are homeless. So, they all work on a central database. A person is entered into the system. Everybody else knows that they are in there, what they have, what they need. And then, this intake process was just so much focus on the barriers to housing. So, for example, in this case one of the basic barriers was this gentleman, Joe Cavazos (ph). He did not have an I.D. And, you know, that is just so common among people. They don’t have their birth certificate. They don’t have a driver’s license. They can’t prove who they are. And so, even if he had been able to apply for a government I.D., there would have been no way to get it to him. There would have been no way to tell him that, you know where to pick it up. And so, Houston has set up a really good system to provide those government I.D.s so that people can be put on a track to housing. And so, that’s — you know, that’s kind of where it starts.

SREENIVASAN: And let’s juxtapose what’s happening in Houston from a city just a few hours’ drive away, in Dallas. What is Dallas emblematic of in how that city deals with homelessness compared to so many other cities in America?

KRISTOF: So, in Dallas, the traditional efforts were, you know, very uncoordinated. They were very well meaning and they did some things, you know, really well, but it wasn’t coordinated. It’s a weaker mayor system. It’s — execution just did not work. And I guess really what struck me was that while Dallas was full of compassion and full of good intentions, you know, good intentions are not enough. And it is about evidence-based policy, it’s about execution. In the early 2000s one city after another all around the country introduced 10-year plans to eliminate homelessness. And looking back, those 10-year plans to eliminate homelessness were really just symbolic. They really didn’t achieve anything. And I think around the country and in Dallas, there were a lot of those, you know, announcements, a lot of talk about how housing is a human right, but none of that actually got people into housing. There is a little bit of a postscript. The folks in Dallas, when I was asking about this, they were — you know, it was kind of a prickly conversation to be the contrast to Houston. But a few years ago, Dallas really just got fed up with the homelessness. They saw Houston’s success and they began to copy the Houston model. And so, as a result, now, the last two years, Dallas has made real progress against homelessness using that Houston model. Now, Dallas is really excited that they’ve turned the corner, that numbers of people who were homeless in Dallas are going down. And so, they’re — you know, they’re kind of excited that now they’ve got it right and are quite full of optimism. Houston, on the other hand, while it has been very successful, I think faces some real challenges. Houston has done this on the cheap, which is impressive that they haven’t spent the hundreds of millions of dollars that the West Coast cities have, but Houston has essentially used federal money, typically COVID money, and that is now running out. And so, the challenge will be, you know, will — you know, Houston has developed a model that works, but will it be willing to fund the model with its own money rather than just federal money coming in? And that is unclear. I think there is some real anxiety among Houston civic leaders about whether they can sustain the momentum when they’re forced to rely on their own resources.

SREENIVASAN: So, zoom out from these two cities for a little bit. How significant is the problem in the United States?

KRISTOF: So, it’s an — you know, it’s an enormous problem. On any given night about 580,000 people are homeless. And, you know, that’s on any one night, but the problem is much greater because people cycle in and out of homelessness. And, you know, they — for a while, they’re on somebody’s couch, then, you know, they’ve — they find a place and then they’re in the car and then they’re in a shelter and then they get a place. And it’s — we only tend to see the tip of the iceberg that is represented by people who are unsheltered and actually out on the street. There’s an enormous number of folks who are — and especially the kids, including those who go to school, who are, you know, doubled up on couches and neighbors plays who are in vehicles, this kind of thing. And I especially worry about the impact on kids, kids who are growing up in that situation. How can you concentrate in school when — you know, when you don’t have a home?

SREENIVASAN: So, what are some of the primary reasons that people slip into homelessness? I mean, is it, you know, medical debt? Is it a divorce? I mean, what kinds of reasons did you see when you were walking and talking with people who are adding homeless populations into Houston’s database on a daily basis?

KRISTOF: So, a financial crisis of some kind is very often what tips people who are vulnerable and fragile into homelessness. So, a health crisis, a medical crisis is very often a factor. And it’s not just the bills, but it may mean that somebody no longer has the ability to work. We have so many Americans around the country who are just living right on the edge, paycheck to paycheck. And, you know, the moment that paycheck doesn’t come in they’re in a crisis. They’re also an enormous number of folks who might be able to afford, you know, $700 a month, $800 a month for rent, but they have bad credit or they have an eviction history. And if you have an eviction history in the last seven years, it is very, very difficult to get anybody to rent to you. You know, likewise, if you have a felony conviction, very, very difficult. And so, all those are factors. But, again, I think there is a risk of focusing just on the population that is homeless and not on the structural factor of not enough housing. The metaphor that is often used as musical chairs, and if you have a game of musical chairs, and there is one seat too few, there is going to be somebody who lacks a chair. And in the same way, if we don’t have enough housing, there are going to be some people who — you know, who are out of housing. And in that scramble, it’s going to be people who are — is competent, least skilled, more disabled, and, you know, very often that is people with addictions, with alcoholism with various other issues, but the fundamental problem is not enough chairs or not enough housing.

SREENIVASAN: So, I understand that it’s less expensive to build a new structure in Houston, but how much does, for example, zoning factor into where people can get shelter?

KRISTOF: Zoning and more broadly kind of nimby issues, not in my backyard issues are, I think, a huge factor. And, you know, look, I’m a liberal and I believe in zoning. I’ve always believed in it. And when I was driving into Houston for this story, I saw this endless urban sprawl, and I’m feeling kind of smug that, you know, back in Oregon, we don’t have that kind of sprawl. But I mean, the uncomfortable truth is that that lack of zoning also makes it cheap and quick to build. And it’s one reason why the cost of housing is a lot cheaper in Houston than it is in Oregon or in California. And so, there are real tradeoffs there that I think my world of liberals has to wrestle with that, you know, we try to preserve neighborhood character, we try to preserve while spaces, and those are important goals, but the upshot of that and also is effectively that we often give a veto to communities over building new housing, and that raises housing costs. And when you have a higher housing costs, then you end up with people who are often homeless. We got rid of SRO housing around the country beginning in the 1960s, and that was intended as a way of improving neighborhoods. And in fact, one of the upshots was that we ended up with more people sleeping on sidewalks.

SREENIVASAN: When you said SROs, you mean single room occupancies, right?

KRISTOF: Yes. Hari, the — I mean, the paradox is that historically we had solutions to homelessness in the form of cheap housing. So, we had single residency occupancy, hotels and buildings, that were a little like a dorm. It’ be a — you know, a small room to sleep in and then a shared bathroom, maybe some kind of shared kitchen facility. And the only real advantage of those was that they were cheap and they weren’t great housing, but they were so much better than sleeping on the street. And then, because they had a reputation for being seedy, they were kind of zoned out of existence in city after city around the country, and, you know, we thought that we were improving neighborhoods to the upshot when people didn’t have access to those was that they often ended up on the street, and I think we have to provide something like those old traditional boarding houses, rooming houses the way we once did.

SREENIVASAN: So, when you think about that, not in my backyard tendency, and so many places around the country who want to shelter people and what can they learn from Houston or other places?

KRISTOF: So, I think that part of it, indeed, has to be to ease the housing shortage and make it easier to build. And there are a number of ways to do that. You know, one is simply that we — there are about 35 million unused bedrooms in America. And it used to be common in the United States to have, you know, a basement flat that one would rent out or occasionally to take in a border. There are a lot of four-and-five-bedroom homes reflecting a housing stock that served a much larger nuclear family structure that are, you know, hugely underused, those could be turned into rooming houses, which used to be very common and now, have pretty much vanished. And I think that also, you know, I’d love to see cities like Portland or San Francisco learn from Houston and have this kind of coordinated approach of nonprofits to support — to reach people. You know, in Portland, there actually was a survey of people who were homeless. And two-thirds had not been ever contacted by an outreach worker in ways that would lead to housing. And of the one-third who had been contacted, most had — there’d never been any follow up. You know, one thing that Houston has done with that outreach also is find – – is to ask people, you know, is there any relative who might be able to help you, to be in touch with you, to take you in, to provide support if you’re trying to get off of drugs, or is there any source of income? Are you a veteran who — is there any disability possibilities or any income stream you might be eligible for? And all these things, you know, at the margin, they help.

SREENIVASAN: So, what’s the most effective policy that research has found is doing the most to stop homelessness? I mean, is it as simple as just saying housing or sheltering people, or is there a difference or distinction between, say, homeless shelters and giving somebody an apartment, a set of keys so that medical services or other social services can show up at a centralized location? I mean, what’s working?

KRISTOF: So, I do think that fundamentally providing more housing, more cheap housing is the single biggest factor. There’s quite a bit of research that underscores that. And for example, West Virginia has an enormous problem with addiction, but West Virginia does not have a substantial homelessness problem because in West Virginia you can, you know, rent a small apartment for $500 or $600 a month. You know, try doing that in California. And so, I do think that providing more housing, lowering the costs that’s making it more accessible helps a great deal. I think we have to tackle this issue of people with bad credit or with eviction histories. One of the, you know, problems is that if you — if you’re facing $1,000 rent, you don’t just have to pay $1,000, you have to also pay, you know, a month security deposit, for example, you have to pay various fees. And so, there are a lot of folks who might be able to pay that monthly rent, but can’t afford all these fees to get them off the street. And then, you know, outreach work. Good outreach just makes such a difference in trying to help people make that move into housing.

SREENIVASAN: Nick Kristof of “The New York Times,” thanks so much for joining us.

KRISTOF: Good to be with you, Hari.