For cities world-wide considering their options for dealing with persistent homelessness, the article linked below offers some useful comparative insights. It describes the efforts in two medium-large cities in the American midwest to tackle their local homelessness problem.
One — Indianapolis, Indiana — is largely employing methods currently favoured by many cities, large and small, across North America. It may be charactarized as a ‘bubble-under-the-wallpaper’ approach, characterized by tent-encampment ‘sweeps.’ The process generally involves the destruction of whatever shelter the homeless have recently been able to manage, together with the wholesale theft of their belongings. Although this approach to homelessness may involve some form of municipal or charitable temporary shelter, it is effectively a homelessness ‘solution’ without the cost and inconvenience of finding homes for the people who are homeless.
By contrast, Milwaukee, Wisconsin is attempting to implement a more challenging ‘Housing First’ approach — an international success story (pioneered in Finland) that depends on the trigger of housing itself — admittedly a more difficult and at least initially more expensive and time consuming to implement — to begin the process of permanently returning a homeless person to ‘housed’ life.
How are the two cities doing? Read more in the IndyStar: Indianapolis’ plan to reduce homelessness misses the mark
