U.S. Mayors Take The Heat For Homelessness — Survey

a lush green park with mature trees and the ground underneath overrun with multicoloured tents of the homeless
Homelessness is a local problem with few locally affordable solutions. Clear them out? Let them stay? Give them portable toilets? Resources and finance often allow little more.

Researchers at the Boston University Initiative on Cities have been interviewing U.S. mayors annually since 2014. This isn’t your standard on-line survey. The team actually speaks to mayors. Although the responses are published, the sources are not named. The assurance of confidentiality means a more candid response than when mayors stand in front of a forest of microphones and cameras.

The report that comes from the interviews is all the more interesting for this reason. It is also interesting because the research team picks themes to report on, so each year has a different flavour. The most recent one is about homelessness and therefore of particular interest to affordablehousingaction.org and its readers.

At a high level, the mayors report that their constituents expect them to do something about homelessness. The mayors also say the situation is not improving.

How would a mayor know if the situation was improving? Getting people into housing would be a good sign. So would homelessness numbers going down. In the interviews, only 40% describe success as reducing homelessness. The majority aren’t keeping track of whether their numbers are going in the right direction.

Digging deeper into the interviews reveals some of the difficulties mayors are dealing with. They include:

  • no dedicated staff for an issue that takes a lot of time and attention,
  • limited data about the issue, and
  • poor linkages with the agencies responsible for coordinating a homelessness response in their city.

It’s not all doom and gloom. More than 25% of mayors report that people with experience of homelessness have a lot of influence in shaping local homelessness policy. It would be interesting to know more about how this happened.

This barely scratches the surface of the interviews and the analysis. The full report is available at Boston University: Mayors and America’s Homelessness Crisis