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I’m Nicholas Kristof. I’m a columnist for The New York Times. I went to Texas recently to visit two cities, Houston and Dallas. They’re both these big Democratic cities that had enormous problems with homelessness and both tried quite earnestly to address the problem. In Dallas, the problem got worse. It now has the largest number of unhoused people in all of Texas, while in Houston, they managed to reduce homelessness by more than 60 percent since 2011.
So, many American cities are like Dallas. And meanwhile, Houston is this shining model of hope. So I wanted to see what we could learn from Houston to help apply those lessons to the rest of the country.
One of Houston’s successes has been its outreach program. And so I followed a young woman, Molly Permenter —
- molly permenter
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And I am systems outreach as well with —
— who works with the Coalition for the Homeless. And I followed along with her as she went off to try to get some people housed.
- molly permenter
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We’re on the feeder road. We’re near what’s called 1960.
We drove to a little wooded area right underneath the Houston airport, so there were jets buzzing along overhead.
- molly permenter
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There’s a lot of encampments out here. Since this is going to be outside of the city, there’s more, like, forested areas.
But inside this little forest, there turned out to be a whole bunch of people who were homeless. The encampment was a quite amazing little set of structures in the woods.
- joe cavazos
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A two-story structure, actually, a two-story. You got the stairs right there. It goes upstairs.
The unofficial leader of this homeless encampment is a guy called Joe Cavazos —
- nicholas kristof
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Hey, Joe.
— a 31-year-old guy, a former construction worker. Joe had been housed and living a perfectly fine life. And then a shard of glass fell and slashed open his arm and badly injured him.
- joe cavazos
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It cut my main artery and every tendon in my arm, so I bled out. When they brought me back, I was like, man. I don’t feel the same. I can’t move my hand. I can’t use it.
- nicholas kristof
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So essentially, you became homeless because of the accident, and then you can no longer work.
- joe cavazos
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Yeah.
- nicholas kristof
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And then you didn’t have an income.
- joe cavazos
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Exactly. So no income. And I’m sorry, man, you got to get out of your house. So —
- nicholas kristof
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You got evicted.
- joe cavazos
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Yeah. So after that, depressed. And then I started losing everything little by little. Everything I gained, I lost real quick.
- molly permenter
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Did you want to do a housing assessment and kind of just work on that?
- joe cavazos
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Yeah, that too.
- molly permenter
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OK, cool. Well, we can do that. And I know that I was speaking to him —
One element of Houston’s success is that all the nonprofits share a common intake system, including the Coalition for the Homeless.
- molly permenter
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All right. I’ll make this quick and painless. Okie dokie. So I’m going to ask you a series of questions. Just be completely transparent, all right? I know it’s weird —
And so Molly pulled out a tablet and began asking Joe questions to enter him into this database.
- molly permenter
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Do you have, like, an emergency contact? Do you have anybody?
- joe cavazos
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No.
- molly permenter
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No? Can we use me?
- joe cavazos
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Yeah.
- molly permenter
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OK.
Molly’s questions might seem a little obvious, but they aren’t getting asked as often as you might think. People just slip through the cracks. In Portland, Oregon, there was a survey that found that 2/3 of unsheltered people had never even been approached by an outreach worker offering steps to get housed.
- molly permenter
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And are you currently applying for disability? I thought you were, right?
- joe cavazos
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Yeah.
- molly permenter
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OK.
- joe cavazos
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Trying to.
People who are homeless face all kinds of challenges we often don’t even think about. And one of those, in the case of Joe, was that he didn’t have an ID. And you can’t get benefits if you don’t have an ID. So Molly very quickly began to work on getting him a government ID.
- molly permenter
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— required documents. They need an ID. They need a Social Security card in order to get into housing, a birth certificate —
And to get that ID, she was planning to enlist the help of the police.
- molly permenter
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So we gather all his documents. We put him on the wait list.
There’s always a lot of tension between police officers and folks who are homeless. And that’s partly because police are often arresting these folks or maybe pushing them out of encampments. But Houston managed really very effectively to integrate police into the solution, partly because homeless people sometimes have arrest records, and so their fingerprints can prove their identities.
- molly permenter
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And they’re amazing. They’ve already got a history with a lot of people on the streets.
And so Houston has empowered the police to help give IDs to folks who don’t have them.
- nicholas kristof
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So Molly, would you expect — I mean, obviously, it’s hard to predict. But would you expect that within six months Joe will probably be in housing?
- molly permenter
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Oh, yeah, we can’t — I can’t make that —
- joe cavazos
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That’s temporary, man. Don’t put a time. Don’t put a date on it, bro. Do not do that. Just do your best. Just do your best.
As I watched Molly interview Joe, what struck me was how effective the outreach was and how that approach was coordinated across agencies.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that Houston has an advantage over a lot of other cities in addressing homelessness.
The aspect of homelessness that I think a lot of people don’t really acknowledge is that it’s basically about a lack of housing units and the difficulty in building cheap housing. Houston has essentially no zoning. The upshot is that you can build a home in Houston for $200,000. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, housing units for people who were homeless were costing more than $800,000.
So you know, I’ve got to say, I was driving through Houston and seeing this urban sprawl and thinking, oh, boy, they need zoning. But the other side of the coin is that because they don’t have it, they can move people off the street into really cheap apartments. And there’s a difficult, painful trade-off that I think liberals like myself need to face squarely.
When I report on homelessness, I’m used to feeling kind of depressed. It feels like this vast problem that keeps getting worse. And Houston cheered me up. What I see in Houston is real progress. And it’s striking that Dallas has learned from that progress and is now emulating the Houston model and is seeing progress in its own right. And I think the lesson is that it’s hard, it’s imperfect, but we can do better.