Innovation around houselessness fails so much(civicsource.info)
civicsource.info
Innovation around houselessness fails so much
https://www.civicsource.info/p/why-innovation-around-houselessness
24 comments
While I agree that's a big part of the problem that needs to be solved. I don't think any one thing is going to tackle such a complex multi-faceted issue. For example the book Evicted by Matthew Desmond was a good read and told the story of some families on the edge of homelessness, facing eviction due to various reasons such as drug addiction, low income, etc. These problems won't go away with addressing housing regulations, although more affordable housing availability could certainly help.
Can someone explain to me why "houselessness" is a term? Doesn't it refer to the same thing as "homelessness"?
George Carlin made som great observations around this.
"Here’s an example. There’s a condition in combat that occurs when a soldier is completely stressed out and is on the verge of a nervous collapse. In World War I it was called 'shell shock.' Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables. Shell shock. It almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was more than eighty years ago.
"Then a generation passed, and in World War II the same combat condition was called 'battle fatigue.' Four syllables now; takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. 'Fatigue' is a nicer word than 'shock.' Shell shock! Battle fatigue.
"By the early 1950s, the Korean War had come along, and the very same condition was being called 'operational exhaustion.' The phrase was up to eight syllables now, and any last traces of humanity had been completely squeezed out of it. It was absolutely sterile: operational exhaustion. Like something that might happen to your car.
"Then, barely fifteen years later, we got into Vietnam, and, thanks to the deceptions surrounding that war, it’s no surprise that the very same condition was referred to as 'post-traumatic stress disorder.' Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen, and the pain is completely buried under jargon: post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet if they had still been calling it 'shell shock,' some of those Vietnam veterans might have received the attention they needed."
He called it softening of language. You can read more here: https://www.thoughtco.com/soft-language-euphemism-1692111
"Here’s an example. There’s a condition in combat that occurs when a soldier is completely stressed out and is on the verge of a nervous collapse. In World War I it was called 'shell shock.' Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables. Shell shock. It almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was more than eighty years ago.
"Then a generation passed, and in World War II the same combat condition was called 'battle fatigue.' Four syllables now; takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. 'Fatigue' is a nicer word than 'shock.' Shell shock! Battle fatigue.
"By the early 1950s, the Korean War had come along, and the very same condition was being called 'operational exhaustion.' The phrase was up to eight syllables now, and any last traces of humanity had been completely squeezed out of it. It was absolutely sterile: operational exhaustion. Like something that might happen to your car.
"Then, barely fifteen years later, we got into Vietnam, and, thanks to the deceptions surrounding that war, it’s no surprise that the very same condition was referred to as 'post-traumatic stress disorder.' Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen, and the pain is completely buried under jargon: post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet if they had still been calling it 'shell shock,' some of those Vietnam veterans might have received the attention they needed."
He called it softening of language. You can read more here: https://www.thoughtco.com/soft-language-euphemism-1692111
Once upon a time the "houseless" were called "vagrants" [1]. Due to the associative nature of human pattern recognition, the word "vagrant" acquired a connotation reminiscent of unpleasant experiences involving its referent.
To insulate their communication from this evocative power of language, activists steered institutions toward a new word ("homeless") and the general public eventually followed suit. But word choice does not change the underlying phenomenon, and so "homeless" was fated to acquire the same nasty connotation as its predecessor, and is now getting replaced again.
Note that the literal nature of "homeless/houseless" actually broadens the category, which is kind of cruel to people who are more functional and only temporarily homeless.
[1] And before that, "bums", "indigents" etc.
To insulate their communication from this evocative power of language, activists steered institutions toward a new word ("homeless") and the general public eventually followed suit. But word choice does not change the underlying phenomenon, and so "homeless" was fated to acquire the same nasty connotation as its predecessor, and is now getting replaced again.
Note that the literal nature of "homeless/houseless" actually broadens the category, which is kind of cruel to people who are more functional and only temporarily homeless.
[1] And before that, "bums", "indigents" etc.
This is called the Euphemism treadmill http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/0...
There’s a revolving door of language where people who should have better things to do insist that terms referring to sensitive groups be renamed every few decades because the old term became immoral.
Occasionally there’s good reason for it but usually it’s a strong signal that the people talking about it have a weak sense of solving the problem and a strong one of projecting the image of solving it.
Occasionally there’s good reason for it but usually it’s a strong signal that the people talking about it have a weak sense of solving the problem and a strong one of projecting the image of solving it.
> strong one of projecting the image of solving it.
That would be just good business sense, if you know that failing to get your grant application to the top of the pile is going to mean spending a lot more time on LinkedIn.
That would be just good business sense, if you know that failing to get your grant application to the top of the pile is going to mean spending a lot more time on LinkedIn.
I believe this is an example of what Wesley Yang refers to as moral entrepreneurism. By inventing ever more sensitive and politically correct language these “moral entrepreneurs” create a moral heirarchy where none existed and they are more virtuous than those who do not use the updated terms.
I honestly would not know, though at least in the U.S., "home" has an emotional and cultural context that "house" does not (e.g. the saying/song lyrics "home is where the heart is" or more objectively, a landlord owns many houses but has 1-2 homes).
There is also a push to refer to people without a place to live as "unhoused" for some of the same reasons. You can have spaces, places, communities that feel like "home" and still not have a safe, consistent, reliable place to eat, sleep and keep up your hygiene.
IMHO there is also the issue of who is accountable. Home is personal so homelessness might be seen as a personal challenge. Whereas house describes a structure and asset so houselessness might denote both the individual plight and the greater socioeconomic and political forces at work.
At the end of the day, I suppose those most affected or most dedicated to addressing the issue should use whatever term fits.
There is also a push to refer to people without a place to live as "unhoused" for some of the same reasons. You can have spaces, places, communities that feel like "home" and still not have a safe, consistent, reliable place to eat, sleep and keep up your hygiene.
IMHO there is also the issue of who is accountable. Home is personal so homelessness might be seen as a personal challenge. Whereas house describes a structure and asset so houselessness might denote both the individual plight and the greater socioeconomic and political forces at work.
At the end of the day, I suppose those most affected or most dedicated to addressing the issue should use whatever term fits.
Likely an example of the Euphemism Treadmill http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/0...
Feelings probably. Because so many people have three or more homes now while so many more will never be able to own even one let alone afford rising rents. So they feel bad for the moment and make up words so they can feel better and probably superior.
Pedantically: The people who live on the street need to be ‘housed’ not ‘homed.’
Cynically: By focusing on housing, people can build some housing, scoot the mentally ill and addicted under a little roof, and call it a day.
Pragmatically: The novelty causes you to think about homelessness longer than you normally would.
Anecdotally: A guy in LA built some “tiny homes” for the homeless but he built them on a lot that wasn’t zoned for a bunch of individual dwellings. The city soon evicted them but for a while the homeless residents were not houseless.
Cynically: By focusing on housing, people can build some housing, scoot the mentally ill and addicted under a little roof, and call it a day.
Pragmatically: The novelty causes you to think about homelessness longer than you normally would.
Anecdotally: A guy in LA built some “tiny homes” for the homeless but he built them on a lot that wasn’t zoned for a bunch of individual dwellings. The city soon evicted them but for a while the homeless residents were not houseless.
Everybody who points out for example @IanDrake, @aaron695 that this might have to do with drug addiction or even metal illness is immediately downvoted and shouted down into oblivion.
I'm sorry, these are valid points of view - if you disagree, fine, but have a dialog or something. There's a lot more than just "zoning rules don't allow us to make enough new houses" and if you're going to say anything at all, you need to address that - not just strut around virtue signaling.
I'm sorry, these are valid points of view - if you disagree, fine, but have a dialog or something. There's a lot more than just "zoning rules don't allow us to make enough new houses" and if you're going to say anything at all, you need to address that - not just strut around virtue signaling.
Drug addiction and mental illness are endemic aspects of the problem, but not definitive. Often enough, the problem is just badly designed society. Drug addiction treatment, mental illness treatment, unemployment help, general medical help are all needed both to get people able to maintain, and to keep others from falling out of place. Mental illness and addiction are not moral failings. Treating them as such has been reliably demonstrated to make things worse. Treating them as illnesses has likewise been demonstrated to produce better results. But the US has long had a terrible problem with letting people have medical treatment they need.
I concur with all of this. And well said. What I was reacting to was two other commenters saying something similar and getting silenced for it. Not disagreed with or challenged or anything, just squashed.
> badly designed society
This the only nit I'd have with what you said. I'd say that it's a flaw in society perhaps, but I don't thing our society is designed by anyone or thing, and I don't know how it could ever be, nor maybe should ever be. In a free society, it evolves. And while some forces are trying to re-design, re-engineer, and steer parts of it, there are millions of other forces semi-aligned or opposed and pushing in all sorts of different directions. That makes the outcomes develop in a chaotic and unpredictable ways. And certainly flawed, but also on the whole, not terrible.
So overly simple pat "answers" like "fix the zoning => affordable houses => no more homeless" or "tiny homes" or "use a new term to destigmatize..." are of course going to get nowhere. We have to recognize all the flaws and problems and push just in the right way to nudge that society of millions in some direction that will hopefully just slightly improve things without backfiring. Wide eyed idealism is not going to help at all, and it's actively harmful when pursued with zealotry to shut down honest communication about those flaws. Like mental health and substance abuse.
> badly designed society
This the only nit I'd have with what you said. I'd say that it's a flaw in society perhaps, but I don't thing our society is designed by anyone or thing, and I don't know how it could ever be, nor maybe should ever be. In a free society, it evolves. And while some forces are trying to re-design, re-engineer, and steer parts of it, there are millions of other forces semi-aligned or opposed and pushing in all sorts of different directions. That makes the outcomes develop in a chaotic and unpredictable ways. And certainly flawed, but also on the whole, not terrible.
So overly simple pat "answers" like "fix the zoning => affordable houses => no more homeless" or "tiny homes" or "use a new term to destigmatize..." are of course going to get nowhere. We have to recognize all the flaws and problems and push just in the right way to nudge that society of millions in some direction that will hopefully just slightly improve things without backfiring. Wide eyed idealism is not going to help at all, and it's actively harmful when pursued with zealotry to shut down honest communication about those flaws. Like mental health and substance abuse.
Some people have what they would describe a home (e.g. a tent in an encampment that they've made their own and lived in sometimes for years), but not a house (a structure with four walls and a roof built to code).
Defining someone by saying they live without a home is pejorative.
Defining someone by saying they live without a home is pejorative.
It's more politically correct? There has been a push to make some terms more politically correct, such as instead of homeless, to unhoused; illegal immigrant to undocumented, etc.
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You can get a good grasp of the size and complexity of HMIS data by perusing the HUD's HMIS Data Dictionary [0]. It shows the business objects and their fields, allowing you to get a rough ERD-like idea of how the HUD views HMIS data. Many HMIS systems, from what I've heard and seen (I've only done a little work in the space), don't use this as a data model internally though or if they do it's not exposed that way through their APIs if they even have APIs that they're willing to let you use. Presumably though, they must have to report it that way to the HUD for funding.
I agree, it would be great to have a fresh, pragmatic take on this data, and I'll be reading more about that Built for Zero framework.
One Center of Care (CoC) I talked to talked about their old HMIS system from a private company who charged something like $70K/yr (iirc) to keep using their software. That seemed excessive to me, but they didn't seem to mind too much. Migrating off would have been extremely difficult anyway. Their bigger stated need was the ability to easily send data from their system to other CoC systems in the area as the people they were helping moved around or were transferred to more relevant services. Each time those people encountered another CoC, basically the intake process would have to be started over again at the new location, which was a drain on both the receivers and givers of services.
We tried a couple attempts at making a sort of hub for pulling and pushing data to the various systems, but only one entry system company was very supportive, while we had to tread carefully around some of the HMIS system makers who seemed very protective and unwilling to expose or share their APIs if they had any. One big challenge was finding a single unique identifier for each person across systems, which is why a local by-name list like the article mentions is very intriguing.
[0] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/FY-2022-H...
I agree, it would be great to have a fresh, pragmatic take on this data, and I'll be reading more about that Built for Zero framework.
One Center of Care (CoC) I talked to talked about their old HMIS system from a private company who charged something like $70K/yr (iirc) to keep using their software. That seemed excessive to me, but they didn't seem to mind too much. Migrating off would have been extremely difficult anyway. Their bigger stated need was the ability to easily send data from their system to other CoC systems in the area as the people they were helping moved around or were transferred to more relevant services. Each time those people encountered another CoC, basically the intake process would have to be started over again at the new location, which was a drain on both the receivers and givers of services.
We tried a couple attempts at making a sort of hub for pulling and pushing data to the various systems, but only one entry system company was very supportive, while we had to tread carefully around some of the HMIS system makers who seemed very protective and unwilling to expose or share their APIs if they had any. One big challenge was finding a single unique identifier for each person across systems, which is why a local by-name list like the article mentions is very intriguing.
[0] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/FY-2022-H...
I am going to overly simplify the problem to prove a point.
The worker doesn't want to share his job.
The saver doesn't want to share his savings. (primarily the rich)
The tax payer doesn't want to share his income.
The land owner doesn't want to share his land.
I don't think this is an exhaustive list but it is a starting point to understand why our markets don't appear to behave like the theory predicts. By that I mean that a market should obviously allocate jobs, savings and land to those who need them most the same way a market allocates products and services to those who need them most. Okay, I have lied, over the long term, revolutions tend to revert the allocation of these things back to how people perceive they should be allocated. One should now wonder why violence is necessary and what it is trying to overcome.
Marx would argue that private property is the root of all evil but I'm not 100% convinced. Democracy still involves centralized control by authorities. It's not much better than a authoritarian government in practice. The bigger difference is that politicians constantly enter and leave their positions of power. That simply doesn't happen fast enough in our economy, we have to wait for the wealthy and powerful to die and revolutions may just be an ugly way of accelerating deaths that are useful to society by people who don't have decades to spare. One could argue that power and wealth cannot die, so we must kill the bearer instead.
The worker doesn't want to share his job.
The saver doesn't want to share his savings. (primarily the rich)
The tax payer doesn't want to share his income.
The land owner doesn't want to share his land.
I don't think this is an exhaustive list but it is a starting point to understand why our markets don't appear to behave like the theory predicts. By that I mean that a market should obviously allocate jobs, savings and land to those who need them most the same way a market allocates products and services to those who need them most. Okay, I have lied, over the long term, revolutions tend to revert the allocation of these things back to how people perceive they should be allocated. One should now wonder why violence is necessary and what it is trying to overcome.
Marx would argue that private property is the root of all evil but I'm not 100% convinced. Democracy still involves centralized control by authorities. It's not much better than a authoritarian government in practice. The bigger difference is that politicians constantly enter and leave their positions of power. That simply doesn't happen fast enough in our economy, we have to wait for the wealthy and powerful to die and revolutions may just be an ugly way of accelerating deaths that are useful to society by people who don't have decades to spare. One could argue that power and wealth cannot die, so we must kill the bearer instead.
This argument would make sense if people voted according to their interests, but they don't. For example, San Francisco renters overwhelmingly vote against the development of new housing that would help with housing costs. Black voters overwhelmingly supported Bill Clinton for president, and he signed the 1994 crime bill into law which was the worse thing to happen to black Americans since slavery, decimating black communities and ruining lives. There's countless other examples as well.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing
This is "looking for lost keys under the street light, not where the keys were lost."