The White House announced today that it would end homelessness by 2020, mostly by increasing funding for more affordable and supportive housing. It would also couple employment and health-care help with the effort.
It's one of those things that sounds laudable, but Jonathan Daniel Harris at the Huffington Post is right to take an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. President Bush said he was going to tackle homeless in the same ways, and we've known since a 1998 study from the University of Pennsylvania that the very few people who were chronically homeless cost the most money, and the most cost-efficient and morally reasonable way to solve the problem is to create supportive housing that would provide a stable home, access to job placement, substance-abuse counseling, and mental-health treatment programs.
Harris notes that some of the implementation strategies are also vague or undetermined. He quotes the executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, Maria Foscarinis, who says action and implementation are different. Counting the homeless population is notoriously hard, and it's not a natural constituency for any politician to care about. So many make the motions without instituting actual policy. We'll have to see if Obama proves different.
-- Monica Potts
