HomeClass Warfare Exists Homeless_Man Utah’s Homeless Population Has Plunged 74%; By 2015 It Could Be Gone Completely

When I worked at Waffle House between IT jobs, one employee they hired would sleep in the back room after his shift was over. It turned out he was homeless. Our manager fired him, although he was doing his job and not causing any trouble.

http://iacknowledge.net/utahs-homeless-population-has-plunged-74-by-2015-it-could-be-gone-completely/

December 20, 2013

When looking at seemingly intractable problems, it’s important to focus on the success stories.

The state of Utah has spent the last eight years fighting homelessness in a very unique, but extremely effective way.

The conventional wisdom is that homelessness comes from people who suffer from addictions, alcoholism, and chronic bad decision-making. If you give them too much, they will just squander it – furthering their addiction. As recently as last month, as the first signs of the bitter cold winter where beginning to make themselves known, reporter John Stossel went on Fox News to say that giving money to the homeless was essentially enabling them (he also said that most beggars you encounter on the street were actually faking it, which is absolutely not true).

Utah looked at its troubling homelessness numbers and threw the conventional wisdom out the window. Instead of forcing the homeless to fix themselves before offering help, the state began giving them homes, no questions asked.

Utah started a pilot program that took 17 people in Salt Lake City who had spent an average of 25 years on the street and put them in apartments. Caseworkers were assigned to help them become self-sufficient, but there were no strings attached – if they failed, the participants still had a place to live. [source]

That pilot program was so successful that Utah expanded it statewide. The results are inarguably positive. The number of homeless living in Utah has plunged 74% in less than a decade.

The program called “Housing First” is part of a growing movement around the country to first supply people with permanent housing and then work on the other stuff. Oftentimes, it is the lack of a place to live that exacerbates all of the other negative situations. Finding a job and keeping it without the benefit of a home to go to afterwards is nearly impossible. Living on the streets becomes a roadblock to ever getting the resources to not live on the street. With “Housing First,” a homeless person is given somewhere to live and a case-worker who works with them to achieve a life of self-sufficiency.

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