Tenets of good in helping unhoused people

Federal and city officials are looking for solutions to homelessness. For one housing developer, renewing communities and individual lives starts with empathy.

The Monitor's View

Each year, the U.S. government does what it calls a point-in-time tally of homelessness. On a single night last January, it counted 582,462 people – some in temporary shelters, others living in their cars or on the streets.

The Biden administration yesterday launched a broad new federal strategy to cut homelessness 25% by 2025. That follows bold new measures introduced in New York and Los Angeles. These plans attempt in different ways to address what officials call the “upstream” causes of homelessness: soaring housing costs, not enough affordable housing, an inadequate minimum wage, unequal access to health care, addiction, mass incarceration, mental health problems, and the full range of social and systemic discrimination.

One developer in Los Angeles has a simpler approach. It is premised on the idea that altruism, as a business model, can build up whole communities as well as unhoused individuals and families. To put that differently, building on social positives may be a shortcut to addressing society’s negatives. In the past seven years, SoLa Impact has built more than 1,500 affordable housing units in underserved communities. An additional 5,000 are planned or under construction. 

Quantity has helped the company cut construction costs. But the key point of progress, founder Martin Muoto describes, has been changing the way investors see minority communities. “When I went into these areas, which are predominantly Black, brown areas,” he recently told NPR, “and as I’ve raised capital, a lot of folks go, boy, that sounds very risky.” The challenge is “to really look at this opportunity objectively and say, look, you can do well while doing good.” 

Providing affordable housing as a remedy for homelessness has been proved effective in cities from Columbus, Ohio, to Helsinki. It recognizes that permanent shelter is a prerequisite to restoring lives derailed by hardship, not the final step. It has been shown to be less expensive and more effective than costly public social safety nets. It honors the dignity of individuals and their inherent capacity for improvement.

“Focusing on the negative and stifled experiences of the homeless invariably produces an incomplete picture, and obscures the creative and resourceful practices that people deploy to deal with their situation,” wrote Johannes Lenhard, a research associate at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, based on a 2018 study of unhoused people in Paris. 

Homelessness, observed Susie Cagle, an editorial cartoonist, in an essay in Aeon in 2015, “has always been more a crisis of empathy and imagination than one of sheer economics.” As city and federal officials grapple anew with the complex web of social ills resulting in homelessness, Mr. Muoto’s work suggests something different: that uplifting unhoused people and the communities around them involves an economics of empathy and imagination.