Getting Closer to the Heart of Houston’s Success with Homelessness

In a little over a decade, Houston housed over 28,000 people who were experiencing homelessness.

The U.S.’s 4th largest city and Texas’ largest has cut its total homelessness figures by more than 60% since committing to tackle this issue head-on in 2012.

Representatives from cities nationwide, including my very own, San Antonio, visit Houston to learn about how they’ve achieved such progress.

Houston adopted what’s called a Housing First strategy. 

Housing First, for those unfamiliar, is an approach to addressing the challenge of homelessness by first, before addressing anything else (addiction and sobriety, employment, etc.), housing the individual in question. Research has shown this is the most effective way to get and keep people out of homelessness. Various studies confirm that a rapid re-housing approach leads to 75%-91% of households remaining housed after one year.

Back in the fall of last year, I interviewed Marc Eichenbaum, who was the Special Assistant to the Mayor of Houston for Homeless Initiatives. He had been working on the issue of homelessness in the Mayor’s office since 2012. He explained the efficacy of the housing first approach well, “The housing is what makes the services effective, and the services are what helps keep the person housed… For services to work, folks have to be housed. And then for the housing to work, they need the services. It takes two to tango.”  

The thing is, Housing First has been around for a while. While the ideas originated around the world over 100 years ago, the term became more widely used in the U.S. in the early 1990s.

In fact, many of the principles of Housing First were “embraced” by the George W. Bush Administration, beginning in 2005. Further, in 2009 under the Obama Administration, congress passed the HEARTH Act which further entrenched housing first as a strategy into federal housing policy as well as the national plan to end homelessness released in 2010. 

From 2007 — 2016, chronic homelessness in the U.S., had fallen by about a third.

Federal funding can be available for localities that buy-in to the policy of housing first. 

Not to take away from what Houston has accomplished, but they didn’t make some groundbreaking discovery. 

They were applying (effectively, very much to their credit) someone else’s (and the federal government’s) ideas. 

So what changed? Where did the political will, the action, come from to commit so fervently to addressing this issue?

How did Houston go just from the available know-how, to knowing how to do what’s good? 

Connection. 

Annise Parker, the Mayor at the time, had adopted a teenager who had been living on the streets (long before she took office).

In The New York Times profile in 2022 on Houston’s accomplishments, Parker said, “Through our son, I had an up close and personal look at what life was like for somebody on the streets who was treated as disposable.”

For Parker, the issue was personal.

She saw first-hand how somebody in this situation struggles and experiences countless barriers to remedy their situation. And so, political will was irrelevant. She had a personal will to address this problem and much greater empathy for those suffering.

And so on Houston went to become an example, with model policy and infrastructure, and coordination to address the issue of homelessness better than any other large city in the United States.

The city, public, private, and nonprofit partners came together to solve this problem, and Marc, in our conversation explained to me his belief why:

“I think it is pretty cultural here. And it might be because of the number of times we had to come together as a community to respond to crises. In the past 8 years, there's been seven federally declared natural disasters and crises in Houston. And so it's kind of like muscle memory to us nowadays, where we do come together.

We're used to working together even with people we don't always agree with, even people we don't always get along with. It is built into our DNA that we do come together to solve big challenges and big issues. You know, if if a hurricane was to hit a city and an earthquake was to hit a city or you name whatever natural disaster, I guarantee you, everybody would be putting aside their differences and coming together as one. We should have that same mentality with major social issues like homelessness.

It is a crisis, and we need to all come together and we need to think about being barrier busters and overcoming all challenges because this is a crisis and it can become even a bigger crisis if we don't come together and act now.”

People care about issues when they are close to them. People collaborate together when they acknowledge they are collectively part of the same group: a community.

Facts are almost irrelevant. Or, they become relevant after some connection opens a pathway for us to receive them.

There’s zero sense why every U.S. city struggling to deal with this problem isn’t coming together, fervently, around the Housing First approach. It’s cost-effective, it’s more humane, based on decades of research, accepted for 20-plus years by both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations as policy, and of course, it has real-world application in one of the largest cities in the United States.

So, solving homelessness is not a question of know-how. It’s a question of will.

And where does the will, the will to act for others in need, to work together with others in their own communities, come from? 

As Marc said, “It’s not that we were doing anything wrong. 

It’s just we weren’t focused on impact… All the money and all of our attention was going into just managing the issue of homelessness. 

And finally, the light bulbs went off, and we said that as a community, no. 

We need to be focused on solving the issue of homelessness.”

The light bulbs went off—and as a community, Houston acted. 

Agencies, service providers, building managers, developers, etc. came together, bound by what connected them, their community, to solve a problem. 

New research has shown, that it might’ve not been our cunning, our intelligence that spurred the evolution of our species, homo sapiens (and extinction of others for that matter) but rather our tolerance for and inclination to cooperate with others. 

Unlike others, neanderthals, etc. etc. we as homo sapiens we’re able to expand our definition of who was apart of our tribe. 

And so again,  it’s not a question of what you know. Political control. 

It’s a question of who we’re connected to. 

From the more mundane of shared sports fandom, to the more meaningful, of friends and family. Personal connections change our perspectives.

Things are different when an issue affects our father, mother, brother, sister, child, or friend. It’s the closeness. It’s the intimacy of the experience. We feel something. All of a sudden, it’s personal. Our human reaction is to care, often very deeply.

And sometimes, perceived to others, irrationally.

After having our son, the issues and challenges of parenthood feel different to my wife and me. And, of course, they do. I didn’t exactly imagine I’d be the dad who would have trouble dropping my son off for the first day of daycare. But, there I was, Annie and I, walking out after day one drop off together; she turned to me with a quivering lip, hoping that I’d have it together and all I could muster as my eyes were tearing up and I held back cries, “I think he’ll have fun.”

We started balling.

And now, I can’t help but feel a kinship with all other parents, too. I won’t care as much as they do about their child, but man, if I ever know how they feel.

It’s why it feels challenging to read and write about the reports of what Texas state troopers were doing to migrant families at the border. Parents with young children, in some cases still nursing babies, in what might be the most vulnerable moment in their lives, being denied water, and in some instances, literally pushed back into the Rio Grande.

It’s shocking. It’s horrendous.

I can’t help but feel like those actions are a product of an era-possessed, like Germany in the 1930s and 40s. So inexplicably inhuman, we’ll still be asking a hundred years from now, but how could people possibly do THAT?

People don’t care about issues or people they aren’t connected to.

Without connection, at a minimum, we don’t empathize—and at a maximum (like we see at the U.S.-Mexico border), without connection, we villainize.

How can residents of any Northern state appropriately weigh in (as they do) on the perceived security or lack thereof on the Southern border? Their only understanding of what’s “happening at the border” comes from sensationalized news.

There’s anonymity and distance we feel walking past a stranger panhandling, sleeping on the sidewalk, or getting out of their tent under the freeway. We’re numb to their experience because we don’t know them. While we all might feel some guilt that we can temporarily ignore, we’re nowhere near feeling personally connected to who they are and what struggle they are going through.

They aren’t {insert their name} . They are a person experiencing homelessness.

But they, too, were someone’s baby. They, too, are someone’s father, mother, brother, sister, or friend.

We don’t always make the right decision or do what’s best. But we sure as shit try to take care of our own backyard, our own families, and lend hands to our friends. Hope to be a good neighbor.

People will act contrary to their stated ideologies in the context of friends and family. With close company, some people are incredibly generous. But to strangers or the general public, those same people might be vastly more conservative and reserved.

It seems there are two competing characteristics of human nature we’re teetering between—one is that personal connection to someone, or something will have us act almost irrationally in service, support, or protection of it.

In the inverse, if we put distance between ourselves and a problem, person, etc., at a minimum, we’re apathetic. At a maximum, as history shows, we can be inexplicably inhumane.

This explains why the late French oceanographer Jaques Cousteau said, “People protect what they love,” and why author and environmentalist Paul Hawken stresses the importance of “finding out where you live.”

The more we learn about the world or our community, the more driven we’ll be to care for it. The more we know about someone or something, the more connected we feel.

So, should the senior citizens mainlining T.V. news, who live an afternoon’s drive from the Canadian border, visit Eagle Pass in Texas? Should the CEOs and board members of multinationals visit their factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere? Should tech CEOs pay a visit to the cobalt mines in the Congo?

Sure—it could help.

We could see more humanity in how we vote and what business decisions, we make, but we have to be honest with ourselves. Those one-off experiences, too, are fleeting.

And is it really practical? Sure, a CEO’s stopover trip to the Bangladeshi factory might be impactful, but will they know what it’s like to live their lives? Can we (or should we) get everybody "concerned" about the border on a bus or flight down to the Rio Grande Valley? No, of course not.

So what do we do instead?

We design for and address these challenges with connection in mind.

With shorter, less complicated supply chains, CEOs and business leadership may be more empathetic to workers on the factory floor. Or, rather, the opacity and complexity of the global marketplace can no longer be an excuse.

If those in positions of political power, resources, and influence asked those experiencing homelessness what might help them, maybe long ago, some of those folks would have told them, “A home.”

Maybe as these families come to our border, we should ask them what they need and why they are here. Not assume we know, or worse, assume they’re here to take something from us.

It’s in our nature to want to do good, be good, and help others. But, all the same, our nature is greatly affected by our proximity, connection, or lack thereof.

Just as it’s hard to maintain relationships with friends who move away, connection fades with distance (literally or figuratively), and apathy or inaction arrives in its place.

So instead of counting on appealing to the heart and soul of the Corporate CEO or the North Dakotan concerned about the crisis at the Southern border, what might we do instead?

As the principle of Occam’s Razor reminds us, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

What if we resourced and empowered the people closest to the issue, maybe even the people experiencing the issue themselves, to solve their own problems instead?

Even when our hearts and soul are in the right place, how much might we be assuming about a group of people or set of problems because we’re too far away?

We’re not short on big problems. Frankly, if the right people are asked, we wouldn’t be short on answers, either.

As we face these many challenges (climate, inequality, social division), it’s worth reflecting and asking ourselves, “Are we even close?”