Homelessness is Solvable

who are working to solve the world's biggest problems. My solvable is to get one million women and girls to learn how to code by the year twenty twenty. My solvable is that refugees and displaced people should have poverty raids, inequality raids, lack of opportunity no greater than the rest of the population. My solvable is to take energy to where communities are. We are not going to solve poverty in the twenty first century if we don't solve energy poverty.

I have a solvable too. It's sharing these solutions wherever and however I can. I'm a contributing writer for The New York Times and The host of the podcast Maybe in America, Immigration IRL and the climate justice podcast Mothers of Invention with Mary Robinson. I'm also a comedian and I've performed all over the world. Now I live in New York, where I write and podcasts about things I care about, and I do so with some levity and some hope because I think that's important. So does the

Rockefeller Foundation. And that's why we're making this podcast together with Pushkin Industries, to introduce you to some of the incredible people who are making a real difference to millions of lives around the world. Get ready to be seriously inspired. In this our first episode, Malcolm Gladwell interviews Rosanne Haggarty. Rosanne is an internationally recognized leader in developing innovative strategies to end homelessness and to strengthen communities. She's the president

and CEO of Community Solutions. That's an organization that helps people around the world find what works where they live to solve homelessness for every individual who needs that help. Now a bit of context, because it's hard to understand the scale of this problem without some numbers. More than half a million people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night, and nearly two hundred thousand of those people are unsheltered. That means they're on the streets

without access to emergency shelters or transitional houses. But Rosanne says that tackling this at the individual level is a key to solving it for everyone. Her organization builds neighborhood partnerships to bring together local residents and institutions to actually change the conditions that produce homelessness. It's an approach Rosanne has developed over nearly forty years of working on the problem.

Back in nineteen eighty two, she spent a year after high school working in a homeless shelter right here in New York. And that's one experience that's really fueled her activism. As you'll hear, Rosanna Malcolm know each other. Back in two thousand and six, Malcolm wrote a New Yorker article called million Dollar Murray about why it may be easier to solve rather than just manage homelessness. That piece really rang true for Rosanne, and they catch up on development

since then. All right, let's take a listen and i'll talk to you after. I think it's significant that in nineteen eighty two, The problem of homelessness in New York City was of a very relatively small scale. It was growing, It was terrible for people experiencing it, but it was possible to believe as a young person that this was an entirely containable and solvable problem. No one had good information there, but the estimates were maybe three thousand people

in a city of pushing eight million. My overwhelming impression was we're asking the wrong questions. I remember thinking there was this huge disconnect between what our ideas were the people kind of responsible for identifying or naming the problem, and what the young people or the women were saying. These young people were looking for help with finding a place to live, finding a job, and my instructions as a volunteer was how to turn on the coffee and

put away the cots in the morning. No one had given us any information about how to help people connect with the things they needed, and so it was that sense of disconnect and sort of the gap between what people experiencing the problem we're seeking and what we were set up to provide that I think really plunge me into this work permanently, that you know, there is a sense of we're coming about this in a way that

doesn't match the nature of the problem. You talk to me about housing first, because as an outsider it is not obvious to us. If you ask me naively, I would have said the opposite. You need to get people, you know, their mental health issues, address their employment, dealt with their family life straightened out before you get them

stabilized and housing. And you see, and this idea is the opposite of that housing first, right, Housing first has become a hugely important principle, but still not completely and fully adopted. But think of it, this is something we all know. How are we going to accomplish anything in our lives, hold a job, maintain stable relationships, manage our health that we don't have a stable place to live. And this notion of stable housing is just so basic.

But in fact, for many years it became inverted, as you say, Malcolm, where you know, there's a sense that people needed to have insight into their mental illness, or needed to be clean and sober, or needed this needed that housing was conditional on behavior, and in fact people's other conditions they vastly improve, you know, once there's a stable environment for them to live in and to manage their other needs from and the fact that this still is contested is one of the things that really needs

to be challenged everywhere. You'll still find places where like, well, let's study it one more time. But in fact it's something that we all know. Imagine our lives without a stable place to live. There's three things and you can add to this list. One is the housing fresh principle. Two is the question of the resources argument, and third is the question of tools. And I realize that tools is the new one, the really interesting one that you've

gotten very involved in. But let's talk a little bit about this resources question, because the second great impediment to communities addressing their homelessness issue is the notion that it will bankrupt them. Well, the interesting thing, Malcolm, and you're actually a character in this story, is that communities are spending a fortune not solving the problem of homelessness. The costs are showing up typically and most profoundly in the

healthcare system, but also in the criminal justice system. And when you look at across communities, the burden of this unresolved, solvable problem on communities is profound. Ask any librarian the country, any emt, any police officer, any court officer, our public workforce, teachers dealing with children who are living in shelters, the emergency room, nurses. You just go down the list of our public workforce and the degree to which their jobs are consumed trying to respond in a humane way to

those in a situation that is itself solvable. So the costs are spread all over the place, and yet communities, i think, seeing to build housing or to subsidize it, or to attach mental health resources, we can't afford to do this. You are paying these costs anyway and creating an environment of everyone losing, as well as trapping individuals and families in a state of limbo, which is so much more humanely and efficiently addressed with just dealing with

getting them into a stable housing situation. So this proposition that homelessness is more expensive to ignore than it is to solve. Tell me why. That's what's hard about making

that argument. Well, let me go back to the point of your being a character in the drama Malcolm You who wrote really a seminal piece in The New Yorker called Million Dollar Murray and explored through the life of this one sort of iconic figure in Reno Nevada, who was known to everyone, this individual who needed someone to basically take responsibility for seeing that his rent was paid and that he had some structure in his life and the counseling support he needed when he needed it, that

he was actually doing well with just a basic structure of participating in a community program. For want of that kind of coordination and accountability, this poor man bounced in and out of the emergency room, rehab programs, the court system, jails, running up a bill of over a million dollars in municipal services over the period of time before his premature death.

And so it's because no one sees the picture hole on home less, we're allowed to think that this is actually kind of a marginal or a low cost problem, or dwell in the myth that these are individuals who are making a choice to opt out of society or services, and in fact, what we've found is someone taking responsibility for seeing that each person who is in this overwhelmed state actually has a stable place to live in enough

structure and support in their lives. Costs a fraction of what all of this diffuse misery and municipal burden actually ends up costing, but it's getting to that point where everyone is accounted for and everyone has a plan. And the thing that we have discovered in our work with many communities around the country now is that it's very

possible to get there. That in no community, even communities that feel overwhelmed by homelessness, is the number of those experiencing homelessness more than a fraction of one percent of their population. This is a total last mile problem. And if we grab the picture whole and have that community level accountability, we find that there are many more assets, many more solutions than communities have imagined. I'm trying to get a sense of the level of kind of baseline

resistance to these arguments you're making. Are you saying that this is a tough sell? I'll say where the resistance typically comes from, that it's a leadership gap that that person who or a group of people who are well positioned to basically call it out, that you know, they are blocked from doing that for whatever reason they don't feel they have the political support. There are internal conflicts.

I did not coin the phrase the homeless industrial complex, but as in so many areas of failure, frankly, in terms of our civic life. You are, as an organization or an agency rewarded for maintaining this at us quo. So there's resistance for reasons of leadership, inertia, fear about you know, what will happen to my organization or my

job at the agency. And there's also just in larger cities, still this myth of the overwhelming nature of the problem, and that's the way the problem is reported, typically bad getting worse. We've done media scans to look at you know, where are the solutions stories on homelessness, and I would say community solutions and the communities we're working with who are seeing these profound shifts. We have a job to do on communications that I think is part of what

needs to happen next. That there are these communities that are now solving the problem, have ended chronic or veteran homelessness, are seeing steady month over month reductions, but we are still in a world that is convinced that this is not a solved problem despite the evidence, but with no clear endgame. Let's talk a little about these tools that allow you to see the problem. That's what you're talking about, right,

You need to be able to see this problem. How does one go about visualizing in real time the problem of homelessness in a given community. What we have found is the real breakthrough moment, and we learn this with our communities. We've been working this problem a long time now, and it was realizing that you need by name, real time information on who's experiencing homelessness in a community and how. Now, homelessness we've come to see is like saying we've got

a sickness issue in our community. It tells you nothing. You need to know exactly how and what. Was there a family break up issue last night and that needs some quick intervention in repair? Or is there a chronict mental health problem and you've been on the street for thirty years, Totally different conditions that require different groups of people to collaborate and respond, and often organizations that have not a whole lot to do with homelessness. You know,

it's domestic violence agency, it's it's medicaid. You know that these other failures show up in homelessness, and if no one's asking the right questions, then the problem just compounds. And so the first step we discovered is helping communities develop quality data that means you basically need to know with a very high degree of reliability. Are you accounting for everyone? And so that means that you need to have in the room all of the outreach teams, the

soup kitchens, the shelters. Everyone in a community who is touching the problem needs to basically share information on who they're working with and get signed releases from those individuals and families so that they can be helped to get

out of the situation or avoid it altogether. Getting to a point where you know in real time what's actually happening and how the problem is moving and changing, because that very highly specific information will allow you to see where you're housing placement rate needs to be increased, where you have problems with certain agencies, or certain conditions or certain events in your communities that are creating incidents of homelessness.

And in that context of having the full picture and being able to see the shifts, communities can be trained and have been trained to use quality improvement human centered design. How you facilitate meetings across different sectors, basically, how you keep coming back to that shared goal of are we reducing and getting closer to zero. Let's walk through a hypothetical example. I am the mayor of a city of two hundred and fifty thousand in Ohio, I have a

homelessness problem. I'll call you up. Question number one. If I have none of these systems in place, do I know how many homeless people I have? Probably not. You probably are relying on your annual point in time count that is mandated by HUD, and that's at best an estimate. We have found it's wildly off on a general basis.

When you can off by two hundred wow. Yeah, so like you really don't know what's going on, but you have that snap off just because this population is so transitory and hard to find, and well, there are various methodologies that HUD will accept as an acceptable way of getting to an estimate. So there's great variability in that. And then there's a coverage issue. Typically communities don't have in one night the ability to really understand fully what's

going on. And then, as you point out, there's the variability. Just what's happening on you one day is not what's happening across the course of a year. As someone has said, you know, a snapshot is the wrong method. You need a video to understand what's going on with with homelessness. As a mayor, you're probably the best information you've got is wildly wrong plus or minus. And then the second thing, that point in time count tells you nothing that's actionable.

It doesn't tell you who in that population you think you have that is experiencing homelessness actually has a one night problem versus a thirty year problem, And so you have no idea like who's going to correct the problem themselves, which is the principal way people escape homelessness by the way they sort it out, versus who we're going to need to actively intervene to help and kind of get everybody around the same table in order to accomplish that.

Here's the people that you need to bring to the first meeting. You need the coalition of not for profits that's receiving money from HUT. You need the head of your housing authority, and you need your local VA Medical center director. Get those folks in a room, and that's the starting point. They're the core team, and it's that group that has to commit to solving the same problem.

Like we're all here to actually get to an end state, which is zero, which is that we don't have chronic homelessness. When you say collect data on these people talking about that means so you need to know one's name, you need to have a medical history, a background, you profile

of me correct. Most communities are using a common assessment tool now I think they're about two hundred a least two undred community who were using an assessment tool that basically gets your identity, but also self reported medical conditions

that correlate with what we know about premature death. Homelessness is a more lethal condition than most cancers, frankly, and also some of the critical information that can allow a community to help match you with resources that can enable you to escape homelessness, like do you have a history of being in the foster care system? Are you over the age of sixty or sixty five and therefore qualify for senior housing programs? For instance? Are you are you

someone who's a veteran. That information already surfaces for communities more than what they had to go on in terms of the range of housing resources they already have access to that maybe are not fully deployed or efficiently matched to people who would qualify for them. And so it's that basic information like a LinkedIn page for the that's a good way of thinking of it for homeless population.

So you say to me, Malcolm, you've got to know the names and backgrounds of your homeless population, and then you have to create this kind of video as opposed to a snapshot. What do I learn from my video? How much movement is there in this video that you're creating. What you will see in communities that have this quality by name data is every month, at the very least often every week or every day. You'll see how many

individuals are moving out of homelessness. Who has been directly assisted housed in a variety of ways, first months, run security deposit, or we've reconnected you with family, or we've

matched you to a housing resource. How many people have been housed, How many people that you have had in your system since you first had that quality data established, who have just gone off the radar, they remain on what we call an inactive list, but accounts for the first time for this phenomenon that all of us who've been doing this work have always understood that most people who experience homelessness resolve it themselves, and so at least

by moving people to you're still aware of them, but you're not like holding a voucher for them. You're not like jamming up a waiting list, thinking where are they. The assumption becomes they have self resolved, but they come back and they don't lose their place if something else has happened, and so on. You have outflow information to show how you're performing in ratcheting up your housing placements

and the effectiveness of your matching system. And then on the inflow side, you're looking at who is new into homelessness this month or this week, who has returned to homelessness, who we assisted in the past, and who have we seen come back from that inactive list. I want to go some for examples. Let's do some very specific so I'm going to give you a for example and tell

me whether it's realistic. You come to me and you say, Malcolm, in your city, we've looked at your movie and we've discovered huge percentage of your homeless population is disabled bets. That is a great example to unpack, for instance, throughout the country. And it's been a commitment of the VA since two and ten to end veteran homelessness. There are sufficient resources allocated to house every remaining veteran who's experiencing homelessness.

The number is just under forty thousand based on the best estimates. The problem has been finding and connecting those individuals or heads of families two housing resources, and so immediately you see you need this kind of collective, accountable structure in order to get the job done. So if there are veterans remaining homeless in a community, that's not a problem of resources. It's a problem of do you have landlords who are unwilling to accept the VA support

of housing vouchers? Do you have programs that are inadvertently keeping veterans homeless because they are operating a shelter and they're not plugged into the housing resources. What this data will surface is why are we not connecting the dots

in more effective ways? Because what I really am describing I think that's happened in communities MALACOLM is a cultural shift where once you say like this is actually a solvable problem, and it's on us, the people who are awareness of the resources, including where are the private landlords,

who are the different organizations have resources. It's up to us to coordinate and be accountable for a result, not up to people who are overwhelmed and been turned away from programs because they're not eligible, and it's left on

these overwhelmed people somehow to navigate the system. Once that flips, you begin to realize that it's many different problems and many different resources can come into play to solve them, and that in no one community is the number so overwhelming that once you see the problem clearly, are you unable to solve it. Give me a good, really specific thing you might learn from creating this movie of your homelessness problem, and how that might inform my job as mayor.

Let me lift up a community like Bergen County, New Jersey, or Rockford, Illinois, or like Montgomery County, Maryland, or Gulf Coast Mississippi, places that have all ended chronic or veteran homelessness or not, and I think the mayor of those communities would see, after significant numbers of their municipal work, people working in homelessness have learned how to work as a team, have grasped the fact that this is a population level problem that we have to be all in on,

and have learned frankly twenty first century problem solving skills like using data for problem solving, not for judgment, and quality improvement. That mayor will see that there is this enlivened, empowered municipal workforce that is able to problem solve not just homelessness, but the problems that contribute to homelessness. Because it's all of this same thing of fragmentation. They're going to see that they're spending money in ways that makes

sense for the whole community. They're not randomly developing housing policies or homeless policies and throwing money against the wall

and hoping something actually works out. That they are embracing with members of their community, this spirit of accountability for taking off hard problems that can't be solved with a single program or you know, an app, but require people to really think and work differently in teams, using real information to drive their understanding of problems as opposed to

ideological views. That those are communities that are actually positioned to thrive in many ways, and that homelessness we've come to see after so many years, you know, and personally working on this issue, it is really the symptom. It's not the problem, it's the symptom of this fragmentation, the breakdown that is so overwhelming to so many communities on

so many fronts. Organizing people around taking on and really committing to ending this most visible form of poverty is a way you can actually make your city work better. It's a lovely phrase the Jesuits used called descending into the particular. Descend into the particular on two of these cities and tell me how their homeless problems are different, because presumably what you learn is that every city's homeless

problem is different. Well, I'll pick a blue and a red community has that, because that's unfortunately, you know, the way we sometimes think we're divided. In fact, I think everywhere people are just hungry to learn how to solve problems in their communities. So let's start with Bergen County, just outside New York City, across the George Washington Bridge, really more or less the same high cost housing market,

so largely urban and suburban county. Their homelessness issues were certainly more pronounced in the poor urban centers there they have with the full on support of the county executive. Just one of the great leaders in the field, a woman named Julia Orlando, who interestingly was trained in an emergency management before she went into this field. And so

they aggregated in one place. All of the players quickly realized that day was the key to this knowing who actually was homeless, rather than developing policy based on kind of theories and bad estimates. They were the first community to end chronic homelessness. They have now also ended veteran homelessness. One of the things that Julia and her team do, I mean, they are like, why is anyone even now homeless? Six months in the county. They have just changed what's normative.

But one of the things that they do, which I think is so powerful, is they have a public meeting I believe it's every month somewhere in the county where they go over their progress, what they've learned about homelessness, who the remaining challenges are. They've kind of made it a community project, so it's not simply like the people who are working formally in the sector. This is I think also a case of a community figuring out a

way to move its resources around very unnimbly. Once they realized the problem was somewhat different than they originally believed. Putting more money was the problem different than they believe. I think they believed that there was sort of an endless flow, and then they realized, actually, it's a more

containable problem and that they saw. Having that highly specific data allowed them to start seeing problems emerging, for instance, older adults who are becoming homeless and coming into seek services, so they're able to adjust how they were targeting their resources to put more resources into older services in the

community and to create specific services there. But that's one example of kind of having this line of sight into something that's emerging and that you need to get ahead of, very much a public health kind of view of a problem.

Now in Bergen County, Wild Julia has done this I think masterful job of just making landlords and active citizens and libraries and local police departments aware of what's happening and roles that they can play and really consolidate kind of the work habits of the organizations, both the government

organizations and the not for profits who receive resources. In Gulf Coast is like a ninety mile area along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, like Biloxi and Past Christian and you know, the smaller like largely rural and wooded areas with these dots of small cities up to like eighty thousand. I think it's it's the largest city they have in an area with almost no state resources going into housing or human services. They have mobilized veterans organizations, their faith community.

They've created outreach teams out of these church groups with vans and like knowing everyone by name. They were one of the first communities to end veteran homelessness because they were able to mobilize the very long tradition of military service and patriotism in the region and say like, this is about us, It's not about these individuals are homeless.

What kind of a community are we and really tap in too there with their small businesses and people participating in like Landlord stepping up the sense of we needed each other and we needed help from everyone else. After Rita and Krina wiped out many of those cities, and so in this area where there is very little in the way of kind of a formal government supported safety net, very different geography, and kind of a different mindset about in terms of their outcomes and the way they have

resourcefully deployed local assets. Very similar to Bergen County, yet in a very different area. Brought to bear once you descend into the particular, it allows you to craft strategies that are appropriate for your community. Correct, and that it's an ongoing thing. It's not like you get there once

and high five it. Having systems in place and having relationships in place, and having the tools in place that allow communities to solve this problem, keep it solved, and begin moving more and more upstream to like where are the fault lines that create vulnerability for people that put them in a situation where they would lose their home? Well,

thank you so much. This has been wonderful. This solvable was so thought provoking for me, like about how and where people get their statistics from, and then how and where they use that information. It seems like Rosanne's years spent working with people who are homeless and then building up community relationships gave her some really priceless insights. In fact, we asked Rosanne for a few suggestions about what we can do to make this problem a little more solvable.

We'll do this with many of our guests, so here are her recommendations. First, create a new expectation in your community. You can visit our built for zero dot org website to see whether your community is part of the built for zero movement in the United States and if not, why not. Second, you could support telling a new story in your community, that it challenge this idea that this isn't a solvable problem. That perception and that mindset disconnect

is really one of the great barriers. Now, then the idea of once your community has its number, just demand that that number be going in the right direction, or that your community, your leadership, and those working on homelessness are accounting for why they're not making progress and what other steps are needed that citizens can support. But it's this community level accountability and expectation of progress that is the most important thing that individuals can contribute to that

new cultural norm. And as Rosan says, it's about changing our mindsets. You know, it's not a hopeless situation and we need to believe that in order to make it work. And remember, get involved and ask questions of your representatives. Speaking of which I loved how Malcolm role played. Being Married into Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and

the Rockefeller Foundation, with production by Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Mia LaBelle, Engineering by Jason Gambrell and the Great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise. Special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Julia Barton, Carlie Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org, slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go solve it. T