The Liaison

“Are We the Answer to Homelessness?”

Lily Le

Home to the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, and Univer­sity of Washington, Seattle remains popular to visitors. In spite of their popularity, each place has one striking commonality: homeless people. Upon seeing someone that is homeless, I won­der about their situation – past and present. How and why are they homeless? Who’s responsible for their situation?

So how does a person transition from a home and then onto the streets? One significant factor is our local governance. To bring this close to home we can look at gentrification in Seattle. Seattle has been planning to build many new high-rise buildings in the downtown areas. These buildings will be occupied by highly paid and highly skilled individuals.

Each new building would take homes away from low-income, long-time residents – without replacing them. Through this process there is a piece of society that suffers for the sake of gentrification. As long as institutions fail to make choices that positively impact low-income, long-time residents, many people falling under those categories will be left without homes.

Federally funded programs are another important player in maintaining the well-being of citizens that need extra help. To give a concrete example of how cutbacks affect specific people, we can look at the mentally ill. In the 1950’s, mental institutions were funded by the government. As new priorities emerged, the government resorted to cutting funds for mental institutions to compensate for their own political priorities; as a result, the mentally ill end up on the streets.

Without the proper skills for survival, ill persons are worse off than a “normal” person and may not live as long as they would have living under a caregiv­er. Government funding allocation will re-prioritize repeatedly, and as a result the population of homeless will suffer people -- as seen in the case of mental institutions.

Even if the government funds more programs or realtors build more transitional housing, as long as norms, roles, institu­tions, and values allow homelessness to exist as “normal” or “acceptable,” homelessness will continue. To be completely rid of homelessness, society would ultimately need to change the norms, institutions, roles, and values. The norms that need to change are the parts of society that alienate outsiders with the fallacy of personal attack. Institutions need to change because it is one of the legs that help society stand strong.

So much trust is put on specific institutions and yet they mislead society with promises of change. The roles and values of society must also change because each person should have the personal respon­sibility to each other in order to create a cohesive and fulfilling society. Until we are willing to change, the lives of the homeless will remain at the hands of our government while society grows continually isolated from others.