Housing, not police or jails, is the solution to homelessness

On Tuesday, November 28, 2011, the day after his 55th birthday, Robert “Bobby” Earl Fowler was arrested under a new ordinance in Escambia County, Florida. The ordinance, enacted less than two weeks earlier, made it illegal to stand in the median of a roadway. The law was targeted toward people like him, unhoused people with no income who asked drivers for spare cash in the hopes of being able to get a hot meal or a motel room for the night. Police had been making arrests of this kind for years. All the new law did was add to the long list of public spaces where unhoused people were not allowed to linger.

It wasn’t Bobby’s first arrest under a law criminalizing homelessness, but it would be his last. He was found on a park bench across the street from a homeless shelter less than a month later on the morning after Christmas, having passed away during the night. 

He was my biological father. 

I never had the chance to meet Bobby. On the night that he passed away, years before I would learn who he was, I was taking cover from the wind in an abandoned home just off I-81 somewhere outside Harrisburg, PA, where the nighttime temperatures were just below freezing. I was hitchhiking back South, trying to get back to the warm weather of my home city of New Orleans. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the midst of my own first experience of unsheltered homelessness. 

Bobby was young when he joined the Army and deployed to Vietnam – too young to have told the truth about his age. In the early-mid 1970s in northern Mississippi, where he was from, there weren’t a lot of resources to help a teenage veteran figure out what came next. To be honest, there still aren’t many today. In his late sister’s words, “he came back after his service but never was really able to find his way home.” He would go on to live most of the rest of his life without stable housing or employment. 

By the time he laid down on that park bench on Christmas night, never to get up again, I imagine he was tired. He’d been arrested over a dozen times, in Tallahassee, Ocala, Sarasota, Gainesville, and Pensacola, with all charges directly related to him being unhoused. Half of the arrests were made in the Pensacola area by the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office in the last few years of his life. His experience in Pensacola coincides with the major trend of escalation in the adoption and enforcement of these kinds of laws nationwide. Florida in particular has been the subject of national attention due to their aggressive tendency toward using public resources to jail people instead of housing them. And as W.E.B. DuBois famously said, “as goes the south, so goes the nation.”

When governments like cities and towns enact laws that allow police to arrest unhoused people for sleeping outdoors or for asking for help, they’re not doing any benefit to their communities. They aren’t taking a step toward solving homelessness, they’re making it worse by ensuring that every person they arrest has one more trauma to heal from, one more legal barrier between them and housing, one more fine they can’t afford to pay. 

But they already know that. Because when governments criminalize homelessness, most of the time, they don’t pretend that it’s for the benefit of people who are unhoused. They’re often shockingly honest in sharing that it’s about tourism dollars, or business concerns, or the complaints of neighbors who are privileged enough to have a roof over their own heads. They want to hide homelessness, shove people into the margins so that they can pretend homelessness doesn’t exist. 

Housing solves homelessness. Not police or jails. Not tickets or fines. 

My bio father was outside for the better part of four decades. How many institutions failed him in that time? How did so much time pass without him getting the housing and health care that he needed? How much longer might he have lived if his basic needs had been met without condition? What would he have wanted for his life if he had the security that comes with housing? I’ll never know the answer to those questions. What I do know is that he deserved so much better, and so does everyone in this country who is unhoused or struggling under the rising cost of rent and shortage of housing options. 

Instead, the 250,000 or so people who are unsheltered across the U.S. on any given night now face a new threat, in the form of a White House Executive Order which returns us to an age in our national history when people with disabilities were regularly forced into institutions against their will instead of provided services and support that helped them live independently while retaining community and family connections. This EO directs that our homelessness response system as it currently exists be dismantled and defunded in favor of aggressive policing and involuntary commitments. 

Philanthropy and state and local community leaders have been presented with a choice. They can choose to meet this moment courageously and continue to fund and implement solutions to homelessness that actually involve housing people, or they can round people up and force them into jail cells and locked rooms in prisons and hospitals, then later tell us they were “just following orders.” 

So long as they remember that unhoused people are people, the decision should be easy.