Ideas into Action Part 3

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006
We have explored some ideas to assist families living in homelessness and applied the IRC test to them. Today, we will analyse one short term idea and one longer term possibility.

Housing families in non-housing arrangements (like church basements) - while this process removes the homeless families from alternative arrangements like sleeping in vehicles, ‘camping’ in parks, or staying in low-cost hotels it doesn’t offer a solution to any of the impacted population. It only serves to treat them as a commodity and likely the volunteers from the churches benefit more than the families. This temporary housing marginalizes the families further and serves to hide them from public scrutiny. As long as someone else is ‘dealing with this’ there isn’t a necessity to find a more permanent solution. In this case the immediate action disempowers rather than builds resilience and creates an environment where the families are not moving towards self sufficiency. If there are companion programs that quickly move the families into a more permanent housing arrangement, then the one or two nights in basements may mitigate their suffering. On the nine point scale. This solution alone only warrants a score of 2/9.

The most long term solution, increase affordibale housing has the problem that the advocacy, planning, budgeting, construction and allocation of housing projects can take 2-3 years. However, this shouldn’t preclude consideration of the idea as part of a more permanent solution. The outcomes achieved from well planned housing projects are relevant and concrete. Affordible housing offers a permanent, empowering solution for homeless families. 7/9

In Part 4 we will explore the final two ideas and recommend one action to proceed with.