Republican View: ‘Housing first’ will not solve homeless problem

The Ithaca Dedicated Encampment Site (TIDES) proposed by Ithaca city officials and others would calm some of the problems associated with current illegal camping in “The Jungle” but risks enabling the drug and mental health disorders that afflict most of our homeless population.

The elaborate facilities (Gathering and conversation spaces! Wrap-around services!) and “low barrier to entry” (translation: you don’t have to be clean, sober or responsible for regulating your own behavior) might be expected to attract even more of the homeless from other counties. This is pretty much what has happened in San Francisco.

Nels Bohn, director of the Ithaca Urban Renewal Agency, has said that 75% of the unsheltered have mental health and/or addiction problems. This fact has been hidden by rebranding the homeless as “houseless” — which implies that the shortage of inexpensive housing is the main problem — and by conflating those who cannot afford housing with the majority who are too impaired, too addicted or too used to antisocial behavior to benefit from currently available options.

These problems will not be solved (and our community’s right to peaceful enjoyment of public spaces will not be guaranteed) by a “housing first” focus. Such a focus fails to make access to permanent, supported housing contingent on meeting important social norms for living in a community.

Contingent access to supported housing restores agency to the person who needs help by allowing a choice between working through a centralized, case-managed system to deal with the medical, behavioral and substance-abuse issues that led to being homeless or to facing the legal consequences of illegally occupying public spaces.

Development of the medical/behavioral support system should precede setting up a permanent “homeless” campground.

Tompkins County currently has a huge deficit in services and funding in all of these areas. Some of the slack is taken up by nonprofits and volunteers. This does not meet current needs and lacks public accountability for outcomes.

The need is so great that last week, Tompkins County Probation Supervisor Karla Brackett told the county’s Public Safety Committee that more people with mental health issues are entering the jail because it’s the safest option available. Becket and Sheriff Derek Osborne both supported designating part of the jail as a behavioral health facility.

Providing free, noncontingent living space without requiring that those with mental or behavioral health problems accept mental health treatment and/or drug treatment programs is like putting people with raging bacterial infections on life support instead of giving them antibiotics. You are not restoring their health — only prolonging their dying.

Republican View appears in the last edition of each month in Tompkins Weekly.