Miller is a local author, professor at San Diego City College, and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
The recent public squabble between former NBA great and beloved San Diego booster Bill Walton and Mayor Todd Gloria exposed public anger at the growing homeless population on the streets of San Diego. Walton’s ire at the mayor’s perceived lack of action was clear as he railed at Gloria and called him to step down because “Things are worse now than ever before. Our lives are being dictated by a large and unruly homeless population. … We want the homeless population off the streets, out of the parks, off the sidewalks and bike paths.”
Elsewhere, Walton has complained about having to make his house a “fortress” to protect himself from the homeless. In sum, he wants the mayor to resign and to get a “tax rebate.”
As someone who has lived and worked in San Diego’s urban core for over 20 years in an area significantly impacted by homelessness, my life is far from “dictated” by my unhoused neighbors, though I am disturbed by the suffering I see on the street outside my front window. But there is no need to turn the home I rent into a fortress, nor will sweeping the streets of people living in deplorable conditions in tattered dome tents or idle cars do an ounce of good over the long haul.
Indeed, as I walk by the tent cities that have proliferated on downtown streets on the way to San Diego City College or to Petco Park for a Padres game, I am humbled by the thought of my own privilege in comparison to less fortunate San Diegans. I don’t have to find a place to use the bathroom at night or worry about losing all my worldly possessions if I leave my house unattended.
And I know, as my career of teaching many homeless and housing insecure students has taught me, all it takes is a bad turn or a personal catastrophe for that homeless person to be me.
While many people like to blame drug addiction, mental illness and other easily individualized issues, some of the more serious research on homelessness suggest that not shockingly, one of the most glaring drivers of it is the lack of affordable housing. As Los Angeles Times reports: “In their University of California Press book ‘Homelessness is a Housing Problem,’ authors Clayton Page Aldern and Gregg Colburn looked at various contributing issues of homelessness, including mental illness and addiction, and the per capita rate of homelessness around the country. By looking at the rate of homeless per 1,000 people, they found communities with the highest housing costs had some of the highest rates of homelessness, something that might be overlooked when looking at just the overall raw number of homeless people.”
Aldern and Colburn’s work points out that homelessness is a structural problem that will require a deep, long-term commitment of government at all levels along with the private sector to address. Hence, to solve the problem, we will need significantly more resources than are now available and far more patience than folks who want to “clear the streets” seem to have at present.
Another central issue driving homelessness is addressed by Thomas H. Byrne, Benjamin F. Henwood and Anthony W. Orlando in their study, “A Rising Tide Drowns Unstable Boats: How Inequality Creates Homelessness,” where they document how “It is the ability of high-income residents to outcompete low-income residents that leads to the exclusion of the latter group from the housing market. The significance of the income channel, rather than the price channel, confirms this finding.” Consequently, they argue that “broader policy efforts to reduce income inequality would have the collateral benefit of reducing homelessness.”
In opposition to those who suggest that “slowing the growth of housing prices” alone would suffice, Byrne, Henwood and Orlando advocate for more efforts to increase wages, public benefit levels and the supply of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers is also needed. In their conclusion, they move beyond the analysis of their data to suggest that “Homelessness is more than a problem of dollars and cents. It is a symptom of a deeper challenge, fundamental to the very structure of our society: how do we share this Earth with our fellow human beings, with all that each location has to offer and all that each person deserves to experience?”
To answer that question, we need to stop demonizing our homeless neighbors, look in the mirror, and see what kind of people we really are.
