Pre-engineered shelters: A proven alternative to SJ's failed Housing First orthodoxy
Image by Wikimedia Commons
To reclaim neighborhoods from rampant homelessness, high-tech shelter tents, as advocated by CM's Doan and Batra, are a first step, notes housing expert Lawrence McQuillan in the Independent Institute.
The Dominant Ideology of “Housing First” Crowds Out Shelter Space and Treatment Solutions
California governments at all levels have allowed neighborhoods to be overwhelmed with people experiencing homelessness because funding has been skewed over time toward greater relative investments of taxpayer dollars into so-called “permanent housing,” rather than badly needed shelter space. These governments have enshrined into law and program rules the ideology of “Housing First,” which contends that the best way to defeat homelessness is to construct or acquire a permanent home for every person experiencing homelessness, often at taxpayer expense.
Housing First sounds fantastic until one realizes the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis in California and the state’s housing realities:
More than 171,500 people experience homelessness in California on any given night, more than any other state, and the total keeps growing.
The true number of people experiencing homelessness throughout a year is estimated to be two to four times the nightly figure, of which 67 percent are unsheltered in California.
For every person who exits homelessness by becoming housed, up to four more people become newly homeless.
California has a severe housing shortage.
California is the second most expensive state to build housing, behind only Hawaii, and it typically takes about five years or longer from concept to move-in.
Putting a permanent roof over the head of a previously unhoused person who has a substance abuse disorder or mental illness does not resolve their root causes of homelessness and may make matters worse.
Those factors combine to make Housing First in California a misguided, budget-busting, Sisyphean pipe dream of the state’s political class, which has produced concentrated urban areas of human misery such as The Jungle (San Jose), Skid Row (Los Angeles), the Tenderloin (San Francisco), and Wood Street (Oakland).
Being unhoused in California means living in a hellscape of murders, sexual assaults, thefts, fights, drug violence, drug use and overdoses, suicides, dangerous unsanitary conditions, chronic and acute diseases that can lead to amputations and deaths, and fires. In San Francisco alone, the number of reported fires in homeless encampments increased by 115 percent, from 457 in 2019 to 981 in 2022. The mortality rate for chronically homeless individuals is four to nine times higher than that of the general population.
City residents who want to raise their children in safe neighborhoods and to go to work and school each day without navigating filth, misery, disease, and dysfunction, see their neighborhoods sacrificed to homelessness by the political elites. Housing First has failed the housed and unhoused alike in California and it will never succeed.
One “affordable” housing unit costs an average of $750,000 to build in San Francisco and as much as $1.2 million on the high end. It’s cheaper to buy units, but not by much.
Even if it was possible to build rapidly—say, 100,000 units—of housing at a reasonable cost for people experiencing homelessness, the following year, there would be a line of 200,000 people wanting free or heavily subsidized permanent housing. Housing First acts as a magnet, drawing more people into an area wave after wave.
In March 2023, San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman summed up the city’s problem, and it also applies statewide: “I don’t think we can provide a permanent home in San Francisco for every person who engages in our homelessness response system, and I don’t think that should be our goal. It’s almost like we’re almost ideologically committed to this PSH [permanent supportive housing] outcome and are almost unwilling to contemplate a more shelter- or transitional housing-based approach.” At last, one official was willing to speak the truth.
It is time to get real about the true scale of California’s growing humanitarian problem and admit that Housing First has been an expensive and dismal failure. A different strategy is needed to fulfill the requirements of Martin and to bring the unhoused population off the streets and closer to life-changing and life-saving treatment.
Step One: Rapidly Restore Civil Society with High-Tech Shelter Tents
A safer and more dignified approach than allowing California’s neighborhoods to become default shelters would be establishing city- or county-designated sites that deploy giant high-tech shelter tents with accompanying security and sanitation services. This innovative approach has many advantages over Housing First: less expensive than permanent housing for everyone, faster to build, rapidly scalable to fit the need, safer and more humane than street life, and brings potential clients closer to service providers daily.
Each giant tent would house hundreds of people. Scaled to need, they would satisfy the “indoor bed” requirement of Martin, thus fulfilling the Ninth Circuit’s demands. Giant tents have long been used by the U.S. military, commercial events , and recently by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) to house newly arriving migrants. The Randalls Island tent complex in New York City was initially 84,400 square feet, accommodating up to 1,000 people and costing $325,000 to set up. As the need increased, the complex was expanded to five tents of 600 people each for a total accommodation of 3,000 people. (That alone would fulfill nearly 70 percent of San Francisco’s unmet shelter need under Martin.) Mayor Adams wisely understood the need to create entry-level shelters rapidly, which California needs to copy.
These high-tech tents are sturdy (they can withstand winds of 90 miles per hour) with an internal frame and can be outfitted with flooring, heat, air conditioning, dividers for privacy, and accompanying portable toilets, wash stations, showers, lockers for personal possessions, and meal and laundry areas (Mahaffey/Sunbelt, for example, sells a combined package that includes those features for up to 1,000 people). The intake process would sort people among tents or sites based on gender, needed living arrangements, and behavioral or physical health needs. Around-the-clock security, inside and outside the tents, would be provided.
Once the Martin requirement is met, the unhoused who choose to stay in a community would have to use, and could not refuse, the available housing at a designated tent site. Neighborhood residents could then begin to reclaim and restore their communities. Zero tolerance for street living could be applied since more humane and dignified alternatives now exist. Of course, the option would always remain for people experiencing homelessness to leave the area rather than use a site, and efforts should be made to reunite the unhoused with family and friends elsewhere.
Tents are a creative and realistic solution because, as New York City has demonstrated, they can be quickly scaled to the need—perhaps initially thousands of people in some locations—which would likely decrease over time as it became known that California neighborhoods are no longer available for whatever lifestyle people want to live for as long as they want to live it.
Read the whole thing here.
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