Georgia Needs a New Path on Homelessness by State Rep. Katie Dempsey

On any given night over 10,000 Georgians are homeless. Georgia has made great strides in reducing that number over the past few years, but it is obvious that street, or “unsheltered,” homelessness has exploded in many of our cities and towns.

Why, even before the pandemic hit, has our state seen more homelessness on the streets? There are two main reasons. First, some cities have condoned or even enabled street sleeping, which has pulled more people into dangerous, illegal encampments. Second, our state and its cities spend most of their money seeking expensive permanent housing for a segment of homeless individuals, rather than providing the diverse services that many homeless people on the streets actually need.

One of the state’s biggest problems is that some cities such as Atlanta decided that condoning or ignoring street sleeping and camping is the most humane solution to homelessness. I know that it is not. In 2020, even before the coronavirus pandemic, Atlanta saw a 25% increase in street homelessness from just a year earlier, at a time when the city had over 600 unused shelter beds, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Since the pandemic, the problem has gotten worse. The same has happened in other cities that have relaxed bans on the street sleeping. After Austin, Texas repealed its ban in 2019, the number of streets homeless went up almost 50%, again before the pandemic, while those in shelters dropped by 20%.

Encouraging people to leave shelters for dangerous street encampments is bad for the homeless as a report from the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing demonstrates. These street camps have no sanitary facilities, leading to the accumulation of human waste and garbage. They are often sources of violence. After Austin repealed its camping ban, reports of violent crimes in which both the perpetrator and the victim were homeless increased by 15%. After Los Angeles ended its attempts to clean up its infamous Skid Row in 2014, homeless deaths more than doubled over the next seven years. Today, 1,400 homeless people die on the streets of LA every year.

Local cities have no excuse for allowing people to die on the streets when they have the option to dedicate cleaner and safer spaces for them.

The second failed policy which explains Georgia’s street homeless problem is the sole focus on giving permanent homes to homeless individuals, known as the “Housing First” model. The basic idea behind the model seems sensible. If a homeless person needs a house, why not just give them one, and allow them to keep it without any strings attached?

Yet, after a decade of experience with this model, we know it is not appropriate for every person on the streets. The country has built almost 200,000 new permanent homes for the homeless, and yet street homelessness continues to increase. Some cities like San Francisco have built enough homes to house every chronically homeless person in the city, and yet they too have seen homelessness increase.