September 29, 2024 • 14 mins
Original Air Date: September 29, 2024
Elizabeth Funk is the founder of Dignitymoves.org, which is getting homeless people off the streets in California by building temporary private housing where they can stay for 1-2 years, as they get back on their feet. It’s working great in San Jose and other areas but not yet in San Francisco.
Elizabeth Funk is the founder of Dignitymoves.org, which is getting homeless people off the streets in California by building temporary private housing where they can stay for 1-2 years, as they get back on their feet. It’s working great in San Jose and other areas but not yet in San Francisco.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, Conversations about issues that matter.
Here's your host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I want to introduce you to Elizabeth Thums. She is
the founder of Dignitymoves dot org. Elizabeth joined us I
think about a year ago and we were talking about
your very very lofty goal of ending homelessness, and you
have a program going. I think New York could learn
(00:30):
from that program. A lot of places can learn from
that program. So tell us about it in a nutshell.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Sure, well, Dignity Moves is about focusing on unsheltered homelessness,
which is only one component of homelessness. People don't understand that.
And yet in California we have got the preponderance of
people who've lost their homes are living on their street,
and therefore half of the unsheltered people in the country
are in California. It's kind of a uniquely California problem,
(00:58):
and that's kind of by design. In California, we've decided
to spend all of our resources only on permanent housing,
and the streets are the waiting room because that takes
so long and costs so much.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Now, in New York.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
There's the opposite where New York you have the right
to shelter and so by law there are enough shelter
beds for everyone, albeit they're not lovely, But then they
don't have the money left over to build the permanent housing,
which is really what ends the problem. So this is
really primarily what Dignity Moves is focused on is a
West Coast phenomenon, and it comes from the fact that
most of the cities believe that it's a waste of
(01:30):
money to spend money on anything that's not a permanent exit,
and I just respectfully disagree. I think getting people off
of the streets is well worth it, both fiscally but
also morally.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So how many homes have been built.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
So Dignity Moves is just really innovative about how we
build our temporary places cabins, people call them tiny homes,
and we can borrow vacant parking lots or vacant land
it's only available for a few years and set these
up in a community. So we've built in San Francisco
and Santa Barbara, Alameda, Rohnert Park, We're working in San Jose, Watsonville,
(02:08):
all up and down the West Coast and what we
first started, what we were doing was really sort of
the opposite of the current system, and the powers that
be and homelessness were actually very opposed to what they
considered squandering resources on interim or temporary solutions. That's changing
now with the Supreme Court ruling and Governor Newsom issuing
(02:29):
a mandate to the cities and saying get these encampments
out of here. Now, all of a sudden, for the
first time, cities of getting much more serious about addressing
the short term problem while they focus on the long
term problem. So this is really a growing, new new
model that is groundbreaking, ironically shouldn't be.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
How did you get involved with this?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Well, I spent most of my career in technology. I
was in Silicon Valley. I was early at Yahoo and Microsoft,
and so I've got a framework in my mind about
you know, don't tell me something's not possible, it's possible.
And you know, looking at homelessness, I think the biggest
thing standing in our way is people believing that it's.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Just not solvable. Of course it's solvable.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
You'll get the number of people multiply times the cost
to build in room housing, and you know, there is
an end and so you know that kind of that
puzzle is what gets me excited to help people think
about things differently. And and we're not looking at this
as the traditional construction that's costing a million dollars a unit.
Land is expensive, great, will borrow it. Building codes are horrendous,
(03:36):
but this is an emergency. We use femas emergency codes.
And people don't want to shelter in the neighborhood, Great,
then let's invite in the people sleeping in the immediate area.
So that neighborhood is what sees the visible difference. Give
us another hurdle. Right, It's not this can't be done,
it's how and it can be. So now we're starting
to do that community by community saying Okay, what's it
(03:57):
going to take to end it in Santa Barbara County,
what's they're going to take to end it in the
city of San Jose, And not ship away at the
problem anymore, but start getting serious at a systems level.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
All right, but these are permanent houses for the homeless.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
No, No, were.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
The un sheltered or the unhoused.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
It's a temporary place where so, like I said, we
borrow land and we use emergency building codes, so they're
not intended to be long term. They're an alternative to
the streets or an alternative to a bunk bed and
a big warehouse kind of a room. It's a dignified
place where they have their own room with a door
that walks. That's fundamental first for the person being willing
(04:39):
to come. They don't want to sleep on a bunk
bed next to a stranger. But it's also fundamental because
when the person could finally relax and get out of
survival mode. Now you've got a chance to work with
them on solutions. And so it's a place that they'd
stay six months, maybe up to two years. We'll stay
on that parking lot or that vacant land as long
as it's a available and when we need to, we
(05:01):
pick it up with a forklift and move it to
the next place.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Wait, so the house moves to the next place.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Think of them as little cabins, little tiny homes. So
they are set up on a vacant available place that's
maybe available for five years, and they come flat packed
like ikea.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
You know, just a thing. It's a it's a box.
Think about it.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
We're overthinking what housing is this is a little dorm
room size sixty four square feet or eighty five square feet.
We don't make them. We buy them from all sorts
of different manufacturers. How you can buy a tiny home
on Amazon or a Walmart, right, I mean, these aren't
homes in the traditional sense, but it's a safe place.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
That's an alternative tent.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
But how do you know in a year or two
that that person can move on to being completely self sufficient.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Well, many of them can't, right, And so what we've
learned is that when people first become homeless, only about
twenty percent have a serious enough mental or drug addiction
problem that would prevent them from returning to stability. Eighty
percent could. But what happens is when they're on the streets,
that struggle for survival is when the trauma happens, and
(06:10):
really quickly a few weeks later, that person's trauma may
never ever be repairable. And we're letting people stay on
the streets for years. So the people that are out
there now have probably been there for a while. Those
folks are many of them are unlikely to return to
self sufficiency, but at least we can get them routed
to the right care and get them to a place
where they can be cared for. But the goal is
(06:32):
soon when we catch up with the backlog that when
people first become homeless, they've got a place to shower
and sleep, plug in their phone, and hopefully be able
to get back out on their feet rather than be
destined for care.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
How long have you been doing this.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
We've been doing this about three years, and it took
us two years to get our first two hundred rooms open.
We really were pushing water uphill now we open two
hundred and last quarter.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's really how many do you have an all?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
So right now we have about five hundred or so
rooms now that can be more beds because you can
be couples and lots of dogs, cats because people can
bring their pet and.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Be with them in their room.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
We've got about one thousand or thirteen hundred rooms in
various stages of construction right now, and it's just the beginning.
We're starting to really see cities get serious about building
alternatives to the streets.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
In a perfect world, how many would you need in California?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
California has about one hundred and fifty thousand people unsheltered.
Now you don't need one for one, because the way
homeless this works, people are coming in and falling out
all the time. But you know, one hundred thousand units
would be enough to probably end the problem. But we
don't think about it California wide. We think about it
city by city or county by county. Santa Barbara County
(07:52):
needed five hundred beds more or less four hundred and fifty,
and so we're working with the county and saying, okay,
let's go four hundred and fifty.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
It's not impossible.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Each of the supervisors they went into a closed door
session and they each came out with one property in
their district and said, let's do it. And with the
public private partnership which is so important, and the partnership
of the local Supportive services agency in this case called
Good Samaritan that can work with those people. We all
come together and say, then, let's just end this problem.
Why are we telling ourselves it's not solvable, and that's happening.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I am speaking with Elizabeth Thunk. She is the founder
of Dignitymoves dot org. Have you had any discussions with
people in our administration in New York City?
Speaker 4 (08:39):
We have not. We have not.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Now New York, it's a little bit of a harder
sell because they do have shelter.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
We're an alternative to shelter.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
So it's a little bit like saying if somebody's already
got an iPhone, but trying to sell in a better one.
In California, we don't have shelter at all. We have
one shelter bed for every four people who need one,
and so the need is greater on the West Coast,
where we really don't have any shelter at all. This
is an alternative that I believe is superior to having
a bunk bed with strangers.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
But in New York you do have enough beds. So
it's not that.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
People don't want to go there because they're unsafe.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
I wouldn't right.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
People want to They need to be able to lock
their door and take a deep breath. My dad said,
I should have named this organization a deep breath, because
that's really what it is. You and I take it
for granted that we can close our door at night
to doubt the world.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
Imagine if you couldn't, So.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
In your mind, will this work on a mass scale
in California? How long will it take for it to work?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
So it's interesting, you know, people think that it's expensive
to indulge in these solutions, and yet what people don't
realize is it's costing society twice as much to let
people lnguish on the streets then it would to bring
them indoors and get them proper supportive services. We don't
realize the cost to clean up after these encampments, the
emergency room, visits, the police interactions. All that adds up
(10:09):
to like sixty eighty thousand dollars a year per person
and to give them a proper supportive services program is
half of that. It's about forty thousand. And so it's
not about the money, it's about the will. And we
can build our little communities in a couple of months.
So it's a question of how do we convince leaders
that it's that it's fiscally responsible, even if it isn't
(10:32):
that one department you've got the wrong pocket problem. You've
got the hospitals and the police and everybody who save,
and yet the housing department that would have to pay.
So we're trying to go up one level and advocate
for that. But how long it would take. I mean,
if we had funding and if we had will. I mean,
this is this is a quick solution. Now, it's not
ending homelessness, it's ending unsheltered homelessness. That's the tip of
(10:54):
the iceberg. Once you get people indoors, you've got much
thornier and much more complex issues of housing cost and discrimination, inequity,
drug addictions. But at least you've got the pressure off
the system where you've got a better chance of spending
resources in the right way and quite frankly, citizens staying
around and feeling proud of their cities.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
That's gone.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
We keep hearing these stories, specifically about San Francisco and
people just living on the streets. Have you made a
dent there? I mean, we just you know there. We
hear that businesses are closing because of the crime, and
that you can't get away from the number of people
on the street.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
It's really tough.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
And San Francisco, you know, it's not to be blamed,
but San Francisco is, just like many cities in California,
still really stuck in the mentality that permanent housing is
the only valid solution. And there are reasons for that,
because cities are scored on reducing their homeless count and
when you move from the streets into interim housing, you're
still counted as homeless, and so it doesn't help their metrics,
(11:59):
and it costs money out of their department for something
they're not measured on.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
But San Francisco is slower on the take up.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
San Jose down the road, by the other hand, is
really an impressive alternative. That is a mayor and a
city that is said, we're going to get people off
the streets. I don't care what the metrics say. And
they started doing these similar projects, they call them quick
build cabins, and you know, it's working astonishingly. They've in
a year when unsheltered homelessness across California went up by
(12:29):
ten and a half percent, it went down by ten
point seven percent in San Jose. It's a twenty one
percent swing and seventy percent of those people are staying
stably housed.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
That's a city that's got it right.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
And we're working with them to do a lot more
of it and take it city wide and return that
the dignity of the streets, reclaim public spaces, reclaim our
own sense of civility, and it's.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
The humane thing. It's just the right thing to do.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
But how can you do it in a city like
San Francisco where you have you don't have the space.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Oh, we can get creative.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
In Los Angeles, we're building on the East LA Community
College on the rooftop of the parking lot. Really, did
you know one in five community college students in California
are experiencing homelessness, one in five, and those are students
that are trying to make a better life for themselves.
That is unacceptable. So it was the students who came
up with the idea seven story parking garage. They said,
(13:23):
why don't we do it on top of the parking
garage so their space. If you get creative, come on,
we just have to try.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
If you were sitting with the presidential candidates and would
you have a national plan for them?
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I do and it's very specific, which is one of
the other main reasons that cities are not investing in
interim solutions.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
We talked about the metrics.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
The other one is the funding for the ongoing supportive services.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
In today's world.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
The reason cities are obsessed with permanent housing is because
it is paid for by the federal government in the
form of Section eight vouchers, and if cities bring them in,
they have to pay for it themselves. So the one
thing that could end unshielded homelessness is if HUD were
providing similar subsidies at the interim stage, all of a sudden,
cities would get on board. So is there talk of that, Well,
(14:19):
we're doing a lot of educating, let's say that, and
really unshielded homelessness could be solved with the stroke of
one penance the Secretary of HUD and then of course
the Congress that has to approve it. But it really
is that simple. And once you've named a problem, you're
halfway to solving it.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Thank you so much, Elizabeth Thunk, the founder of Dignitymoves
dot org. And you could go online and learn more
about that.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
You've been listening to Sunstein sessions on iHeartRadio, a production
of New York's classic rock Q one O four point
three
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, Conversations about issues that matter.
Here's your host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I want to introduce you to Elizabeth Thums. She is
the founder of Dignitymoves dot org. Elizabeth joined us I
think about a year ago and we were talking about
your very very lofty goal of ending homelessness, and you
have a program going. I think New York could learn
(00:30):
from that program. A lot of places can learn from
that program. So tell us about it in a nutshell.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Sure, well, Dignity Moves is about focusing on unsheltered homelessness,
which is only one component of homelessness. People don't understand that.
And yet in California we have got the preponderance of
people who've lost their homes are living on their street,
and therefore half of the unsheltered people in the country
are in California. It's kind of a uniquely California problem,
(00:58):
and that's kind of by design. In California, we've decided
to spend all of our resources only on permanent housing,
and the streets are the waiting room because that takes
so long and costs so much.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Now, in New York.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
There's the opposite where New York you have the right
to shelter and so by law there are enough shelter
beds for everyone, albeit they're not lovely, But then they
don't have the money left over to build the permanent housing,
which is really what ends the problem. So this is
really primarily what Dignity Moves is focused on is a
West Coast phenomenon, and it comes from the fact that
most of the cities believe that it's a waste of
(01:30):
money to spend money on anything that's not a permanent exit,
and I just respectfully disagree. I think getting people off
of the streets is well worth it, both fiscally but
also morally.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So how many homes have been built.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
So Dignity Moves is just really innovative about how we
build our temporary places cabins, people call them tiny homes,
and we can borrow vacant parking lots or vacant land
it's only available for a few years and set these
up in a community. So we've built in San Francisco
and Santa Barbara, Alameda, Rohnert Park, We're working in San Jose, Watsonville,
(02:08):
all up and down the West Coast and what we
first started, what we were doing was really sort of
the opposite of the current system, and the powers that
be and homelessness were actually very opposed to what they
considered squandering resources on interim or temporary solutions. That's changing
now with the Supreme Court ruling and Governor Newsom issuing
(02:29):
a mandate to the cities and saying get these encampments
out of here. Now, all of a sudden, for the
first time, cities of getting much more serious about addressing
the short term problem while they focus on the long
term problem. So this is really a growing, new new
model that is groundbreaking, ironically shouldn't be.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
How did you get involved with this?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Well, I spent most of my career in technology. I
was in Silicon Valley. I was early at Yahoo and Microsoft,
and so I've got a framework in my mind about
you know, don't tell me something's not possible, it's possible.
And you know, looking at homelessness, I think the biggest
thing standing in our way is people believing that it's.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Just not solvable. Of course it's solvable.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
You'll get the number of people multiply times the cost
to build in room housing, and you know, there is
an end and so you know that kind of that
puzzle is what gets me excited to help people think
about things differently. And and we're not looking at this
as the traditional construction that's costing a million dollars a unit.
Land is expensive, great, will borrow it. Building codes are horrendous,
(03:36):
but this is an emergency. We use femas emergency codes.
And people don't want to shelter in the neighborhood, Great,
then let's invite in the people sleeping in the immediate area.
So that neighborhood is what sees the visible difference. Give
us another hurdle. Right, It's not this can't be done,
it's how and it can be. So now we're starting
to do that community by community saying Okay, what's it
(03:57):
going to take to end it in Santa Barbara County,
what's they're going to take to end it in the
city of San Jose, And not ship away at the
problem anymore, but start getting serious at a systems level.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
All right, but these are permanent houses for the homeless.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
No, No, were.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
The un sheltered or the unhoused.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
It's a temporary place where so, like I said, we
borrow land and we use emergency building codes, so they're
not intended to be long term. They're an alternative to
the streets or an alternative to a bunk bed and
a big warehouse kind of a room. It's a dignified
place where they have their own room with a door
that walks. That's fundamental first for the person being willing
(04:39):
to come. They don't want to sleep on a bunk
bed next to a stranger. But it's also fundamental because
when the person could finally relax and get out of
survival mode. Now you've got a chance to work with
them on solutions. And so it's a place that they'd
stay six months, maybe up to two years. We'll stay
on that parking lot or that vacant land as long
as it's a available and when we need to, we
(05:01):
pick it up with a forklift and move it to
the next place.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Wait, so the house moves to the next place.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Think of them as little cabins, little tiny homes. So
they are set up on a vacant available place that's
maybe available for five years, and they come flat packed
like ikea.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
You know, just a thing. It's a it's a box.
Think about it.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
We're overthinking what housing is this is a little dorm
room size sixty four square feet or eighty five square feet.
We don't make them. We buy them from all sorts
of different manufacturers. How you can buy a tiny home
on Amazon or a Walmart, right, I mean, these aren't
homes in the traditional sense, but it's a safe place.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
That's an alternative tent.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
But how do you know in a year or two
that that person can move on to being completely self sufficient.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Well, many of them can't, right, And so what we've
learned is that when people first become homeless, only about
twenty percent have a serious enough mental or drug addiction
problem that would prevent them from returning to stability. Eighty
percent could. But what happens is when they're on the streets,
that struggle for survival is when the trauma happens, and
(06:10):
really quickly a few weeks later, that person's trauma may
never ever be repairable. And we're letting people stay on
the streets for years. So the people that are out
there now have probably been there for a while. Those
folks are many of them are unlikely to return to
self sufficiency, but at least we can get them routed
to the right care and get them to a place
where they can be cared for. But the goal is
(06:32):
soon when we catch up with the backlog that when
people first become homeless, they've got a place to shower
and sleep, plug in their phone, and hopefully be able
to get back out on their feet rather than be
destined for care.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
How long have you been doing this.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
We've been doing this about three years, and it took
us two years to get our first two hundred rooms open.
We really were pushing water uphill now we open two
hundred and last quarter.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's really how many do you have an all?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
So right now we have about five hundred or so
rooms now that can be more beds because you can
be couples and lots of dogs, cats because people can
bring their pet and.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Be with them in their room.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
We've got about one thousand or thirteen hundred rooms in
various stages of construction right now, and it's just the beginning.
We're starting to really see cities get serious about building
alternatives to the streets.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
In a perfect world, how many would you need in California?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
California has about one hundred and fifty thousand people unsheltered.
Now you don't need one for one, because the way
homeless this works, people are coming in and falling out
all the time. But you know, one hundred thousand units
would be enough to probably end the problem. But we
don't think about it California wide. We think about it
city by city or county by county. Santa Barbara County
(07:52):
needed five hundred beds more or less four hundred and fifty,
and so we're working with the county and saying, okay,
let's go four hundred and fifty.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
It's not impossible.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Each of the supervisors they went into a closed door
session and they each came out with one property in
their district and said, let's do it. And with the
public private partnership which is so important, and the partnership
of the local Supportive services agency in this case called
Good Samaritan that can work with those people. We all
come together and say, then, let's just end this problem.
Why are we telling ourselves it's not solvable, and that's happening.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I am speaking with Elizabeth Thunk. She is the founder
of Dignitymoves dot org. Have you had any discussions with
people in our administration in New York City?
Speaker 4 (08:39):
We have not. We have not.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Now New York, it's a little bit of a harder
sell because they do have shelter.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
We're an alternative to shelter.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
So it's a little bit like saying if somebody's already
got an iPhone, but trying to sell in a better one.
In California, we don't have shelter at all. We have
one shelter bed for every four people who need one,
and so the need is greater on the West Coast,
where we really don't have any shelter at all. This
is an alternative that I believe is superior to having
a bunk bed with strangers.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
But in New York you do have enough beds. So
it's not that.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
People don't want to go there because they're unsafe.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
I wouldn't right.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
People want to They need to be able to lock
their door and take a deep breath. My dad said,
I should have named this organization a deep breath, because
that's really what it is. You and I take it
for granted that we can close our door at night
to doubt the world.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
Imagine if you couldn't, So.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
In your mind, will this work on a mass scale
in California? How long will it take for it to work?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
So it's interesting, you know, people think that it's expensive
to indulge in these solutions, and yet what people don't
realize is it's costing society twice as much to let
people lnguish on the streets then it would to bring
them indoors and get them proper supportive services. We don't
realize the cost to clean up after these encampments, the
emergency room, visits, the police interactions. All that adds up
(10:09):
to like sixty eighty thousand dollars a year per person
and to give them a proper supportive services program is
half of that. It's about forty thousand. And so it's
not about the money, it's about the will. And we
can build our little communities in a couple of months.
So it's a question of how do we convince leaders
that it's that it's fiscally responsible, even if it isn't
(10:32):
that one department you've got the wrong pocket problem. You've
got the hospitals and the police and everybody who save,
and yet the housing department that would have to pay.
So we're trying to go up one level and advocate
for that. But how long it would take. I mean,
if we had funding and if we had will. I mean,
this is this is a quick solution. Now, it's not
ending homelessness, it's ending unsheltered homelessness. That's the tip of
(10:54):
the iceberg. Once you get people indoors, you've got much
thornier and much more complex issues of housing cost and discrimination, inequity,
drug addictions. But at least you've got the pressure off
the system where you've got a better chance of spending
resources in the right way and quite frankly, citizens staying
around and feeling proud of their cities.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
That's gone.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
We keep hearing these stories, specifically about San Francisco and
people just living on the streets. Have you made a
dent there? I mean, we just you know there. We
hear that businesses are closing because of the crime, and
that you can't get away from the number of people
on the street.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
It's really tough.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
And San Francisco, you know, it's not to be blamed,
but San Francisco is, just like many cities in California,
still really stuck in the mentality that permanent housing is
the only valid solution. And there are reasons for that,
because cities are scored on reducing their homeless count and
when you move from the streets into interim housing, you're
still counted as homeless, and so it doesn't help their metrics,
(11:59):
and it costs money out of their department for something
they're not measured on.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
But San Francisco is slower on the take up.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
San Jose down the road, by the other hand, is
really an impressive alternative. That is a mayor and a
city that is said, we're going to get people off
the streets. I don't care what the metrics say. And
they started doing these similar projects, they call them quick
build cabins, and you know, it's working astonishingly. They've in
a year when unsheltered homelessness across California went up by
(12:29):
ten and a half percent, it went down by ten
point seven percent in San Jose. It's a twenty one
percent swing and seventy percent of those people are staying
stably housed.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
That's a city that's got it right.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
And we're working with them to do a lot more
of it and take it city wide and return that
the dignity of the streets, reclaim public spaces, reclaim our
own sense of civility, and it's.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
The humane thing. It's just the right thing to do.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
But how can you do it in a city like
San Francisco where you have you don't have the space.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Oh, we can get creative.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
In Los Angeles, we're building on the East LA Community
College on the rooftop of the parking lot. Really, did
you know one in five community college students in California
are experiencing homelessness, one in five, and those are students
that are trying to make a better life for themselves.
That is unacceptable. So it was the students who came
up with the idea seven story parking garage. They said,
(13:23):
why don't we do it on top of the parking
garage so their space. If you get creative, come on,
we just have to try.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
If you were sitting with the presidential candidates and would
you have a national plan for them?
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I do and it's very specific, which is one of
the other main reasons that cities are not investing in
interim solutions.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
We talked about the metrics.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
The other one is the funding for the ongoing supportive services.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
In today's world.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
The reason cities are obsessed with permanent housing is because
it is paid for by the federal government in the
form of Section eight vouchers, and if cities bring them in,
they have to pay for it themselves. So the one
thing that could end unshielded homelessness is if HUD were
providing similar subsidies at the interim stage, all of a sudden,
cities would get on board. So is there talk of that, Well,
(14:19):
we're doing a lot of educating, let's say that, and
really unshielded homelessness could be solved with the stroke of
one penance the Secretary of HUD and then of course
the Congress that has to approve it. But it really
is that simple. And once you've named a problem, you're
halfway to solving it.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Thank you so much, Elizabeth Thunk, the founder of Dignitymoves
dot org. And you could go online and learn more
about that.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
You've been listening to Sunstein sessions on iHeartRadio, a production
of New York's classic rock Q one O four point
three
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
Today’s Latest News In 4 Minutes. Updated Hourly.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.