Lee Begelman, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD anticipated May 2019
It’s officially 2018, and the East Coast started off the year competing for a record. Unfortunately for those of us who live on the East Coast, the record being sought after was for “Longest Streak of Days Below Freezing.” Fortunately, I guess, we ended up tying for third-longest streak. Nevertheless, it’s been mightily cold in Philadelphia so far this winter, and its only mid-January. But while most of us are able to cope with extra blankets and hot chocolate, the same cannot be said for our neighbors who have no shelter to call their own.
When Philadelphia’s temperatures fall below freezing, thousands of our neighbors’ lives are at stake because Philadelphia has a tragic homelessness problem. According to the city’s 2016 statistics, about 15,000 people, including families, access city shelters each year. In 2015, homelessness outreach organizations engaged 6,500 individuals living on streets, in abandoned buildings, cars, train stations, and other places not fit for human habitation. At various points in the year, city officials conduct a “Point in Time” count, when officials and volunteers walk around the city getting a rough approximation of the city’s unsheltered individuals on a given night. The city’s January 2016 “Point in Time” count found over 700 unsheltered Philadelphians: that’s 700 men, women, children, and likely some non-human companions who had no choice but to spend the night outdoors.
Project HOME, a Philadelphia homelessness advocacy non-profit that also builds affordable housing, names several predominant causes of homelessness, including poverty from a shortage of jobs or a lack of jobs that pay livable wages; disparity between housing costs and minimum wage and earned benefits; lack of affordable transportation; lack of affordable housing and inadequate housing assistance; lack of affordable healthcare; domestic violence; and inadequate support for mental health care and substance abuse challenges. As Philadelphia’s opioid crisis worsens and more individuals come to Philadelphia for its supply of pure, cheap heroin, our homeless population only grows; Liz Hersh, director of the city’s Office of Homeless Services, estimates that three-fourths of the homeless population has a substance-abuse or mental health disorder.
There are some small but positive steps the city has taken in recent years to help. The city recently announced that, in collaboration with Project HOME, a $1.4 million service center for the city’s homeless population will be constructed in Suburban Station’s underground concourse. Projected to open in January 2018, the new “Hub of Hope” will feature medical, psychiatric and legal services, showers, and laundry, though it will only stay open until 7 p.m. most days. In a smaller, but still impactful step, the University City District (UCD) decided to buck the trend of “defensive architecture”—the strategy employed by cities to keep people experiencing homelessness from laying down or being comfortable in public spaces, like park benches—and instead opted to provide large, comfortable, and welcoming furniture in its redesigned Porch outside 30th Street Station or a transit bench at 47th Street and Baltimore Avenue. UCD has also started to offer Mental Health First Aid training for its “ambassadors” who patrol their public spaces, and encouraged ambassadors to connect people experiencing homelessness who appear in-need of assistance to Project HOME and other city resources.
The city is definitely aware of its homelessness problem and has made an effort to improve the lives of people experiencing homelessness, making the city a more welcoming and hospitable place for both our own citizens and our out-of-town visitors. But, of course, more can be done. I have three ideas.
First, we need to re-conceptualize the way we think about homelessness. It is common and intuitive to try to tackle the problem by increasing the number of beds and shelters in the city; after all, if there are more beds, then fewer people will be turned away and forced to sleep outdoors. Danny Farrell of HELP USA (and an acquaintance of mine) has a different idea. His nonprofit administers a program in New York City called “Homebase,” which focuses on those at risk of homelessness by prioritizing efforts on keeping people in their homes. They provide a variety of assistance, from short-term financial help to landlord-tenant dispute mediation: “We keep it simple — see the ball, hit the ball. [If] someone has an option, do everything you can to keep them from losing that option,” he said during testimony at a hearing in front of City Council in March 2017. Of course, Philadelphia should also continue to ensure people in need have access to shelter, but the “Homebase” approach could prevent even more people from losing their homes.
Second, Philadelphia should steal a simple but impactful idea from across the Atlantic. On the first day of November in France, a policy called “trêve hivernale,” or “winter break,” begins. Until March 31st, landlords are forbidden from evicting tenants and cannot turn off access to gas or electricity. This year, France passed the Equality and Citizenship Act, which further extends the policy to apply to all “inhabited places,” which includes makeshift shelters. The measure ensures that individuals are not forced to reckon with extreme weather, on top of the burden of homelessness. The National Coalition for Homelessness estimates that 700 Americans experiencing homelessness die from hypothermia each year; Philadelphia can lessen its contribution to that tragic statistic with just a single piece of legislation.
Finally, and perhaps more ambitiously, Philadelphia should install public restroom facilities in at least a handful of popular areas. I live near the Convention Center, and frequently walk down 12th Street under the Convention Center underpass: people sleep there every night, and they have no choice but to take care of their business on the street or against the wall. Not only is the smell horrible (especially on hot days), but it is just appalling to me that our public officials do not see any urgency to remedy that fact that human beings in our city are forced to live in such filth and squalor, right next-door to thousands of feet (if not more) of empty space in the Convention Center.
I say that public restrooms would be ambitious not because it would be cumbersome to set up, but because it would likely result in the most public backlash. I would imagine that many people would understandably oppose public restrooms, either worried that they would encourage vagrancy, or have the same fate of Philadelphia’s streets and trash cans and not be cleaned sufficiently. To the first potential objection, I would say that homelessness is a reality of urban life, especially in a capitalist society with a papier-mâché safety net. And for the second, I have seen other cities with public restrooms, namely Paris and Denver. They were not so bad! They made for much cleaner streets, and as a tourist I especially was impressed. I am sure that if I had to go without proper shelter for a night or more, I would greatly appreciate living in a city that provided such simple accommodations as a sink and an actual toilet. And regularly maintained public restrooms could go a long way in resolving our “Filthadelphia” reputation. It should be a win-win for everyone.
There would of course be so much more I would encourage our city to do to ensure that no one even has to consider sleeping on the street or in a park for any amount of time. But Philadelphia is just one city—a cash-strapped one at that. Even if Philadelphia had a larger and richer tax base, bolstering the safety net cannot be done unilaterally by individual cities, but truly requires a national, societal effort. That being the case, I hope that Philadelphia can take at least a few small steps to incrementally improve the lives of at least one population of its citizens.