Q&A with Beth Shinn: Local homelessness expert shares causes and solutions in new book

BY HANNAH HERNER

Beth Shinn could be considered a homelessness expert. She’s been studying homelessness for decades and spent the past 12 years in Nashville as a researcher at Vanderbilt University. She recently co-wrote a book, In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessnessand What to Do About It, with Jill Khadduri, researcher and former Department of Housing and Urban Development staff.

The book is divided into four sections that each seek to answer a big question about homelessness.

Who becomes homeless? Why do people become homeless (and why are people of color overrepresented)? How do we end homelessness for different groups? How do we prevent it?

Shinn maintains that homelessness is absolutely solvable. She shared her expertise with The Contributor.

Your book talks about how there are no people who are too “risky to serve.” Can you expand on that?

That has to do with prevention ... People sometimes wonder whether prevention should involve triage — whether there are some people that are going to become homeless no matter what, some that don’t need services, and maybe there’s a sweet spot in the middle. That turns out not to be the case. It turns out that if you give whatever you’ve got … it’ll have the most impact given to the people at highest risk.

If you give your services to people at low risk, it will look like [the organizations] do a great job because nobody becomes homeless, but nobody would have become homeless even without those services. So instead of doing triage and trying to find people who are worthy to give your prevention services to, you should try to give your prevention services to the people who are at highest risk.

Why are people who are Black so overrepresented amongst people experiencing homelessness?

There are four reasons that all have to do with the racism in our society. One is discrimination in employment and hence, income. A second is longstanding historical patterns of discrimination that lead to big disparities in wealth. And the major form of wealth for most people is their housing. If you can’t afford to own your own home and if your friends and relatives don’t have housing that they can help you out with, ongoing and longterm discrimination in wealth leads to more homelessness.

A third form of discrimination is in housing itself. [The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development] measures the extent to which landlords will give the same offers to a similarly situated white perspective renter and Black perspective renter and find ongoing discrimination. African Americans get less access to housing than white americans or they’re expected or pay more or put down a better security deposit.

The fourth form of discrimination is racism in the criminal justice system. African Americans are much more likely — at every stage of criminal processing — to be dealt with more severely. They’re much more likely to end up in prison. You have more Black men in prison, and those men aren’t able to support their families and they’re not contributing to their communities while they’re locked up. There is continuing discrimination in the private sector by employers and others. Those four different forms of racism really compound each other to put African Americans at greater risk [of homelessness] than white Americans.

You started studying homelessness in New York City. How does the way they address homelessness there compare to Nashville?

I’m not sure I would hold up New York City as a model but New York City has a right to shelter, so that anybody who is homeless is kind of guaranteed shelter. And shelter is seen as a public responsibility, so it’s supported by a tax system.

In Tennessee .. our taxes are low and there’s not a lot of public investment in funding either affordable housing or services for people who succumb to homelessness. It’s largely fallen to churches and religious organizations to create shelters and other programs. They’re a little spotty. For example we have a winter sheltering program but not one in the summer.

Religious organizations in general are wonderful for having stepped up to the plate and trying to take responsibility for our neighbors that are unhoused. They vary in their approaches, but they aren’t always driven by evidence about what works best.

You wrote a paper about homelessness back in 1990. What have we learned about it since then?

I think at this point we understand better some of the causes of homelessness — which is essentially the lack of affordable housing — and the solutions.

We know, for example, from a recent study that I was involved with, that if you give families who experience homelessness housing vouchers that hold their rental expenses to 30 percent of their income, you’ll not only end homelessness, but you’ll have all these radiating benefits for families. You reduce psychological distress and substance abuse and domestic violence and kids’ behavior problems and kids have better school attendance. You reduce food insecurity, you reduce family separations and foster care placements.

So if you give families a platform to security of housing, any other problems they have they can work out by themselves. If you don’t have that housing as a secure platform, nothing else that you’re going to provide in the way of services is going to have much impact.

We know what it takes to end homelessness, and it’s really a question of political will to put in the resources to make it happen.

A lot of vendors of The Contributor are single adults. What are the solutions you see for them?

You’ve got to make housing affordable. Housing is unaffordable because income can’t pay rent. You have to make housing cheaper, and you have to increase incomes. There are lots of ways to increase income and there are lots of ways to reduce housing costs and we have to do them all.

For income, you can raise the minimum wage, you can add to the earned income tax credit, you can bring back general assistance to individuals. If folks are eligible for disability benefits you can increase the payment standards. (Editor’s note: General assistance refers to welfare that is not restricted to people with children or people with disabilities. This was more common in states before the introduction of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 1996, Shinn says.)

For reducing housing costs there are things like [Metro’s Barnes Housing Trust Fund], which are way too small. We could give a preference for public housing for people experiencing homelessness, too.

How did you become interested in studying homelessness to begin with?

I was a young mom in New York City at the point when homelessness began to spill out of skid rows and into everyone’s consciousness. It happened in New York a little earlier than other places. You have to understand that in the 1950s everyone thought homelessness was coming to an end. Homelessness was a phenomenon of a few older men … The thought was when that generation passed, homelessness was over. Folks weren’t even homeless by HUD’s current standards. They were abysmally housed in cage motels and single room occupancy hotels, flop houses. They weren’t sleeping on the streets even, then. We thought homelessness was at an end.

Then as cheap housing disappeared, those SROs got torn down to make way for luxury apartments. As income inequality increased, and incomes at the bottom didn’t keep pace with housing costs, homelessness began to re-emerge and it began to affect a larger group of people. It had been old white men, but it started to be young people and minorities and women and kids. At that point there was a sense of shock and disbelief that’s hard to recapture today. The young people today have never known a time where they haven’t had to pick their way around their fellow citizens on the streets. It was shocking.

I wanted to try to do something about it.

I know I had a lot of misconceptions about people experiencing homelessness in the past. Were there any standout learning moments for you?

One common misconception is that homelessness is a personality trait. I think we understand now that people pass through homelessness. Many people experience homelessness at some point. Most people who are homeless are homeless fairly briefly.

That’s important for a lot of reasons. It shows that it’s a bigger problem than you might think. It shows that there are many points of intervention. If homelessness is something that people pass through, then we can try to prevent them from getting there.

A lot of people are holding on by their fingernails who are low income. A bad event or a series of events could push them over. Really understanding that homelessness is this dynamic process is important. I don’t think any of us really understood just how dynamic and how many people were affected.