Emergency shelter money is limited, and given conditions in shelters, many folks prefer to be outdoors during the warm summer months where they can be comfortable and relatively undisturbed. Why swelter in Harrington Hall with 100 other guys undergoing their own traumas, far from anything else in the state, only to be kicked out at 7 am when you can sleep in a tent with your girlfriend and your dog in a place that’s convenient to you at a time you like?

The shelters understand this as well (it’s also not easy to find good people to staff shelters). And to some extent, the government understands this, so they only release winter shelter money when things get dire (although many advocates will point out this is far too late most years).

Okay, that’s shelters. Why does government not fix the problem of homelessness? Two reasons. First, policymakers are housed while the homeless are notably not. There is a huge power differential here. If you are fighting for your literal survival everyday, you know what you don’t do? Vote. If your address changes repeatedly (though I’ll note “under the X bridge in Y town” is a valid home address for voting in RI, IIRC), then it’s hard to figure out where you should vote, and you may not waste precious data on your phone to look it up. Meanwhile, housed people generally vote much more reliably, and are generally more likely to support policies that criminalize homelessness (like banning panhandling) than solve it (building housing). Indeed, they often mobilize to stop the latter.

You might be surprised to know that >10 years ago the State created a 10-year plan to end homelessness. Guess what? No political support for enacting it.

Second, the whole “homeless system” is fragmented between a bunch of charities, which the government relies on to do the actual work. The State of RI basically acts as a source of funding for many of these charities. But they’re one of many such sources.

These charities are mixed. Some are pretty good, some are awful. There’s a few dozen of them, mostly regionally based. Some of them are genuinely threatened by the idea that we should end homelessness; after all, that’s how they get all of their money. These are the ones that refused to move to the national “Housing First” model until it became clear that all the money out there was demanding they do so.

Such a fragmented system filled with disinterested politicians creates the conditions for this. The myth that homelessness is hard to solve (it’s not, it requires housing: it’s right there in the word “home-less”) is also useful cover. Dishing out a few hundred thousand to charities allows politicians to say they’re “working on it” when they’re not spending the tens of millions required to truly end homelessness in RI.

Finally a word on bike lanes. Housing policy is mostly set by the State, cities could do more for it (housing authorities, zoning reform, etc.), but it’s not their prerogative, as it’s a statewide system. Bike lanes, however, are a municipal issue, since they generally run down municipally-owned streets. Spending money on bike lanes doesn’t preclude spending on housing, any more than sending an officer to arrest someone for panhandling does (a complete waste of resources, since panhandling is protected speech under the First Amendment). Also, many homeless people are also bike riders, so making cycling safer isn’t exactly a problem for them.