Jennifer Egan Discusses a Solution for Chronic Homelessness
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2023
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
About 1.4 million people in the United States end up in homeless shelters every year, with many thousands more living on the street. You could fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused. The problem seems gigantic, tragic, and intractable. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing—providing not only a stable apartment but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. TheNew Yorkercontributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals who had been homeless for long periods of timeas they transitionedinto a new supportive-housing building in New York. “Is it easy to bring people with these kinds of difficult histories into one place in the span of eight months? No,” she tells David Remnick. “Does it work? From what I have seen, the answer is yes.” By one estimate, addressing the country’s homeless problem would cost about ten billion dollars. But Egan argues that figure pales in comparison to what we’re spending on the problem in the form of emergency medical care, emergency shelter, and other piecemeal solutions. “No one wants to see that line item in a budget, but we are already spending it in all of these diffuse ways,” she says. “We are hemorrhaging money at this problem.”
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| 0:49.3 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:57.7 | By the time. This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. By one measure, something like 1.4 million people end up in homeless shelters every year, |
| 1:05.4 | and many thousands more are living on the street. |
| 1:08.5 | You could nearly fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused in this country. |
| 1:13.0 | The problem seems gigantic and tragic |
| 1:15.6 | and absolutely intractable. |
| 1:18.0 | But homelessless, in fact, is not intractable. |
| 1:20.6 | There are solutions. |
| 1:22.0 | No one solution is going to work |
| 1:23.4 | for every person or every city, |
| 1:25.9 | but we could greatly reduce the scale of this tragedy. |
| 1:29.7 | That's the good news and the bad news, according to Jennifer Egan, and she's been reporting |
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