The Sunday Read: ‘How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times, traveled to Houston to observe an approach to chronic homelessness that has won widespread praise. Houston, the nation’s fourth-most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses in the past decade, an overwhelming majority of whom remain housed after two years. This has been achieved through a “housing first” practice: moving the most vulnerable from the streets directly into apartments, instead of shelters, without individuals being required to do a 12-step program, or to find a job. Delving into the finer details of the process, Kimmelman considers the different logic “housing first” involves. After all, “when you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore,” he writes. “You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.”

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0:00.0	The Daily is sponsored by Amazon Ads.
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0:28.2	Your brand, their world.
0:30.2	As the architecture critic, the job is to look at the world we're building.
0:37.6	And that means the world we're building for people who are housed and also for people
0:42.4	who are not housed.
0:44.4	I'm Michael Kimmelman.
0:45.4	I'm the architecture critic for The New York Times and also the founder and editor at
0:49.2	large for a new enterprise called Headway.
0:53.1	And Headway's brief is to tackle big global challenges through the lens of progress.
1:00.2	Homelessness is in a way just the visible tip of the iceberg of problems in the country.
1:08.4	The affordable housing crisis, poverty, racial inequities, substance and drug abuse, and
1:14.9	addictions, mental health, all of them are sort of manifest by when you see people living
1:21.2	in the streets.
1:23.0	Healing homelessness is in fact a kind of triage.
	...

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