Theroux says the way to end homelessness is not the top-down government approach, but the traditional American way of an entire community working together.
Her documentary team found that while most localities have small programs that work well, San Antonio’s Haven for Hope in Texas was the only large-scale program successfully fighting homelessness because it was modeled after a whole-of-community approach.
“Most importantly, it’s done it through a very Tocquevillian, traditional American model where everybody in the community came together … [and] formed a task force,” to strategize about the comprehensive needs of the population, including interviewing the homeless to find out what they were looking for, Theroux said in a recent interview with NTD’s Fresh Look America.
“But more importantly, provide[ing] transformational care, residential transformational services, for people to take themselves from the street to achieve their full potential, and live rich lives.”
Unlike San Francisco, “where you stick somebody in housing, not able to live successfully that way, and they end up just back on the streets over and over and over again,” at Haven for Hope “what they’re being given upfront is unconditional love and acceptance,” said Theroux.
Increase in Unsheltered Homeless Due to Policy
According to the HUD 2020 report, before the pandemic, the number of unsheltered individuals increased by 7 percent between 2019 and 2020, while the number of sheltered individuals across the country remained almost unchanged.However, Theroux said her findings show that homelessness is on the rise nationally, and is worse in many major cities because of a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) policy shift that started under President George W. Bush and was enhanced under the Barack Obama administration.
“[The government] made the streets the waiting room in the meantime,” and “you never address the root causes [that] put someone into homelessness in the first place.”
Even those who do get into permanent housing often do not have the skills to live independently and end up back on the street, or dead from a drug overdose, she said.
“It’s a very bad solution, and we have to reverse it.”
Solution Lies Elsewhere
“You have to address what put them into homelessness, or what’s keeping them in homelessness, in order to resolve it, and ... four walls don’t do that,” said Theroux. “You’re just taking a homeless person and putting them inside, so they remain culturally homeless, and you’re not helping them.”Childhood trauma, mental health disorders, and economic downturn are the leading causes of homelessness, she said. While many are already addicts, many others become addicted as a way to escape the misery of homelessness.
And instead of making it easier for them, which city officials call “harm reduction,” Theroux said. “We really need to be providing people with the resources to escape that slavery and achieve their full potentials as human beings.”
Newsom also addressed mental health in fighting homelessness and said his budget includes putting billions into mental health programs for the homeless population.
While Theroux believes drug prohibition does not work, neither does she believe in giving ready access to drugs for harm reduction measures—such as providing syringes, like they do in San Francisco. She said educating people, especially youth, about the reality of drug use, is the key to decreasing addiction.
“We have to maintain or return our streets to civil order, and deal with drug use through education and treatment, and helping people understand that it’s not a good choice. And if you’re addicted, there’s a way to not become addicted,” said Theroux.
“Concurrent with that, we have to be letting kids know that there’s a purpose to life, and we’ve taken a lot of that away. We’re telling kids ‘no, there’s no purpose.’”
The other, more important, factor, she said, is to empower families, who can help instill a sense of belonging and purpose.
“We have a war on children in this country ... We’re trying to destroy childhood. We have families that are in deep distress.”
Too Much Government Control
In California—one of the top six worst states for homelessness—zoning laws, climate change policies, and government control of building housing units, have made building homes extremely expensive and contributed to the increase of homelessness.Clearly, the billions allotted to the crisis have not helped reduce homelessness in that state’s major cities.
“It’s central planning,“ said Theroux. ”We saw it in all the communist countries and socialist countries, when it’s centrally planned. It’s very expensive, and it takes a long time, and it’s not very good.”
The reason San Antonio’s Haven for Hope is successful is because it brings the business and the nonprofit community, the police, fire department, and city government together to provide all of the services people need to end the cycle of homelessness, said Theroux.
The San Antonio community is invested in the Haven for Hope because they know it improves lives, and people want to help so it sets up a “virtuous cycle,” said Theroux. While filming there, she saw how the larger community responded to a call for help to prepare for winter.
Moving Beyond Politics
Theroux believes in order to replicate the Haven for Hope on a national scale, or in other cities, leaders will have to reach across political lines, as they did in San Antonio. There, despite their differences, a Democratic mayor and Republican businessman worked together to find a lasting solution.“The important thing about volunteering, about working with people who are different from you is that you do learn that ‘Nope, we’re all the same.’ Underneath it all, we’re all exactly the same, and we have to regain that,” said Theroux.
Although the left and the right are divided on many political and social issues, their dissatisfaction with the government is bringing the two sides together, which Theroux sees as crucial to combating the homelessness-addiction crisis.
“We don’t want people thinking that it’s the government’s job to take care of each other. It’s our job to take care of each other,” said Theroux.