Poverty sucks. And, as many of you know, I believe one of its cruelest forms is homelessness.
Every night in Minnesota, thousands of people are excluded and forced to live with out a home.
Children sleep in cars with their families. People living with severe and persistent mental illness survive on our streets or in encampments. Women and young people flee domestic violence only to find themselves in shelters, hoping they can eventually secure a home beyond their abuser’s reach. People living with traumatic brain injuries are also disproportionately affected by homelessness.
Each of these stories is different, but they all point to the same reality: too many of our neighbors cannot find the housing—and, in many cases, the services—they need not only to survive, but to build stable, fulfilling lives.
That leaves me with a set of questions I just can’t shake: Why isn’t every child experiencing homelessness treated as an emergency? Why have we grown numb to seeing people with severe mental illness living outdoors? Why have we accepted that someone can work full-time and still be unable to afford a place to live in the community they help sustain?
When a political controversy erupts, it dominates headlines. Yet homelessness—something that affects thousands of Minnesotans every single night—rarely receives the same sustained attention. Imagine if every new case of homelessness prompted a press conference where people experiencing homelessness could ask elected leaders one simple question: “What are you doing to abolish homelessness and ensure everyone has access to safe, affordable housing?”
Homelessness is made a complicated challenge, but complexity should never become an excuse for complacency. It requires more housing. It requires supportive services. It requires stronger mental health systems, better resources for those fleeinng domestic violence, and policies that make housing attainable for working families. Most of all, it requires the determination to treat this issue with the urgency it deserves.
Charity matters. Shelters matter. They save lives. But they were never meant to be permanent solutions. Our goal should be something much greater: making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.
This is about politics. It is about priorities. Above all, it is about political will. It’s about deciding what kind of communities we want to build: communities where teachers, nursing assistants, restaurant workers, child care providers, retail clerks, and countless others can afford to live in or near the places where they work. Communities where children don’t go to sleep in cars. Communities where people living with a mental illness receive treatment instead of being left to survive on the streets.
I know I keep coming back to the same question, but I can’t let it go:
Why isn’t this treated like an emergency?
