Ending Homelessness

Homelessness needs to be addressed in MANY different angles, because it doesn’t concern a finite set of elements/causes

1. Foster care: Between 30-50% of foster parents drop out of fostering each year despite the increasing number of children in foster care to about more than 440,000 today and no longer is foster care being a temporary, safe place for children anymore – more foster youth are falling into homelessness. We must provide for more transitional living programs, where our youth are taught how to budget, build a credit score, train and look for a job, and receive therapy counseling and mindfulness tools, while communicating to our communities that we have a moral responsibility to make sure our youth have safe families to live with. We are one human race as well, and sometimes, we forget this.

2. Modular housing units/Federal funding/More creative, collaborative efforts with state/county/city governments: It doesn’t make sense that with the $1.2 billion that was approved in our county a few years ago towards building housing for the homeless, that we only have 22 units, with each unit costing more than $600K to build. It’s absurd! We can build modular, portable units at a fraction of the costs, while also building immediate housing units at an even smaller fraction. We must launch investigations into the county and city developer agreements for housing, and those for the homeless, and have them pay back taxpayer money to go towards supplying these modular units as well. We must also be creative and look for unused school buildings, church buildings and others in which we can house our neighbors who don’t have a roof under which to sleep each night. We also can quickly act to provide more land to be used as RV parks, along with providing financing/use options for RVs, while increasing federal funding for these ALL of these various efforts, while also engaging in other collaborative ways to work towards housing for the homeless and providing affordable, collective housing arrangements with state, county and city governments as well.

3. Universal Basic Income: Receiving $1,000 in cash every month will be a HUGE assistance for our homeless neighbors, and will give them bootstraps to pull themselves up with. For other benefits in receiving UBI, please visit the UBI page to read more.

4. Immediate Wrap-Around Services/Care: Immediate services like medical/dental assistance, trauma counseling, mindfulness training, domestic violence counseling, drug addiction recovery and therapy programs, and etc.. must be made available if we really care about our people as the U.S. government. If someone in your own family needed help, I’m sure you’d want him/her/the person to receive as much care and assistance as possible in order to fully recover and be healthy again.

5. Take Corporate Money out of Politics: We must ban politicians and elected officials from accepting money and donations from corporate interests, including developers. This is IMPERATIVE, as otherwise, every single industry will continue to be negatively affected and harm our general welfare, health and interests as the people, be it in food, housing, chemicals, education, healthcare, and etc..

6. De-Criminalize Homelessness: We must de-criminalize homelessness. Plain and simple. You can't be charged with a crime of being homeless, whether that be sleeping in your car or sleeping outside. And we can do this all while still addressing the concerns and interests of landlords and business owners' interests as well.

7. Prevent and Reduce Eviction Statewide: While it's important to protect the rights and interests of landlords, it's also equally important to protect the rights and interests of tenants as well. The federal, state, county and local governments can work to provide programs that are aimed to prevent and reduce evictions in our district and across the state. We should support, fund and establish more free legal clinic services for our tenants who don't know what their legal rights are and can't obtain legal representation due to financial costs.

Please also visit our Housing page as well.