Almost everyone now agrees that what America has been doing about homelessness isn’t working. But that’s where the agreement ends.
In the final episode of Street Fight, we lay out the two camps and let them make their best case. On one side is Housing First: the idea, backed by academic studies, that you should give a struggling person an apartment before you ask anything of them — because no one solves their addiction or their illness while sleeping on the pavement. Believers in this philosophy say it's a proven strategy when it's done right. But others are frustrated, saying the high price tag hasn’t paid off.
On the other side is Enforcement Now, the name we give to a group that believes a city has to be able to say that no one lives on the sidewalk, and to back that up with teeth. They argue that what gets called a homelessness problem is often an addiction or mental illness problem that no amount of housing will fix. But others counter that a night in jail, or a ticket, doesn’t leave the person any better off than they were before.