The Modern Homelessness Crisis

I have spent the last 12 year working to end homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, and after all this time, rarely a week goes by that I don’t hear some version of “There’s no point trying to solve homelessness. It’s just a choice.”

While I have the professional experience of working with hundreds, if not thousands, of people trying desperately to get back inside, rather than dismissing the notion of choice, I want to reframe it within systems thinking.

A system is simply an interconnected set of people / things / ideas that is organized in a way that achieves something. We are surrounded by systems: our digestive systems, schools, our democracy, international trade, forest ecosystems.

According to the great systems theorist Donella Meadows:

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war … persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them … because they are intrinsically systems problems — undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.

In other words, system structures shape the “choices” of the people within that system.