High-End Approach To Homelessness Freaks People Out About What The Poor “Deserve”

Growing up, my best friend’s father was a Republican, and that was fascinating because no one else I knew was one. He and I used to have long conversations in the kitchen. In one of those talks, when I was 17 or 18, he asked where I was thinking of studying abroad. I told him, “Copenhagen.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Ugh, Scandinavia,” he said. “Nobody works there. They don’t have any incentive to.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The Welfare State.”

I thought of that conversation went I landed in Denmark the following January and began marveling at everything around me, from the quaint but well-kept buildings to the bustling shops, from the dorms where students, including graduate students!, lived for free, to the bike lanes filled at rush hour with purposeful-looking male and female cyclists in business attire. The days were too short and too soggy, and otherwise the city felt like paradise.

Were people lazing around with no incentive to work? Not that I could tell. In fact everyone seemed very efficient. They even put sheep to good use, bringing them into parks at nighttime to munch on the grass. But the Welfare State was very much in evidence. There were almost no homeless people anywhere, for example. The state took seriously its responsibility to house its citizens, even those who couldn’t afford rent. And public housing looked nearly indistinguishable from the private kind. Even poor people, I was told as though it were obvious, deserve dignity.

Since I was there, now about fifteen years ago, the situation nationwide has gotten less rosy. But solutions have followed — municipalities have continued to build more decent, spread out homes — including some that are what you might call out-of-the-box, like encouraging people to play soccer together.

“When I started on the (football) project, I got a lot of energy. It opened some doors and all of the sudden I thought I wanted to have goals in life,” recalls Marco.

“Now, I just want to live. I want to make it better for myself. It was a hard struggle but I’m here today.”

He now has a steady job as a clerk in a Copenhagen church. …

“Society has got a responsibility towards the homeless and socially disadvantaged,” says Prof Krustrup.

“And football is an easy solution. All you need is a ball and two goals. The effects are rapid and marked in relation to health profile and well-being.”

If you think that a homeless person could use a stable place to live and a team to join, you’re probably thinking of that person as a person, not that different from you. Recent American endeavors along similar lines encounter pushback, though, perhaps because we’re conditioned not to think of the poor as people and instead as problems. And because perhaps, as the NYT put it, “The United States also tolerates more inequality” than other countries do.

Comes from believing so fervently in meritocracy and bootstraps, I guess. Even if all of those things turn out to be, basically, myths.

For decades in America, we’ve dealt with homelessness — when we’ve dealt with it at all — by carving out dense, depressing, even toxic environments for the poor and saying, “Here. Pack in here and be grateful.”

Now some developers are trying something very different: housing that’s not merely shelter but sanctuary.

“It’s going to be definitively an inspiring place for the folks that are in it and for this neighborhood as well,” says Nadine Maleh, executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Until recently, she was the director of inspiring places at the nonprofit Community Solutions, one of the groups behind the project.

“The front of the building will be predominately glass,” Maleh adds, explaining that it’s designed to let in as much natural light as possible.

The building will provide permanent housing for 60 homeless veterans and 64 other low-income adults, beginning early next year. Each resident will pay about a third of their income in rent for an efficiency apartment. The building will also have a big, open lobby with a concierge desk, much like many of the other new apartment buildings in the area. …

There are also plans to build a restaurant or cafe on the ground floor, to help attract others in the community who might be wary about having such a facility in the neighborhood.

Maleh says that’s the whole idea behind this place: that people who have the kinds of mental health and other issues that made them homeless in the first place will do better — even thrive — when they live somewhere they feel calm, comfortable and part of a community.

The idea of doing more for people with needs rather than less — even with private, not government, funds! — is, it turns out, anathema. At least to some. Why is that apartment nicer than my house, demands one person in the comments. Why are you teaching people helplessness, asks another. And so on.

I get it. If you work hard for what you have, it smarts to see someone else being given a handout. My best friend’s father got where he was — an upscale, spacious house in Bethesda, MD — by working hard! He started out with very little. But there are so many ways most currently well-to-do people have gotten handouts, even if they’ve been subtle or very hard to see: from government programs, from parents, from history, from patriarchy, whatever.

I understand a certain amount of knee-jerk bitterness. But I very much doubt that most people voicing it would elect to be homeless in DC — to have the kind of background and issues and stigma people have to face every day — in order to take advantage of this one perk. Most of us want to be self-sufficient. We want to be able to provide: for our own needs, for the needs of others.

Even if you lived in Scandinavia and could fall back on a cushy safety net, you would probably still work, right? Because there’s pride and satisfaction in knowing that you can rely on yourself. Because careers can give shape to your days as well as fullness to your wallet. The people moving into these buildings are people, too, and many of them probably feel exactly the same way. In the meantime, by providing them with this kind of housing, at last society isn’t treating them like they ought to be punished for needing help.

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