Opponents of shelters should count their own benefits

Views and to-dos from your Pittsburgh neighbors.

Homelessness is a policy choice. It’s a consequence of policies restricting development, our taxation schemes and public funding priorities. It’s a consequence of employment practices, the minimum wage and how we ensure (or don’t) access to childcare. 

There are myriad decisions we as a society make that predictably contribute to the homelessness crisis. And in the absence of political will to make different policy decisions, it falls to us as a community to ask: What do we owe to those who are left without reliable shelter as a result of the status quo?

Whenever a new homeless shelter is proposed, local homeowners frequently offer the loudest opposition. That can take the form of ad hominem attacks on the homeless (“They’ll bring drugs to our community!” “They’re choosing to live outdoors!”), but in truth many concerns that homeowners raise – and the ones that surface at public hearings where resident input can sway outcomes of shelter initiatives – fall under the umbrella of “nuisances.”  Impacts on local traffic, parking, noise levels and the management of waste and sanitation often loom large in homeowner testimony.

I’m a homeowner and here’s the thing: Everyone who owns a home benefits from many of the same policies that contribute to the homelessness crisis. For example, since 1986 a home mortgage is among a narrow range of personal loans for which a U.S. resident can claim a tax deduction – a policy that drives both inequality and housing unaffordability.  Inequality, because wealthier folks can buy more (and more expensive) homes, thus relieving a greater share of their tax burdens. And housing unaffordability because a mortgage interest deduction introduces a distortion in the housing market by incentivizing buyers to spend more than they otherwise would on homes, driving up prices. 

Similarly, our federal income tax scheme allows homeowners to deduct state and local property taxes, further contributing to inequality in our housing market and withholding tax revenues that could otherwise be invested into greater social services or housing initiatives.

Why does it matter that as homeowners we benefit from these policies? Because those benefits come at a cost to those who don’t own homes, including those who are pushed into short- or long-term homelessness. We benefit unfairly from the overlapping set of policies that drive the homelessness crisis, and we have an obligation to cede some of those benefits to those bearing its costs.  

We have political obligations to support better housing policy, more progressive taxation schemes and better budgets at local, state and federal levels. But political change is a slow process and the effects of that change take longer to materialize. In the interim, we have obligations not to obstruct efforts to mitigate the worst impacts of economic policies on our society’s most vulnerable.

One way to make this obligation salient is to ask those who oppose resources for the homeless in their neighborhoods to pass what I’ll call an “eyeball test.” The general idea is that adequate respect for others demands that we be able to look someone in the eye when they are in need of help and explain why we decline to provide that help. I would be ashamed to look somebody in the eye and tell them that they can’t have a safe place to sleep tonight because the proposal to temporarily house them might bring more noise to my neighborhood or make it harder to find a parking spot. I respectfully submit that other homeowners making these arguments would, and should, be similarly ashamed.

Dani Wenner is a political philosopher who writes about structural injustice and exploitation and can be reached via firstperson@publicsource.org.