Why I Had to Learn About Homelessness
I’m a climate person. I write about energy policy, building performance standards, carbon accounting. That’s my world.
So why am I writing about homelessness?
Taxi drivers.
I travel a lot for work, and I’ve developed a habit of testing arguments on cab drivers. They’re a captive audience, they have opinions, and they’ll tell you when you’re full of it. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at talking to conservatives about climate change. Not converting them. Just having actual conversations that don’t end in someone getting mad.
My go-to is the food security argument. I don’t start with polar bears or sea level rise. I start with wheat. Corn. Rice. The crops that feed the world grow in specific temperature ranges, and those ranges are shifting faster than agriculture can adapt. This isn’t abstract. It’s the price of bread, the stability of supply chains, the kind of disruption that starts wars.
Most people, left or right, get this. Food is real. Prices are real. The idea that climate affects harvests isn’t political, it’s agricultural.
So I’d be in a cab, somewhere in middle America, having a version of this conversation. The driver would nod along. We’d talk about farmers, about droughts, about how his cousin’s ranch isn’t what it used to be. I’d think: okay, we’re getting somewhere.
And then, right when I thought I had them:
“But you really think the government can fix climate? Look what they’ve done with homelessness. They can’t even handle that.”
Every. Single. Time.
It became a pattern. I’d build this careful bridge on climate, and they’d blow it up with homelessness. Not because they didn’t believe me about food scarcity. Because they didn’t trust that any government-led solution could work. And homelessness was their proof.
The first few times, I fumbled. I’d say something about housing costs or mental health funding. Their eyes would glaze over. I sounded like every other person who’d never actually thought about it.
So I went and thought about it.
The Question That Haunted Me
Here’s what I couldn’t shake: homelessness isn’t new. There have always been poor people. There have always been people without stable housing. Medieval cities had beggars. Gold rush towns had transients. The Great Depression had Hoovervilles.
But something feels different now. It feels more visible, more permanent, more intractable. Why?
I spent months reading. Historical accounts of informal settlements. Policy evaluations. HUD reports. Academic studies on what works and what doesn’t. The more I read, the more one pattern kept emerging.
It’s the tents.
The Equipment of Transience
Think about what a tent actually is. It’s a temporary structure designed to be packed up and moved. That’s its whole purpose. When you go camping, you bring a tent because you’re not staying. You’re passing through.
When we give homeless people tents, we’re giving them the equipment of transience. We’re saying: here’s something that will keep the rain off tonight, but don’t get comfortable. Don’t put down roots. Don’t build anything. Be ready to move.
And they do move. That’s what sweeps are. A city gives out tents, people set up camp, neighbors complain, and then the police come through and sweep everyone out. Pack it up. Move along. Go somewhere else. And because tents are portable, people can do exactly that. They relocate to another sidewalk, another park, another underpass. The city counts this as a success. The problem has been moved.
But the people haven’t been helped. They’ve just been displaced. Again.
Nobody pressure-washes a tent. Nobody plants flowers outside a tent. Nobody organizes a neighborhood watch for a collection of tents. But people do all of those things for structures they built themselves. Even rough ones. Even imperfect ones. Because they’re theirs.
Throughout history, when displaced people settled in one place long enough, they built community. They developed governance. They improved their conditions incrementally. And eventually, their permanence forced the cities around them to extend infrastructure (water, sanitation, roads) because the settlements weren’t going away.
Permanence created political leverage that transience never could.
The tents took that away.
We Have the Order Wrong
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: we have the intervention order backwards.
The standard model goes like this: stabilize people first, then treat their issues, then maybe they’ll develop enough dignity to rejoin society. Get them into shelter. Get them into treatment. Get them compliant with the program. Then they’ll become functional humans again.
It doesn’t work. Treatment doesn’t stick when people have no dignity. Stability doesn’t hold when people have nothing to stabilize for. You can’t program your way to human flourishing.
Housing First got part of this right. It recognized that requiring treatment compliance before housing was backwards. But Housing First still treats people as recipients. You get placed in a unit someone else built. You get services someone else designed. You wait, sometimes for years, while the system processes you.
There’s something deeply un-American about that. Americans don’t want to be processed. They want to build. They want to contribute. They want to earn their place, not be assigned one.
I’m arguing for something different: dignity first, then stability, then treatment if they still need it.
Give someone dignity. Let them build something. Let them contribute to others. Let them be seen as a person who matters, not a problem to be managed. From dignity comes the will to stabilize. From stability comes the clarity to seek help. And help that’s sought, not imposed, is help that actually sticks.
Give People Wood
This is why I keep saying: give people wood. Give them tools. Give them materials and land and the chance to build something.
Not because rough structures are better than apartments. They’re not. But because the act of building creates investment. The act of contributing creates belonging. The act of improving your own space, day by day, creates hope.
I know this sounds naive. I know there are legitimate concerns about safety, sanitation, fire risk. I know that “just let people build” isn’t a complete policy platform.
But here’s what I also know: everything we’ve tried hasn’t worked. California spent over $20 billion on homelessness programs between 2018 and 2024. Homelessness increased by 6%. Los Angeles promised 10,000 units at $140,000 each. They delivered 1,200 units at $596,000 each.
We don’t have a funding problem. We have a direction problem.
Maybe it’s time to try something very old. Something that worked for thousands of years before we decided we knew better.
What I Found
Next week, I’ll dig into the data. The historical rates. What’s actually working in Austin and Portland. The real costs. The research on why stability enables services and why dispersion defeats them. The hard questions about who this works for and who it doesn’t.
But I wanted to start here, with the story of how I got to this question in the first place. Because it matters that this came from somewhere real.
Those taxi drivers weren’t wrong to be skeptical. They’d watched government programs fail for decades. They’d seen billions spent and nothing improve. When they said “look at homelessness,” they weren’t changing the subject. They were telling me something important about trust.
If we can’t solve visible problems, why would anyone believe we can solve invisible ones?
Climate change is the biggest challenge of our generation. But we won’t build the political will to address it until we rebuild trust that collective action can work. And we won’t rebuild that trust by ignoring the failures people can see with their own eyes.
Homelessness is that failure. And I think I found a different way to think about it.
Next week: The data, the models that work, and why we should stop giving out tents and start giving out wood.
Anna Kelly is the author of Climate Champions and works on energy policy and building performance standards. Her graduate research on community response to wind energy siting was published in Energy Research & Social Science. She writes about climate, housing, and the systems that shape how we live.