The Huffington Post published an article (“How A Traveling Consultant Helps America Hide The Homeless“) yesterday that questions the ideas of Robert Marbut, the national consultant that the city of Pensacola paid $30,000 to come up with recommendations on how the city should deal with its homeless population.
The consensus nationally is that the best way to end homelessness is to give the homeless homes. However Marbut advises cities, including Pensacola, to build shelters that are more like jails or supervised, fenced-in homeless camps that keep the homeless out of sight.
Just as Gov. Rick Scott has banned his staff from using the words “climate change,” Marbut doesn’t use the term “shelter.” He prefers “transformational campus.” And Marbut has been recommending these transformational campuses to Florida cities. Both Daytona Beach and Pensacola heard the pitch last October.
The approach that others espouse, according to the article, is “Housing First” that gives people a permanent roof over their heads before anything else. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have adopted Housing First strategies. Since 2008, the number of chronically homeless has dropped about 30 percent.
Housing First has been the strategy adopted to as part of the veterans initiative to reduce their homeless numbers. More than 400 cities –not Pensacola — have taken up it up. In January, New Orleans announced that the city had succeeded in housing 100 percent of its homeless veterans.
Where is Pensacola? It has a $30,000 study from Marbut and little else, even though we know a significant number of our homeless are military veterans.
Before Mayor Hayward, his staff and the Pensacola City Council decide on what to do with Marbut’s recommendations, it would be prudent to also discuss Housing First. Hiring Marbut appears to have been a knee-jerk reaction to get political heat off the mayor and city council during an election year. In my conversations with citizens who served on the task force, Marbut’s principles were the only solutions ever really discussed–which is why the recommendations given to Pensacola and Daytona Beach were nearly identical.
Yes, adding Housing First to the discussion adds more delays but the winter is almost over. The city already lost its chance to show decisive leadership. Now is the time to develop the right solutions, not waste taxpayers’ dollars on recommendations that may not really help in the long run.