What Is It Like Being Homeless in America? - Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Brian [11:48-14:21]

her fear for her kids. I can see the toll this is taking on them, she said. But her words seem to have no effect. The assessment was over in a matter of minutes. The caseworker looked up inside. She said that unfortunately Celeste's vulnerability score was too low. Even her cancer didn't render her vulnerable enough to qualify for her housing aid. And because she wasn't living in a shelter or on the street, she didn't meet HUD's definition of literally homeless. In other words, she wasn't homeless in the right way. And I just want to pause at this scene for a moment because what was playing out here is absolutely crucial to how we understand homelessness in America. Versions of the same encounter play out every day at gateway style intake centers across the country, different buildings, different cities, but with the same questions, the same rules, the same outcomes. HUD's definition effectively ignores how the vast majority of people, especially families with kids, experience homelessness, in cars, on couches, in hotels and motels. And this narrow definition doesn't just determine eligibility for services. It also shapes our sense of the true magnitude and breadth and nature of homelessness in this country. And that in turn affects our vision of what meaningfully addressing the problem ought to look like. Before something can be counted, it has to be defined. In one way we have managed to both reduce homelessness and obscure its root causes, is by defining people like Celeste out of existence. This exclusion was by design. For decades, the dominant way we've been taught to think about homelessness has narrowed our moral and political field of vision. Beginning in the 1980s, a story took hold that focused on individual pathology, addiction, mental illness, personal failure, because that frame made the crisis easier to contain and to explain. If homelessness is primarily a problem of broken individuals, rather than broken systems, then the solution becomes triage or charity. Not a reckoning with, for example, housing or the shredded social safety net or the shrinking supply of affordable homes.