Answering the Hard Questions: A Messaging Guide for the Homeless Services Sector

How to Talk to Your Neighbors About Homelessness

Part 2 of an ongoing series on messaging and narrative change. Read part 1 here.

You’re at a church barbecue. You’re waiting in line for potato salad and the person next to you starts talking about the homeless encampment that went up near their kid’s school. Or the money they heard the city spent and why nothing seems to change. Or something they saw on the news that made them angry.

It’s a real concern. From a real person. Who is genuinely frustrated.

And if you work in this sector, your stomach tightened a little. Because you’ve heard this before. A hundred times. And you’re holding a plate of food, and you just wanted a normal Saturday.

So, you get defensive. Not because you’re a bad person. Because you care deeply about the people you serve and it’s exhausting to feel like you have to justify that everywhere you go. But if we’re being really honest, there’s another reason too.

We don’t know what to say.

Nobody taught us how to have this conversation. There’s no collective playbook for the potato salad line moment. No guide that says here’s what to do when a good person asks a hard question and you’ve got thirty seconds and a plate of coleslaw and you don’t want to lose them. So, we either over-explain, go defensive, or just change the subject.

And we lose them.

These conversations are happening everywhere. At town hall meetings. In the lunchroom at work. On bowling nights. At the school pickup line. Between neighbors over the back fence. People don’t need to know you work in homeless services for this conversation to find you. It’s happening all around us, all the time, between ordinary people who are watching homelessness grow in their communities and trying to make sense of it.

Most people asking these questions are good people. They have real concerns. Real fears. Real frustrations. And when we shut them down or lecture them or walk away, we lose them. We leave a void.

That void doesn’t stay empty.

Politicians are weaponizing these fears to win votes. Organizations like the Cicero Institute are taking that same frustration and pointing it straight toward criminalization. Toward sweeps. Toward the idea that if we arrest enough people and push them far enough away the problem disappears. It won’t. But that message is simple. And we keep handing them the microphone by refusing to have the conversation.

We’re going to see more of this. A lot more. Every election cycle this gets louder.

This guide exists because of a recent interview with a reporter who asked all the right questions. The kind of questions reporters ask when they actually take the time to research homelessness. And the same questions the person at the church barbecue is asking. The ones people want answers to, but nobody seems to have. She was kind enough to share her transcript with me.

If you’re preparing for a media interview, this is for you, too.

These are the questions people are actually asking. Here’s how to answer them.

‘If cities are offering shelter beds, why are people saying no?’

Also shows up as: “Why won’t homeless people accept help?” / “Isn’t a shelter safer than the street?”

The short answer:

It’s not that people are refusing help. It’s that what’s being offered often isn’t actually helpful.

We’re all human. We all have needs. But somewhere along the way we decided that if you’re homeless you should just accept whatever we hand you and be grateful. Nobody asked homeless people what they actually needed. We built the system and expected them to fit into it. Too often that system is inadequate, underfunded, and designed more for compliance than for actually helping people get off the street. When people don’t accept it, we call them the problem.

The longer answer:

Many shelter operators are doing the best they can with limited resources and growing demand. But the reality of shelter life is hard. You can’t bring your belongings. Pets are out of the question. You sleep on a cot in a room with a hundred other people. Just the snoring alone will keep you up all night. And it’s not just snoring. It’s a hundred people with a hundred different situations, some dealing with mental illness, some with addiction, some who are just down on their luck, all crammed into one room trying to sleep. There’s no privacy. There’s no quiet. There’s nowhere to decompress.

You’re woken up at five in the morning, given a short window to eat a bowl of oatmeal, because oatmeal is cheap and you can feed a hundred people a giant vat of it, then kicked out by six into the cold. There’s an old saying among people who’ve lived in shelters: if the bread had mold on it at dinner, don’t eat the French toast in the morning.

You then spend your day waiting to come back and stand in line again just to hopefully get a bed. If the shelter fills up before you get to the front, you’re not just back outside. You’ve got to figure out where you can find a safe place to sleep. And at some point, the math changes. You stop spending two hours a day standing in line for a bed you might not get, and just find a spot for your tent where you feel safe.

And here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough. Shelters often don’t work for people who are employed. Curfews make it impossible to hold a job with evening hours. No third shift allowed. Miss a curfew by ten minutes because your bus was late and you’re back on the street.

In many communities, the only shelter option is faith-based, which means mandatory religious programming. Mandatory Bible study. Mandatory church services twice a week. Even if you’re a Christian, being forced into religious programming twice a day as a condition of having a place to sleep isn’t help. It’s coercion.

Shelters do not solve homelessness. They are a valuable part of a community-wide system to move people from the street into housing. But by themselves, without dignity, without flexibility, without a real path out, they don’t work.

The problem isn’t that people are service resistant. Services are people resistant.

‘We spent billions and homelessness got worse. Where did the money go?’

Also shows up as: “We keep throwing money at this problem.” / “Taxpayers are fed up.” / “Nonprofits are profiting off homelessness.”

The short answer:

For every $100 increase in median rent, homelessness goes up 9%. That’s not a nonprofit problem. That’s a housing affordability problem. Homelessness spending will keep going up as long as rents keep going up. That’s just math. Are you OK with paying billions more every year? Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless we fix the affordable housing crisis.

The longer answer:

Nonprofits are housing more people than ever before. But for every person they get off the street, two or three new people lose their home and end up homeless because they can no longer afford rent. Gas prices are up. Food prices are up. Rent prices are up. And wages haven’t kept up with any of it.

Homelessness is a symptom, not a cause. The causes are the lack of affordable housing, stagnant wages, racism, domestic violence, mental illness, and addiction, just to name a few. Until we address those causes, over 19,000 people are entering homelessness every single week, and that number is going to keep growing no matter how much we spend on services.

So yes, spending is going up. Yes, homelessness is growing. Those two things are happening at the same time because we’re treating the symptom while ignoring the cause. Nonprofits are not profiting off homelessness. They’re drowning trying to keep up with it.

For more on how to respond to the homelessness industrial complex argument, read the first guide in this series: They’re Coming for Nonprofits. Stop Letting Bad Narratives Kill Good Work.

‘What about encampment sweeps? Isn’t clearing them at least doing something?’

Also shows up as: “Encampments breed disease and disorder.” / “I shouldn’t have to step over people on my way to work.” / “At least it gets people off the street.”

The short answer:

Homeless sweeps don’t make homelessness go away. They displace people who get pushed to another part of the city, with no support and nowhere to go. Nothing is solved. And every time someone gets displaced, it becomes harder for outreach workers to connect them to housing. If you support homeless sweeps, you’re supporting more homelessness in your community, not less.

The longer answer:

Here’s something most people don’t know. Homeless people don’t hate the cleaning. Nobody wants to live in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. Think about what your own home would look like without trash pickup. Without running water. Without a bathroom. Most encampments have none of those things.

The conditions people are living in aren’t a reflection of who they are. They’re a reflection of what they don’t have access to. What they hate isn’t the cleaning. It’s the displacement. The destruction of their belongings. The psychological warfare of being moved from park to park every few days, as officials wait for them to just give up and go somewhere else.

But here’s the problem. Every community is doing the same thing. They’re all sweeping homeless people out, pushing them to the next neighborhood, the next city, the next county. There’s no ‘somewhere else’ left. People just get displaced and come back or cycle back through the same areas temporarily. Homelessness didn’t go down. It just moved.

And that movement has a cost nobody counts. Every time someone gets displaced, outreach workers lose them. Getting someone connected to housing and services takes time. There’s paperwork. There are waiting lists. There’s bureaucracy. When someone is finally ready and you can’t find them, everything goes back to zero. Sweeps don’t reduce homelessness. They grow it.

Grants Pass, Oregon became the center of a national debate on this. The city passed laws to continuously displace homeless people, moving them from park to park every few days. We documented it. What we also found was that the neighboring community took a completely different approach. Instead of pushing people out, they invested in real solutions: spaces with support services and a real path out of homelessness. Two communities, side by side. One moves the problem around. The other starts solving it.

Since Grants Pass, over 300 communities have passed or are working on laws to criminalize homelessness. None of those laws will reduce homelessness. They will make it worse. Because when you displace people, you’re not solving homelessness. You’re just making sure it shows up somewhere else. And with more than 19,000 people entering homelessness every single week, that somewhere else is going to be everywhere.

Criminalization is not just cruel. It’s expensive, and it will make homelessness worse.

Part 3 of this series will tackle drugs, forced treatment, and what actually works. Coming soon.