[00:00:00] In a little over a decade, Houston has housed over 28, 000 people who were experiencing homelessness. The U. S. 's fourth largest city has cut its total homelessness figures by more than 60 percent since committing to tackle this issue head on in 2012. Representatives from cities nationwide visit Houston to learn about how they've achieved such progress.

Houston adopted what's called a housing first strategy. Housing first, for those unfamiliar, is an approach to addressing the challenge of homelessness by first before addressing anything else, housing the individual in question. Research has shown this is the most effective way to get and keep people out of homelessness.

Various studies confirm that a rapid rehousing approach leads to 75 to 91 percent of households remaining housed after one year. The thing is, housing first has been around for a while. While the ideas originated around the world over a [00:01:00] hundred years ago, the term became more widely used in the U. S. in the early 1990s.

Not to take away from what Houston has accomplished, but they didn't make some groundbreaking discovery. They were applying, effectively, very much to their credit, someone else's ideas. So what changed? Where did the political will come from to commit so fervently to addressing this issue? Connection.

Anise Parker, the mayor at the time, had adopted a teenager who had been living on the streets long before she took office. And in the New York Times profile on Houston's accomplishments, Parker said, [00:02:00] through our son, I had an up close and personal look at what life was like for somebody on the streets who was treated as.

Disposable. For Parker, the issue was personal. She saw firsthand how somebody in this situation struggles and experiences countless barriers to remedy their situation. And so political will was irrelevant. She had a personal will to address the problem and much greater empathy for those suffering.

And so on, Houston went to becoming an example with model policy and infrastructure to address the issue of homelessness better than any other large city in the United States.

People care about issues when they are close to them. Facts are almost irrelevant, or they become relevant after some connection opens a pathway for us to receive them. There's zero sense why every U. S. city struggling to deal with this problem isn't implementing the housing first approach. It's cost effective based on [00:03:00] decades of research and now has real world application in one of the largest cities in the United States.

It's not a question of know how, it's a question of will. And so, it's a question of connection. Personal connections change our perspectives. Things are different when an issue affects our father, mother, brother, sister, child, or friend. It's the closeness. It's the intimacy of the experience. We feel something.

All of a sudden, it's personal. Our human reaction is to care, often very deeply, and sometimes to others, it seems irrational. After having our son, the issues and challenges of parenthood feel different to my wife and me, and of course they do. I didn't exactly imagine I'd be the dad who would have trouble dropping my son off for the first day of daycare, but there I was, Annie and I, walking out after day one drop off together.

She turned to me with a quivering lip, hoping that I'd have it together, and all I could muster as my eyes were tearing up and I held back cries, I think [00:04:00] he'll have fun. We started bawling. And now I can't help but feel a kinship with all other parents too. I won't care as much as they do about their child, but fuck if I ever know how they feel.

It's why it feels challenging to read and write about the reports of what Texas state troopers are doing to migrant families at the border. Parents with young children, in some cases still nursing babies in what might be the most vulnerable moment in their lives, being denied water, and in some instances literally pushed back into the Rio Grande.

It's shocking. It's horrendous. I can't help but feel like those are actions of a product of an era possessed, like Germany in the 1930s and 40s. So inexplicably inhuman. We'll still be asking 100 years from now, but how could people possibly do that? People don't care about issues or people they aren't connected to.

Without connection, at a minimum, [00:05:00] we don't empathize. And at a maximum, like we see at the US Mexico border, without connection, we villainize. How can residents of any northern state appropriately weigh in, as they do, on the perceived security or lack thereof on the southern border? Their only understanding of what's happening at the border comes from sensationalized news.

There's anonymity and distance we feel walking past a stranger, panhandling, sleeping on the sidewalk, or getting out of their tent under the freeway. We're numb to their experience. Because we don't know them. While we all might feel some guilt that we can temporarily ignore, we're nowhere near feeling personally connected to who they are and what struggle they are going through.

They aren't, insert their name, they are a person experiencing homelessness. But they too were someone's baby. They too are someone's father, mother, brother, sister, or friend. We don't always make the right decision or do [00:06:00] what's best, but we sure as shit try to take care of our own backyard, our own families, and lend hands to our friends.

Hope to be a good neighbor. People will act contrary to their stated ideologies in the context of friends and family. With close company, some people are incredibly generous. But to strangers, or the general public, those same people might be vastly more conservative and reserved.

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It seems there are two competing characteristics of human nature we are teetering between.

One is that personal connection to someone or something will have us act almost irrationally in service, support, or protection of it. In the inverse, if we put distance between ourselves and a problem, person, or whatever, At a minimum, we're apathetic. At a maximum, as history shows, we can be inexplicably inhumane.

This explains why the [00:07:00] late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said, people protect what they love, and why author and environmentalist Paul Hawken stresses the importance of finding out where you live. The more we learn about the world or our community, the more driven we'll be to care for it. The more we know about someone or something, the more connected we feel.

So should the senior citizens mainlining TV news, who live in Afternoons Drive from the Canadian border, visit Eagle Pass in Texas? Should the CEOs and board members of multinationals visit their factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere? Should tech CEOs pay a visit to the cobalt mines in the Congo?

It could help. We could see more humanity in how we vote and what business decisions we make, but we have to be honest with ourselves. Those one off experiences, too, are fleeting and for some, theatrical. And is it really practical? Sure, a CEO's [00:08:00] stopover trip to the Bangladeshi factory might be impactful, but will they know what it's like to live their lives?

Can we or should we get everybody concerned about the border on a bus or flight down to the Rio Grande Valley? No, of course not. So what do we do instead? We design for and address these challenges with connection in mind. With shorter, less complicated supply chains, CEOs and business leadership may be more empathetic to workers on the factory floor.

Or rather, the opacity and complexity of the global marketplace can no longer be an excuse. If those in positions of political power, resources, and influence ask those experiencing homelessness what might help them, maybe long ago, some of those folks would have told them, maybe as these families come to our border, we should ask them what they need and why they are here.

Not assume we know, or worse, assume they're here to take something [00:09:00] from us. It's in our nature to want to do good, be good, and help others. I thoroughly believe that. But all the same, our nature is greatly affected by our proximity, connection, or lack thereof. Just as it's hard to maintain relationships with friends who move away, connection fades with distance.

Literally, or figuratively, an apathy or an action arrives in its place. So instead of counting on appealing to the heart and soul of the corporate CEO or the North Dakotan concerned about the crisis at the southern border, what might we do instead? As the principle of Occam's Razor reminds us, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

What if we resourced and empowered the people closest to the issue, maybe even the people experiencing the issue themselves, to solve their own problems instead?

Even when our hearts and soul are in the right place, how much might we be assuming about a group of people [00:10:00] or set of problems because we're too far away?

We're not short on big problems, and frankly, if the right people were asked, we wouldn't be short on answers either. As we face these many challenges, climate inequality, or whatever else, it's worth reflecting and asking ourselves, are we even close?

Alright y'all, that's a wrap. If you liked this ensemble and want to keep up with those to come, sustainably.

You can find a link in the show notes or video description or go to growensemble.com backslash newsletter until next time [00:11:00]