Homelessness/The Unhoused
I am privileged to not have a personal experience with housing insecurity. However, I have met people in my life that have. I have gotten to know queer teens who have been kicked out of their homes for example. Additionally, my experience as a UNLV student informs my perspective. To put it frankly, the campus sometimes felt like more of a shelter than a place for students. Unhoused community members would use our public facilities to protect themselves from the elements. One time, my professor discovered someone sleeping behind her desk after hours! It wasn’t uncommon, as a student, to witness multiple police cars with a group of officers surrounding an unhoused person as they confronted them. The campus’ relationship with this community seemed to be a constant push and pull of compassion and brute force.
I share these anecdotes not to complain or to shame people just trying their best to survive but as a means to point out the ridiculous nature of the reality we live in. The people in power have allowed Las Vegas’ premier university to bear the burden of this public policy crisis rather than meaningfully try to house this struggling population. This is a policy choice, not an inevitable phenomenon. I think, as a society, we have been conditioned to fear the unhoused, to judge them. Yet, at the end of the day, the average Nevadan is closer to living on the streets than they ever will be to living in the gilded halls of the 1%, who profit from our lack of a strong social safety net. It’s time to end this inhumane cycle of poverty and dehumanization.
Policy Priorities:
Streamline Affordable Housing and Shelters: You can do everything right and still not be granted permission to build a shelter. The challenges to the project by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation to house veterans exemplifies this. Red tape, unaccountable leaders, and NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) activists often stand in the way of projects that will help people in need. This is why we need to completely rethink our approach to housing and declare a housing emergency in order to intervene more aggressively.
See Housing; Responsible, Dense Growth; and Tenant’s Rights for more info
Expand non-police response to mental health crises and other non-violent 911 calls: When it comes to creating safe communities, we need a two-pronged approach: prevention and response. Police are not always the best response to situations that require intervention such as mental health calls. Jurisdictions across the country have already begun programs to divert these calls to non-police teams of professionals, and Nevada can explore how to do the same. Policies like this have the potential to build trust with communities who are afraid of over policing; increase police efficiency and response time because of the lightened caseload; and help deliver services to people in crisis and decrease stigma for asking for help. We know that many unhoused individuals struggle with mental illness, and they, too, should benefit from a policy like this. As some of our lawmakers want to criminalize the unhoused, I think we should be responding with professionals better equipped to deliver the results we want to see, which is more people achieving sustainable lives off the streets.
