Bring America Home Now Direct-Action Campaign

The National Coalition has been developing the Adaptive Reuse Initiative. NCH has entered a partnership with the Pew research institute and DLA Piper to promote the redevelopment of abandoned buildings, malls and other properties as low-income housing for people experiencing homelessnss. We must resupply the workforce units that left the market in the 1970's.  NCH has opened 4 field offices and 35 state captains to organize a nationwide effort to produce housing and beautify communities.

The Pew Research institute reports Homelessness was rare as recently as the early 1970s. But as SROs disappeared in largenumbers, that changed. The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas notes that “tent encampments werenot a significant part of the urban landscape before the 1980s. … [But now they are] because local governments have sought to rid their housing markets of low-income people by getting rid of low-income-housing options, while ensuring that the rest of the market would become
prohibitively expensive.” In 1978, even a potential SRO buyer lamented that “old hotels are tornndown and the people who lived in them are left homeless,” according to a U.S. Senate report published that year on the destruction of residential hotels. 2 Professor Dennis Culhane has noted “Many people attribute the growth of street homelessness in the ’80s to the loss of this
SRO stock that began in the ’60s… It’s a necessary option. If we could get a few thousand of those units in [Philadelphia], it could have a really significant impact on homelessness.” 3 A 1993 Washington Post article by Malcolm Gladwell was written close enough to the loss of many SROs that the connection between their demise and the rise in homelessness was
obvious to many. Gladwell wrote of New York City: “As the city systematically upgraded its housing stock, more than 100,000 rooms that housed the poor have been renovated and converted to other uses, helping to create a homelessness problem that has become the nation’s worst.” The piece quoted the head of a low-income housing group who explained, “We
had literally hundreds of thousands of SRO units that provided housing to large segments of the population. Then the city decided that it was inadequate and unsuitable and developed zoning provisions and incentives to put them out of business. The result is the enormous homeless mess we now have.” Gladwell writes, “When city social workers polled homeless men entering shelters in 1980, they found that about half had lived in SROs.” He cites the head of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City who laments, “The people you see sleeping under bridges used to be valued members of the housing market… they aren’t anymore.” The Coalition for the Homeless recounts, “The first sign of modern homelessness in New York
City was the appearance of thousands of homeless men sleeping in parks, on sidewalks, in transportation terminals, and in other public spaces in the late 1970s.” National Alliance to End Homelessness president Nan Roman explains this was new because “In the 1970s, there was an adequate supply of affordable units for every low-income household that needed one — and we really didnt have the crisis we have today.

Links:

• https://www.abandonedamerica.us/

• SRO_loss_report_4.docx (DOCX)