Shelter Out of Place — histories of ‘home’
A Multi-Level Perspective covering the ‘wicked problem’ of homelessness in Pittsburgh (and in an era of COVID-19).
Transition Design Seminar, Carnegie Mellon University
a. Sánchez, Erica Dorn, Xuehui Zhang, and Sanika Sahasrabuddhe
Introduction
In this post we explore the wicked problem of Homelessness in Pittsburgh through a Multi-Level Perspective Mapping process (MLP). The MLP is a framework for looking at longer time horizons and the various levels in which events take place and move up and down systems-levels to affect transitions. The MLP Framework outlines three levels where events occur — the micro level of Niche, the meso level of Regime, and the macro level of Landscape — ‘networks of relationships between systems levels (and their various actors/factors) become progressively more “entrenched” and resistant to change as their scale increases. Eventually large systems become “locked in” to a particular trajectory or transition pathway.’ — Transition Design Seminar CMU
Our research is informed by historical data on the homeless and affordable housing crisis’ in the US, and more specifically in the context of Pittsburgh where we are Design Masters and PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University. COVID 19 has undoubtedly had an impact on how we understand homelessness and housing insecurity today, which we address before diving into deeper historical events and interventions, as well as how we best imagine intervening to address this multi-level systems challenge.
First a note on language/terms and redefining the problem and a description of our process —
‘a home is essentially a place to return to for the next night.But the homeless live in a world which is becoming ever more hostile, where there is liter- ally no place for the non-propertied, especially those who cannot or do not want to use the often inadequate and insufficient homeless shelters. They are forced into perpetual mobility, where basic acts of survival are criminalized’ — Manuel Lutz, Uncommon Claims to the Commons: Homeless Tent Cities in the US
From the start of mapping the ‘wicked problem’ of homelessness, the term ‘homeless’ seemed to be a misnomer. What is ‘home’ after all?
What we’ve examined however, through the process of looking at a multi-level stakeholder approach is the interconnected web that creates a sense of ‘home’. Home isn’t only a physical structure, it is also relationships, memories, history, vocation, resources, and countless emotional bonds tied to human needs. There is a spectrum of individuals and communities that are considered ‘homeless’, which includes those living in shelters, on the streets, and in temporary housing. Many advocates have begun to shift the language to more appropriate terms such as ‘unsheltered’ or ‘unhoused’ and housing insecure.
Throughout this post we use the term homeless since it continues to be common nomenclature, however we attempt to replace it as often as possible. In doing so we shift our own mindsets and reframe the ‘problem’ on completely new terms. Seeing the world as have and have nots is problematic and perpetuates a development theory established in metaphors such as ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps’ and ‘work your way up the ladder’. Instead we attempt to view currently unsheltered and housing insecure individuals as whole human beings, making choices in the systemic contexts in which they find themselves. Each of the needs on Max Neef’s Human Needs Matrix can be traced to the concept of ‘home’. Any individual no matter what type of housed or unhoused situation in which they find themselves is attempting to fulfill their human needs and by doing so create ‘home’.
The Impact of COVID-19 on the housing insecure
Pre-COVID19 there were an estimated half a million homeless individuals in the United States. In Portland, OR (where one of the article authors currently resides) there are an estimated 14,000 homeless residents within a population of 600,000+, a drastically larger number than the estimated 1,400 homeless residents of Pittsburgh, a city of 300,000+. Though it’s not entirely useful to compare the two cities’ houselessness crisis it becomes ever more apparent during this COVID-Era. If one ventures out during quarantine and happens to pass through a city center like Portland, San Francisco, or Rome the houseless crisis comes into a very stark view. Without the hustle and bustle of commerce and passerby's, city squares, parks, and street fronts become the sole domain of those who find themselves ever more isolated, stranded, and forgotten. The scene of patchwork tents, refuse strewn about, and respite seekers finding a moment’s rest on edges of curbs is a tragic reality of current conditions — one, that at least for the time being, cannot be ignored because it’s more visible than ever.
Where does one shelter in place if they have no shelter? Where do they wash their hands? How can they procure food and store it?
These are questions that shelters, which are often underfunded, across the country address on a daily basis, however the conditions due to COVID have exacerbated the challenge. In a ‘normal’ season at a shelter a simple cough or cold spreads like wildfire through a shelter. It’s an understatement to say that shelters are perfect breeding grounds for a COVID outbreak, where to make things worse, there is a higher number of immunocompromised residents combined with shortages of necessities like soap, disinfectants, and good drainage, and safe spaces to quarantine those that are infected.
During this time, many shelterless individuals are choosing the streets over a bed at a shelter, hoping they can maintain social distancing better outdoors and yet becoming susceptible to issues caused by living on the streets. Criminalization of homelessness continues even during COVID where those trying to keep themselves alive are often ticketed or jailed.
As we’ve addressed in previous blogs, there is a spectrum of individuals that may find themselves shelter disadvantaged for a myriad of reasons. For many, and more acutely womxn of color, this is most often due to evictions due to systemic breakdowns and injustices spanning centuries. However during the 2008 housing crisis, diverse demographics across the country fell susceptible to being homeless after foreclosures and job losses from a severely weakened economy. Given the current economic free-fall, we are very likely headed for an economic recession like 2008 or perhaps one that is even more dire than the great depression. In 1932 the stock market hit an all-time low and the following period led to nearly 2 million of the 132 Million US residents finding themselves homeless. Today there is a US population of 332 Million and half a million homeless — many economists and housing advocates are predicting an increase in homelessness due to job loss and foreclosures.
What can we do now to prevent a housing crisis like we experienced in 2008 or during the great depression?
We will address this and more later when we look at interventions informed by Donella Meadows Leverage Points in the system and through the Casual-Layered-Analysis in our upcoming blog. But it’s important to mention a few promising interventions related to COVID-19. Firstly, many states including Pennsylvania have enacted a moratorium on evictions — as we’ve previously addressed evictions can cause lifelong challenges for housing security so this relief is much needed at this time. Secondly, residents are finding their own paths to housing security through networking support and advocacy groups that seize vacant homes in places like LA and Oakland.
Though it’s both urgent and responsible to view the world anew through our current COVID reality, we cannot forget the layered system challenges that exist alongside it. We now refocus our attention on historic and more recent niche, regime, and landscape events that have influenced and accrued to help establish the current paradigm. specifically Pittsburgh.
Themes and Threads from our MLP
Through our historical research of events at the levels of niche, regime, and landscape levels we’ve identified several threads that weave up and down the system that lead to current-day conditions. Conditions where many find themselves criminalized for being housing insecure, within a system that perpetuates discrimination that leads to housing oppression, a healthcare system that exacerbates the issues, and an economic paradigm that benefits from keeping some people in poverty. Alongside this we examine many existing interventions and offer glimpses into potential future interventions.
In our first assignment and post we performed historical analysis through ‘Wicked Problem’ which we built upon in our MLP to surface the following threads.
History of criminalization of homelessness — A brief background on norms that form the concept of ‘home’
Being ‘homeless’ has been criminalized in this country since its founding. Colonizers came to establish new roots and to ‘settle’ the country. Native groups were either exterminated or confined to inhospitable reservations where ‘settlement’ was a severe form of punishment, especially for the semi-nomadic groups that were dependent on roaming to survive and thrive. The promotion of sedentary life could be traced as far back and tied to the age of agriculture 10,000 years ago. In more recent time horizons, castigation for being nomadic, wandering and drifting extended to colonial-era ‘vagrants’ — some of the earliest criminal cases of homelessness extend as far back as 1640. Though the idea of the upwardly mobile (often white) nuclear family in a single home has accrued over the decades, further entrenched in the 1950’s — this vision has come to permeate the understanding of what ‘home’ looks like. Because of this settled, cartesian, production and consumption vision of the ‘good life’ — those finding themselves outside of this image can struggle disproportionately for housing justice. These disproportionate injustices more often affect immigrants, African-Americans awaiting reparations from the transatlantic slave trade and suffering from its cruel prolonged injustice, suffering war veterans, those struggling from mental health issues, and from injustices of the medical industry. For the privileged and powerful, mobility and semi-nomadism were and continue to be romanticized, especially in the age of the internet and cheap travel. However, for the poor, movement and mobility is further stigmatized and leads to increased disadvantages — this historical paradigm where sedentarism is valued over nomadism is at the crux of the so-called ‘Wicked Problem’ of Homelessness. A problem we later reframe as a potential for housing justice.
Ebbs and flows of social programs and public housing
‘Poor houses’ began springing up in various colonies in the 1700's. New colonists came to this country to seek a new life and living, they also left behind social ties, contracts, and safety nets. Many had to travel and move frequently to find work — unable to support themselves and their families, the need for social programs and payments became a rampant issue. This issue was exacerbated by changes in the economy through the American and Industrial Revolutions and led to some of the first unemployment payments being enacted in the late 1800s. In Pittsburgh, like in many industrial cities, the relationship between industry employment and how housing developed is closely linked. Many of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods could be considered slums of their days where waves of new immigrants packed into tight quarters. Over time the need and standard for better sanitation and overall living conditions changed and so too did the type of housing that various people were able to acquire and secure. In this history of urbanization, we can see how poor individuals and families are often pushed to the margins.
The Great Depression led to the first large-scale federal response to homelessness called the ‘Federal Transient Service’ (FTS) which in the 1930s provided an ecosystem of services to over 400,000 people. Stemming from the Great Depression we started to see a roll-out of services and social programs aimed at providing social welfare for the disadvantaged. From the 40’s-60’s many more programs were enacted such as Social Security and the predecessor to TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). When these programs were enacted there seemed to be an understanding that social programs were needed to address systemic challenges. That is to say that because so many people became unemployed and homeless due to the stock market crash, joblessness and homelessness could more likely be seen as a systemic issue of the time, especially because it affected all people (white families, black families, etc). In the following decades, however — as we moved farther away from these events, anyone who continued to struggle began to be seen as personally weak as opposed to systemically and disproportionately affected by generational injustice and trauma.
Then, in the late 1960’s began the war on poverty and the era of the ‘Great Society’ and related programs. This is a critical juncture and series of events within the MLP that have impacted current-day conditions of housing insecurity in the U.S and Pittsburgh. Urban renewal in the 1970s, for example, adversely affected neighborhoods like East Liberty where social ties were demolished along with the intricate web of family homes. The poor were cordoned off in complexes meant to control and create order, but instead later became plagued by violence and poverty. Exacerbating this overtime was a series of federal program cuts to social welfare programs and the simultaneous defunding of public housing, increasing numbers of shelter insecure populations.
The decline of public housing was replaced by a privatized casino-style housing industry. This turn of events was a ‘wicked’ compliment to an already unfair wealth-building strategy that earlier-on redlined predominantly black neighborhoods, cutting communities off from mortgages and home-ownership opportunities. All of this has been an ensuing force that, for many low-income and people of color, guaranteed a revolving door of overpriced, squalid rentals with evictions and endless court appearances at each dead-end.
Pittsburgh's history of housing policies over the last 40–50 years mimics the devastating pattern of urban renewal across the country. It's unique however in its hands-on approach and ecosystem of interventions that have been relatively effective at reducing the number of housing insecure people in the city and supporting those that find themselves homeless. Often these interventions are what you might consider ‘bandaid’ solutions but nonetheless are addressing urgent needs.
Social Programs and Decriminalization — Existing and Potential Interventions -
- Existing decriminalization Homelessness interventions include programs like Allegheny County’s homeless outreach program that assigns individual case-workers to help reduce and remove fines for panhandling and vagrancy that can lead to unnecessary jail sentences that cost the city and county more money.
- Housing First programs have been effective solutions for quickly moving shelter insecure populations to secure housing with fewer hoops and hurdles. In the past more step-by-step programs proved to create more insecurity and susceptibility to returning to the streets.
- A recent postponement of some evictions are an urgent and well-timed intervention during COVID. However a future intervention we plan to look at is the permanent erasure of eviction records that disproportionately affect women of color from ever securing affordable, safe, long-term housing.
- Examples of occupation of vacant properties, such as those currently happening in LA, represents potential for niche level interventions that could be possible in Pittsburgh. Vacant land and properties are an excellent opportunity for municipalities to slow down the rate of casino-like privatization of land city land and instead develop land trusts and opportunities for cooperative homeownership for the long-term.
- Additionally, during this time of COVID as shelters struggle to safely quarantine unsheltered populations — vacant hotel rooms could be opened up to shelter in place.
- We also plan to look more into social impact bonds that would support a new paradigm of public housing in Pittsburgh.
- Perhaps at a deeper level of intervention, the power to evolve the structure of the system in ‘Donella Meadows Leverage Points in the system’ could look like cities adopting more policies and infrastructure that allows of itinerant communities to self organize, co-build, create ‘uncommon commons’ Home and our goals for home isn’t the same for everyone — our society will need to adapt to the myriad of ways that humans fulfill their needs and find a home, without the threat of criminalization or marginalization.
The Healthcare Regime — Experimentation and Paradigms that led to the status quo
In outlining the key paradigms in health, and its effect on homelessness, we are looking at root causes and secondary root causes of niche practices becoming widespread regimes that affect populations at scale and contribute to exacerbating marginalized populations.
Furthermore, unique to the Pittsburgh context, is the ecosystem of healthcare centers and understanding the relationship of that regime with homelessness sheds light on certain practices. The correlation of homelessness with health is concerned with the low quality of sanitation and daily living conditions of homeless people, but also with practices that relate with over-prescription of Historically, the health regimes that have played into the status quo of the homeless living situations, as we researched are the following.
Changing paradigms of Mental health care, and deinstitutionalization
The MLP outlines how mental health care started being recognized as a paradigm in health due to landscape events like the American Civil War and the World Wars, and later Vietnam War. Casualties of the conflicts were not limited to those with physical ailments but also those with mental ailments. Not only war veterans, but also civilians who faced mental health issues, are included in this. There were landmark events where many mental health institutions were built in the 1800s and many psychiatric facilities sprung up by the 1900s, deinstitutionalization of mental health patients, because of institutions running overcapacity resulted in homelessness caused by an inability to find housing and the system being unable to make adjustments to the needs of those with mental health conditions. Pittsburgh and neighboring counties and states saw the establishment of asylums and mental care wards for patients facing mental health challenges.
The early 1900s led to the formation of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene as well as the gradual establishment of chapters and societies in many states. This citizen mental health movement also resulted in the development of child guidance. These events have formed the landscape in which the paradigm of mental health is situated today.
The Opioid Epidemic and the healthcare ecosystem
The Opioid crisis has rendered certain demographic groups homeless due to high access to easily available opioids while the healthcare regime doesn’t face shared accountability of these regimented practices that emerged from pain management being seen as a course of medicine. States in the U.S. began to pass intractable pain treatment acts, which removed the threat of prosecution for physicians who treated their patients’ pain aggressively with pain killers.
Existing Practice: Among researchers at UPitt, the Health Policy Institute has initiatives to control the overuse of opioids through pharmacist education and building awareness among recipients of prescription drugs.
Insurance Provision and Employable Work In pursuit of work, communities moved to Pittsburgh from the interiors to cities in search of employment. With the steel industry backdrop, union workers started asking for financial cover to mitigate accidents that occurred in the steel mills. Despite this movement to secure financial aid for health and economic protection, unemployed populations are kept out of this network. The barriers to access to healthcare keep increasing with time and for the uninsured, access to healthcare is a question of affordability and acceptance. Even today, the insured and the employed overlap. Health benefits exclude the homeless populations that most require it. In a recent lecture by Sarah Fox, she mentioned Dean Spade’s perspective on looking at social aid and inclusion as solidarity rather than charity. Many religious and social philanthropic organization, care for the homeless in terms of grants and care packages that serve short term needs. Employment initiatives are often seen as sustainable way forward for health care inclusion.
Existing Practice: Niche practices are attempting to bring more inclusion in work from the homeless population. An approach that instates the homeless into the workforce may be a potentially meaningful intervention that signifies providing agency rather than a conditional transfer of food, clothing, and shelter.
Public Health Crisis — In the wake of the COVID-19 Epidemic, The Homeless population is often the more vulnerable to epidemics, chronic health conditions, even though they may not always be the cause of it’s spread. While the public health system overwhelmed with patients included within the system, the homeless remain on the fringe with exacerbated effects and ailments caused by communicable diseases. Through several epidemics, both artificial and virus-borne, like HIV, Hepatitis A, and the opioid epidemic, the vulnerability of the population increases and disease contraction is higher. Historically, the skewed ratio of care facilities and affected patients have pushed many people out of the system, be it mental health wards or, in the current situation, primary intensive care because of a pandemic.
Potential Interventions -
Potential Interventions under the theme of health could be spread across the three levels of the MLP. Within the theme of health, specifically, if we look at it as a provision from the state, in a preferable future, many interventions may lie at the regime level —
- Regime: Reimagine Insurance and Medicaid for All — In all states, Medicaid provides health coverage for some low-income people, families and children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with disabilities. In some states the program covers all low-income adults below a certain income level.
- Niche: Mobile clinic and care aid for opioid crisis — Dr. Jim Withers, the street doctor, was motivated by the desire to reach out to those who seemed to be excluded from mainstream health care systems despite their high rates of illness and premature death.
- Regime: Revitalizing from the opioid crisis — Pharmacist education — Through making resources available and connecting faculty from various disciplines, WGOIPE hopes to integrate opioid prescribing and pain management education and opportunities for interprofessional learning and collaboration into the curriculum of all University of Pittsburgh’s Schools of Health Sciences.
- Niche: Sanitation and Emergency services — SF72 is an example of a local government service that offers public service information about emergency care and measures(like first aid) that can be carried out in the wake of emergencies related to public health.
Economic Structural Shift and Unemployment
Homelessness, to some extent, is an economic problem. The housing insecure are often treated as the burden of an economy as they are seen as not generating income for economic indexes, and instead, consume public resources and generate expense. However, throughout history, one of the root causes of homeless issues is changes in the economy, such as recessions and unemployment, inflation, and economic shift in industries. In order to understand the homeless issue in Pittsburgh, we looked into the national-wide historical transition in economics.
Throughout history in Pittsburgh, its economy has been through many ups and downs. In the early age, the location and geographical features of Pittsburgh made it an ideal place for trading and formed an economic focus on agriculture. Corn farmed turned into Whiskey, which was a large part of its culture at that time. In the 19th century, Pittsburgh shifted its economy from commerce to new industries such as refining natural resources, and steel plants. At this time, workers started taking out their own monetary “protections” because of the “needed economic protection against the unforeseeable losses” created by illness and accidents. However, in the 20th century, a weakness of Pittsburgh was its overspecialization in steel, and it started to transition its economy into the manufacturing sector.
After looking at economic development and the downturn in Pittsburgh, many people struggled in these transitions. Although there could be employment opportunities generated in the transitions, not all families adapted to the new economy and labor structure, because it required learning new skills, mindset shifts, lifestyle changes and so on. In fact, it was highly possible to have a sudden drop in social class level, and become homeless.
Through the research, we found out that it is really difficult to understand the situation of homelessness through the lens of economics. The historical marks in economics don’t show clues for the homelessness, nor include the homeless as part of the picture. Also, the statistics on homeless counts are often estimates and undercounted. Let alone other information such as health conditions, veteran status, and housing history.
That said, we asked ourselves: Does the history of capitalistic culture and individuals who built wealth, like Carnegie, relate to the homeless population in PGH? Is that possibly why homeless numbers are low? Or is it because people left after the steel industry collapsed?
Andrew Carnegie was perhaps the first to publicly assert that the rich are obliged to help the poor, and the whole community. As an important figure for Pittsburgh history and current Pittsburgh citizens, Carnegie formed a sense of generosity and solidarity in the region, which has influenced the number of charitable organizations serving the poor on Pittsburgh. However, we do realize that philanthropy from the wealthiest does not make up the negative impacts of inequality, especially in the current age. Not only the amount of the donation is not comparable to the actual need, but also donations are often made in areas are not necessarily related to poverty. For example, Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic focus was around education and world peace, which are not directly related to homelessness. As one of the steel industry titans, Carnegie was one of a big forces in structuring industries in Pittsburgh. His steel plants could also cause many safety risks for the workers, who didn’t have union’s protection at that time. Both lead workers, and their families to become homeless.
Philanthropy Continued: Is a Philanthropic approach to homelessness sustainable? Medical and religious institutions and historically accrued capital give rise to economic activity around philanthropy — it’s a pillar/agent that tries to make society equitable in some way ie. shelters, food, clothing. (Maslow’s needs), and there is a bottom-up approach through niche/grassroots events. If our world was rid of problems we might still mind an economic reason to keep people in poverty. Philanthropy, we discussed, looks at homelessness through Maslow’s pyramid of needs. This repeating model of social service can accrue to form mental models that lead to the current situation, where we have multiple initiatives to care for the homeless but that are not connected to each other through a common motivation and vision. How can we change that narrative or shift to Max Neef’s needs that encompass more social and psychological aspects of participation (that comes with access and inclusion)?
How this is related to future interventions
In order to help housing insecure groups, it is important to leverage the economy to prevent poverty, since this is an important factor leading to housing insecurity. In this process, a potential leverage point could be a reshaping mindset of understanding the economy. On the other hand, we will focus on how to bring a sense of community and economic inclusion opportunities to homeless groups through economic incentives.
As transition designers, we’ve spoken about the pervasiveness of the economic regime and whether keeping certain populations at the fringe or disadvantaged has an economic benefit to it? This is a question worth exploring in the further investigation of effective interventions.
Some of the potential interventions that we are going to explore more include UBI for poverty alleviation, legislation for hiring the homeless, and conditional offer for the homeless to help them come back to society.
Racism and Discrimination Perpetuate and Accrue to Form the Current Homelessness Crisis
Structural and systemic racism and discrimination has persisted locally, nationally, and globally. Obvious structures and practices like the shipping and selling of slaves in Amerika are large blemishes that will and have taken a long long time to recover from. We are far from that. Via the MLP analysis, it was obvious that those in leadership have (over time) attempted to resolve the inequalities that have persisted. But these ‘solutions’ are only recent. Racist and discriminatory policies and practices are one of the core pieces of what creates homelessness and maintain it. In this section, we’ll also consider those who are living in deep deep poverty. Homelessness and deep poverty disproportionately affect people of color in the United States. Based on the U.S Census Bureau data “African-Americans makeup 13 percent of the general population. Twenty-one percent of people living in poverty in the United States are black, according to census data. “African-Americans account for 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness — and half of the homeless families with children, according to the 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR), produced by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.” There are many reasons why one may become homeless…but what happens when one has the opportunity to find a home? Discriminatory practices that are illegal but are still maintained by landlords are still practiced today. Things like redlining and assessing criminal records to rent a unit is still very much in practice today. The prison industrial complex is built to oppress people of color. If people of color are wrongly accused, are victims of the school to prison pipeline, or are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, they are very likely to serve time and have a criminal record — making it extremely difficult to secure any kind of housing.
Freedom, but for who?
The accrual of policies and practices that tried to solve the access land, health services, and in general — freedom — has mostly hurt, not helped, non-white humans. Although these othering policies began before this, we’ll begin this oppressive history with the American Revolution and talk about how it disproportionately affected the timeline of homelessness. During the American Revolution, the homelessness increased like never before. Many individuals soon after the war were forced into homelessness from strict vagrancy laws and a shift in the economy. Then, in 1798, the naturalization act stated that only free white immigrants were eligible for citizenship in the United States, granting them access to many rights and liberties that black slaves and immigrants did not and could not access. Then came the Civil War in 1861 — the fight to end slavery. The result was the ‘freedom’ of slaves and the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation — an executive order from President Lincoln that all “all persons held as slaves” within the United States “are, and henceforward shall be free”. Although this was signed into law, the persistence of racism against black folk continued. There were also little to no programs to help recently freed slaves to integrate into society, therefore beginning a large lineage of generational trauma. Although this new proclamation gave ‘freedom’ to Black folk, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 did prohibit discrimination in housing but like many other laws, it did not provide federal enforcement provisions. In 1887, the passing of laws that discriminated against the color of people’s skin began — 9 states including Louisiana made it law to require separation on public conveyances such as modes of transportation. This discrimination via gatekeeping public services made it difficult for the marginalized to access means of transportation and goods needed to survive and get things like jobs. In 1934, FDR passed the National Housing Act which was meant to improve housing conditions, but in doing so perpetuated this new practice called redlining. This kept many black folk and families from integrating into well-funded and well-kept white neighborhoods. This type of practice is consistent with The City of Pittsburgh’s zoning ordinance of 1923 — prescribing what can be built where. This was a milestone marker for discriminatory housing policies in Pittsburgh that would be pervasive in the next 100 years to come. By the early 1960s, the Pittsburgh Housing Authority had constructed eight public housing projects but placed six of these communities, including St. Clair Village, Allegheny Dwellings, Northview Heights, Broadhead Manor, Arlington Heights and Glen Hazel Heights on steep hillsides, isolated and disconnected from the larger community. In doing this, they upheld racist and discriminatory practices that were being practiced across the United States. Fast forward to Pittsburgh in 2016 where neighborhood lines are obvious. In 2016, Pittsburgh’s ‘Equitable Development’ Plain in east liberty displaced a lot of low-income black residents. All of these practices and policies have many things in common — mainly all made black residents more susceptible or pushed them into poverty, and potentially homelessness. The persistence of these laws and policies have made it difficult for black citizens to find equitable and safe and convenient housing.
Leverage Points
If we look at Donella Meadows Leverage points, clearly (1) The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture is a leverage point that we believe racist history and policy would majorly benefit from. Along with (4) The rules of the system and (3) the distribution of power of the rules of the system are interesting leverage points to consider as well. Racist histories and policies are still very much written into our policies but strongly held personal moral beliefs by many Americans are still very much held. Many black Americans are turned down from potential housing, potential jobs just because of who they are. These strongly held beliefs that persist and exist to oppress the non-white are still very much here today.
A People’s Movement for the Future of Justice & Equity
If you look at activist movements like Black Lives Matter, they organize with the African-American community that campaigns against violent and systemic racism towards black people. Similarly to the black panthers, they fight for the liberation of black folk in the United States. They work to create internal social programs and practices and networks to fight against oppressive systems. They garner the power of the collective. It’s interesting to think about the potential of bottom-up organizing and the power of the people when they gather together to fight for equity and justice. The intervention of powerful and effective people’s movement is very much possible.
Conclusion
Miscellaneous Musings towards the Causal Layered Analysis
As transition designers we are interested and arcing towards future visions of housing justice met by sufficient investment in public housing and social programs, healthcare for all, and anti-racist policies.
We continue to be curious to examine the qualitative and quantitative data around being unhoused in Pittsburgh in relationship to other cities in the U.S. Even though our inquiry is contextual to Pittsburgh, we need to venture out of Pittsburgh to understand the issue of homelessness. Solving homelessness in Pittsburgh can be supported by looking at the manifestation of this problem at a national level and in other parts of the world as well.
How do we inhabit this earth? Can we be homeful? What is the plurality of notions of home to explore in the future?
Being home is being somewhere you feel safe. Home does not mean being in a building. Forget about the house. A house? I will get there when I get there. But for now, I am home. — Pastor Preston
Link to Multi-Level Perspective Map here
