Workers doing Mecklenburg County’s annual homeless count found a dead man on the street early Thursday morning. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says we have fallen short in helping our neighbors.
You know, in your heart, that homelessness can sometimes be a matter of life or death.
On Thursday it proved true.
Community workers and volunteers doing Mecklenburg County’s annual homeless count in the freezing early hours of Thursday morning found a dead man lying on a sidewalk uptown. He’d been sleeping there.
Police have not released his name.
The homeless count has a couple of purposes. One is to create an educated guess of the county’s homeless population, which is required for federal money to combat the problem.
The other reason is to reach out to our neighbors without homes, to find out how they’re doing and what they need.
At any given time, there are a few thousand homeless people in our county — about 3,100 as of the count from January a year ago. Most of those folks find shelters to stay in at night. But there’s a hard core — nearly 400 as of last year’s count — who don’t go to the shelters, meaning they sleep on the streets or in their cars or in the woods.
I know it’s easy to harden our hearts to the homeless. It’s hard not to jump to conclusions, to assume that every homeless person is an addict or an alcoholic or a criminal. They blew their shot, so, tough luck. In many ways they’re our version of lepers–people many of us would cross the street to avoid, people we might think somehow deserved their fate.
The key word in that last sentence was “people.”
They’re homeless people.
Some of them have ended up on the streets because of a lifetime of terrible decisions. But others are there because of late paychecks, medical bills, house fires, broken-down pickup trucks — all the calamities that can wreck a life for the millions of Americans who live on paper-thin margins.
The biggest burden for most Americans on the edge is rent. The simplest fix is more affordable housing. It’s one of those many things that everybody agrees should exist but nobody actually wants to do. Builders want to make higher profits. Neighborhoods don’t want poor people. Governments’ knees turn to water at the power of those builders and neighborhoods.
In Mecklenburg County, it has fallen to churches to create affordable housing from their land and resources. They are doing the Lord’s work, but they can’t build enough.
And it has long been known that the key to reducing chronic homelessness is to just give people a place to live. It’s called "housing first: and in the long run, it’s cheaper than endless trips to the ER and jail — not to mention more humane. In Charlotte, buildings like Moore Place north of uptown have taken in some of our most hard-core homeless and given them a chance at better lives.
Some people think that’s not fair because those folks are given something they didn’t earn. Years ago, I interviewed a bunch of residents at Moore Place. Once you hear how most of them grew up, barely having a chance in life, it might change your idea of fairness.
We don’t know yet about the man found dead on our streets Thursday morning. All I know is that this was his city, and his county, as much as it is ours. And it’s likely that we could have taken better care of him.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
