Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness

[PoliticAverse]

The process of innovation is often one of mystery. Where does an idea come from? How do innovators find it? What makes them different from everyone else fumbling around in the dark?

Compounding the puzzle is the irony that those most likely to innovate are rarely the experts. They’re outsiders who see things freshly.

And so, on a recent morning, one such outsider picks his way down a sun-splashed Brookland street. Face patched in scruff, wiry frame crammed into a Patagonia jacket, he doesn’t at first seem like an innovator who has had national impact. But few thinkers today are in greater demand.

Meet Sam Tsemberis. According to academics and advocates, he’s all but solved chronic homelessness. His research, which commands the support of most scholars, has inspired policies across the nation, as well as in the District. The results have been staggering. Late last month, Utah, the latest laboratory for Tsemberis’s’s models, reported it has nearly eradicated chronic homelessness. Phoenix, an earlier test case, eliminated chronic homelessness among veterans. Then New Orleans housed every homeless veteran.

Read the rest at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/06/meet-the-outsider-who-accidentally-solved-chronic-homelessness/?wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1

[dhill926]

1. outstanding...

and seemingly related to the idea of GIVING people a livable income. Some place in Scandinavia? Can't remember...

[bemildred]

2. To end poverty, give people money. It is simple.

It even costs less.

[Nay]

3. "Born in Greece and raised in Montreal, Tsemberis was never trained in how to treat the homeless."

This tells me a lot about why he was successful; he wasn't raised in a country where it was axiomatic that you didn't GIVE people anything -- they always had to "earn" it by conforming to certain behaviors and be monitored like they were serial killers. Just being a poor person in trouble wasn't enough, oh, no. You had to suffer before anybody did one thing for you. That's the U.S. -- crack-the-whip nation.

My SIL would be so angry with this that spittle would be flying. Everybody is ripping her off, getting tax money, etc. It wouldn't matter if you showed her that it was cheaper to do it this way; she would be totally stuck in the mode that somebody, somewhere, was "getting something for nothing."