Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Homelessness isn’t as far away from home anymore.
January “point in time” counts show that New Mexico’s unhoused population has been growing in recent years, while nationally it’s at a 15-year high.
Last year’s count found a 48% increase in New Mexico’s homeless population from a year earlier, and this year’s count showed a 62% increase. This is more than a perception; it’s a reality.
It’s not just in the cities these days. Where I live, along Interstate 40 in Santa Rosa, we get our share of transients, sometimes hoofing or hitchhiking their way through town. Other times you’ll see people alongside beat-up or broken-down vehicles, hoping for a little charity to get them farther down the road.
Still others make themselves invisible in hidden campsites, then come out during the day to panhandle. The desperation so many Americans feel these days is evident, even in this small town.
In the larger cities, however, homelessness has become more of a public safety issue. Panhandlers seem to be at just about every major intersection in Albuquerque, while homeless encampments are creating health and safety hazards not only for their “residents” but for those who live and work nearby.
A recent Supreme Court ruling strengthened government authority over such encampments, leading to a more aggressive approach to breaking them up. But as long as the unhoused have nowhere to go, they will keep showing up.
Of course, several things lead to homelessness.
Poverty and mental illness are two of the most obvious reasons, owed to a lack of affordable housing and treatment facilities. There are myriad reasons for homelessness — but it’s not an insurmountable issue.
The most obvious solution is to get the unhoused into housing. There’s been an effort to build “tiny homes” — 100- to 400-square-foot structures with kitchen and bathroom — and even 3-D housing construction, that the unhoused can move into, but some call these approaches little more than placing a band-aid on an open wound.
Affordable housing is a long-term solution — something the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was actually created to do, back in 1965, as part of the “Great Society” initiatives of that time. But that was then and this is now, and now it seems that society’s great “safety net” is full of holes, with more and more people slipping through.
If we’re going to truly address crime, we need to address the root causes, and some of the same reasons a person turns to crime are the very reasons why they lose their homes. Poverty can turn good people into desperados who will do what they must to take care of themselves and their loved ones.
We are the wealthiest nation on earth, but that wealth is walled off to a sizable population of Americans. If our society doesn’t find a way to help those who need our help the most, our wealth won’t save us. It will only divide us, even more than we are now.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: