FROM THE EDITOR: Politics Got Us Here ... Community and Government Will Get Us Out
America's social network is facing an unprecedented crisis. Though painful now, good can eventually come from it, if we learn to embrace a communal mindset.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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In 50 years, when historians have sufficient distance from current events and easy access to the necessary records, the story of Donald Trump will be primarily told not by chronicling the destructive approach to government he is unleashing in Washington or the cruelty being leveled against the country’s own citizens.
Rather, it will be told in how citizens rebalance community and government in post-Trump America.
That rebalancing is already underway.
People Over Data
Data properly deployed allows for the discovery of problems and trends that anecdotal evidence on its own is unlikely to raise up. When data becomes the arbiter of what is true, however, we lose sight of the people we are trying to help.
That is the great insight of Brian Goldstone’s new book, There Is No Place for Us. Through the stories of five Atlanta families, Goldstone shows how the categories that we assign to people based on data produced by the Point-in-Time Count, itself of limited value, prevent us from understanding the growing plague of homelessness.
The consequences are profound.
“[O]ur approach to counting and defining homelessness is not just robbing people of support,” he wrote in his book:
[i]t also distorts our understanding of the problem. Narrow the lens, and perhaps we can persuade ourselves … that homelessness is a unique condition afflicting a particular type of person. Widen the lens, adjust the focus, and homelessness begins to look very different.
What does widening the lens show us?
According to Goldstone, it shows that the number of homeless in America is far larger than the data says. Goldstone estimates “well over four million” people. The Point-in-Time Count pins the number at just over 700,000.
How do we overlook these people? When we define homelessness too narrowly — a person living on the street is counted, but a person living in a car may not be — we simply don’t see the obvious before us.
The Point-in-Time Count for Fredericksburg has consistently pinned the number of homeless people in our area at between 200 and 300 people.
The problem, however, is far worse. LoisAnn’s Hope House fielded 15,309 calls for assistance between July 2023 and July 2024. This year, the organization is seeing unprecedented need for assistance in the wake of federal job cuts and the government shutdown.
Funds to serve this community are limited. And recently, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is looking to shift much of the nearly $4 billion spent nationwide on the issue away from providing housing and shelter to people to focusing on “impos[ing] work rules, help[ing] the police dismantle encampments, and requir[ing] the homeless to accept treatment for mental illness or addiction.”
This threat is rallying people in the community to organizations like the Thurman Brisbane Center, Micah, and LoisAnn’s Hope House, which will bear the brunt of increased homelessness should these policies become reality.
The upside to this is people beginning to rely more on one another to address the problems before them.
But that coming together will face a significant downside. This change in federal policy, should it come about, will worsen the homelessness problem and make it more visible.
Ann Oliva, the chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group, told the Times that “No one can wrap their head around the idea that HUD is about to kick 170,000 vulnerable people out of their homes. People don’t know what’s about to hit them.”
While the 170,000 people being removed from their homes by the government’s pending policy change is not yet visible to the public, the government shutdown and disruption of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) did become visible, and gave people a taste of what significantly fewer federal services means for local communities.
Appreciating Government’s Importance
Dan Maher, CEO of the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank, told the Advance on November 4 — a time just after SNAP benefits were curtailed, and two weeks after localities had warned that money might not arrive for beneficiaries in November — that turnout for food distributions was running “50 - 100 percent higher than a month ago and our surveying shows more than 50 percent indicate it is their first time receiving assistance.”
While the Food Bank survived the surge, it is unlikely to be able to cover the need if SNAP were to be significantly reduced.
According to Maher, for every meal that the Food Bank network provides, SNAP provides nine. That’s 90 percent.
That disparity between what a strong local organization like the Food Bank can produce vs. what the government can provide brings home the extent to which social problems like hunger (and homelessness) cannot be handled by local communities and charities alone.
The extent to which government should be involved, and how much government should provide, will always be a matter for dispute.
However, what communities are beginning to realize is that the social problems they face are too large to be handled by themselves.
Government has a role to play.
Expanding Community
One strength of American democracy is that it was, from the beginning, designed to deal with swings in public need and society. And for most of U.S. history, government has done this well — the Civil War being the notable exception.
It handles those swings best when a majority of people have a sound understanding of a simple question — “Who is my neighbor?”
Certainly, it includes the people nearest us, as well as those in the cities and towns people call home. But it goes beyond this.
Though we are better connected now than ever before in human history, we arguably have a poorer understanding of the ways in which people and events in places further removed from our immediate surroundings affect us.
Understanding the connections we don’t see is part of learning to see with a “communal mindset,” as Dan Maher called it in a recent piece about the Food Bank. And understanding that is the key to striking a working balance between local charity, state, and federal governments in addressing the social challenges before us.
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