Street Fight Part III: Can We End It?
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Why does the episode open with a comedy bit about a homeless person?
Hello again, this is Andy Mills, and you are listening to the third episode of Street Fight, our miniseries about the rise of homelessness in America and what might be done to stop it. And I'm back with reporter Emma Pettit. Hi, Emma.
Hi, Andy.
So where are we starting today?
Okay, so it might seem weird, but I want to start off actually with a comedy bit from a totally uncontroversial comedian, Louis C.K. Ah. You might have heard of him. I
remember one time I was with a friend of mine who lives in New York also. We went to pick up his cousin. She lives on a farm in New Hampshire her whole life.
There is this girl who is this, like, country girl. She grew up sheltered, and she's coming to visit New York City. And they decide to meet her at Port Authority.
She had never been to any city before, and we're picking her up at the Port Authority, that smelly hole of a place. And we pick her up there, and she's just freaking out at New York. She's never seen anything like it. And we pass this homeless guy, and she sees him. I mean, we all passed him, but she saw him. She's the only one who actually saw him.
And she sees, seemingly for the first time, a man lying on the ground, desperate. You know, I think Louis C.K. describes him as particularly homeless.
His cousin immediately just gets, she's like, oh my God, she takes a knee. She goes, oh my God, sir, are you okay? What happened? What happens? America happens. What do you mean, what happens?
And she's alarmed and confused.
So she's down there, sir, can we call someone? And me and my friend, we're from New York, this is the crazy part, we immediately go to her, oh, no, no, no, honey, don't. We start correcting her behavior like she's doing something wrong. She's like, why, is he okay? No, no, he needs you desperately. That's not the point. We just don't do that here. You silly country girl.
And the funny thing is about this shirt, the reason I laugh is because it's so familiar.
Right. It rings true.
Yeah. It rings totally true. Like, I moved to the city. I live in Washington, D.C. I moved to the city, you know, eight years ago. And it feels like to operate there every day, you have to develop this ignorance. Like, you have to be like Louis C.K. and not see the, like, desperation in front of you.
Yeah. No, I think it's one of the strangest norms of city life. You know, I moved here from a small town to New York City, and the way that it's just normal here to pretend that you don't see these people, that the norm is to look through them, to act as if they are invisible. Right. Yeah. And I fear that it creates a callousness.
Yeah, I think it does. I think it does. Because like when I started reporting this story, I think I might have told you or somebody like, oh, I actually don't think that there are that many homeless people in my neighborhood. And when I started working on this, I realized, oh, I was wrong.
Oh, like you had stopped seeing
them. Yeah, I totally stopped seeing them. And I think that's a dehumanizing experience for them and for me. And the reason I'm starting with this joke is because today we're going to talk about these two sides who both want us to stop doing that, who both want us to stop, like, ignoring the person on the sidewalk, who think that, like, they have a solution for what to do, but they really disagree on what that actually is and what we should do next. Okay, let's start with you introducing yourself. Can you just tell me who you are and what you do?
So my name is Ian DeYoung, and I am the president and CEO of OrgCode Consulting.
So let's start with a guy I talked to named Ian DeYoung.
I've been in the field for more than three decades, trying to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.
He runs a company called OrgCode Consulting, where he works with local governments and nonprofits. He's even written a book called The Book on Ending Homelessness. And he's part of a broad camp that generally believes in something called housing first.
So housing first, the way I try to describe it to people who don't necessarily work in this field is,
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