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Approximately 1.4 million people enter homeless shelters in the United States each year, and thousands more live on the streets. The city of San Diego may be overrun with homeless people. The problem seems huge, tragic, and intractable. But there are proven solutions. A key strategy for chronically homeless people is supportive housing, which provides not only stable apartments but also services such as on-site psychiatric and medical care.this New Yorker Contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several chronically homeless people as they moved into a new supportive housing building in New York. “Is it easy to take people who have had these difficult experiences and bring them to one place over the course of eight months? No,” she told David Remnick. “Is it effective? From what I’ve seen, the answer is yes.” It is estimated that solving the country’s homelessness problem will cost about $10 billion. But Egan believes that number pales in comparison to the money we spend on emergency medical care, emergency shelters and other piecemeal solutions. “No one wants to see this item in the budget, but we’re already spending it in all these scattered ways,” she said. “We’ve wasted money on this problem.”
