We took some time to talk to Jesse Rabinowitz about his work to confront the criminalization of homelessness and policies that actually make a difference in reducing homelessness.
To start, can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and how you got into this work?
Jesse: My mom used to run the emergency hypothermia shelter at our synagogue growing up. I remember being in the kitchen with her, and I’m sure I was being a brat, and she was like, just go, talk to people. I have this strong memory of sitting with homeless folks on their mats and connecting with them as people, learning that they wanted the same thing that everybody does – a place to live, to feel safe, and to be part of an accepting community. And that has carried with me throughout my life.
I’ve been doing this work for about a decade, from homeless street outreach, a case manager in a drop-in center, to local policy and organizing. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been at the National Homelessness Law Center fighting the onslaught of laws that make it a crime to be homeless.
What are some misconceptions about homelessness that you’d like to challenge, or alternative narratives you’d like to uplift?
Jesse: The biggest narrative that we have to debunk is that people are choosing to be homeless. I’ve never met anyone who has wanted to be homeless. Homelessness happens because our priorities are backwards and our systems are broken: there’s not enough housing, there’s not enough support, there’s not enough care. But homelessness is not an individual choice. It’s a policy failure. Anti-homeless laws respond to this false belief that if we make homelessness harder, people will choose something else. But there is no “something else.” People would not be sleeping outside if they had anywhere else to go.
Making it a crime to be homeless makes homelessness worse. It destroys people’s trust with the government. It destroys people’s belongings, like their medicine, IDs that they need to get into housing. It saddles people with a criminal record, making it harder to find a job or housing, and displaces them. It does not work.
One of the interesting things our polling showed is that more people than not now recognize homelessness as a systems failing and not an individual issue, because either they or a loved one has experienced homelessness or housing instability.
Homelessness is not new, but it’s not inevitable. When I talk to folks who are older than I am, they remember not seeing huge numbers of people sleeping outside every night. Homelessness exploded when the Reagan administration decimated the social safety net, and I find comfort in that, in an odd way, because that teaches us that homelessness is solvable. That means that we can get back there. We have to build people power to demand that our elected officials do their jobs and fund a housing system that works for everybody.
But we have had proven success in reducing homelessness and in connecting people with the services and support they need. Cities and states across the country continue to do important work moving folks off the street and into housing. I feel like that’s unseen because we are not yet preventing more people from coming into homelessness. Housing and support works – there’s just not nearly enough of it. Across the country, the overwhelming majority of folks stay stably housed after the first year. When I was a case manager, folks would get into housing, they got healthy, reconnected with their families, started volunteering or found jobs. We know housing and support works, there aren’t enough of these proven solutions to go around. And that is a policy choice.
As a field, we can often silo community development and homelessness. How do you think about their intersection?
Jesse: Homelessness is the most visible way our failed housing system shows up. And it is frustrating to see people talk about housing justice but not those who are most impacted, people who are living outside. If we want to build a world where everybody has a place to live, that has to include and focus on folks who are living outside and in shelters. Otherwise you’re missing a key segment of the work. People don’t always want to engage with homelessness – but we need to.
It’s also important to address the inflow into homelessness, so we need to be doing both the work of preventing eviction, making sure that people stay stably housed at the same time as we are moving people from homelessness into housing. That requires increased coordination and increased funding of all of these programs.
What is giving you hope in the future you want to see?
Jesse: We’re in this sad but potentially powerful time when half of renters are paying more than they can afford each month. One in four families worry about imminently becoming homeless, and one in five households spend all of their income on rent. More and more people are seeing that our housing system is rigged for billionaires, and more and more people are realizing that homelessness is caused by policy and not by personal choices.
Our polling consistently shows that over 70% of people support solutions to homelessness, like Housing, Not Handcuffs. And we’re seeing results. In the last legislative cycle, there were 54 bills introduced that criminalized homelessness, and advocates and people with experience of homelessness and community members came together and defeated 80% of those bills. When we organize, we win.
I’m excited that our opposition is forcing us to collaborate across sectors. We are coordinating with mental health advocates, harm reductionists, disability rights advocates in new ways.
When we look at authoritarian regimes throughout history, they have come after two groups first – people they believe to be foreign, and homeless people. We saw this in Italy. We saw this in Germany. It’s happening here right now. Dehumanizing rhetoric turning into dehumanizing policy. In Atlanta, Cornelius Taylor was killed by a bulldozer when the city was throwing away his encampment. There is a twisted desire to remove people from society and force them into camps. At no time in history has forcing people into camps ever been a good thing. While people are rightly concerned about government overreach and authoritarianism, I need them to understand that a key counter to that is fighting against the criminalization of homelessness and fighting for the housing and support that everybody needs.
If you can do one thing, check out our resources and campaigns at Housing Not Handcuffs. We have a campaign right now saying no federal funding for detention camps. Housing Not Handcuffs is our effort to counter the lies of a billionaire-backed campaign to make it a crime to be homeless. People who got rich from Palantir – which sells facial recognition technology to ICE that the Trump administration has used to find, locate and deport migrants – are using their billionaires to fund this anti-homelessness push in cities, states, and now the federal government. The only real solution to homelessness is getting folks housing and support they need. Let’s push for the policies we know we need to actually solve homelessness.
Jesse Rabinowitz is the Campaign and Communications Director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He led the communications and power-building work on the historic Johnson vs. Grants Pass Supreme Court Case. Previously, he was the Senior Manager for Policy and Advocacy at Miriam’s Kitchen, where he managed a coalition that won funding to end chronic homelessness for over 6,000 people. Jesse received his master’s in social work at Howard University and lives in DC with his spouse and kiddo.