A Solution For the Chronically Homeless, and Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison
About 1.2 million people in the United States experience homelessness in a given year\u2014you could nearly fill the city of Dallas with the unhoused. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing\u2014providing not only a stable apartment, but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. The New Yorker contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals as they transitioned into a new supportive-housing building in Brooklyn. She found that this housing model works and argues that it could be scaled up nationally for less than the cost of emergency services for the homeless. But \u201cno one,\u201d Egan notes ruefully, \u201cwants to see that line item in their budget.\u201d Plus, Joe Garcia, an inmate serving a life sentence for murder in California\u2019s High Desert State Prison, reads from his essay \u201cListening to Taylor Swift in Prison,\u201d recently published by The New Yorker.