People in this tent encampment off of U.S. 70 near Garner were recently forced to move. (Photo: Greg Childress)
To help the more than 400 people attending the “Bringing it Home 2024” conference in Raleigh on Tuesday get a glimpse of what homelessness is like, Marisol Bello, executive director of the Housing Narrative Lab, challenged them do this:
Marisol Bello (Photo: NC Housing Coalition)
“Close your eyes and think about your home. Then I’m going to ask you to imagine opening the front door of your house and then the back door, if you have one too. I want you to open all of the windows in the house. I want you to keep all the windows, all the doors open at night. Now, go to bed and try to go to sleep.”
Bello, the conference’s keynote speaker, said the exercise is the way her friend Turquoise, an advocate working to solve homelessness in San Diego, helps people understand the vulnerability of experiencing street homelessness.
“When they talked about that experience, [at a training session] the room was quiet because in that one simple metaphor, they brought people who’ve never been homeless and could possibly never imagine what it was like, a view into what it could be like with something they could relate to,” Bello said.
Samuel Gunter, executive director of the NC Housing Coalition, said that North Carolina and the nation are in an extraordinary time when people across the political spectrum and income levels are thinking about housing in way that has never been seen.
“A large part of that is because that cost burden has crept further and further up the income ladder until it has affected people in a way that it hasn’t,” Gunter said.
A recent Housing Coalition report shows that 28% of North Carolina’s households — 1.2 million — having difficulty affording their homes. That means the households spend more than 30% of income on housing.
Samuel Gunter (Photo: NC Housing Coalition)
Gunter used the state motto — Esss quam videri, “To be rather than to seem” — to make a point about how some communities have addressed the homelessness problem.
“We’ve seen in a lot of communities around the state, how some of the interventions have been to address the seem [of homelessness] — let’s get it out of the public eye,” Gunter said. “We’re not about the being [when it comes to homelessness], we’re about the seeming and our challenge in this moment is to think about how we tell the story in a way that builds that broad coalition of folks to be about the being of that thriving and inclusive community were everyone has a decent place to live.”
The Housing Narrative Lab that Bello directs is a national communications and narrative research hub that lifts up the stories of people facing homelessness and housing insecurity. Bello is a career journalist who most recently worked at USA Today telling the stories of working families.
Bello believes that strong narratives can change “hearts and minds” about people experiencing homelessness and move citizens to action.
“Narratives are why 3,000 years later, we compare underdogs to the David and Goliath story, or why we equate the founding fathers to this country’s ideals of freedom and liberty, even though several were enslavers who owned people,” Bello said. “I can’t stress enough the power of narratives to shape how we feel and think.”
The current narrative about people experiencing homelessness or those who are housing insecure allows critics of efforts to end homelessness to “spread lies or disinformation” that can end public investments in programs that can solve homelessness, Bello said.
“If you mostly are hearing stories that blame people for living on the street and assert that the people that are housing insecure or experiencing homelessness, that they’ve made bad choices, you’re not going to support the idea of providing a guaranteed place for everyone to live,” Bello said.
If the narrative about people experiencing homelessness doesn’t change, Bello warned, it will lead to more cities and towns passing ordinances that criminalize homelessness.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson, an Oregon case testing a city ordinance that prohibits people experiencing homelessness from sleeping in public, Bello noted.
“The Grants Pass case is about whether cities solve homelessness through housing and the supportive services people need to stay housed or whether … we deal with visibility of homelessness,” Bello said.
She noted recent ordinances in Charlotte that critics say disproportionately affect people experiencing homelessness. The laws make sleeping on benches, public defecation, panhandling, public drinking, public masturbation and trespassing arrestable offenses. The were previously ticketed offenses.
Bello also mentions the recent removal of people experiencing homelessness from an encampment along U.S. 70 in Raleigh near Garner.
“We’ve seeded the narrative, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to us when we face backlash against new housing in our communities or growing resentment, anger and blame for people who can’t afford places to live,” Bello said.
She asked conference attendees to think about narratives as a garden. She said a gardener needs to decide what they want their garden to look like and understand the ecosystem in which they want it to grow, the impact of weather changes, and how much water, sunlight and mulch is needed.
“If you don’t do any of this, you end up planting coconut trees in Beech Mountain,” Bello said.
The way the narrative has changed about cigarette smoking is a good example of what is possible when it comes to changing the narrative about people experiencing homelessness, Bello said. Cigarette smoking was once considered cool and glamorous and featured in movies and on television, she said.
“Today, more people [see] smoking as toxic, not just to your health but to our communities,” Bello said.
The North Carolina Housing Coalition’s “Bringing it Home 2024: Ending Homelessness in NC” conference continued today at the McKimmon Center in Raleigh. It’s the first time since 2019 the two-day, statewide conference has been held in person.
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