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UNLOCKING CHANGE is a production of Colorado Radio for Justice (CRJ). It's an in-depth conversation between CRJ's system-impacted hosts and reporters with leading voices in the criminal-legal space. What is “justice”? What is “freedom”? How might these aspirations become real in our communities & across our culture? www.radioforjustice.org
Introduction
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Joybelle Phelan: Welcome to [00:02:00] "Unlocking Change" on Colorado Radio for Justice. I'm your host today, JoyBelle Phelan, and joining me today is Dr. Don Burnes, who has spent more than 40 years studying the questions of homelessness. Not the surface level debates you hear in the news, um, but the deeper questions. How did we get here? Who is most affected?
And what does it actually take to end it? Dr. Burnes' most recent book is called "When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America," and it's a title that says a lot all on its own. Don, welcome to "Unlocking Change."
Donald W. Burnes: Thank you very much, JoyBelle, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today. Thank you.
Joybelle Phelan: We're thrilled to have you.
Meet Dr. Donald Burnes
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Joybelle Phelan: Let's start with if some of our listeners have never heard of Dr. Don Burnes, if they have never heard of the Burnes Center, [00:03:00] which is now the Center for Housing and Homelessness Research at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work, introduce yourself for a moment. What would you want our watchers and listeners to know about you today?
Donald W. Burnes: I think the most important thing is that, um, I've been studying the issue of homelessness now for, as you indicated, over 40 years. Um, people ask me, uh, "How effective has all your work been in ending homelessness?" And my response is, "Well, there are more people now experiencing homelessness than there were 40 years ago when I got started, so clearly I've been very effective."
Um, seriously, it's a problem that we have not solved. We have to figure out how to change the narrative, change our approach.
Joybelle Phelan: That is the hope. The, the [00:04:00] great-- One of the great things I, I like about doing this particular series is that we're able to dig deeply into an issue, and so I am hoping we get there today.
So as you've mentioned, right, you've been studying homelessness and poverty for more than 40 years, and that's a really long time to be committed to one of the hardest problems in our country.
What Got You Into This Work?
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Joybelle Phelan: What got you into this work originally?
Donald W. Burnes: Um, actually I was in, uh, educational research and evaluation, uh, as a professional, um, work.
And I kept thinking back to my experience right after college when I spent two years as a volunteer for Mission in St. Louis in a, uh, low-income Black neighborhood in St. Louis. And I got fed up with the educational research that I was doing, and I decided to shift gears. And what I really wanted to do was to replicate that two years [00:05:00] in St. Louis. So I started as a service provider in Washington, D.C., and I ran a direct services program for about three years. And then, uh, my late wife and I decided that we really wanted to be more policy-oriented and look at some of the deeper questions and some of the major policy issues, and that's where I've been ever since.
Joybelle Phelan: That's great. Um, and
What are we Walking by?
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Joybelle Phelan: your most recent book is called "When We Walk By." There's something really pointed about that title. What does that phrase mean to you, and what do you want most people to understand about what it is they're actually walking past?
Donald W. Burnes: In 2014 in New York City, uh, an organization on the Lower East Side ran an experiment.
They identified five families, and from each [00:06:00] family, unbeknownst to the other family members, they took one member of the family separately and dressed them up as people experiencing homelessness and had them sit on streets in New York City. And then during the course of the day, they asked all the other family members to walk along those streets and see what happened. At the end of the day, they discovered that none of the other family members stopped, recognized a sister, a brother, a spouse, a good friend. People just kept walking by. We simply don't pay
Criminalization & Camping Bans
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Donald W. Burnes: attention.
Joybelle Phelan: Across Colorado, um, Denver, Colorado Springs, even the smaller cities, we've seen a wave of camping bans, [00:07:00] um, ordinances and enforcement sweeps to address homelessness. From your research, what is actually happening when cities take that approach?
Donald W. Burnes: Basically, what we're doing is criminalizing people who are experiencing homelessness. Um, there was a major, uh, Supreme Court decision last year, Grants Pass versus Johnson, in which the Supreme Court decided that even if there were no, uh, shelter available, cities could penalize people for camping on the streets. This was a tremendous setback, uh, for lots of agencies around the country. What it does is, in most cases, simply move encampments from one location to another, and it costs money in terms of [00:08:00] police, in terms of garbage collection. And the thing that I always wondered was why can't we put porta potties? Why can't we put washing stations? Why can't we put garbage collection? Why is it that we refuse to provide any kind of helpful or sanitary assistance for people in camps? It's because we don't like the sight of them and we wanna get rid of them. Here in Denver, uh, the mayor started off his, uh, mayoralty saying, "I'm not gonna do sweeps." Well, after a year, people pushed him and he did sweeps. What he did do, he made a conscious effort to put people who were being swept into shelters.
The Homelessness-to-Incarceration Cycle
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Joybelle Phelan: There's a cycle that researchers talk [00:09:00] about, um, homelessness to arrest to incarceration back to homelessness, that cycle, and it just keeps going. I'm curious from your knowledge as a researcher, how did that cycle get built into our systems and who does it serve?
Donald W. Burnes: Uh, basically it serves the people who have created the prisons. They make money off of loading up prisons with, uh, incarcerates. What we need to think about is why are people being put in prison? And even more seriously, um, what is the, what is the purpose of basic, uh, imprisonment? Is it punishment or is it rehabilitation?
About 45% of, uh, people experiencing homelessness are employed.
Intro: [00:10:00] Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: Which means that, uh, even with a full-time minimum wage job, they can't afford housing. Mm-hmm. So given those circumstances, I don't feel too badly if somebody goes in and tries to swipe a loaf of bread, uh, to try and feed his or her family.
Joybelle Phelan: For someone being released from prison or jail, right, whether it's a year or after a decade, the housing landscape probably looks markedly different, right? Whether they were housed or not. How does having a record change what's available to you?
Donald W. Burnes: Let me take, uh, the worst case scenario, which is somebody who has been, uh, convicted of sex offense.
So it's almost impossible for that kind of a person to find housing at all. Then you get to the [00:11:00] issue of employment- Mm-hmm ... which would produce, uh, the wages necessary, and most employers, um, say, "I can't hire you." Uh, I'll tell you a quick story. Uh, a colleague of mine, he was convicted of a sex offense. When he got out, he went to two different employers who said independently, "You know, I really would like to hire you, but I'm not allowed to because you're a sex offender.
It would be much easier to, uh, hire you if you'd just gone out and killed somebody." And, you know, I heard that and it, you know, my jaw dropped.
Housing Vouchers & Barriers to Reentry
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Donald W. Burnes: Something like 40 to 50% of the vouchers that are, uh, distributed come back unused. One is there's no housing available.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: Or two, [00:12:00] um, landlords won't accept people with a housing voucher.
It takes too long to get reimbursed by either the state or particularly the federal government. They won't wait.
Joybelle Phelan: They don't want to, ' cause they don't have to, 'cause they can rent that to somebody else-
Donald W. Burnes: That's right.
Joybelle Phelan: That's right ... that doesn't have that same time delay.
Donald W. Burnes: There is such a demand for relatively inexpensive housing- Mm-hmm
that, you know, if somebody comes in with a voucher, "Eh, uh, I can get somebody else."
Joybelle Phelan: And they can,
Donald W. Burnes: sadly. And they can.
Joybelle Phelan: Yeah. So, um,
Whole Person Reentry
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Joybelle Phelan: here at Colorado Radio for Justice, we talk a lot around whole person re-entry. Um, the idea that housing is just one piece of what someone needs when they're coming home from incarceration.
From your research, what does that full picture look like, and are our systems set up to support it?
Donald W. Burnes: It? A person coming out of prison, A, needs [00:13:00] somehow to be inserted into a network of support, not only financial, but human support.
Intro: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: And unfortunately, a lot of the folks who are coming out of prison are isolated, and one of the most significant and universal characteristics of people experiencing homelessness is social isolation.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: So creating some kind of a community of support becomes absolutely critical.
Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: You really need to help the person become familiar with everything that's going on outside. Mm-hmm. And I mean, employment opportunities, housing opportunities, uh, long-term social opportunities. Um, I've talked to a number [00:14:00] of people who have experienced, uh, incarceration, and I've asked people, "So, um, has the treatment been successful?
Uh, have you learned stuff through your treatment?" And most of the people say no.
Hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: Uh, that by and large, the treatment continues to treat people as though they are guilty and should be punished. Mm-hmm. Rather than looking for ways for what I call rehabilitation.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: Um, unfortunately, if we can't provide that kind of assistance for people as they come out of prison, they're gonna end up back in prison.
Joybelle Phelan: So I wanna jump in a little bit to some root causes and systems.
Root Causes: Mental Health & Addiction Myths
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Joybelle Phelan: So there's a persistent narrative that homelessness is primarily a mental health or addiction [00:15:00] problem, that if we just got people treatment, we'd solve it. What does the research actually say?
Donald W. Burnes: Let me approach this in two different ways, Joybelle.
Uh, the conventional wisdom is that people experiencing homelessness are lazy, crazy, drunks, druggies, or they've made a bad decision. And who among us has never made a bad decision?
Joybelle Phelan: Nobody I know.
Donald W. Burnes: Nobody I know. So what's the difference between the housed people and those, uh, experiencing homelessness? The answer is access to financial resources- Mm
and to human resources. Mm-hmm. And, uh, we have already talked a little bit about that.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: The other way of approaching this is to say, okay, one of the myths about homelessness is everybody is an [00:16:00] alcoholic.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm.
Donald W. Burnes: Well, we know from the research that 25, 30, 35% may have problems with alcohol.
Okay.
Donald W. Burnes: Uh, drugs less.
Mm. Uh, 20 to 25%.
Okay.
Donald W. Burnes: Mental illness, 30 to 35%. And yet most of us continue to believe that that's the big problem.
Hey, you bum, get a job. Well, half of them have a job.
Joybelle Phelan: Right.
Donald W. Burnes: But they're not making enough to make-- uh, to pay rent. One example of that, uh, the National Low Income Housing Coalition every year creates, uh, what is called the housing wage.
The housing wage is how much you have to earn on an hourly basis to afford an average two-bedroom housing unit without paying more than 30% of your income-
The housing wage [00:17:00] in Denver is about $43 an hour.
Joybelle Phelan: Wow.
Donald W. Burnes: Our current minimum wage is $19 an hour.
Joybelle Phelan: Yeah, only if you're in Denver.
Donald W. Burnes: Only if you're in Denver.
Joybelle Phelan: Yep. It's less other places.
Donald W. Burnes: Yes. Uh, the state, uh, minimum or housing wage is $37 something. Mm. Uh, the minimum wage across the state is $14.
Intro: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: So in both cases, the minimum wage is less than 50% of the housing wage.
Joybelle Phelan: That math isn't gonna work. So I wanna talk a little bit about
Relational Poverty
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Joybelle Phelan: your most recent book argues that, and you've mentioned it already, eroding social bonds, so general distrust, disconnection in our society, is a core thought, um, a core part of what's blocking progress.
That's a different kind of argument than what most [00:18:00] policy conversations have. So can you walk us through that idea a little bit?
Donald W. Burnes: In our book, we call it relational poverty. People experiencing homelessness don't have a lot of networks of support. They don't have a lot of contact with other people, except for people who are just like them, who are not in a position to provide much real support.
I would argue that most of us in housing have very poor relationships with people experiencing homelessness.
Mm.
Donald W. Burnes: Which is another kind of relational poverty.
Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: So both sides suffer from relational poverty.
Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: And until we change those attitudes that most of us have, we're not going [00:19:00] to address successfully the problem of homelessness.
Joybelle Phelan: Right. It's that unconscious bias.
Donald W. Burnes: Yes, that's right.
Joybelle Phelan: Yeah.
Donald W. Burnes: And it's partly race.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: It's partly class.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: Uh, it's partly all kinds of other things. But, you know, rather than approaching somebody experiencing homelessness as one of them- That's a human being
Joybelle Phelan: started to go here a little bit. So
Race & Housing Instability in Colorado
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Joybelle Phelan: racial disparities in homelessness- Yes
are significant and well-documented. Black and Indigenous people are dramatically over-represented, over-represented. So in Colorado, how do you think about the relationship between housing instability and the history of racial exclusion in the state?
Donald W. Burnes: Um, I don't know as much about, uh, the exclusion in Colorado.[00:20:00]
I do know that on a national basis, and here in Denver, Blacks are three to four times over-represented among the homeless-
Hmm ...
Donald W. Burnes: than, uh, within the general population. Unfortunately, ever since 1492,
um, we as a society have, um, had a very negative attitude about people who are different from us.
Joybelle Phelan: So you've spent time with people experiencing homelessness, not just studying them from a distance. And I'm curious what those conversations have taught you that the data points don't really cover.
Donald W. Burnes: Somehow we don't, and it, it's, it's, uh, partly, uh, xenophobia.
It's partly, uh, [00:21:00] a new word I've just learned is aporophobia. It's fear of the poor.
Joybelle Phelan: Hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: Um, somehow we don't take the time to think and appreciate our brothers and sisters. Hmm. Um, and it's to our great misfortune.
Joybelle Phelan: It is. So you've written about tough love approaches and the idea that being harsh or withholding help motivates people to change, and you've pushed back on that pretty directly.
What does the research say, and what would you say to someone who genuinely believes that that's the right approach?
Donald W. Burnes: Um, I think the biggest danger is thinking that people experiencing homelessness are all alike. Hmm. That one size [00:22:00] fits all. It doesn't. We have to be better at- Assessing where folks are and trying to figure out what has happened to you, what are the circumstances that have forced you into this situation, and what's the best way to address all that-
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm
Donald W. Burnes: on a much more individualized basis than, um, one size fits all. Right, 'cause it never does. It never does. It never does. So I wanna come back to Denver
Joybelle Phelan: a little bit. So
Denver's Homelessness Response
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Joybelle Phelan: Denver in particular has gotten a lot of national attention for the homelessness response. You, you mentioned it earlier. Yeah. Um, both for innovative programs and for enforcement. From your perspective, what is perhaps an honest assessment of Denver's approach?
Donald W. Burnes: I think unfortunately, uh, in our previous mayor's administration, [00:23:00] um- You know, he, he made the good sounds, but he really wasn't interested in the issue of homelessness.
Mayor Johnston, um, I think really has the right instincts and has his heart in the right place. Um, he doesn't always spend a lot of time trying to think through the best way to deal with a problem. On his second day in office, he said, uh, """I'm gonna end homelessness by the end of this year," and, and his first day in office was early July of 2023, uh, "I'm going to get 1,000 people into housing by the end of the year," which was on its face ridiculous.
And fortunately, he had staff who asked him to, uh, walk it back a bit. [00:24:00] And he ended up saying, "Well, I'll get 1,000 people off the streets," which he was successful in doing. Right. They're off the streets. Mayor Johnston can be patted on the back for, uh, at least trying.
Where Is the Hope?
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Joybelle Phelan: Where do you find hope right now? Is there something you're seeing, a program, um, a place, a shift in thinking that genuinely gives you some hope for optimism here?
Donald W. Burnes: Yes. Thank you. Uh, I think there are individual projects, um, in places like Austin, uh, in places like Houston, in some other places, We know what to do. Mm-hmm. We really do. There are enough good programs, uh, but we don't have the resources to, uh, scale these programs up.
Joybelle Phelan: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: What gives me hope is in 2009, 2010, uh, [00:25:00] President Obama got together with, uh, Secretary of HUD, uh, Shaun Donovan, and they pieced together a solid initiative to address veteran homelessness.
And over the course of six years, they reduced veteran homelessness by 50%. Hmm. Which means to me that if you have the political will to generate the resources, you can do an incredible job.
Mm. Unfortunately, we don't have the political will to generate the resources,
The only way we're gonna generate the political will is to change the narrative.
Joybelle Phelan: If you could change one thing, a policy, an attitude, a funding priority, like anything, you have a magic wand and you can change one thing, what would have the biggest impact on ending [00:26:00] homelessness in Colorado?
Donald W. Burnes: generating, uh, the funding to create a massive expansion of, um, the available, affordable, and, uh, accessible housing. Now, there are lots of other things that have to go along with that. Mm-hmm. But, um, yeah, we really need, uh, more resources.
Joybelle Phelan: Is there anything you wish someone would ask you about this that never comes up?
Donald W. Burnes: Well, except you asked me. And that is, why did you get started in this?
Mm-hmm.
Donald W. Burnes: And I think, um- It really stemmed from that two years in St. Louis. Um, it was such a wonderful experience that I knew when I sort of, uh, threw my educational research and [00:27:00] evaluation, uh, career in the toilet, uh, I knew I wanted to somehow replicate that.
And, um, this has done that in spades.
Joybelle Phelan: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Don.
Donald W. Burnes: Thank you, Joybelle. Uh, this has been a real treat for me.
Joybelle Phelan: It's a good time here.
Closing Reflection
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Joybelle Phelan: So that was Dr. Don Burnes, a researcher, author, and one of the clearest voices in the country on why homelessness persists and what it would actually take to end it.
if this conversation stayed with you, I hope that's because it's meant to. These people that we're talking about, the people that we walk past, they're not abstractions. They're our neighbors, our family members, people coming home from incarceration trying to find somewhere to land.
The systems that make it harder are not inevitable. They're choices, and choices can change. You've been listening to "Unlocking [00:28:00] Change", which is a production of Colorado Radio for Justice. We're a nonprofit media organization amplifying the voices of people impacted by the criminal legal system in Colorado.
You can find us and listen to us 24/7 at coloradoradioforjustice.org, and you can follow us wherever you like to find your podcasts. If today's conversation moved you, share it, like it, follow us. That's how this kind of work travels. I'm Joybelle Phelan, your host today on "Unlocking Change". Thank you for being with us.
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