Anti-homeless construction is not the solution to homelessness.

Driving for a coffee meeting in Austin a few months ago, I drove past a homeless shelter under one of the city’s main bridges. It was quite astonishing how many homeless people were under the bridge. I’d witnessed the homeless encampments outside the Mayor’s office a few years ago but this was even worse.

But worse than that a few weeks ago was the construction work I saw being carried out under that same bridge that had removed the homeless tents and was now replacing them with inclined concrete slides (to ensure anything kept there would slide down) and bumpy boulders to prevent the ability to roll trolleys onto the leveled areas. The city had gotten rid of the homeless people and had showed it lacked empathy for their plight with one act.

This stark contrast is emerging between gleaming tech campuses and sidewalks where the homeless seek shelter in many cities across the US. The city's prosperity juxtaposition against destitution is sparking a national debate about urban responsibility. As office spaces stand vacant post-Covid, we might do well to provide pop-up modular homes to take the spaces that have been left behind by the techlirati. This could be a transformative approach to addressing what we are seeing happening to our society at large; a rift between those who have the wealth and those who can barely survive the economic hardships of high inflation. Cities like Austin and San Francisco, famous for innovation, are thus poised to redefine urban compassion, merging technology and empathy.

The Biden Administration recently declared a multiple agency initiative to fund office space conversion into homes. The plan is to make ~35Bn in lending capacity available to provide below-market rate loans to developers to aid the construction and conversion of homes near transportation hubs. But the problem here is that the current building codes, in cities like SF and NY (particularly), prohibit a wholesale conversion of commercial buildings into dwelling places.

For example, every bedroom in a home should have a window, but by the time you carve up rooms from the vast open-plan office spaces (that we got carried away with in our downtown office spaces) we end up with solitary confinement cells in the middle of the what is supposed to be a residential space. Even as money gets thrown at the problem, we will need to address the policy requirements of making this work.

The tension will continue to exist between addressing homelessness and resisting quick, perhaps inhumane, solutions. We must navigate the complex issue of providing shelter while avoiding further marginalization of people who are, for the most part, desiring the basic needs that most of us take for granted; a roof over their heads and a place to call home. We have the technology to address this problem. But do we have the empathy to do what is necessary? I hope so.