I send a lot of my time on this blog writing about getting people housed. However, people experiencing homelessness face interlocking obstacles that make it difficult to secure employment, housing, and benefits if they want to find housing (which is becoming very important seeing as in the Trump era, HUD is pushing for the elimination of unconditional housing). These include lost or inaccessible IDs, inability to provide an address for job applications, and shelter policies that separate couples or exclude pets. All of those could make it hard for an individual to qualify for housing in the era of recent changes. Even those who do find housing suffer from the lasting effects of things like lost IDs and familial separation. I find that these barriers to escape are almost never discussed by politicians.

Why don’t policymakers try to implement things like ID access programs, address verification, and public digital document storage? What do you think?