Advocates are concerned that several bills moving ahead in the North Carolina General Assembly will criminalize homelessness and make their jobs even harder.
The Cicero Institute was founded by venture capitalist and tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale, and focuses on issues like regulatory reform and adding performance-based funding into the prison and parole systems.
But the Texas-based institute is perhaps best known for its policies on homelessness. Cicero has become a bit of a bogeyman to housing and homelessness advocates because it has placed model legislation in the hands of state lawmakers — legislation those advocates feel will make things worse, not better, for the unhoused.
Latoya Agard, the executive director of the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness, spoke against one such bill in a House Judiciary Committee meeting on April 29.
"The Cicero Institute has finally revealed itself as the sponsor and lobbyist for this bill. The Cicero Institute has been founded by a billionaire who is outside of our state," she said. "They have provided the template for this bill and other states around the country as an opposition to Housing First, which is documented and clearly has evidence that it does work when it is funded properly.”
Cicero Institute's legislative recommendations often target or oppose Housing First policies — that's a collection of approaches that essentially offer housing with no strings attached, based on research suggesting that dealing with other issues, like sobriety, mental health, or employment, is significantly more manageable when someone has stable housing under their belt. Housing First has become a target for a lot of conservative politicians and groups.
At the April 29 Committee meeting, Agard was speaking out against House Bill 781, which bans the homeless from camping in public areas. Local governments could allow short-term exceptions in designated areas — but the bill doesn’t provide funding for that.
Devon Kurtz, the director of public safety policy for Cicero Institute, said the bill isn’t intended to criminalize homelessness.
"The goal here is not, is not, in fact, the mechanism is not conducive to trying to arrest homeless people. To the contrary, it is trying to create a subtle accountability for individuals who are refusing to accept help but really do need it, and making sure that we have some sort of recourse as a community when encampments are getting out of control," he said.
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Asked about areas where there aren’t sufficient shelter beds available, Kurtz said that’s not actually a serious problem, and there are many gospel missions that have unrecorded shelter beds, "so you actually do have a lot more sheltered capacity than it may appear." Moreover, the goal is to pressure the local government to create sanctioned camping zones, he said.
Good Shepherd Center Executive Director Katrina Knight says it's untrue that there are unrecorded shelter beds: even if officials don’t always know where all the beds are, local advocates do — and they’re at capacity.
"Most communities, with the increase in housing crisis brought on by, you know, runaway rent increases for one, you know, we don't have enough shelter currently," she said.
Cicero Institute has also advocated for a drug-free zone near homeless shelters, similar to the enhanced penalties around schools. Kurtz says the aim there is to help the homeless.
"The leading cause of death among homeless people in my home state, Utah, is overdose. So what we've seen is that there is a vulnerable population that is dying of a thing that the system is not designed to try to intervene on or protect them from," he said.
But Knight, whose shelter doesn’t ban people for drug use, says that can cause more harm than good, because it just means people will not seek shelter at all if they’re in active addiction.
"Past policy did fail, and that was the punitive approach. You know, there's, again, research after research that punitive measures tend to fall flat," she said. "They appeal to that need. We have to see something being done. You know: ‘I don't want as many people visibly homeless in this part or that part of town. Do something. Do something.’ Well, we do something, and we pass punitive measures, but when they don't get to the heart of how to engage people and help them to a better situation, ultimately, the numbers do increase.”
She says low-barrier shelters reach the hardest people to serve and get them connected with social workers and permanent housing that will eventually get them into a better place with issues like substance abuse or mental illness.
"You engage that person and help them begin to take baby steps toward, you know, a better situation,” she said.
The drug-free zone policy passed the House and is now in the Senate. The camping ban is still making its way through House committees as of this week — and it remains to be seen whether it will survive Thursday's 'crossover day' (the General Assembly's self-imposed deadline to move most bills out of one chamber and into the other).
Note: NC Newsroom's Mary Helen Moore contributed to this reporting.
