LONG BEACH HOMELESSNESS - Long before he became Homeless Services Bureau Manager for the City of Long Beach, Paul Duncan had an intimate understanding of what instability could look like. His parents separated when he was very young. He has no memory of them being together. His mother remarried when he was three, while his relationship with his father was marked by inconsistency and long absences. There were periods when Duncan lived with his father in hotels. His father would sometimes disappear for stretches of time and, at other points, return to Kentucky. His mother, Duncan says, extended him considerable grace as he moved between different environments and lived with a great deal of uncertainty. Eventually, his father died of a drug overdose.
Looking back, Duncan can recognize the threads of homelessness and instability running through parts of his childhood, even though he did not yet have the language to name what he was experiencing. That history may help explain why Duncan eventually found it difficult to see homelessness simply as a social problem to be managed.
His first professional work was in outpatient mental health, where he spent several years working directly with people receiving behavioral-health services. Over time, he began noticing a pattern that would alter the trajectory of his career. People with relatively stable housing tended to have more stability in other areas of their lives. They were more likely to make it to mental-health appointments, pursue employment, work on their wellness and remain engaged in treatment. Those moving in and out of homelessness faced a different reality. Their instability was not confined to housing. It touched nearly every other part of their lives, making it harder to sustain treatment, maintain employment or build the kind of continuity that recovery often requires. For Duncan, the lesson was becoming difficult to ignore: housing was not simply one service among many. It was often the foundation that made the others possible. “They were just surviving day to day,” Duncan recalls. “Those who did not have a stable place or were on and off homeless, those were the people who struggled with their mental health.”
The observation seems obvious now, but it was consequential for him. Behavioral health could not be separated from housing. Yet outpatient mental-health services were not necessarily designed to address the absence of a safe, stable place to live. Duncan came to believe that the system was sometimes asking people to solve problems that became almost impossible to solve without first addressing their housing. His career gradually moved toward that question.
Paul left his initial position to help launch a veterans program, where he became involved in rental assistance, homelessness prevention, and other forms of housing support. During his time working in the veterans space, he became part of a broader effort to develop a coordinated system of care and move organizations away from working in silos. The initiative eventually expanded beyond veterans to address the needs of multiple populations. The effort was initially seeded through philanthropy, with the goal of creating a sustainable coordinated system that could eventually be led and supported by a government entity. As that transition began to take shape, Paul joined the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), where he helped support the transition and the development of a more integrated system of care. The evolution of Duncan’s career reflects an important realization about homelessness: individual interventions matter, but systems determine how many people can be reached, how quickly they can be helped and what happens to those who fall through the cracks. And the need is enormous.
In Long Beach, a city of roughly 450,000 people, Duncan says the city has received approximately 4,500 applications over a 3-month period for people who are currently behind on rent and looking for assistance to maintain their existing housing. Behind those numbers are people making decisions that should never have to be made. “People making difficult choices, do I pay rent, cover this medical expense, a car loan so I can get to work,” he says. These are not necessarily people who have become homeless. They are people standing at the edge of homelessness, where one unexpected expense can become the event that changes everything. Duncan has become increasingly interested in that edge.
During the pandemic, emergency rental assistance demonstrated what can happen when substantial resources are directed toward preventing people from losing their homes. More recently, Long Beach has expanded efforts around rental assistance and prevention. Duncan sees these investments as essential, but insufficient. “When people are on the edge, a lot of people will end up in crisis,” says Duncan. The inflow into homelessness, he argues, is more important than the snapshot captured by any single point-in-time count. The number of people entering homelessness over a year can be far greater than the number visible on a given night. Instead of asking only how many people are homeless, we might ask how many people are being pushed toward homelessness and what could be done before they cross that threshold.
The stakes become particularly stark among older adults. Duncan describes seeing people who are spending 70 percent or more of their income on housing. Older adults are increasingly entering homelessness systems with significant health needs and other vulnerabilities. “The idea of a 93 year old coming into our access center, that doesn’t sit well,” he says. The consequences can be devastating. Among people experiencing homelessness, the average age of death is often reported in the late 40s or early 50s.
Housing, in this context, is not merely about having an address. It is about survival. It is also about time.
Duncan has been working in the field for roughly 15 years, and he says the work has become heavier. “There are more shelter beds and permanent housing opportunity and treatment options than ten years ago yet the amount of need has gone up at the same time,” he says. The paradox is exhausting: a community can build more programs, improve its systems and create more resources, only to discover that the crisis has grown faster. That is where compassion can collide with burnout. “You can feel like you have done so much work, to build programs and systems and yet here we are, you can feel just as overwhelmed.”
Duncan remembers the nonprofit years as difficult but also rewarding. There were moments when he could see people putting their lives back together. He could watch someone reconnect with a community, find stability or experience a moment of genuine happiness. Those moments provided evidence that the work mattered. In his current role, the scale of the system can sometimes make those victories harder to see. Instead of witnessing every individual transformation, he is often looking at data, trends, programs, political debates and institutional problems. “If you can’t provide context and meaning that provides hope, it is going to get dark. You are not going to provide good services.”
The community is frustrated. Duncan understands that frustration. He shares some of it. But he has also watched the nature of homelessness change. “The fact that people we are engaging, you can see it in our access center or our outreach team, I think back to when I started 15 years ago. What you encounter today there is more violence, more illness, people are in worse health.” The result is not simply a larger problem, but a more complicated one.
That complexity creates a moral dilemma at the heart of homelessness policy: How do you build a system that is fair when there are not enough resources to meet every need? Families need help. Older adults need help. Survivors of domestic violence. People with disabilities. Veterans. People experiencing chronic homelessness. People facing a temporary financial crisis. Every category contains genuine vulnerability. Every category can make a legitimate claim on limited resources.
Duncan is skeptical that a perfect screening tool can resolve that tension. Assessment systems can unintentionally reproduce inequities involving race, gender and other forms of vulnerability. Yet he is equally wary of a system based entirely on individual discretion. If decisions are left entirely to individuals, he asks, how can the system ensure that people are treated fairly? The challenge is to build a consistent framework while preserving enough human judgment to recognize the person who does not fit neatly inside it.
That tension extends to questions of safety. Homeless-services workers must create environments that are welcoming while also protecting staff and clients. Duncan remembers earlier workplaces where there were few locked doors and little physical separation between staff and clients. People could walk directly up to a desk. Eventually, additional security measures became necessary. But every additional barrier can change the character of a place. How do you make an access center safe without making it feel like a fortress? How do you establish boundaries without destroying relationships? How do you respond to behavior that is frightening or disruptive without losing sight of the person behind it? Duncan does not pretend there is an easy answer.
Relationships matter, he says. So does context. In an access center, staff may encounter 30 people a day with whom they have no established relationship. Someone may arrive frightened, angry or traumatized, seeking help from strangers. That makes trust difficult. It also makes leadership deeply personal.
Duncan tries to step into difficult situations alongside his staff rather than asking them to carry those experiences alone. He believes people need opportunities to process what happens at work. His department has created retreats where employees can eat together, step away from their responsibilities and simply breathe. There is an implicit recognition in that practice: people cannot spend their entire lives absorbing other people’s suffering without somewhere to put down their own. “It is important to celebrate when things go well and to take time to mourn when things do not go well,” he says. “As much as the leadership team and I put into this effort, it never feels quite enough. The work is heavy, and it is sometimes hard to know exactly how to both support and protect the team. By no means do I feel like I have this piece figured out. Often, I feel like I’m not fully meeting the moment or that I’m letting down my team.”
A new program moving forward. An individual success. A team solving a difficult problem. A moment when something that once seemed impossible becomes manageable. These moments matter because the larger picture can be overwhelming. So can the politics.
Across the country, homelessness has become increasingly entangled with political identity, public anger and competing visions of government. Duncan worries when political gestures or institutional optics become more important than whether a policy actually helps people. Leaders want to demonstrate progress. Agencies want to show results. Politicians want to tell voters that something is being done. But homelessness is resistant to simple declarations of victory. That becomes particularly evident in debates over encampments and public space.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, municipalities have greater latitude to enforce restrictions on public camping. Duncan understands the pressures cities face. Residents and business owners have legitimate concerns about safety, sanitation and the use of public space. But he also recognizes the danger of turning homelessness itself into the offense. There is a difference between addressing unsafe conditions and criminalizing a person’s existence. For Duncan, the better approach is neither unlimited tolerance nor reflexive enforcement. It is engagement, planning and alternatives.
If people have to leave a particular location, where will they go? Can the city provide time? Can outreach workers establish relationships first? Can government work with state agencies and property owners to identify alternatives? Can officials address health and safety concerns without simply moving people from one place to another? Those questions are slower than enforcement. They are also more human.
Duncan’s philosophy becomes clearest when he imagines someone who has been homeless for decades and says, simply, “I don’t want your program. I want to be left alone.” His response is not to give up on that person. But neither is it to force an intervention simply because professionals believe they know what is best. He would keep coming back. He would ask why. He would try to understand whether the person’s resistance came from a previous experience with the system, whether something had changed since then, or whether there might be another option. Most importantly, he would leave the door open.
Because sometimes the work of helping someone begins not with getting them to say yes, but with making sure they know they can still come back. “We’ll keep coming back,” is the spirit of his response. That may be one of the most important principles in homelessness work: presence without coercion.
There are circumstances, Duncan acknowledges, involving immediate danger or the safety of others, where different obligations apply. But absent those circumstances, the relationship itself can be a form of intervention. It tells a person: You have not been forgotten. For someone living on the margins, that may matter more than a program brochure.
Paul is cautious about relying on forced treatment as a solution. The research, he notes, is mixed, and he does not believe most people advocating for greater intervention are necessarily seeking a more coercive system. More often, they are responding to the suffering they see around them — the effects on individuals, families and neighborhoods — and asking where the line should be drawn when someone is no longer in a position to make a fully informed decision. The harder question, he suggests, is what happens after that line is crossed. “There are countries out there where there are good models in how to intervene in these situations,” Paul says. “One thing that is pretty key in each of those is that there is housing and an ongoing system of care that exists beyond that intervention.” Without those supports, coercion may produce initial compliance, he argues, while also deepening mistrust and trauma. A more effective system would allow for earlier intervention and a quicker response — before a person’s circumstances become so dire that the available choices are reduced to crisis or force.
Duncan’s own relationship to the work is complicated by how much it has come to mean to him. If he woke up tomorrow and could no longer work in homelessness services, he says he would struggle to feel fulfilled. He has other skills. He could do other things. But his heart would not necessarily be in them. “I have gotten very lucky and have learned from thought leaders. I have crossed paths with some really intelligent people,” he says. He describes the work as connected to something larger: the desire to live a meaningful life. That does not mean he is immune to exhaustion. He admits he needs to get better at taking vacations. After six years with the city, he has accumulated an extraordinary amount of unused leave. He laughs about it, but the admission reveals something deeper. People who devote themselves to difficult work can begin to confuse endurance with commitment. Duncan knows that danger.
He has learned that urgency cannot be sustained indefinitely. People enter this field with tremendous passion, push themselves relentlessly and eventually hit a wall. There are exceptional people who seem capable of working endlessly, but they are exceptions, not models. The sustainable version of commitment requires something else. You have to know when to push. You have to know when to stop. You have to celebrate when something goes right and mourn when something goes wrong. And, perhaps most importantly, you have to find meaning in the moments when the larger system appears incapable of producing the change you want. “You will need to stop at times and take a breath at times. How do you keep a certain level of urgency without burnout?” he says. That may be the hardest lesson of Duncan’s work.
Homelessness services can help one person find housing today while the housing market pushes another person toward homelessness tomorrow. A city can create a rental-assistance program while thousands remain economically precarious. A community can build more shelter beds while the underlying supply of affordable housing remains inadequate. The system can improve and still fail to keep pace. Duncan does not seem to believe that this contradiction makes the work meaningless. Quite the opposite. It makes the work necessary.
His career has taken him from childhood experiences of instability to mental-health services, veterans programs, homelessness prevention and municipal leadership. Along the way, he has learned that homelessness cannot be reduced to a statistic, a behavioral-health diagnosis, an encampment or a political talking point. It is a human condition produced at the crossroads of housing, health, economics, trauma, disability, aging, addiction, family instability and public policy. And behind every category is a person. That is what keeps Duncan going. He has not lost the zeal. Most days, he says, he arrives ready to work. That is not the same as believing the system will solve homelessness. It is something more modest, and more durable: the conviction that people are worth returning to, even when the larger problem seems to have no end. The work, ultimately, is not only about ending homelessness. It is about refusing to let homelessness become an excuse for giving up on human beings.
“There is no way I could do this work every day without knowing that I am surrounded by some of the most beautiful souls. They bring dedication and a genuine desire to see a better world. I see them constantly lifting one another up, and I feel surrounded by people who lift me up in my own moments of despair. I have also been blessed throughout my career to work with brilliant and inspiring leaders, including the leaders I work with today.” “The thing I am most proud of as a leader is the people I have had the opportunity to work with — people who have grown alongside me and gone on to do amazing things of their own.”
“The first person I ever hired as a manager, I have now rehired twice at different organizations. I have had the privilege of watching her grow and develop an extraordinary set of skills. I don’t know anyone better at working with people who others struggle to build relationships with. I remember building a program together when she was providing case management. To watch her eventually step into an administrative role, supporting numerous programs and helping an entire agency think about how it develops its work, has been incredible. I don’t think there is a better mentor you could have coming into this field than Charisse.” “And she is not alone. I have had staff go on to lead homeless-response systems in other communities, run large nonprofit programs, develop and oversee shelters, advise high-level political leaders and hone their direct-service skills to the point where the connections they make with people sometimes feel almost magical to me.” “That makes me proud, even if I was only a small piece of their journey.”
“I think it is unfortunate that much of the community never gets to see that side of this work. They see the person who may have entered the field for the wrong reasons, or someone who started with good intentions but took a different turn. When someone profits from the suffering of others or does something harmful in this space, it can be repulsive, and the outrage is justified. But those stories can come to dominate the conversation, and we lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of people doing this work come into it with an enormous amount of heart. They want to make a difference. They want to make their communities better.” “It breaks my heart that some of my team members have to worry about how people will respond when they ask what they do for a living.” “They should be proud to say they work in this space.”
—Paul Duncan
(George Cassidy Payne is a graduate of CRCDS (2006) and a freelance journalist and philosophy educator based in Rochester, New York. Payne holds advanced degrees in the humanities and writes at the intersection of religion, ethics, politics, and culture. Payne also serves as a 988 Suicide Prevention Counselor and is a community organizer focused on youth empowerment and nonprofit development.)
