Myths of Homelessness Part 5: “Providing Services Just Enables Them”

You cannot “enable” a human being into wanting to sleep in the woods.

Yet this is one of the most common arguments against providing basic services to our unhoused neighbors—that a hot meal or a shower somehow makes homelessness preferable. This isn’t just cruel. It’s operationally wrong.

The Reality Behind the Myth

I bathed in my van. I parked overnight in the shelter parking lot—before that shelter closed—because it was one of the few places I could do so without getting “the knock.” I slept there with my dog, ran delivery gigs during the day, filled out job applications between orders, and tried to rebuild my business from the driver’s seat.

I had no mailing address. No permanent place to receive mail or documents. Every job application that asked for an address was a reminder that the system wasn’t built for someone in my situation.

And yet—I was trying. Every single day.

Now imagine if I hadn’t had that shelter parking lot. No safe place to park overnight, nowhere to bathe, no anchor point in my day. The mental energy required just to find those basics would have consumed everything I had left for job searching, gig work, and business rebuilding.

Services aren’t a cushion. They’re friction reducers. They lower the level of crisis just enough for a person to reclaim the mental bandwidth required to actually climb out.

Some claim people “game the system” by using services without trying to improve their situation. But what system? The one that costs taxpayers $85 per day in emergency responses while providing no pathway to stability? The one where you can’t get a job without a mailing address, but can’t get a mailing address without a job? There’s nothing to “game” here—there’s only survival. And the people who talk about “gaming the system” rarely mention that the current system is designed to fail, cycling people through expensive crisis interventions instead of providing the basic infrastructure that would actually help them escape homelessness.

The “Enabling” Fallacy

The idea that basic survival services—hygiene access, food, a mailing address—make someone “want” to stay homeless is a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans actually climb out of crisis.

Nobody chooses wet socks and a van over a warm bed. Nobody turns down stability because the shelter parking lot was too comfortable. What services do is reduce the immediate desperation enough to make long-term thinking possible.

When your entire focus is where you’ll find water, food, and a safe place to sleep in the next six hours, you don’t have the mental bandwidth for a career plan. That’s not a character flaw—that’s how the human brain works under sustained crisis. We covered this in Myth #4: survival mode is real, and it shuts down long-term planning.

Services interrupt that cycle. They don’t perpetuate it.

The Operational Reality

In operations management, if a VP refused to give their field team the equipment they needed because “it might make them soft,” that leader would be replaced—and rightfully so. You provide the tools required to get the job done.

The goal here is self-sufficiency. Services are the tools that make that possible—the clean clothes, the working phone number, the mailing address that lets someone actually receive a job offer letter.

I filled out job applications with no mailing address to put on them. Think about what that costs someone in opportunity. A mailing address isn’t a luxury—it’s a basic requirement for participating in the economy. Refusing to provide it doesn’t make someone work harder to get housed. It just guarantees another rejection letter gets returned to sender.

In any other industry, we call this a bottleneck. In homelessness advocacy, people call it “tough love.” It’s time we call it what it really is: a systemic failure.

And as we established in Myth #3: keeping someone in that cycle of crisis costs taxpayers approximately $85 per day in emergency response. Providing the services that break that cycle costs far less. This isn’t charity—it’s math.

The Dignity Factor

I’ve seen—and lived—how something as simple as being able to bathe and put on clean clothes can be the difference between walking into a job interview with confidence or not going at all.

You cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you don’t have boots—or a place to wash the street off your face.

Withholding services doesn’t motivate people to find housing faster. It strips them of the dignity and basic functionality required to even begin that process.

The Bottom Line

You cannot “enable” a human being into wanting to sleep in the woods.

What you can do is provide the infrastructure—hygiene, food, a mailing address, a safe overnight location—that gives someone just enough stability to start climbing out. And while services reduce friction and open the door to progress, we also need more affordable housing and livable wages to make long-term stability sustainable.

One without the other isn’t a solution. It’s a waiting room.

Have you seen how access to basic services changed someone’s path? Share your experience in the comments.

Get Involved:

The Putnam County Homelessness Solutions Coalition advocates for the services and infrastructure that make recovery possible—because you can’t solve homelessness by making it harder to survive.

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