Morgantown never had ‘housing-first’
In the most recent Morgantown City Council Committee of the Whole meeting, councilors stated Morgantown has used a housing-first strategy for years to address homelessness. While the city might have aspirations for a housing-first strategy, it doesn’t currently, and the necessary supports don’t exist to make it successful.
Housing-first prioritizes housing above all. There aren’t barriers such as sobriety or employment keeping someone from getting indoors. They’re housed regardless, and from there, the individual can work on getting the resources they need to recover from what they’re experiencing.
Many residents in our community view harm reduction tactics, such as providing resources like water, food, housing and Narcan, as enabling our unhoused community. But a basic tenet of psychology — Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory — illustrates it’s nearly impossible to achieve personal and economic growth without stable access to basic resources. Without access to food, water and a safe place to sleep and exist, folks can’t recover.
Just like with any disabling health condition, if patients don’t have stable access to basic needs, including a clean, safe place to live, they often struggle to gain the best results of any course of treatment, because treatment regimens are based on the assumption individuals have all their basic needs met or a way to achieve those things while recovering.
No approach to helping poor and unhoused folks can be successful without the proper supportive services. Morgantown doesn’t have adequate affordable public transportation and there’s serious dysfunction preventing medical and mental health services, including crisis response teams, from being able to meet needs in a trauma-informed way.
Misinformation about homelessness, recovery and harm reduction, as well as half-baked resources, are detrimental to improving outcomes in our community.
Ana Saab
Morgantown
Trump and allies saying it, doesn’t make it true
This is in response to the claim in LaVerne Waybright’s letter (Aug. 4) that Donald Trump is “our one truly elected president.” The implication seems to be that the 2020 election was somehow stolen.
Are we supposed to believe this just because Trump says so? Let’s consider some facts. When the ex-president and his allies challenged the election results in various courts, they were unsuccessful in one case after another. That’s because no actual evidence of election fraud has been discovered, in spite of numerous investigations and recounts around the country.
On the other hand, the evidence did benefit the targets of election-fraud lies. For example, Dominion Voting Systems reached a settlement of $787 million for defamation of its business by Fox News, which had amplified false claims about rigged voting machines. And Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million to two poll workers he falsely and repeatedly accused of vote tampering.
Here’s how another Trump associate, Steve Bannon, explained the origins of the strategy to create doubts about the 2020 election. Just days before the election Bannon said, “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory … But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.” Trump would claim that an influx of Democratic votes late in the evening was evidence of vote flipping. (The actual cause was the extra time needed to count mail-in ballots.)
Trump and some rich and powerful people in his orbit seem to be OK with deceiving the American people, even if it means falsely accusing legitimate businesses and respectable citizens of criminal activity. That should make us question anything they say.
Juliet Marlier
Morgantown
