Critics often argue that accountability “criminalizes homelessness.” This is a distraction. The real crisis isn’t accountability — it’s a system built on the belief that the chronically homeless are too fragile for expectations.
The current approach fails for two main reasons:
We’ve convinced ourselves that accountability is harmful for people in deep crisis — so we strip away the very social feedback that helps every other human being grow, change and stay grounded.
The system is built on specialists who do their part, bill for services and then step back as people slip through the cracks and fall right back to the streets the moment the service window closes.
The Other Side Village is built on a bold assumption that perhaps, just perhaps, those who are chronically homeless are human. The current homeless services system, by contrast, is unintentionally built on a bigotry of low expectations. We assume people living for years in a mental health crisis, addiction and homelessness can’t handle structure, responsibility or real change.
The Other Side Village rejects that assumption. We believe that even the most marginalized among us have enormous potential.
After an average of living nine years on the streets, 80% of the people who enter The Other Side Village Prep School — a rigorous 6–12 month residential life-skills program — finish it and move into a permanent supportive housing community at The Other Side Village.
Everyone who enters The Other Side Village maintains sobriety and meaningful employment.
Before joining the Village, folks were surviving on about $118 a month. Today, the average Village resident is earning roughly $2,600 a month.
Meet Barb — a composite drawn from real stories inside The Other Side Village. For years, Barb cycled through the entire homeless services system. She scared customers outside storefronts. She used public parks as bathrooms. She dealt drugs, traded sex, panhandled and broke into cars when she needed to survive. She spent weeks in psychosis and battled bipolar disorder.
She lost part of her foot to gangrene after a brutal winter outside. She racked up dozens of ER visits and short-lived mental health check-ins, walking away with 25 prescriptions and no plan. She overdosed seven times and was revived. She went to detox, only to be dumped back on the street where the cycle restarted. Twice she completed rehab programs — only to relapse within hours because she had nowhere stable to go. She used warming shelters, food vouchers, housing vouchers and mobile medical services.
But none of this addressed the core issue. Her problem wasn’t just mental illness, addiction or homelessness. It was that she no longer knew how to live in a healthy community. What she needed wasn’t another specialist to “fix” one slice of her life. She needed a therapeutic community — real people, real structure, real expectations and consistent accountability.
Today, the individuals behind this composite are thriving: permanently housed and working as a retail manager, a logistics manager, a nurse, a property maintenance lead and dozens of other dignified careers.
Most Villagers narrowly escaped a system ready to classify them as permanently disabled and dependent — locking them into a lifetime of passive entitlement. Instead, they discovered their own capability. Ask them what’s changed, and they’ll say the same thing: “I’ve discovered I have potential.”
We believe accountability isn’t punishment. It’s how people rebuild their lives. Some argue it’s immoral to hold people accountable for criminal behavior if they’re homeless. We see that as a soft form of bigotry.
The Village stays sober, safe and beautiful because accountability is real here. Residents learn how their actions affect others. They build the resilience needed to hold a job, navigate conflict and handle pressure. Over time, they rebuild the moral muscle required to face life the healthy way.
It’s time to put an end to the quiet bigotry of low expectations. For too long, we’ve handed chronically homeless individuals a maze of specialists and called it a system. It isn’t. It’s a revolving door — one that shuffles people from appointment to appointment without ever offering a way out.
What people actually need is a real path — from street-level misery to becoming PSDC: permanently housed, self-reliant, drug-free and crime-free. That’s the goal. Anything less is just managed decline dressed up as compassion.
And let’s be honest: it’s past time we stop rewarding programs that check boxes but don’t change lives. We can do better, and our community deserves better. The stakes are too high for business as usual. It’s time to build a system that delivers results, not reports.