作业5-强化技巧：六级阅读技巧5-0403@刘琦老师.pdfVIP

2014-6 （1） The Street-Level Solution A) When I was growing up, one of my father’s favorite sayings (borrowed from humorist Will Rogers) was:“It isnt what we don’t know that causes the trouble; it’s what we think we know that just ain’t so,”One of the main insights to be taken from the 100,000 Homes Campaign and its strategy to end chronic homelessness is that，until recently, our society thought it understood the nature of homelessness, but it didn’t. B) That led to a series of mistaken assumptions about why people become homeless and what they need. Many of the errors in our homelessness policies have stemmed from the conception that the homeless are a homogeneous group. Ifs only in the past 15 years that organizations like Common Ground, and others,have taken a street-level view of the problem 一 distinguishing the “episodically homeless”from the“chronically homeless” in order to understand their needs at an individual level. This is why we can now envisage a different approach 一 and get better results. C) Most readers expressed support for the effort, although a number were skeptical, and a few utterly dismissive, about the chances of long-term homeless people adapting well to housing. This is to be expected; it’s hard to imagine what we haven’t yet seen. As Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, one of the major obstacles in any effort to advance systemic change is the “incredulity of men,” which is to say that people “do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.” Most of us have witnessed homeless people on the streets for decades. Few have seen formerly homeless people after they have been housed successfully. We don，t have reference points for that story. So we generalize from what we know 一or think we know. D) But that can be misleading, even to experts. When I asked Rosanne Haggerty, founder of Common Ground, which currently operates 2,310 units of supportive housing (with 552 more under const