Since 1983, federal funding for affordable housing has been cut by $54 billion annually and as a consequence the number of homeless people in the US has spiked to over 3.5 million.

Since then, however, every federal plan to address homelessness has failed because every plan has been based on the assumption that something was wrong with the people who were finding themselves without housing. FEMA emergency shelter plans, HUD Continuum of Care plans and 10-Year Plans to End Homelessness as spearheaded by the Bush administration’s Interagency Council on Homelessness all identify homeless people as “the problem” that needs fixing.

The overwhelming omission of systemic and structural causes of homelessness in public discussions and public policy responses to homelessness in the US is a collective deception that has involved thousands of policymakers, poverty “experts,” researchers, charity foundation staff, and journalists.

WRAP strives to reframe the debate. Our challenge is to raise the level of discussion from public outrage over streets filled with sleeping bodies to outrage that we deny others basic rights that guarantee human dignity. As long as we continue to allow basic human necessities to be treated as issues of individual failures or charity, we will continue to see the pain and suffering of homelessness increase, just as we will continue to see local governments use police forces to remove homeless and poor people from public view.

WRAP provides the information and tools needed to break through the misinformation of right wing policy institutes, a classist mainstream media, and a government more interested in managing homelessness than eradicating it.