The City’s Homelessness Strategy is Missing Something — Holistic is Spelled Without a “W”
There’s a difference between solving a problem and optimizing its management. Sioux Falls has chosen the latter.
During the recent Regional Homeless Forum, Mayor Paul TenHaken spoke about homelessness using language that sounded less like a public official addressing a systemic crisis and more like a corporate executive discussing customer retention. “I want to know who the most frequent flyers were,” he said, referring to individuals who use emergency services often. He emphasized the financial cost to the city and the need for a system that “just flowed.” He even suggested tracking whether police interactions with a particular individual had dropped by “36%” as a measure of success.
This is not how you approach a complex, interconnected crisis. This is how you track customer engagement in a software dashboard.
The CRM Approach to Homelessness: Why It’s Reductionist and Harmful
The city’s policies treat homelessness as a management issue rather than a systemic failure that demands real solutions. Sioux Falls doesn’t think in terms of holistic systems or holistic challenges — and this isn’t just metaphorical. During the Monday, February 24th Informational meeting about the Bishop Dudley fence, city officials actually displayed a PowerPoint slide that spelled “holistic” with a W. This literal misspelling perfectly encapsulates the fundamental misunderstanding at work.
Let’s be clear about what “holistic” actually means: it comes from the Greek “holos,” meaning whole or entire. A holistic approach recognizes that the parts of any system are intimately interconnected and can only be understood by reference to the whole. In healthcare, holistic medicine treats the entire person rather than just symptoms. In addressing social crises like homelessness, a holistic approach means addressing all interconnected factors — housing, mental health, economic opportunity, social support — as parts of a single ecosystem.
Instead of embracing this holistic understanding, Sioux Falls operates from a corporate playbook that prioritizes efficiency, data tracking, and public optics over genuine change.
What does this look like in practice?
- People Become Data Points, Not Humans: In CRM, businesses track customer behavior to optimize services. When city leaders apply this thinking to homelessness, they treat people as inefficiencies to be managed rather than individuals with agency and needs. The “frequent flyer” label is a perfect example — it reduces someone’s life circumstances to a pattern of emergency service usage, stripping away the context of trauma, economic instability, and systemic barriers.
- The Wrong Success Metrics: In a CRM system, engagement is measured in clicks, purchase history, and customer lifetime value. In Sioux Falls’ homelessness strategy, success is measured by reductions in police interactions and shelter stays — without asking why those numbers might be changing. Are people actually getting housed, or are they just being pushed out of sight? A “36%” drop in police interactions means nothing if it’s the result of displacement, incarceration, or a fence keeping people off private property.
- Temporary Fixes Instead of Structural Change: Businesses don’t solve problems; they manage them for profitability. That’s exactly how the city approaches homelessness. More shelter beds, more policing, more fences — these are all short-term tactics to handle the problem, not solve it. The equivalent in a CRM system would be a company reducing customer service complaints by making it harder to contact support, rather than improving the product.
The Blind Spot of Externalities
What the city fails to grasp — or deliberately ignores — is the concept of externalities. In economics, externalities are costs or benefits that affect parties who did not choose to incur them. The city’s approach to homelessness creates massive negative externalities by simply pushing problems elsewhere:
- When you fence off a shelter’s perimeter, you don’t eliminate homelessness — you relocate it to another neighborhood, park, or business district.
- When you criminalize panhandling or sleeping in public, you don’t reduce poverty — you increase incarceration rates and taxpayer costs for the criminal justice system.
- When you underfund mental health services while increasing police presence, you don’t address underlying issues — you transfer the burden of care to emergency rooms and jails.
The city leadership seems to believe that if they don’t see these costs on their immediate balance sheet, they don’t exist. This is the antithesis of holistic thinking.
The Fence at Bishop Dudley: A Physical Firewall
If Sioux Falls’ approach to homelessness were a software system, then the fence at Bishop Dudley House would be its latest feature update: a way to keep “high-need users” from “clogging up” the system.
The city justifies the fence by citing concerns about trash and safety, but what is that “trash,” really? It’s blankets, food, and the personal belongings of people with nowhere else to go. What does “safety” mean in this context? It means reducing public discomfort by keeping the most visible signs of homelessness out of sight.
The fence does not make people safer. It does not make them less homeless. It just makes them someone else’s problem. That’s not a holistic solution — it’s a glorified spam filter that creates externalities for neighboring areas and puts additional burdens on homeless individuals themselves.
The City’s Favorite Argument: “Look at How Much We’re Spending”
When confronted with criticism, city officials like to point to the millions of dollars they’ve allocated for affordable housing, as if the size of the budget proves the success of the effort. But let’s put this in perspective: in 2024, Sioux Falls dedicated just $4 million to affordable housing out of a total city budget of $781 million — a mere 0.5% of city spending. Not only is spending money not the same as solving a problem, but the city is barely spending at all.
This budgetary neglect creates a cascade of expensive problems downstream. Consider how much of our city budget is consumed by reactive responses to the conditions created by housing insecurity:
- Increased policing costs: Millions spent on police calls, arrests, and processing people whose only “crime” is having nowhere to go — often 20–30 times what it would cost to simply house them.
- Emergency services strain: Ambulance calls, ER visits, and hospital stays become the de facto healthcare system for people without stable housing, costing taxpayers exponentially more than preventative care.
- Public works cleanup: Staff hours and resources devoted to managing encampments and addressing sanitation issues in public spaces — a recurring cost that could be redirected to permanent solutions.
- Economic impact: Lost tourism dollars, decreased property values, and struggling downtown businesses in areas with visible homelessness — the hidden tax on our local economy.
Most troublingly, this manufactured scarcity creates the very conditions for increased crime and disorder that the city then uses to justify more punitive approaches. When people cannot access basic necessities like shelter, bathrooms, and places to store belongings, they’re pushed into situations where minor infractions become inevitable. The city then points to these infractions as evidence that homelessness itself is the problem rather than the lack of affordable housing.
And what little they do spend is funneled into projects that don’t address the root causes of homelessness.
Consider:
- Most of Sioux Falls’ “affordable housing” efforts are market-driven, meaning they serve moderate-income earners rather than those at the highest risk of homelessness. When developers build “affordable” units, they often still price out the people who need them most.
- The city’s housing assistance programs remain bureaucratic and difficult to access, with long waitlists, restrictive eligibility requirements, and limited capacity.
- There is still no large-scale Housing First initiative, despite the overwhelming evidence that providing unconditional housing is the most effective way to end homelessness.
The city is spending money, sure — but they’re doing it in a way that maintains the existing power structures and prioritizes public perception over impact. This is like a corporation touting record profits while its customer service ratings plummet.
What Sioux Falls Needs Instead of CRM Thinking
The city needs to abandon its corporate-minded approach to homelessness and start thinking in truly holistic (again, no “W”) terms. That means:
- A True Housing First Strategy: Provide permanent housing first, then offer services like mental healthcare, addiction treatment, and job training. Stop forcing people to navigate a gauntlet of temporary solutions before they can access stability.
- Measuring the Right Outcomes: Track how many people move into stable housing and stay there. Track improvements in health, employment, and community reintegration. Stop using police data as a metric for success.
- Addressing Structural Causes: Tackle wage stagnation, rental market manipulation, and discriminatory housing policies. No amount of shelter beds will solve a housing affordability crisis.
- Accounting for Externalities: Recognize that every “solution” that simply moves homeless people elsewhere creates costs that don’t disappear — they just shift to other systems, neighborhoods, or future budgets. A truly holistic approach acknowledges these interconnections rather than pretending they don’t exist.
Homelessness is not a customer service problem. It is not a data challenge. It is not something to be “optimized.” It is the result of systemic failures in housing, healthcare, and economic policy. Until Sioux Falls starts treating it as such, no amount of CRM-style tracking, spending, or fencing will make a difference.
Real solutions require real systems thinking — not corporate efficiency strategies dressed up as governance. Until then, the city can keep boasting about its spending and policing statistics. But the people still sleeping outside, fenced off from shelter, will tell you the truth: Sioux Falls isn’t fixing homelessness. It’s just managing it badly, pushing its externalities onto others, and failing to see the whole picture.
Want to see our community solution to the Bishop Dudley fence situation? Take a look at the “Dudley Commons.”