Homelessness, both in my county and throughout Kentucky, is a growing problem that has created a stark divide among keyboard warriors and activists after the recent eviction of several unhoused citizens camping on private lands near Central City. Yet dehumanizing those affected by it does nothing to solve this very real issue – we can no longer afford to pretend that homelessness is only a big city problem for addicts.
It will take cooler heads and common sense to outwit the budding housing crisis facing Muhlenberg County leaders this week, as the community wrestles with how to respond to the growing number of unhoused or nearly homeless residents.
Affordable housing in the county is running dangerously short – local wait lists for subsidized housing have grown so long that some applicants say they expect to wait two years for an apartment they need now. In December, the Kentucky Lantern reported that, “A national research firm had estimated Muhlenberg County, with a little over 30,000 people, had a housing gap of 952 units in 2024.”
Statewide, homelessness has sharply increased since January 2024, up more than 10% as the Kentucky Housing Corporation reported in 2025.
Studies show a growing number of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck with less than a few thousand in savings, putting them that much closer to the edge of becoming unhoused themselves. A U.S. News and World Report survey in February found that, “More than two in five Americans surveyed (43%) couldn’t pay for a $1,000 emergency expense with their savings. One-third say they don’t have enough savings to cover even one month of living expenses.”
In short, “We’re all just one car wreck, one medical diagnosis, one lost job, one fire away from being homeless,” Gwen Clements, director of Breakthrough Base of Muhlenberg County, told Spectrum 1 News earlier this year.
Clements’ organization, a homeless outreach program, is trying to put in the work necessary to keep local homeless citizens from freezing to death on church steps, as happened to unhoused Phillip Morris, 62, in Ohio County last year. They provide clothes, food, and other resources to help the local homeless population find shelter and employment, though they would like to do more.
Persistent stigmas against the homeless, as echoed by numerous Facebook posts discussing the Central City camp, have created a local storm in which Breakthrough Base is facing a stiff headwind.
As Clements told Channel 14 news last week, “We’ve had this building for almost a year now, and we’ve been trying to get some zoning laws and building codes and things from the city to know what we need to do, or where we stand to have a just a warming cooling center, let alone an emergency overnight place for people to lay their head. And we can’t seem to get anywhere with those requests.”
A large portion of homeless citizens are wrestling with domestic violence rather than addiction, as is often assumed. According to the American Bar Association, “Domestic violence is one of the leading causes of homelessness for children in the United States, with one quarter of homeless children having witnessed violence.” Additionally, “38 percent of all domestic violence victims become homeless at some point in their lifetime.”
No one wants an unregulated tent city of the homeless in their back yard. But, that’s not to say we should allow homeless people to freeze to death on a city park bench instead. Community leaders must stop ignoring a new reality: homeless people and those nearly homeless exist in this community, and their numbers are likely to grow as affordable housing falls short while inflation climbs. If local leaders cannot find a way to support an emergency shelter for the temporarily homeless in our community, then illegal encampments and their many problems will continue to grow on private and public lands.
Some of the more vicious Facebook comments labeled the work of Breakthrough Base and similar homeless outreach programs as “enabling,” as though keeping our streets and parks clean of homeless encampments by providing them the ability to become productive members of society is somehow personally offensive.
Restoring a person’s ability to be employed, housed, and fiscally independent is not enabling. It is common sense to keep the myriad problems of homelessness out of our community by addressing the early needs of the homeless seeking employment before it sinks into a deeper malaise.
Aside from the abject human suffering, or the failure of that whole “Love thy neighbor” thing, the real scourge of homelessness is this: it can be fixed – but only if a society cares enough to make the effort.
Some communities choose to step over unhoused neighbors wrapped in tarps along their alleyways. Let us not sink so far from humanity. Instead we must use common sense tactics to address the trickle of unhoused neighbors with simple needs, before it becomes a worsening crisis.
Common sense, for example, tells us to set a broken bone before it festers and the entire patient is lost. Providing that temporary cast is not a wasted investment. So too should our community leaders consider the unhoused citizens among us – offering someone a leg up out of the swamp keeps far worse floods from our own door.
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