Grant Shapps Quotes

It's very difficult to solve a lot of problems from the top down.

We must all work together to end youth homelessness in America.

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.

You know there's problems - you can see all the poverty and so on - but it's quite another matter to know what you can do about it.

The voters have been very clear that we need to address the homelessness and housing crisis that is affecting our City, and I remain focused on solving these issues.

One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.

The movement toward a holistic approach to community development has been long in the making, but the housing crisis has motivated further progress.

As Secretary of Housing, I do have to express alarm, signal the alarm if you will, that the potential for homelessness to grow is there.

Homelessness is an issue close to my heart.

And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

When I first started, it was really an innocent response to the needs of women in rural areas. When we started planting trees to meet their needs, there was nothing beyond that. I did not see all the issues that I have to come to deal with.

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.

I'm not so sure that people consider homelessness to be as important as, say, the Vietnam War. One should never even try to equate them because, of course, they're tragedies on both sides of the coin.

We just can't stop people from being homeless if that's their choice.

However much a president wishes it, a national problem cannot be knocked out with a single punch. A president must work with the problem as much as against it, turn it into a solution if she can.

Public housing is more than just a place to live, public housing programs should provide opportunities to residents and their families.

We cannot have homeless people in our society. It's just wrong.

Healing Advices for the Poor

We can either allow our youth to shoot baskets or watch them shoot people.

Changing social policy is just dogged hard work.

We are not in politics to ignore peoples' worries: we are in politics to deal with them.

Health care is a design problem. Dependence on foreign oil is a design problem. To some extent, poverty is a design problem. We need design thinkers to solve those problems, and most people who are in positions of political power are not design thinkers, to put it mildly.

One of the problems in America is that everybody focuses on their own narrow little bit of the problem without connecting punishment and prevention together, without connecting the schools and the police together, without connecting the pediatricians and the social workers together.

Some people say that rough sleeping has always existed and always will - that there is nothing that can be done to stop it. That is simply not true.

Living and working in the centre of a city, one cannot but be affected by the sight of the homeless on the streets. They are almost an expected feature of life in a big city, and it is tempting to think there is little or nothing that can, or even should, be done about it. This is not so.