Aging & Wisdom Quote by Henry Cisneros

Alarm is doing double duty here: it signals urgency while also signalling restraint. Henry Cisneros, speaking as Secretary of Housing, can’t just describe homelessness as a looming disaster; he has to perform concern in a way that fits the bureaucratic choreography of Washington. The line’s most revealing move is its careful, almost fussy escalation: "express alarm" becomes "signal the alarm if you will", then retreats again into the hedged, technocratic "potential for homelessness to grow is there". That self-correction mid-sentence reads like a politician feeling the limits of what he’s allowed to say in real time.

The intent is clear: warn the public and Congress without detonating panic or admitting institutional failure. Cisneros frames homelessness not as a present indictment but as an approaching risk - a forecast, not a verdict. That matters politically. If homelessness is already surging, the administration is already behind. If the "potential" exists, action can be cast as prudent prevention rather than desperate remediation.

Subtext: the system is producing pressure - housing costs, wage stagnation, insufficient vouchers, local resistance to shelters - but naming those forces directly would require picking fights with powerful constituencies. So the sentence becomes a kind of verbal sandbag: sturdy enough to justify funding and policy attention, soft enough to avoid indicting specific actors. In the 1990s policy climate, with welfare reform and deficit anxiety in the air, even a housing chief had to translate human crisis into cautious probability. The irony is that the careful language mirrors the very slow-moving machinery that helps homelessness grow.