COMMENTS: The Epidemic of Homelessness

...Many people in shelters say they are there because benefits they once lived on were cut or terminated...

...To date, Reagan's only response to the governors' pleas for housing aid has been a proposal to sell off to the highest bidder the Federal Housing Administration, one of the best friends the average under-housed person ever had in Washington...

...A neat strategy and it works...

...That was chiefly the work of the American Civil Liberties Union and other concerned liberals who admirably opposed the forced confinement of the mentally ill but neglected to alert us to their new "freedom" to freeze on the city streets...

...Some citizens, assuming people must be crazy to want to live in the streets, asked, "How can we get them back in asylums...

...The current White House policy of robbing the poor and giving to the rich, however, results in the poor being able neither to work at decent wages nor to qualify for decent welfare benefits...

...Some wondered if maybe the idle and the streetwise were again feeding at the public trough...

...No blood has issued from those turnips...

...29 percent of singles and 10 percent of family members are white...

...In over half the programs, demand rose 50 percent in a recent twoyear period, and in Harlem it rose 1,250 percent...

...A third in New York City (about 10,000 men) are vets but only 17 percent of these receive VA benefits, even though most could qualify for pensions, state veterans' homes, domiciliary care, community care, and medical treatment...

...Lending the lawyers a hand were doctors and other high-level professionals who said it was okay to give the sick their pills and set them free, whether or not community-based care was available and with no reason to suspect the sick would or could use the care if it were offered...

...The chair of the committee, a Dr...

...Homelessness has most to do with housing, but it is related to every other deficit in the society, including family integrity, anomie, and most especially, the economy...

...New approaches to group and family living might relieve pressures on the housing market...

...In 1984 the poverty rate in the nation was 14.4 percent, down from 15 percent in 1982, but up from 11.4 percent in 1978—an increase from 24.5 to 33.7 million poor...

...As for ethnicity, 54 percent of singles and 57 percent of family members are black...

...During the 1970s in New York City, for instance, 81 percent of Single Room Occupancy units (SROs) were lost...

...A UCLA study in Los Angeles found 51 percent of the homeless were white, 30 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic...

...Vieth, said he had not even read his committee's report...

...Between 1955 and 1980, the inmate population of state mental hospitals, what with pushouts and tightened admissions, shrank by more than threefourths, from 559,000 to 138,000, despite increases in the total U.S...

...We city folks and liberals, know it or not, also had a hand in it, and some of us have made handsome profits from gentrification, a fact to consider when the time for atonement rolls around...

...Having known bedlam, many ex-asylum patients now prefer the streets...

...4 percent of singles and 24 percent of family members are "victims of domestic violence...

...As for hunger, the fraternal twin of homelessness, demand for soup kitchens has risen steeply...

...Washington, D.C...

...33 percent of singles and 9 percent of family members are "substance abusers...

...The roomers, of course, lack any share of this publiclysubsidized explosion of wealth...

...Changing Demographics UNTIL THE 1970s, the homeless were the typical skid-row mix: white, male, alcoholic...

...Congress in 1984 authorized $60 million annually for HUD homeless aid, but HUD opposed the program and funds were directed instead to the one special federal program for the homeless, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which sponsors no housing at all...

...The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could, of course, be most helpful to the homeless because it alone among federal agencies could provide low-cost housing...

...She holds a master's in journalism from Syracuse University and has worked in the field for many years...

...The incomes of the affluent meanwhile have risen to a level where $40,000 a year is considered just so-so, but the national minimum wage is still only $3.35 and millions of people, when they can get jobs, work for that...

...HOMELESSNESS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY, a growing problem...

...If we can only get a liberal swing in the 1986 congressional elections, perhaps we can raise the minimum wage and make the lousy jobs better, and perhaps we can make it easier for labor unions to organize and politicize the work force on the way to achieving some justice for the homeless...

...Using what is for some purposes a threadbare model, the Japanese have maintained steady jobless rates of only about two percent, while also controlling inflation and holding a five-to-one spread between the highestand lowest-paid employees, compared to ours of about eleven-to-one...

...In 1982 more than three million people worked the whole year and still remained below the poverty line...

...For the last seven years she was managing editor of Democratic Left, a publication of DSA, and is the author of several booklets in the health and social-service fields...

...Certainly not to taxpayers who repeatedly vote for conservatives whose policies knock out even emergency welfare...

...Preferable to whom...

...ABOUT 50 PERCENT of the homeless are said by the National Institute of Mental Health to have severe mental disorders, but then a study of midtown Manhattan not too many years ago found that nearly half of the comfortably housed had some diagnosable mental disorder...

...During the 1970s alone more than 38 million well-paid jobs in basic industry were lost forever to deindustrialization...

...About 25 years ago, looking for a cheap place in New York to stay briefly, I discovered the SRO, a sleazy space to house, or hide, the city's not quite dispossessed, yet an address and a room of one's own...

...Nobody really likes the dole, neither the givers nor receivers, except as an emergency measure when people cannot support themselves...

...These are not the hard-core homeless, but like many of us, they could be...

...Who is "Crazy...

...In 1984, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler sent 25 modest suggestions to Reagan for helping the homeless, 138 but the White House has neither responded to the report nor adopted any of its suggestions...

...Now 45 percent are minorities, 21 percent family members, 13 percent single women, and their average age is only 34...

...and 16 percent of singles and 32 percent of family members are Hispanic...

...Medicare is only for the aged or for disabled workers, and state Medicaid often depends on eligibility for AFDC or SSI, which exclude many homeless...

...HUD's low-income program, moreover, was cut from $1 billion in 1975 to about half that by 1983...

...They need help to get it...

...The causes, it says, are scarcity of low-income housing, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, unemployment, cuts in federal assistance programs, and personal crises...

...She plans to do some writing and other free-lance work...

...It was a brilliant concept—for the city and the new owners...

...The answer seems to matter most to those whose reductionist tendencies point to only one problem, insanity, and one solution, reinstitutionalization—a concept as hard to type as to apply...

...In Phoenix the only public "shelter" is an outdoor, fenced-in lot without a roof...

...A housing crisis unmatched in this century looms over the homeless, says the National Governors' Association, and one governor, New York's Mario Cuomo, traces the crisis back to the impounding of federal funds in 1972, adding that SROs and moderate- and low-income housing have been wiped out and replaced with condos, coops and luxury housing of all kinds, so that it is now uneconomical to build moderate-income housing in the state...

...Half of homeless males in cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix are veterans...

...MAXINE PHILLIPS becomes our managing editor with this issue...

...Nor can the feds be blamed wholly for pushouts from state hospitals of hundreds of thousands of mentally ill...

...Is that the price of progress...

...Once past this crisis, New York—and many other cities—entertained less charitable thoughts about the homeless...

...Such showcase cities as Las Vegas, Houston, Miami, and Atlanta support no public shelters at all and rely only on private charity, such as it is...

...For those homeless who are too disabled to have worked at all, the complaint about SSDI is its exclusion of people without work histories...

...These cuts alone may have pushed some 587,000 more people into poverty . . . and many of these out into the street...

...population...

...FEMA, the first national program to aid the homeless, has been funded with only $70 million yearly for the whole country...

...As for the feds, in 1985 the House Committee on Government Operations issued a concise summary of the causes of the homeless crisis and the federal government's response to it...

...So who's crazy...

...Between 1982 and 1983 alone the number of homeless increased by 38 percent...

...But perhaps if as much ingenuity were applied to this crisis as to the city's gentrification, 137 these costs might be cut and owners of existing housing might be tempted to convert to SROs, families with space to take in roomers and boarders as families once did, and new impetus given to creating European-style bed-and-breakfast establishments, and more communal and dormitory-type living spaces...

...The house I almost bought for $60,000 may be worth a million or more now, enough to buy decent, lifelong shelter for all its former roomers...

...As a small example, in the winter of 1982, a 61year-old former psychiatric patient was found dead in a cardboard box on a New York City street...

...The homeless, the hungry, the jobless, the afflicted—not to mention liberals and socialists—are heavy losers in this game...

...Those who had tuned in to this Reaganite oneliner (an ideological relative to the old Stalinist quip, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs") expressed their outrage to the network...

...The rest of us, too...

...Many of them now live under bridges, in abandoned buildings, emergency shelters, subways, bus terminals, cardboard boxes, plastic bags—and lack even a mailing address...

...Unfortunately, the homeless cannot, as some propose, be easily returned to their last address because in many cases we are living there now...

...She has been active in the socialist religious movement and in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which she served as executive director from January 1984 to June 1985...

...The biggest problem for many homeless is that the feds these days are far more reluctant to giveth than to taketh away, and their strong preference for the latter has driven many out of their housing if not their minds...

...The city predicts that its shelter population will have grown by 500 percent between 1980 and 1987, and while the city's homeless are more sheltered than in other cities, demand still may exceed supply by as much as 100 percent—not to mention problems with the quality of shelter...

...and nationally about 300,000 people, many of them mentally ill, have been dropped from Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) on reexamination of eligibility...

...Numbers of homeless could qualify for these entitlements, but they need a mailing address and a lot of help to do it...

...The programs are filled with cracks and catches...

...Conservatives are at ease with a high jobless rate because it loosens the labor market, reduces labor Changes EDITH mitcov is retiring after 20 years as managing editor of Dissent...

...The mentally ill are eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), but find it hard to apply for or manage benefits...

...New York City now has about 350 operating soup kitchens...

...In New York State, 32 percent of singles and 5 percent of family members are "mentally disabled...

...55 percent had never married, 65 percent were high school graduates, 39 percent had some postsecondary education, and 12 percent had college degrees...

...Federal spending for social programs in 1985 is said to be about $38 billion less than it would have been had not budget cuts been made in 1981...

...The Editorial Board expresses its appreciation of her editing, managerial work, and devotion to Dissent and its writers...

...She will, of course, stay on as a member of the board and thereby continue to serve the magazine...

...Some homeless, about 10 to 15 percent of the total, are afflicted only by personal crisis—divorce, abuse, poor health—and will usually find new shelter...

...A major source of this increase was, according to the Census Bureau, the tightening of eligibility standards for various government programs...

...And fewer than 800 of the 2,000 or so community centers needed for the newly released actually materialized...

...has no publicly-funded shelters, and one of its few private shelters provides one shower for every 300 people and one toilet for every 150...

...As for food stamps, the sheltered are deemed institutionalized and hence ineligible for stamps, and those living on the streets have no place to prepare food and hence are also ineligible...

...Not many years later I almost bought an SRO, one of the Upper West Side's brownstones into which the public was pouring millions in lowinterest loans and tax-exempt treatment in an effort to gentrify those sleazy spaces...

...Los Angeles has maybe 50,000 homeless, but it offers shelter to only 2,000, and it often excludes the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, alcohol and drug abusers and others, and 82 percent of its funds come from private sources...

...Hardly...

...She had lived there for eight months after her entitlements were cut off when she failed to appear for reexamination...

...More puzzling are some strategy gyrations on the left, and the new notion, popularized by Frances Piven, Richard Cloward, and Barbara Ehrenreich that a permanent dole is somehow preferable to jobs, especially when the jobs are lowwage and demeaning...

...The major suggestion of the report was for an Executive Order to direct federal agencies to give top priority to and expand their efforts on behalf of the homeless...

...Moreover, all evidence points to a strong desire of the homeless and most welfare receivers to work— preferably at decent jobs but even at lousy ones— since nothing is so demeaning as the dole, and few things are more empowering than being able to support oneself...

...but then it was the Yuletide, and popular sympathies had made a seasonal turn to the Tiny Tims and the down-and-out...

...Meanwhile, cities contend with the exorbitant costs of low-income housing ($60,000 for an average two-bedroom Housing Authority unit in New York City...

...By now very few are left...

...New York City alone spent more than $217 million on the homeless in 1985...

...So the feds and the right have not pushed people into the streets without some help...

...Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is for families, not singles...

...costs, humbles workers, knocks the hell out of labor unions, pushes the jobless and underpaid onto the dole or out into the streets, where they then bedevil average taxpayers and make them vote conservative...

...And many do not, but have no choice...

...In that same decade, close to a million SROs were lost nationally, a figure perhaps close to the number of homeless nationally—though estimates range from 250,000 to three million...