Give 'em Shelter
TUCKER, WILLIAM
Give 'em Shelter Good news for the homeless. by WILLIAM TUCKER WHATEVER happened to the homeless? "We haven't heard much—anything, really— about the homeless since, oh, roughly January 20, 1993,"...
...Mangano witnessed the same pattern in Boston...
...That may be true for now, but it's hard to argue with success, and the formula can easily be extended to families as well...
...We're trying to upset the status quo," says Mangano, who brims with nonstop enthusiasm...
...In 1991, the New York City Commission on the Homeless, chaired by Cuomo, published a report, The Way Home: A New Direction in Social Policy, that defied liberal orthodoxy and argued that housing was not the problem...
...One factor now motivating local officials is a realization of how much the homeless are costing them...
...The most dismaying thing was that in the end the people were right back where they started...
...For that kind of money, the city could have bought them each a penthouse apartment...
...More public housing was completed in the 1980s than in any previous decade...
...Pep rallies are held...
...Critics argue that the program is skewed toward winos and shopping-bag ladies and will not serve homeless families...
...We made progress that is visible, measurable, and quantifiable," says Mangano, anticipating that Ph.D...
...Malcolm Gladwell lectures on the "Tipping Point...
...Meanwhile, conservatives argued that home-lessness was the result of personal pathologies—particularly the flood of deinstitutionalized mental patients...
...Street people often have to be persuaded to enter such housing...
...With a home base, the residents can enter drug or alcohol programs or even train for jobs...
...At a remarkably underreported conference in Denver in May, advocates for the homeless met to discuss a pattern of falling homeless populations across the country...
...The whole program costs about $13,000 per person," he says...
...The very term 'homeless' is a misnomer," said Cuomo...
...Harvard's Clayton Christensen talks about the "Innovator's Dilemma" and the "Innovator's Solution...
...It's a lot cheaper than what we were doing before...
...He doesn't like to see people left behind...
...Then Andrew Cuomo, son of New York governor Mario Cuomo, started a counterrevolution...
...SROs, lodging houses, mom-and-pop rooming houses, all had fallen before campaigns that were supposed to improve housing...
...What is the council's secret of success this time...
...Although Reagan cut authorizations for new housing, projects in the pipeline continued to come on line...
...The problem is not that the federal government is not building public housing...
...A]n increase in the number of homeless singles there in the past five years has corresponded directly to the loss of these SROs...
...Now if only the press will pay a little attention...
...By 1999, HUD was claiming the effort had "helped 300,000 homeless people get housing and jobs to become self-sufficient...
...All this comes from President Bush," says Philip Mangano, who worked with the homeless for 25 years in Boston before becoming director of the federal Interagency Council on the Homeless...
...Much of the program is admittedly a rah-rah, get-everybody-on-board effort that enlists mayors, governors, church leaders, shelter organizations, social service agencies, civic groups, business leaders, and everyone else to the task...
...The real problem is that cities have been very efficient in eliminating bottom-rung housing through building code enforcement, zoning restrictions, and (in cites such as New York and San Francisco) rent control...
...An apartment doesn't cure a crack addiction...
...students will soon be lining up to study this rare public policy success story...
...It's the 'no-child-left-behind' mentality...
...Cuomo became secretary of housing and urban development under President Clinton and moved his plan— now called the "Continuum of Care"— to the national level...
...Entrepreneurs used to take old factory floors and other buildings and turn them into "partition hotels" where people could sleep behind thin walls for as little as $2 a night...
...By taking away bottom-rung housing, we left the poor with nothing...
...They were astonished to discover that every individual was costing the city an average of $200,000 per year...
...It might have looked like blight, but it was functional housing for transients...
...In Chicago, SRO units declined 80 percent between 1960 and 1980," reported veteran social worker Richard White in Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us (1991...
...For years we've been patting ourselves on the back and saying we've been serving the same homeless person...
...San Francisco is restoring 1,500 apartments in the Tenderloin district through private ownership...
...In the past twenty years, there has been a net loss of 22,000 low-rent units in downtown Seattle...
...In the past six months, New York has announced a reduction of 13 percent, Denver 11 percent, Portland 20 percent, Miami 30 percent, Philadelphia 50 percent...
...We haven't heard much—anything, really— about the homeless since, oh, roughly January 20, 1993," Andrew Ferguson noted in January 2001, predicting that with Bush replacing Clinton, the media would soon rediscover them...
...Advocates for the homeless argued "housing, housing, housing," and pointed to alleged cutbacks in federal housing programs by the Reagan administration...
...Seattle has created 50 new units with a shared kitchen and a bathroom down the hall and 25 more that are nothing but a partitioned room with a bed and a dresser...
...The principal victim of "reform" has been SROs—the single-room occupancy hotels that were the last resort of winos and stumblebums in bygone days...
...The important thing is that somebody has finally found something that works...
...At the same time, there was a mirror-image rise in emergency shelters...
...In San Diego, researchers tracked a population of 20 homeless people for almost two years, measuring what they absorbed in free medical care, ambulance services, emergency-room hospital visits, and law enforcement," says Mangano...
...The president promised in his 2002 State of the Union that we were going to find a cure for homelessness...
...Beyond that, silence...
...Some bring their shopping carts...
...Indianapolis found it had 20,000 vacant units ripe for rehabilitation...
...This explanation never held up...
...Yet somehow the number of homeless people on the street did not seem to decrease...
...The Interagency Council is now encouraging cities to reverse this trend and adjust building and zoning codes to tolerate housing once labeled "substandard...
...All these "reforms" were supposed to upgrade "substandard" housing and improve opportunities for the poor...
...It's time to start looking for permanent solutions...
...But does the reverse hold...
...In fact they worsened conditions for the very poor...
...Governor William Weld commissioned a study, and we found that almost 96 percent of these bottom-rung units had gone out of business during the 1970s and 1980s," he says...
...As if on cue, days later the Washington Post ran a 2,000-word opus on the plight of the homeless in the nation's capital...
...The story merited squibs in the Denver Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Rocky Mountain News...
...Eventually they must pay rent...
...If the Bush administration makes progress on homelessness, does it make news...
...The New York Times ran a page 19 story almost a month later...
...Since the days of the Reagan administration, an argument has raged over whether homelessness is caused by lack of housing or a plethora of personal pathologies...
...Our retention rates are about 85 percent," says Mangano...
...Moreover, the Reagan administration engineered a changeover to federal housing vouchers, which reached far more people than public housing ever did...
...In 1986, with generous assistance from the government, Cuomo founded Housing Enterprises for Low-Income People (HELP), which built boot-camp-like shelters that put people through rigorous drug and alcohol treatment before placing them in jobs and permanent housing...
...The answer, all too predictably, is no...
...Such declarations have been made time and again over the past 25 years without much effect...
...have found a successful formula— "Housing First...
...Once established, however, they tend to stay...
...The program's slogan— "Housing First"—tells the story...
...The difference this time is that Mangano and the Interagency Council seem to William Tucker is author of The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policies...
...Housing First" has now returned to the original idea—that housing is the problem—with a twist...
Vol. 11 • July 2006 • No. 40
