TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121790/1217100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 18.3 KB | 363 lines

                =╢Σ                                                          NATION, Page 44

Answers at Last


After a decade of despair, Americans are finding ways to help
the homeless by providing treatment, counseling and training
-- along with shelter

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Melissa Ludtke/Boston and James
Willwerth/San Francisco


    There was a time in public memory when Americans imagined
that the homeless were refugees of a kind, on their way from
somewhere to somewhere else, residing temporarily in the
tunnels and doorways between here and there. Some people were
uprooted after the War on Poverty was fought to a draw, when
their rents went up, their wages went down, and the safety net
turned out to be full of holes. Others were in transit from
mental asylums that didn't heal them or to halfway houses that
didn't exist. Still others were maimed by drug abuse.
Communities from coast to coast quietly wished that the living
clutter would all go away. Yet during the past 10 years it has
only multiplied.

    Who could have imagined, in so smugly prosperous a decade,
that shantytowns would become tourist attractions? Until the
mayor evicted them last summer, homeless people in San
Francisco drew busloads of photo-snapping foreign tourists to
their refugee camp in front of city hall. There, the visitors
found a second city of cardboard condos, clogged with the
traffic of shopping carts through makeshift living rooms,
outfitted with easy chairs and dresser drawers. The waterless
fountain steamed with stale urine; a sun-scorched lawn sprouted
cigarette butts.

    Over the years no social issue has looked so easy and proved
so hard to resolve. It looked easy because merely building
houses is simpler than, say, curing a deadly disease or
cleansing a polluted ocean or handing out hope to the poor. But
it turned out to be a nettlesome problem, for homelessness is
not the same as houselessness. Each disaster has its own
genealogy; the problems of the street people only begin with
the need for shelter. Perhaps that is because homelessness is
a symptom of every other social ill: drugs, crime, poverty,
teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, violence, even the decline of
compassion during the me-first '80s.

    When the street people first appeared in force a decade or
so ago, they inspired shouts of dismay and calls for action.
Cities hurriedly opened shelters; churches converted their
basements into temporary dormitories; soup kitchens doubled
their seating capacity. When the problem only grew worse, city
officials across the nation sought to drive beggars from their
tunnels and parks and public doorways. The homeless became
targets; sleeping vagrants were set afire, doused with acid
and, in a particularly horrific attack in New York City last
Halloween, slashed with a meat cleaver. Finally came
resignation. After years of running hurdles over bodies in
train stations, of being hustled by panhandlers on the street,
many urban dwellers moved past pity to contempt, and are no
longer scalded by the suffering they see.

    "Society lost faith that there were solutions," says Paul
Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation,
a source of funds and faith for grass-roots rescue efforts. A
poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion shows that 75%
of Americans believe the homeless problem will worsen or remain
the same. The irony is that the loss of hope has occurred just
when hope may be at hand. In city after city, advocates of the
homeless can point to programs and policies that are
tailor-made, cost effective, time tested. Now if adequate funds
are provided, they will know what to do with them.

    San Francisco could end up setting an example. When last
year's earthquake nearly leveled a few crumbling flophouses,
the city resisted building the standard emergency homeless
shelters. Instead, officials used almost $12 million in federal
relief money to build state-of-the-art multiservice centers
where homeless people can live, get health care, see a social
worker, treat their addictions, receive job training --
whatever is necessary to meet their needs and return them to
independent living. "If you give me the money, we have the
chance to end sleeping on the streets," says Mayor Art Agnos.
"I'm willing to be the first mayor in America to say so."

    It may seem such an obvious prescription -- build housing,
and then help people hold on to it. But it has taken a long
time to strip homeless policy of its mythology. For years,
whenever the congressional committees or the network-news
programs took up the cause, they would call Robert Hayes,
founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, and put in
an order for an intact white family recently evicted from a
Norman Rockwell painting -- people, they said, with whom others
could identify. Yet in cities like New York, such families
account for less than 10% of the homeless population, a tiny
proportion compared with the homeless who are drug addicts,
ex-convicts, alcoholics, single mothers, mostly black and
Hispanic. Homeless advocates admit to a well-intentioned
whitewash: in their search for support and sympathy, they
conspired to uphold the sanitized image of the deserving poor,
in fear that if the more complex truth were known, the public
would blame the victims and walk away.

    And who could know the truth anyway? Estimates of the number
of homeless people have ranged from 300,000 to 3 million. There
may never be an accurate national figure: for the first time,
this year census takers tried to include the street people in
their count, but some advocates fear that the tallies could be
too low by as much as 70%. No city is typical. In Norfolk, Va.,
81% of homeless people are thought to be families with
children; in Minneapolis, 76% are single men, according to the
1989 Conference of Mayors Survey. Nationwide, anywhere from
one-half to two-thirds are either substance abusers, mentally
ill or both. Up to a quarter have been in jail. With such a
great range of needs, it was all but impossible to cook up a
comprehensive national policy that would fit into a 10-second
sound bite.

    So when advocates were pressed for a solution, they answered
the congressional committees and task forces and think tanks
with a sharp demand: "Housing, housing and housing." And in a
way, they were right. It was no secret that a main cause of
homelessness in the '80s was the poor being squeezed out of the
housing market. In the 1970s and '80s, the average rent grew
twice as fast as the average income. Manufacturing jobs
disappeared: of the 12 million new jobs created since 1979,
more than half pay less than $7,000 a year, and many provide
no health insurance. One serious illness, and a worker could
spiral into poverty and onto the streets. Meanwhile, a 1981
change in welfare laws meant that a quarter of a million
families with children lost all their public assistance, and
an additional 200,000 had benefits reduced.

    Rising rents in a tight real estate market were enough to
cast these borderline workers and welfare families out of their
homes. For young people approaching the housing market for the
first time, there was no point of entry. In Massachusetts
cities, a renter must earn $13.65 an hour -- more than three
times the minimum wage -- to afford the $800-a-month average
rent on a two-bedroom unit in decent condition. Under the
Reagan Administration, the Federal Government cut housing
assistance 75%, and much of what was left was wasted. The
Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped subsidizing
new housing and handed out rent vouchers instead. This
increased demand without increasing the supply and set off a
scramble for the cheap units that remained.

    When people began to compete fiercely for affordable
housing, the ones to lose out were the least resourceful: the
teenage mothers, the addicted, the abused, the illiterate, the
unskilled. The explosion of crack use in the '80s did
immeasurable damage; once people were addicted, what employer
or landlord would touch them? "Ronald Reagan and the housing
cuts are a convenient way to look at the homeless problem,"
says Mike Neely, an engineer in Los Angeles, who squandered all
he had, including his home and family, on cocaine before he
turned his life around and founded the Homeless Outreach
Project. "I think it's a drug problem. You can't pay the
landlord and the dope man at the same time."

    Perhaps the most vulnerable of the abandoned people were the
mentally ill, who moved through the cities like a great
muttering army, foraging, frightening, fearful. In a stunning
social blunder, patients were released from public institutions
and given no place to go -- no halfway houses, no local
clinics, no community care. Between 1960 and 1984, the
population in mental institutions fell from 544,000 to 134,000.
But deinstitutionalization alone did not create the homeless
problem. Many released patients survived for a time in
single-room-occupancy hotels, where they at least had a fixed
address and could receive monthly benefit checks. It was the
1980s real estate boom, during which developers eliminated half
of all the nation's SROs, that emptied the mentally ill onto
the streets. Meanwhile, the government cut nearly 500,000
mentally ill people off the welfare rolls.

    When wave after wave of newly homeless people rolled through
the cities, emergency shelters seemed the surest and quickest
way to get them off the streets. So most of the money allocated
by Congress and by states went toward emergency, rather than
preventive, care. Only rarely was there money for rental
assistance, tenant-landlord mediation or short-term crisis
loans to help the near homeless keep the roofs over their
heads. Public money paid slumlords $2,000 a month to put up
families in "welfare hotels." But this did nothing to ease the
families' desperation, fight their addictions or restore their
dignity. The emergency shelters grew up like weeds in the cities
because there was no time to plant anything else.

    Though they were never supposed to become a part of the
landscape, the temporary shelters soon began to look like
permanent poorhouses. Architects studied how to build better
shelters; interior decorators worked to beautify them. The late
Mitch Snyder, the ubiquitous crusader, created a vast
Washington shelter that was considered a model of its kind. "It
is the best shelter in the world," he once said of his
creation, "but it is an abomination and should be destroyed."

    Every shelter may be an abomination in theory, but many were
in fact as well. Half the people residing for more than two
years in New York City shelters test positive for tuberculosis.
Men sleep with their shoes wedged under the legs of the cots
so they won't be stolen. At least one-third of all homeless
women have been raped. "You don't get to sit and relax when
you're homeless," says Catherine, 62, a homeless woman in
Seattle. "God help your behind while you're out there."

    When cities tried to move families out of shelters, they
discovered just how deeply scarred the victims were. In an
effort to empty its disgraceful welfare hotels, New York City
renovated old public housing and moved in homeless families.
No one anticipated the invisible quarantine: shunned by their
neighbors, the families had no sense of community, no help for
the problems that had put them on the streets in the first
place. Many parents still had no jobs, still drank too much,
still beat their kids. Within a year, some of the buildings had
been looted or burned, and drug dealers were moving in. At
city-council hearings, tenants testified repeatedly that
rehabilitating the buildings was not enough. The city had to
"rehab people."

    Other cities were having the same experience, until it
became impossible to sustain the illusion that all a pregnant,
crack-addicted teenage prostitute with AIDS needed was a place
to call home. From that admission was born the concept of
linkage. Rather than merely providing a shelter, homeless
advocates are weaving a web. By combining detoxification
programs, job training, day care, parenting classes, health care
and social services under one roof, they can help the street
people who are unwilling or unable to travel all over town to
find the services they need -- if those services exist.

    Not only are such multipurpose centers more humane than
warehousing people in welfare hotels, but they can also cost
about half as much. Each city, even each neighborhood, can
custom-design its programs. Areas with a desperate AIDS problem
can focus on providing outpatient care. For single adults, SROs
with on-site services may be a permanent answer. For homeless
families, transitional housing can cushion their re-entry into
the private market.

    In the absence of leadership from Washington, local
governments and private groups have spent countless millions
of hours and dollars on this problem. Because the homeless
population varies so greatly from city to city, community
groups often devise the most ingenious solutions -- especially
when they can enlist the help of corporations, banks and local
government. In New York, America Works trains welfare
recipients for jobs and pays their salaries for the first four
months; if the employer is satisfied and hires a worker
permanently (usually about 70% of trainees make it), America
Works collects a $5,000 fee from the state. Employers get a
trained employee, the state reduces its welfare bill, and the
worker becomes self-sufficient.

    Leading the private-sector initiative is developer James
Rouse's Enterprise Foundation, a sort of brain-trust godparent
to housing efforts all across the country. Rouse's idea was to
combine government incentives, benign capitalism and community
energy to build decent, affordable housing. One key to the
organization's success is Rouse's knack for persuading
corporations to get involved and for pointing out the tax
incentives that make it worth their while. If a company invests
$1 million in a financing pool for low-income housing, over  15
years it could realize $2.3 million in tax savings.

    But the risk that comes with private success is that it
gives the Federal Government an excuse to applaud the local
initiatives and then bow out. In Washington itself, with a huge
homeless population, private groups are struggling to "hold the
situation together with gum and baling wire," says Jack M.
White Jr. of the city's Coalition for the Homeless. Even
Washington's most ebullient convert to the cause -- Housing
Secretary Jack Kemp -- is full of ideas but inevitably short
of funds. His latest initiative, Homeownership and Opportunity
for People Everywhere, would promote home ownership for
low-income tenants and support local nonprofit groups. But its
total funding is only $750 million next year. The 1987 McKinney
Act allotted $596 million this year to states and cities for
homeless programs. But even that amount pales next to what the
cities are spending. New York City's human-resources
administration will spend $146.4 million on the homeless next
year; its portion of McKinney funds will total only $5.95
million.

    Finally, perhaps the single greatest source of help for the
homeless comes from volunteers. Frustrated, angry, ashamed that
a country so wealthy should ignore such poverty, volunteers
give money and their time to manning the soup kitchens,
supervising the church basements at night, distributing
information, teaching reading, running clothing drives. In the
process, they are learning invaluable lessons about what works
and what does not. For example:

    -- Go beyond shelter. Providing a roof for the night is not
enough, and in many cities the shelters are not full. Homeless
people need a place that is safe and that addresses their
needs. Drug addicts need treatment; the mentally ill need
guidance; single mothers need help with child rearing; most
homeless people need job training and health care. Don't make
them commute all over town to get it.

    -- Have a plan. To avoid duplication and red tape, city
policymakers and charities must coordinate their efforts.
Officials in Portland, Ore., devised a 12-point plan for
coordinating services that has been widely copied by other
communities. Each city must study its own homeless population
to understand its nature and needs, then devise a strategy for
solving the problem.

    -- Involve the private sector. Private corporations allied
with pioneering charities can make public money stretch a long
way. In 1986-87 some 460 nonprofit community groups created
23,120 units of low-income housing, compared with nearly 20,000
for HUD.

    -- Build communities. When it is time to move homeless
people into permanent housing, do not isolate them. City
officials must resist the temptation to congratulate themselves
with signs on the buildings, like those that have appeared in
New York City, that in essence announce that this is where
formerly homeless people live. Homelessness carries a terrible
stigma, particularly for children. Its veterans must be allowed
to return to the community without carrying that stigma with
them.

    -- Have services, will travel. Even if social services are
available, many homeless people cannot or will not use them.
So more and more cities are mobilizing their resources. Food
vans carry soup and sandwiches to the bridges and parks.
Boston's Health Care for the Homeless program sends nurses out
knocking on doors in family shelters, offering parents and
children preventive health care.

    -- Build more housing. It is only the start of a solution
-- but the problem will never be solved without it.

    When foreign visitors come to American cities, their
reaction is almost invariably astonishment, and sorrow, at what
they see on the streets. America is a wealthy nation of
conspicuous ideals, one that presumes to have something to
teach infant democracies all around the world. By failing to
act creatively, generously and mercifully on behalf of its most
desperate citizens, a country loses more than its credibility;
it weakens its character. After such a long and ambivalent
search for answers to this problem, Americans should rejoice
that there is at last an opportunity to act on the principles
they so proudly proclaim.