Wednesday, May 01, 2013
A secret success on homelessness
If there is one thing we love here at the Razor, besides pandas, haiku, unusual hockey team ads, and political diatribes that somehow end up with a moderate position, it's unheralded political success stories.
Here is a good one-- David Frum reflecting on CNN about an unheralded success of the Bush administration:
For three decades, we have debated what causes homelessness and how to deal with it. Is homelessness a mental health problem? A substance abuse problem? A problem caused by gentrification and urban redevelopment? Or something else again?
The Bush administration substituted a much simpler idea -- an idea that happened to work. Whatever the cause of homelessness, the solution is ... a home.
In 2002, Bush appointed a new national homeless policy czar, Philip Mangano. A former music agent imbued with the religious philosophy of St. Francis of Assisi, Mangano was seized by an idea pioneered by New York University psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis: "housing first."
The "housing first" concept urges authorities to concentrate resources on the hardest cases -- to move them into housing immediately -- and only to worry about the other problems of the homeless after they first have a roof over their heads. A 2004 profile in The Atlantic nicely summarized Tsemberis' ideas: "Offer them (the homeless) the apartment first, he believes, and you don't need to spend years, and service dollars, winning their trust."
Best of all, it worked!
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007. You might have expected the numbers to spike again when the financial crisis hit but no. Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.
And I love it when things work.
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A perfect solution. Kind of like that old Christian philosophy: feed first and then preach second.
# posted by 
: 11:43 AM
: 11:43 AM
Key issue is and always has been community integration. Given that most of the homeless population lives in urban areas, public housing complexes is where they get to be given a home. Public housing communities are often held together by very fragile bonds mostly related to socio-economic issues, where the fine line between poor people who work and poor people living on public assistance becomes a deep divide. I can only speak from the experience of living in NYC where housing is a mind-blowing matter and from the fortunate position of living in a subsidized rent apartment in a public housing complex. Theoretically the model for this type of housing is fantastic and the numbers make all the politicians pat themselves on the back, not just in the number of homeless families that get a roof over their head and a dignified existence, but also a range of working people who could not otherwise afford to pay two thirds of their net income on rent. The reality of those numbers is a lot different though. In my complex there are fair market apartments (I will not even mention the stratosphere), subsidized apartments (where rent was calculated based on one third of the gross income and now go up 5% every year) and voucher apartments (public assistance and working poor). Over time the expensive apartments have been segregated to certain areas of the complex (river and Manhattan views and refurbished with granite kitchen counters…what’s up with the granite thing, I always wonder), the subsidized apartments are being held on for dear life and the voucher apartments which have pretty much swinging doors. Why? Because the people that come off the street or mental wards are not always the best neighbors… not to the market rent neighbors, to the neighbors who come back home dead tired from all those unglamorous, dirty jobs that make the great city of New York work and pay just a little above dirt poverty line. So the shuffling around the public housing inventory starts for the former homeless and the manageably mental. The success numbers you read on CNN stay the same… just not under the same roof.
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