Blue Notes from a Red Zone

Policy Perspectives

This past week I've logged more miles than a trucker, primarily by criss-crossing the state to meet with funders of homeless programs. The results were disheartening, to say the least. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is once again tightening the definition of homelessness, and eliminating more classes of people who formerly received housing and supportive services. The latest version defines those persons eligible for permanent supportive housing as being restricted to "single, unaccompanied individuals with disabilities who have been living on the streets or using emergency shelter, either continuously for a year or for four distinct periods within the last three years." The disabilities are pretty much limited to mental health and substance abuse disorders.

Put into practice, this is terrible policy, as it excludes the chronically homeless families who currently make up 50% of my agency's supportive housing population, and from 40-50% of our overall homeless population in the community. The new regulations, if executed to the letter, would result in 24 children being put out on the streets this week. We will not, of course, be anything like that callous. But already we have started denying services to new families, including a single pregnant woman. According to what we were told in Jacksonville, she stops being unaccompanied the moment she gives birth, and therefore we cannot accept her now. Some of the HUD reps even went so far as to tell us we had to avoid this possibility by only accepting men.

It would be easy to go on a rant about the evils of George Bush and the Republican administration, and they deserve a lot of blame. One of the motivations for this change of policy is to demonstrate that Bush has upheld his campaign pledge of reducing homelessness. Since his economic policies have contributed to a rise in the number of homeless persons, this would be difficult for the average straight-line thinker to do. However, in typical fashion, the administration is simply redefining terms to get the desired result. If you keep refining the definition of homelessness to omit ever increasing classes of people who do, in fact, live on the streets, then you can say you have met your goals despite not housing so much as a single homeless person. Also, the data on which this policy was based has shifted due to surging home and transportation costs and lagging wages, and this shift has not led to essential policy adjustments.

But the truth is, the Bush administration is only one institution failing our homeless men, women and children. Indeed, if state and local governments, in partnership with foundations and faith-based organizations, had done their part, the HUD emphasis could have been beneficial.

Starting in 1995, several studies indicated that a small slice, approximately 10%, of homeless persons, consumed 85% of the resources committed to fighting homelessness. These chronically homeless people were typically male substance abusers, often with mental disease, who lived on the streets on a full-time basis. These individuals remain the stereotype we associate with homelessness. They frighten the rest of us, while their disabilities stress law enforcement agencies to the point that too many officers become bullies and thugs.

HUD decided that it would focus on these chronically homeless persons whom everyone else wished would just dematerialize into some other universe. HUD would pour resources into assisting this group to get off the streets, and thus free up state and local resources for combatting homelessness among families, women and runaway children. In addition, HUD's efforts would relieve burdens on law enforcement, courts and the jails which have become the primary shelter for the mentally ill in virtually all communities. This had the added virtue of allowing state and local agencies to campaign for the homeless populations that pull heart-strings, as opposed to those which engender fear and revulsion among large segments of the voting citizenry.

The fallacy was that state and local agencies would welcome the opportunity to help any homeless persons at all. The state of Florida allots $2.8 million to assist communities in alleviating homelessness, which works out to anywhere from $65,000 to $150,000 for 20 of the 30+ homeless coalitions. Further restricting the usefulness of these funds, they must be spent between January and June. While some of the metropolitan areas fill in the gaps, smaller communities give nothing at all. Okaloosa and Walton Counties do not allocate a dime to homeless mitigation, nor do any of their constiuent municipalities. A few churches provide cold night shelter. Other than that, there is nothing. Women and children, persons without disabilities, and young adults aging out of foster care, get no services at all - not even a blanket and a roof over their heads for the night.

As a result, the homeless population served by HUD is often the only population to receive any help at all. Washington is not happy, because not even the federal government has the resources to tackle this entire problem by itself. Indeed, under the current administration, resources to serve the one population claimed by the feds are stretched ever tighter, resulting in increasingly restrictive definitions of who may be served.

The current situation as regards relief for homelessness is a scandal, but it is not exclusively limited to the Bush administration. Indeed, there is merit in the administration approach of selecting out the most costly and challenging of the homeless populations to serve, and thus theoretically enabling others to focus their resources on homeless persons most likely to have successful outcomes using only a relatively few services. It would have been optimal had the administration recognized that no one was, in fact, chiming in with help, and given local coalitions the flexibility to put resources where they were most needed in individual communities. It would have been even more optimal if state and local agencies had risen to the challenge.

As it is, I am frustrated. But far worse, children will be sleeping in cars, in woods, in abandoned buildings tonight because everyone who mattered was only interested in passing the buck.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 12:03 AM