Lies, lies and more lies…

by rocketpoetry

Most common folk around the country will wake up tomorrow and read here and here that homelessness is on the decline.

The Housing and Urban Development released a report today claiming that “chronic” homelessness in America is down 15 percent - that’s 52,000 fewer Americans on the streets.

The report captures street counts in 3,800 cities and counties around the country from October 1, 2006 to September 30, 2007.

Beyond the fact that it’s actually July of 2008 and street homelessness is visibly on the rise, it’s actually 2008 - 10 months after the fact! Haven’t I been hearing about a housing and banking collapse? That must be in my head. After all, I’m just another one of those crazy west coast housing activists. Really, I don’t know shit.

I mean there’s no reason to think that the Bush Administration would be lying to us, or that the media might not be asking hard questions.

“At the beginning of his Administration, President Bush set a goal to end chronic homelessness in America,” said a statement released by the White House Press Office. “Today, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Preston reported that the Administration has continued to make progress on this goal.” The statement further noted that the new results demonstrate that “targeted, focused resources can achieve measurable results.”

I mean we know how much the Bush Administration cares about targeted, focused resources that can achieve goals.

I’m amazed that more insiders and local governments have not spoken out on the truths of the 10-year plan to end homelessness. Of course, honesty does mean dollars - or the lack there of. What gives?

Back in 2007 I was slapped on the wrist by advocates claiming that I was fucking up their political will to end homelessness when I spoke out of turn to the Portland Tribune. But the reality is, street homelessness was no more on the decline then as it is now - it’s just in how the establishment spins and frames such figures.

Tim Harris, the Director of Real Change up in Seattle wrote a great piece this week - where the spin factor is in full effect.

The reality is things are not quiet on the western front. In fact, it’s a bit noisy and hard to concentrate.

The problem we find ourselves faced with is that when the federal government says jump, we all get in line to jump. The spin rolls downhill - from the Beltway to state and local governments, to affordable housing and homeless advocates, we all have to swallow the hard pill, fix the numbers and make it look like we are somehow winning the war on poverty - horseshit.

Chronic homelessness is a term used for individuals that have been on the streets for more than year. It does not include anyone that is doubled-up, children, families, etc. It more or less is a way to target the hardcore - which is fine so long as we don’t exclude thousands of individuals falling into homelessness and individuals living on the fringe of society - fading in and out of a stable living environment.

The failure of the 10-year plan also lies in the idea that homelessness is an individuals fault and not a byproduct of any number of things ranging from the war on drugs, mental health, domestic violence, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, on and on and on. My good friend Paul Boden captures this reality in a story that appeared in Street Roots in early July.

Finally, we have failed to recognize how much criminalization of people experiencing homelessness has played into the failure of addressing the problem at hand. On one hand we are told the 10-year plan to end homelessness is helping those hard to reach individuals that find themselves fallen through the cracks time and again through the criminal justice system, while on the other we enforce BS laws that create thousands upon thousands of individuals forced to live with criminal records and no way to gain access to housing. Bassackwards.

In short, regardless of the spin coming from Washington D.C., the federal governments 10-year plan to end homelessness is fucked. And I’m an optimist. And it’s as simple as that…

Mission Accomplished, American Style

The current hot trend in addressing homelessness in America’s cities is, once again, to remove panhandlers from downtown corridors. Lately the Bush administration – through their Interagency Council on Homelessness – has lauded Denver, Colorado and its 10-year planning process for coming up with one of the 20 Major Innovations this year. This major innovation that President Bush is so enamored with? Have people put change in old parking meters that the City then collects for United Way, rather than giving alms directly to people who are panhandling.

Clearly another case of “Mission Accomplished!!”

These panhandling meters are to homelessness what weapons of mass destruction were to the invasion of Iraq: a public relations ploy to achieve a government policy objective. Just as the Iraq invasion was really about oil for multinational corporations, these dumbass meters are really about removing poor people from downtown commercial areas. Denver officials told the SF Chronicle that the meter program there has not been lucrative, but panhandlers have seemed to disappear where they went up. Not to be deterred by facts, Team Bush has declared amazing results in Denver: $15,000 raised and a 92% reduction in panhandling. Plans are to get “more businesses to adopt meters” (at $1,000 a pop) and to hire local artists to spiff them up and make them more “visible and attractive,” which – when you think about it – raises an interesting question. If the initial crop of meters got rid off 92% of the panhandlers, why do a nicer, prettier version? Wouldn’t a pit bull design be more appropriate for that hard core 8% with the audacity to still be in public space?

Not concerned with contradictions and illogical facts, other cities are following suit. Baltimore installed some panhandling meters with similar “no money but damn, those immobile inanimate objects sure do scare away panhandlers!” results. And now San Francisco has announced plans to launch yet another in a long line of anti-panhandling campaigns, following this “innovative model.”

Cities and people are vexed with the realities of increasing income disparities and homelessness, but has the Bush administration developed any meaningful or substantive policy plans to address either income disparity or homelessness? Besides spending the past 7 years requiring local communities to write 10-Year Plans to End Homelessness while gutting funding for affordable housing and treatment services, what the fuck have these guys done?

They write blank checks to the military-industrial complex, putting us all in massive, never-before-seen levels of debt. They dole out Corporate Welfare that would require all of us spending 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year putting all our money into panhandling meters to match even a fraction of it. They are currently working in Congress to redefine the federal definition of who is homeless, so as to reduce the US population of homeless people DOWN to the 700,000 people they claim it to be (the 900,000 children listed as homeless in our Public Schools by the Department of Education will disappear quicker than the panhandlers in Denver), and they bail out the bankers while millions of middle- and low-income people are losing their homes to foreclosure.

Team Bush praises spare change panhandling meters as an “Innovative Solution” to homelessness, and they spend millions of dollars flying their henchman around the country to promote this and other “Innovative” ideas like using Police Officers as Outreach workers. It’s ironic. The feds created homelessness with draconian cuts to subsidized housing, and now it’s the local governments that are panhandling with meters and arresting homeless people for sleeping outdoors.
San Francisco is faced with a $300 million deficit, and has told service and treatment providers to anticipate a 20 to 30 percent reduction in the number of clients they will be able to serve next year. Many public health and homeless programs that have been serving thousands of poor people every year will be forced to close. Yet 6 months ago the Mayor found $200,000 to invest in a Homeless Coordinator who needed to do something or risk being seen as irrelevant in the face of these serious budget cuts. Presto, an innovative new idea “to see if we can save some lives out there.” Panhandling Parking Meters!! Now the Mayor’s office wants another $500,000 for 2 holding cells (ie, jail cells) in a new “Community Justice Center” to detain people arrested for minor nonviolent offenses (ie, panhandling).

Don’t believe for a second poor people just suddenly “disappear” with these seemingly innocuous little anti-sleeping, anti-panhandling, anti-loitering programs. Local jail cells are overflowing with them.

“Mission Accomplished,” my ass.

Panhandling VS. Panhandlers

San Francisco is panhandling to put panhandlers out of business (Full Article)

Other Cities doing same game (Full Article)

Removing homeless from sight doesn't make them go away

Paul Boden,Jennifer Friedenbach

Friday, December 7, 2007

The insatiable appetite to see homeless people disappear from our parks, streets, business districts and tourist areas requires us all to go back to one of the very first lessons we are taught as infants. Just because you can no longer see it, doesn't mean it no longer exists. Think of this the next time you play peek-a-boo with a toddler. Now you see the homeless. Now you don't. But either way, we're still here. Peek-a-boo!! When city government talks about closing our parks at night and establishing expanded camping and cooking restrictions, and when Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius writes about the parks, we often hear the phrase, "This is not about homelessness. It's about the parks." While this phrase is a great tagline, it is also blatantly untrue.

Park sweeps, police outreach teams and the busting up of encampments in China Basin and along the freeways has EVERYTHING to do with homelessness! Our parks, our freeway underpasses and our streets have been around a lot longer than the very recent advent of closing and fencing them off has. In fact, a direct correlation can be made between the massive increases in homelessness in the early 1980s and the park closures, police programs with both old and new vagrancy laws, and the fencing off of open space. Prior to Mayor Frank Jordan's Matrix program, all of San Francisco's public parks were open 24-hours-a-day. Now, Golden Gate Park closes at 10 p.m. and other parks at dusk or midnight.

Prior to the federal cuts to affordable housing programs - from $83 billion in 1978 to $18 billion in 1983 - contemporary homelessness did not exist. Public parks were open for stargazing (and necking) and panhandling was around but not that big of a deal. After the cuts in government funding for affordable housing, Disney moves into Times Square and Union Square, million-dollar lofts are built in what was once skid row, the public parks are all closed at night, and practically every store front has a "no trespassing" sign in its window. For homeless people, the end result is almost everything other than walking and breathing can get you a ticket, which then lands you in jail.

We need to rediscover what we learned when we were infants: People still exist even if we don't see them. It's called object permanence. Maybe if we remembered this lesson, we would choose to do something about the increasing number of families and individuals living without housing in the United States and begin to fund housing programs again. Maybe we could find a unified community voice for restoring the governor's recent (in a long series of) mental health funding cuts instead of constantly reading about the potential dangers those scary crazy homeless people impose on the rest of us.

When local government is allowed to play peek-a-boo with people's lives, when it is given the authority to make people disappear from society's consciousness, the result is inevitable - incarceration. After all, removing people's presence from society pretty much requires you put them somewhere. As the federal and state governments abandoned all pretense of responsibility for the health and housing needs of people who may be poor and/or disabled, local governments increasingly turned to laws and policing programs to mitigate the damage.

In response, jails are overflowing and municipal courts have established "special courts" along social, as opposed to criminal, lines to deal with this influx. Drug courts, mental health courts and homeless or community courts are all, at their core, manifestations of a criminal justice system overwhelmed by a society that attempts rid itself of poor people rather than attempting to rid itself of poverty.

Just as sweeping dirt under the rug doesn't really clean the floor, sweeping disabled and homeless people from public view or into jail doesn't really address homelessness. They are still disabled and homeless when they are released. It is ineffective as hell, but local governments keep trying and we keep letting them.

It has been 25 years since the re-emergence of massive homelessness in America. It is time we stop trying to recreate Jim Crow and start trying to recreate the New Deal. After all, the New Deal didn't build prisons. It created jobs building Hospitals, Schools and Homes.

Paul Boden is the director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project and

Jennifer Friedenbach is the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco.

10-year plan to end homelessness point/counterpoint

Street Roots recently asked U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness head Philip Mangano or Paul Carslon who oversees Region X (Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho) with the council to write a point, counterpoint alongside Paul Boden with the Western Regional Advocacy Project on the 10-year plan to end homelessness. Mangano and Carlson declined, but got Regional Director with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, John Meyers to offer a federal perspective on ending homelessness. Both pieces ran in the June 15, edition of Street Roots and will be published on the Street News Service for other street papers around the globe to run this month. In my opinion, the first piece by Meyers offers us a cheerleading perspective by the federal government. No doubt, great work is being done, but it's still a little far fetched. Boden’s piece hits the hammer on the head, but you can decide for yourself. Enjoy!

Israel Bayer, Street Roots

We can end homelessness in the USA
By John Meyers

Can homelessness be ended in the next ten years? Frankly when asked this question a few years ago I was incredulous. We had accepted homelessness as a social reality, not be ended but to be lived with. As the new HUD director for the Pacific NW and Alaska, I imagined that my job was to oversee the programs that brought some relief to the homeless, perhaps a good number would even leave the streets through our housing programs, but end homelessness? Get serious. The best we could do was to manage the problem so it didn’t get totally out of control. I’d wager to say that my opinion was shared by most public officials, federal, state and local, not to mention by mayors, county commissioners, sheriffs, Democrat and Republican.

All that has changed. It changed because we were persuaded by facts provided by reliable research about the costs of homelessness, and reliable data about solutions. National advocates used these facts and pledged to achieve something social programs rarely do: to produce results.

One of these national advocates was a dynamo named Philip Mangano from Massachusetts, where he had been a leading advocate for the homeless for many years. I met Mr. Mangano and while impressed with his charisma, I was far more impressed with the facts he wielded: people who are living long term on the streets are not without cost to local government, quite the opposite they can cost from $40,000 to as high as $100,000 in jail, law enforcement, ER and emergency services. That was a shocking fact, but there it was laid out in a study by a Dr. Dennis Culhane from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Culhane’s cost study has been verified by nearly every major American city. In Seattle and Portland the cost of these chronically homeless was over $50,000 per person per year. And what did we have after spending all that tax payer money? Just another person homeless on the streets.

But OK, I asked Philip Mangano, what about solutions? I got an equal shock to see the research on proven programs that could produce lasting results for people we thought were beyond hope. For $15,000 a year or less these same American citizens could be brought into decent housing that was coupled with social services and they would stay off the streets. The data convinced me. Homeless people could and must be given a humane alternative to living in squalor on the streets, and cycling through ER, jail or prison. The solution made humane sense, it made fiscal sense.

But would it work? Could we persuade enough mayors, county executives, city council and county commissions to develop their own local plan to end homelessness in ten years? Their leadership was crucial. We also knew that homelessness had gotten too big a social problem for a solution to be found among the efforts of the small cadre of social service providers. We knew we needed the leadership of governors and state agency executives if the large state systems like prisons, mental hospitals and foster care systems were to stop discharging people into homelessness. We had the solutions, but could we persuade enough of these leaders to take a stand and make their local systems accountable for results?

Working with the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, HUD took the lead in bringing together federal agencies to work together in support of the development of these local plans. In the Pacific NW we hired a Regional Homelessness Coordinator whose job it was to visit mayors and county commissions in our four states and make the case. He did. My own experience with Philip Mangano was repeated with an ever growing number of mayors and county commissioners in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska. County sheriffs quickly produced data from local jails that confirmed the escalating costs of homelessness. The result: a network of local plans throughout Washington State, local plans underway in nine Oregon counties with several more starting up this year. Plans underway in Anchorage and Boise with all four states having governor appointed executive level councils dedicated to support the local plans to end homelessness.

But when we would get results? It takes a lot of planning to change an entire social service system. How long would it take to fully implement housing first programs, coordinated entry, PACT case management teams? Could we get our counts of the homeless to be reliable? How long till our homeless management information systems would be operational? Some tough logistical challenges faced these plans and still do.

Portland’s plan (co-led by the city and Multnomah County) was impressive from the start. It had political will, great agencies and determination. An early federal investment of $10 million helped engineer change. The results amazed the mayor, City Commission and County Commission as much as it did me. A 70 percent reduction in chronic homelessness. A 40 percent reduction in the overall street count. Could this really be true after only two years? I sent out our Regional Homelessness Coordinator to check it out. He took me a little too literally and walked the streets of Portland at 2 a.m. and went under the bridges and through the alleys. He talked with not just city officials but providers such as JOIN and Central City Concern. We found out only later that downtown business owners had already gone to Mayor Potter and asked where so many of the homeless had gone to? Answer: to housing, nearly 1,500 of them in one of the most extraordinary efforts in the country.

Can we get results? Emphatically yes. Do we have a long way to go? Absolutely. Portland can’t stand alone in Oregon. Oregon City, Beaverton, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Albany, McMinnville, Corvallis Medford, Grant’ Pass and Newport have to develop effective plans as well.

Most of these same plans have strategies to prevent and end the homelessness of families, veterans and youth. HUD continues to invest over half of its homeless funds towards families. Now new research on effective solutions holds the same promise it does for chronically homeless persons; we can create a system that is accountable at every level, that will produce results.

We are determined. We have solutions. We are getting results. We can end homelessness.

John Meyers is the regional director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

Counterpoint:

What is it going to take to end homelessness in the USA?
By Paul Boden

The federal government’s current fixation on local Ten Year Plans to End Chronic Homelessness – with HUD’s McKinney homeless assistance dollars – has many homeless people, service providers and housing developers shaking their heads in dismay, there’s one thing these pla ns have done that many of us have waited years to hear: the federal government is giving lip service to "ending homelessness."

Hey, it’s a start and a long way from where we started 20 years ago!

The trick now is to go from talking, meeting, planning and writing plans to end "chronic" homelessness to actually funding the housing, healthcare, education and employment programs ALL poor people need to avoid or escape homelessness. This is where the head shaking comes in. The Bush administration has invested millions and millions of tax dollars over the past six years going from town to town and state to state rallying business and government "leaders" and getting them to spend thousands of their own local dollars to write plans to end "chronic" homelessness in 10 years; meanwhile, a 25-year trend of defunding the very federal programs that local communities so desperately need to end homelessness continues.

McKinney homeless assistance funding is a miniscule allocation of approximately $1.4 billion this year; compare that to the $52 billion a year (in 2004 dollars) reduction in funding for affordable housing programs since 1979 and the word miniscule makes sense.

Before the reemergence in 1983 of massive contemporary homelessness in the US, poor people in local communities faced many of the same obstacles homeless people face today, but they did have one thing they don’t have today: housing. Not always the best housing, certainly – often not very nice housing – but they had housing nonetheless. When the federal government’s role in supporting housing opportunities was changed in Reagan’s reinvention of government, large numbers of people who were living in the not very nice housing found themselves with no housing at all. They became "the homeless," and 25 years later the Bush administration has chosen to focus on a subsection of "the homeless" that they call "chronic." From poor to homeless to chronically homeless, who will they want us to write plans on next? The left-handed blue-eyed homeless?

What happened to our humanity in addressing poverty? Homeless people are just that, people; they’re not "the homeless." They’re people just like anybody reading this. They love, they learn, they get pissed off, they have good days and they have some really, really bad days as well. They are people living their lives day by day. The only difference is that they live their lives without housing. With all the silly studies that HUD loves to praise people like Dennis Culhane or Phil Mangano for, isn’t it ironic that HUD never praises people who study HUD? But they sure study the hell out of poor people without housing, they study social service programs, and every other week come up with a new "business-based best practices program." They especially love to study Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) to best "track and count the homeless," so long as "the homeless" being counted aren’t the 914,000 kids without housing in our Public School system.

With more than 480 5-year local Continuum of Care plans initiated by the Clinton administration and more than 300 (and growing) Ten Year Plans initiated by the Bush administration, it’s long past time for HUD to stop studying us and take a good long hard look in the mirror.

We’ll even save them the money of doing another study. Here are the facts:

Since 1996, HUD funding for new public housing has been ZERO, while over 100,000 public housing units have been lost to demolition, sale or other removal in that same period.

In 2005, federal homeowner subsidies totaled more than $122 billion, while HUD affordable housing outlays were only $31 billion – a difference of more than $91 billion.

In 1978 (pre-homelessness), HUD’s budget was $83 billion. By 1983 (when shelters opened nationwide), HUD’s budget had been reduced to $18 billion. In 2006 HUD’s budget was $29 billion.

In recent years over 200,000 private sector rental units have been lost annually, and 1.2 million unsubsidized affordable housing units disappeared from 1993-2003.

For rural communities dependent on USDA Section 515 funding, the Bush Administration is proposing eliminating this funding altogether. Up until 1985 this vital housing development program produced a yearly average of 31,000 new units of affordable housing a year.

The list goes on and on, and goes back to 1979. Emergency shelters opened throughout the country in 1982 and 1983, and by the time the Stewart B. McKinney Act passed in 1987 they were a pretty well established part of local communities, as they are still today. Before Congressman McKinney passed away – and a reluctant President Reagan signed his bill – the McKinney Act was originally called the "Urgent Relief for the Homeless Act." Urgent relief from policy decisions created under the premises that the market would "take care of itself," and that government’s role is to subsidize the market rather then subsidizing places for poor people to live. The market would take care of them.

Before the Great Depression we were told that the market would take care of itself, but the rest of us have to take care of ourselves. After the crash, we – as a nation – put in place systemic safety nets for the poorest among us so that they wouldn’t fall when the market failed.

Homelessness is not an intractable human experience. It is not created by dysfunctional individuals. Homelessness is the result of dysfunctional social policy and funding priorities. When the federal government was investing in housing through HUD and USDA housing and community development programs, we didn’t need the urgent relief of McKinney homeless assistance funding. We had housing.

Paul Boden is the Executive Director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project made up of grassroots homeless organizations up and down the West Coast.

Counting the Homeless with Philip Mangano

NPR's Scott Simon did a softball interview with Bush administration homelessness czar Philip Mangano on Weekend Edition, and Phil offered a genially upbeat litany of distortions and half truths as he assured us that the "business focused, results oriented" Ten Year Plan strategies are succeeding in ending homelessness. It was disappointing to hear Simon, who is certainly capable of doing a tough interview, defer to Mangano as if he were the reincarnation of Mother Theresa.

Simon sets the stage for Mangano's rap by parroting the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness line that ten percent of the homeless draw fifty percent of the emergency shelter resources, and that the magic bullet to ending homelessness lies in relentlessly focusing our attention on the toughest cases.

The rebuttal to this gets pretty deep into the weeds, which is part of why Mangano's oversimplification works so well. The short version is that the studies upon which this is based exclude several key groups, like families with children. The Ten Tear Plan model also assumes a static reality, which is just weird. For a good overview and critique, see NPACH's Q&A on chronic homelessness.

What I find so maddening about Mangano is how successful he's been in sidelining any discussion of structural poverty in relation to the problem of homelessness. By focusing national attention on the most dysfunctional and stereotypically "homeless" ten percent of the two million or more who are without housing, he has managed to deflect attention from the many ways in which federal policy creates poverty while effectively placing ninety-five percent of the responsibility for a solution on the localities.

He uses the terms chronic homeless, street homeless, and homeless interchangeably, so when he talks about these huge "reductions" that are taking place, any normal person would assume he's talking about homelessness in general. Thus, the illusion is established that major progress has been made when the reality is far less encouraging.

In Portland, for example, Mangano says homelessness has decreased by 70%. Without going into the complexities of the count, let's just say that this is an extremely contested number. The City of Portland claims a 39% decrease. Portland's Street Roots says they're not convinced.

The 2006 Conference of Mayors report says that requests for family shelter in that city actually rose. Outside the city, these rosy reports of ending homelessness turn positively grim. Some advocates claim that rural homelessness in Oregon is up by as much as 300%.

San Fransisco, another of Mangano's successes with a 38% decrease, reports a rise in family requests for shelter as well. Overall, says the Conference of Mayors, homelessness is up by six percent, nearly a third of family requests for shelter go unmet, and the average length of an episode of homelessness is now at eight months, the longest on record.

A recent internal fight within the our own Committee to End Homelessness in King County might shed some light. While some parties within CEHKC, based on the last two years' counts, wanted to report similar declines in homelessness, others argued that changes in the timing and methodology of the annual one night count rendered comparisons less than entirely meaningful. This point of view eventually prevailed.

Something that goes unsaid in all this counting and recounting is that most cities are employing liberal use of the stick right along side the Housing First carrot. Portland, LA, San Fransisco, and a host of other cities have become decidedly less hospitable, and this decreases the numbers as well. LA, for example, sends their police out every two weeks to roust sleeping homeless people under the guise of getting an accurate count. The numbers in LA's skid row have declined sharply.

Over the last three years in San Fransisco, says the Mayor's press release, "1,864 homeless persons left San Francisco to be reunited with friends or family members in other parts of the country through the City's Homeward Bound Program." This is otherwise known as the one-way bus ticket out of town. Long-time San Fransisco advocate Paul Boden reports that his city now counts these as housing placements.

So as Mangano goes around crowing his mission accomplished message, I'm thinking I've heard it before, and it wasn't true then either.

I'm just thankful that he didn't go into his "I'm from Massachusetts and an abolitionist, and Republicans ended slavery and they'll end homelessness too" rap. That just might have sent me right over the edge.

Originally posted on Apesmas Lament.