Cities see increace in homelessness

Capt. Martin Cooper of the Salvation Army has been handing out free sandwiches and soup near the Civic Center in San Francisco for the last year and a half. Lately he's noticed some troubling changes.(Full Article)

CT. to receive $2 Mil. for new projects

State to get $24 mil. for current programs and $2 mil. for new projects. (Full Article)
And S.C. city receives $2 mil. (Full Article)

Lying liars and the lies they tell

A fact check on HUD’s “News Release” Wednesday 11/7/07

Today Alfonso Jackson, Secretary of HUD, borrowed a few pages from Interagency Council on Homelessness Executive Director Phil Mangano as he released a HUD report claiming an 11.5% decrease in the numbers of chronically homeless people from 175,914 in 2005 to 155,623 in 2006. He claimed 20,000 people moved into transitional and permanent housing between 2005 and 2006. This is directly attributed to HUD and local continuums of care creating more supportive housing units and, “breaking the vicious cycle of homelessness for those who have lived on the streets as a way of life,” as well as better data collection. He further claims HUD awarded “$286 million to 1,100 programs that house and serve individuals experiencing chronic homelessness… creating 4,000 new units of permanent supportive housing.” (You might be tempted to ask how 20,000 people fit into 4,000 units but wait we’ll get to that.) He also claimed that since 2001 the Bushies, “have awarded $9 billion to support thousands of local housing and service programs throughout the nation and is seeking a record $1.6 billion… for FY 2008.” He says this is a 41% increase compared to 2001. He then refers to the, “comprehensive shelter and street point in time snapshots,” as a, “powerful tool to gauge the progress in meeting the homeless challenge and creating innovative housing solutions in response.” He then repeated the mantra of, “754,000 persons homeless on any given night.” Note that the last two sentences are the only ones that say “homeless” with the chronic label in front of it.

So, now a little fact checking:
HUD’s mission statement says they are, “the nation’s housing agency”..”… creating affordable housing opportunities for low-income Americans.” So let’s start there.
We’ll use the 2001 timeline that is referenced in the press release since that is when Bush took office:

1. Since 2001 HUD has spent $0 dollars on the development of new public housing units while 100,000 units of public housing were lost to demolition, sale or other removal between 1996 and 2006.
2. While many readers will think that this report means that homelessness has decreased by 12%, in reality HUD is only talking about people considered “chronically” homeless—a subpopulation the Department estimates to comprise 10% of the entire homeless population—meaning that we’re really talking about a 1.2-2.7% change.
3. While HUD maintains that 754,000 people total are homeless on any given day the Department of Education documents that 904,000 children alone attend public school everyday that do not have housing. While HUD’s number is based on a point-in-time count, wherein volunteers scramble to count all the people they see and think might be homeless, the DOE’s number comes from actual documentation of names and Social Security numbers. When HUD’s numbers are so far off, an apparent decrease of 1-3% means more or less jack.
4. 22 of the continua of care that applied for funding from HUD this year got no assistance whatsoever, meaning that all new chronic homelessness programs came at the expense of these communities.
5. No amount of data shuffling and reprioritizing of the homeless populations will ever change the fact that we need to restore the $52 billion a year we were spending on affordable housing before HUD become so damn proud of how great it was doing in ending chronic homelessness. We didn’t have any such thing as chronic homelessness…we had housing.

The Canadians Have Caught On

I've found a new hero in Canadian "street nurse" Cathy Crowe. This longtime health professional and homeless advocate worries that Philip Mangano has been spending too much time in Canada spreading the gospel of Housing First for the "chronic homeless" and public/private partnerships such as Project Connect.

Crowe totally has Mangano's number. Which doesn't mean Canadian politicians and human service bureaucrats won't be just as enamored of the corporate-friendly Ten Year Plan strategy to end homelessness as their technocratic brethren to the South. It just means that Canada still has homeless advocates who are willing to question the government.

And if our government isn't questionable, I don't know whose is.

Crowe describes Mangano's Canadian Ten Year Plan road show as promoting a punitive approach to homelessness that is hostile to emergency services and focused on victim-blaming approaches that offer cosmetic change while doing nothing to address root causes of homelessness.

Michael Shapcott and I had a chance to hear Mr Mangano in Calgary earlier in May. He really is a remarkable speaker — you could almost say evangelical — preaching the issues of health, economics and the social evils of homelessness. The trouble is that the American approach is obviously not working. It's a game of smoke and mirrors. So why on earth are our municipal and national leaders looking to the United States for solutions on homelessness?

As Michael Shapcott explains: "So, what's wrong with this picture? While Mangano has been piling up frequent flier points visiting every part of the US to convince state and local governments that they need to take up the responsibility for a "housing first" policy for the homeless, his political boss — President Bush — has been gutting the US federal government's funding for housing. This year alone, there are massive cuts to seniors' supportive housing and disabled housing funding. The US federal housing program for people with AIDS will help about 67,000 people this year — yet an estimated 500,000 people living with HIV / AIDS desperately need housing help.

The problem is so bad that even the rather staid Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University has proclaimed in its latest annual State of the Nation's Housing that affordable housing and homelessness have reached their worst levels ever, and funding cuts by the federal government are the chief culprit.

Crowe points out that homeless people in cities across America are under attack from law enforcement approaches that target sitting and sleeping in public, feeding people, using parks, panhandling, and other public activities to create an urban environment that is hostile to the visible poor, and says that Canada is beginning to catch America's cold.

In Canada it's the same thing. We are witnessing an almost fetishized emphasis on research, including street counts and investigations into panhandlers' needs, new by-laws against panhandling and by-laws restricting where homeless people can sleep, reduction of funding to programs that do outreach to people who are homeless, and a withdrawal of funding for emergency day and night shelters. Toronto alone has lost over 300 shelter beds just this past winter and it continues to rely on its Streets to Homes program as an answer to visible street homelessness. There are many reports that people who are housed through this program suffer greatly from hunger and isolation and remain at great risk of becoming or do become homeless again.

As we struggle to come to grips with homeless policy in America and break the USICH's growing hegemony over the issue of homelessness, maybe we need to keep a better eye on Canada. They're certainly looking out for us.

Boden plugs the WRAP Without Housing Report

Paul Boden came to Seattle to make fun of the Phil Mangano Rock & Roll Tour and call bullshit on federal housing policy. (2:08 Mins). Download the report.

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.