The Real Face Of Homelessness

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
Priced out of the Columbus, Ohio housing market, Phenom Cochran looks for shelter

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Three weeks after Bush named Mel Martinez his HUD Secretary, Baker landed a meeting with him. She sold him Culhane's research, arguing that with just 200,000 apartments, the Administration could end chronic homelessness in 10 years. The meeting went so well that the plan became Bush's official stance on homelessness: the 2003 budget has four paragraphs promising to end chronic homelessness in a decade.

Bush reinstated last spring the office of homeless czar, a position that had been dormant for six years, tapping Mangano to be head of the Interagency Council on Homelessness. He is liked by members of both parties and fits Bush's theme of faith-based compassion. A former rock manager who represented members of Buffalo Springfield and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mangano says his life changed in 1972 when he saw Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a movie about the life of St. Francis. For Mangano, who calls himself a homeless abolitionist, ending chronic homeless is a moral call. "Is there any manifestation of homelessness more tragic or more visible than chronic homelessness experienced by those who are suffering from mental illness, addiction or physical disability?" he asks.

Building permanent housing for the chronically ill is in fact a long-standing Democratic initiative. In 1990 New York Governor Mario Cuomo began building "supportive housing" projects with attached mental-health services; there are now more than 60,000 such units across the country, funded by a combination of government and private organizations. While the buildings are not licensed like mental hospitals, nurses, social workers and psychologists keep office hours. In midtown Manhattan's Prince George Hotel, which has a ballroom, a restored lobby and salon, former street dwellers bake cookies, use the computer lab and take Pilates and yoga classes. Director Nancy Porcaro says the surroundings give the homeless enough help and pride to better themselves. "People do rise to the occasion, despite what the mainstream may think. They want more," she says.

That's the compassionate part. Here's the conservative side: Bush isn't spending any money on this. While HUD already spends 30% of its homeless dollars on permanent housing, all the Administration has added so far for its new push is $35 million, scraped together from within the existing budgets of three departments. To give a sense of how much that means in Washington budgetary terms, $35 million is equal to the money set aside to help keep insects from crossing the border. Although last month HUD touted the $1.1 billion in the budget for homeless services as the largest amount of homeless assistance in history, it's about the same as the amount set aside before Newt Gingrich's Congress made major cuts. And the Administration, more quietly, also announced a 30% cut in operating funds for public housing last week.

Congressman Barney Frank, ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee (which oversees government housing agencies), is not kind about the Bush Administration's intentions. "They are just lying when they say they have a housing program," he says. And of the additional $35 million pledged to end chronic homelessness, Frank says, "it's not only peanuts; it's taking the peanuts from one dish and putting them in another." In fact, in October the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that, if it becomes law, will cut $938 million from the President's budget for rental vouchers, one of the government's main methods of paying to house the homeless.

The old-school Democrats are also upset at the philosophy behind Bush's plan, which they argue is more interested in getting the homeless out of view than in solving their problems. "The largest-growing sector is actually women and children," says Donald Whitehead, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, the oldest and largest advocacy group on this issue. "A true strategy needs to include the entire population."

Andrew Cuomo, founder of HELP USA, a national, nonprofit shelter provider, says the Administration is merely redefining the issue so as to appear to be doing something. "What makes you say that a guy who has been on the street for five years and is a heroin addict is any more needy than a woman who is being beaten nightly in front of her children?" he asks. For his part, Senator John Kerry, a Democrat running for President, has proposed legislation that would add 1.5 million units of affordable housing to address the fact that America's population has grown 11% in the past decade while rental stock has shrunk. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which lobbies for government housing, for the fourth year in a row there isn't a single jurisdiction in the U.S., with the exception of places in Puerto Rico, where a person working full time for minimum wage can afford to rent a one-bedroom home at fair-market value.