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Create more community-based health clinics. The homeless crisis began when overcrowded mental hospitals started to release patients who were not considered dangerous to themselves or others. The number of mental patients in U.S. institutions dropped from a peak of 560,000 to 143,000 today, and an estimated 30% to 40% of the homeless are mentally impaired. The release program was intended to lead to more small facilities, where the poor could receive affordable outpatient care. Yet 70% of the $6 billion spent each year on state-run mental health programs still goes to institutions. A greater proportion must go to promoting neighborhood clinics and group homes. What is more, the operators of these clinics must reach out aggressively to get people off the streets, especially in cold weather. They must trek to the parks, bus depots and other places where the homeless congregate to persuade them of the need for health care.
Once more, Washington does not have to bear this burden by itself. The National Academy of Sciences report cites the Zacchaeus Medical Clinic in Washington as a superb example of an inner-city health center that has been funded exclusively by church and community groups and individual donors.
Raise the minimum wage. The best way to help the working homeless is to pay them better: the national minimum wage has stayed at $3.35 an hour since 1981, while the cost of living has risen by a third. Modest financial help is already coming from some states. California raised its minimum wage to $4.25 an hour in July. Other states provide more direct assistance: New Jersey has prevented 12,000 families from being evicted over the past four years by providing loans and grants to help pay rents and mortgages.
Clearly, alleviating homelessness is going to cost U.S. taxpayers money. It is up to the next President and to the American people to decide how high a priority housing of the dispossessed deserves. In considering the cost, the President should keep in mind that the $7.5 billion the Federal Government will spend for low-cost housing this year is meager compared with the nation's biggest housing subsidy: more than $30 billion in a mortgage-interest tax deduction goes to 58.5 million private homeowners, including the very wealthy.