Homeless Aid Quick to Pass, Slow to Arrive

In New York City, employment official Mary C. Quigley hopes new federal funds will help her expand a program that has placed 460 homeless men in private-sector jobs in the last year.

Andy Raubeson, executive director of SRO Housing Corp. in downtown Los Angeles, could use expanded federal housing aid to refurbish additional rooms in the city’s Skid Row hotels.

And in Milwaukee, Tom Hickey hopes for additional money to deliver medical care to men and women sleeping in the city’s parks and under its bridges.

They had better not plan on such spending very soon, however. Even for the country’s hundreds of thousands of homeless--whose plight Congress has identified as an urgent national emergency--the federal government is a machine not built for speed.

Congress is agreed that increased federal spending for the homeless is a top priority. But most of the money will not begin to flow for months, and next winter will probably come and go with at least some of the new funds still unspent as the bureaucratic process unfolds.

Amounts to Be Resolved

To begin with, the House and Senate have approved somewhat different versions of legislation providing more money to aid the homeless--$500 million in the House bill, $423 million in the Senate version. When Congress returns this week from its Easter recess, both houses will put at the top of the agenda the resolution of the differences and sending a final bill to President Reagan.

After that, Congress must enact separate legislation to appropriate the money. The federal agencies in charge of the programs will have to draft regulations governing them, and the public must have time to comment on the rules. Only then may localities apply for grants, and more time will be consumed as the federal agencies decide which applications to accept.

All these steps, said Beryl Radin, a professor of public administration at USC’s Washington Public Affairs Center, are “legitimate accountability measures.” But, she added, “when you put it all together, it looks crazy.”

Consider the lesson of recent months. Congress appropriated $70 million in October for emergency food and shelter. Then, alarmed that many of the homeless had died in cold winter weather, it voted another $45 million in January.

At that point, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which supervises the food and shelter program, had only just begun turning any of October’s appropriation over to the United Way, which operates the program nationally. For the previous three months, said the Rev. Eugene Boutilier of United Way in Los Angeles, the program “was shut down.”

Funds Finally Spent

Now, one month into spring, the last of October’s $70 million is being spent. January’s $45-million appropriation has not yet been touched.

And the food and shelter program, which would receive another $35 million under the pending House-passed bill, is widely praised for its relative speed and lack of bureaucratic complications.

Fate of Funds Cited

More typical was the fate of another $5 million included in last October’s money bill for Housing and Urban Development grants for “transitional housing” designed to get people out of shelters and headed toward independent living.

To date, however, HUD has not issued the regulations necessary to allow it to spend any of the money.

At the end of March, James W. Stimpson, a deputy assistant HUD secretary for policy development, told a congressional hearing that his department expected to finish writing regulations “shortly.” Stimpson said he hoped the first transition housing projects would open by December--14 months after the legislation creating the program was signed into law.

Make a Difference

“It’s frustrating,” said David Christiansen, who runs the Harbor Interfaith Shelter and a small transitional housing program in San Pedro. Transitional housing, he said, is the way to “make a real difference in the lives of the people you’re serving.”

Congress apparently agrees. Despite the delays in spending the initial $5 million, legislation now pending would authorize additional millions--$30 million in the House version, $60 million in the Senate--for this program.

Delays in getting aid to the homeless are aggravated by a lack of agreement on such fundamental questions as who the homeless are, why their numbers appear to be increasing and how they should be helped. Not only do the disagreements slow the process of passing legislation, but they also complicate the task faced by federal agencies that must decide what their programs should accomplish.

Reagan Administration officials have told congressional committees that homelessness is a problem best dealt with locally, without a costly national effort. “Just because there is a problem doesn’t mean the federal tax dollar is the one that should solve it,” said Carole T. Crawford, the White House budget aide who oversees federal homeless aid programs.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, which supports the Administration on the issue, argues that most homeless people are former mental patients, not “otherwise typical Americans who have suffered massive economic catastrophe.”

Unemployment Cited

But advocates for the homeless insist that their increasing numbers result from unemployment and a lack of affordable housing--stemming in part from national policies. “The federal government has bailed out of housing,” said Raubeson of SRO Housing. “It needs to get back in.”

Raubeson is a national leader in the effort to increase and rehabilitate the stock of hotels, rooming houses and other buildings that provide low-cost “single-room occupancy” dwellings. Once scorned by government policy-makers as unfit habitations, SROs have increasingly won favor as city officials have looked for relatively inexpensive housing for the homeless.

Currently, limited amounts of money from the federal government’s chief housing program, known as Section 8, are available to renovate SRO buildings. The Senate-passed bill for the first time would set aside a specific amount of Section 8 funds--$35 million--for SRO rehabilitation.

Under Section 8 as it works today, landlords bring their buildings up to standards for “decent, safe and sanitary” housing and rent them to low-income tenants. Tenants pay 30% of their income toward rent, and federal funds make up the difference between that amount and fair market rent.

The federal subsidies, which are guaranteed for 10 years, provide landlords a strong incentive to repair SRO housing, says Raubeson, whose organization has fixed up and runs 930 units in Los Angeles’ downtown Skid Row area. The $35 million in the Senate bill, he notes, would be enough to rehabilitate only 1,000 rooms nationwide and subsidize their rents for 10 years. Although the potential demand for cheap housing is far greater, he said that “1,000 is exactly 1,000 more than zero.”

Rent Vouchers Proposed

Zero is what the Administration would prefer. Opposing the Section 8 program as cumbersome and expensive, it has proposed instead to give low-income tenants rent vouchers and allow them to seek housing in the existing market.

Critics say that approach would add nothing to the stock of housing for poor people. The long-running argument has impeded any kind of action on behalf of low-income renters.

Although Administration officials have fewer philosophical objections to the job-training and health programs that would be getting more money under the pending homeless bills, they argue that existing federal programs are sufficient.

Advocates for the homeless insist that the other sources of federal money are already stretched too thin. Several cities, they say, want to start job training programs like New York’s but lack the funds to do so.

The federally assisted New York program, which began last spring at the 215-bed Harlem Men’s Shelter in Manhattan, provides shelter residents with job placement referrals, training, work clothes and $7 a day for lunch and subway fare.

Homeless Found Skilled

“The homeless men definitely turned out to be employable, men with skills, a lot more skills than we thought,” said Quigley, New York’s assistant employment commissioner. The city is starting a similar pilot program at a women’s shelter in Manhattan, and the Senate homeless bill would provide another $10 million for such programs.

Similarly, supporters of the legislation say new federal funds for health care--the House bill would provide $75 million, the Senate version $35 million--would allow programs to begin beyond the 19 cities that currently share $27 million in four-year grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Memorial Trust.

Milwaukee’s program, one of the 19, employs five full-time social workers, five part-time doctors and six part-time nurses who visit the city’s soup kitchens and shelters and travel in a medical van seeking out homeless people who need medical help.

“The city just does not have the money” to pay for the entire program on its own, said Hickey, and he hopes federal funds will become available before the foundation grant runs out. In the meantime, he said, “you have to keep every door open. For now, I’m scrambling.”