Alliance of Cities, Private Sector : Innovative, Experimental Programs Aid Homeless

During a visit to Los Angeles last year, Hope Gleicher looked out of her downtown hotel window to a plaza below and was appalled by the sight of so many homeless people aimlessly milling about or sleeping in cardboard boxes. “I couldn’t forget that picture,” Gleicher said. “The problem was on a greater scale than anything I’d ever seen, even in New York City.”

And she believes other cities have found better ways to respond to the problem than Los Angeles’ recent attempt to sweep the homeless out of Skid Row and relocate them in a “tent city” near the Los Angeles River.

“These are not healthy solutions,” said Gleicher, a specialist in problems of the homeless. “Today, there are scores of innovative, experimental programs springing up for the homeless all over the country, and that’s what people should really be paying attention to.”

Across the nation, from San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin neighborhood to blue-collar communities in New Jersey, local government officials and community leaders have launched myriad programs to aid the growing number of men, women and children flooding their shelters and food lines. Gleicher directs one of them herself--a medical clinic for homeless men and women in downtown Baltimore.

These programs--including several in the Los Angeles area--vary from emergency shelters and food banks to health clinics for the mentally ill who wander the streets of American cities because of a breakdown in the nation’s health care system. Most of the new programs are run without a penny of federal aid and reflect a growing alliance between local government, the private sector and political activists.

Sponsors say many of these ventures have begun to show encouraging results.

Major Shortcomings

But even their staunchest supporters acknowledge two major shortcomings:

--Many are piecemeal approaches, not comprehensive solutions. They deal with only one or two kinds of victims, leaving others without help.

--The money that keeps the new programs alive, usually a hodgepodge of foundation grants, private contributions and city revenues, is temporary and short-term. It will run out and the programs will wither if long-term funding arrangements are not made.

Encouraged as they are by the determination and innovative spirit of many cities and towns, most experts in the problems of the homeless say only the federal government can provide the secure financing and comprehensive strategies that are indispensable for long-term progress on the problem.

“If Congress doesn’t face up to its responsibility soon on this issue, the future of these homeless programs will be very, very bleak,” said Maria Foscarinis, the Washington counsel for the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Currently, a House-Senate conference committee has agreed on a bill to authorize as much as $442.7 million through next year for the homeless. However, the real legislative battle will be over the amount actually appropriated. The House supports $425 million and the Senate only $327.5 million.

No Well-Defined Strategy

“We don’t have a well-defined national strategy that addresses all the underlying causes of homelessness, which is certainly the most extreme manifestation of poverty,” Foscarinis said. “In the absence of that, local governments have pretty much been on their own.”

The results have been mixed.

Some programs have sparked stiff community opposition. For example Seattle, on the theory that local government might not be able to stop the homeless from drinking but could at least put a roof over their heads, is planning to open a “wet shelter” where alcoholics can drink.

Other ideas have died aborning. A San Francisco architect offered last April to house the homeless in portable, inexpensive plywood structures, but city officials rejected the idea after a leading activist dismissed it as “doghouses for the poor.”

By and large, however, the homeless programs sprouting across America have received strong community support--especially in cities hard-hit by the problem.

Need for Shelter, Food

“We’re trying to deal with solutions for each group,” said Bill Stafford, assistant to the mayor of Seattle. “They have different requirements and needs. People who want to be on the street need shelter and survival food. The person who is mentally ill requires a different solution. The family who is there temporarily because of the loss of a job is completely different from the situation of the battered wife or the person who is an alcoholic.”

Some communities have attempted to prevent homelessness before it occurs. In 1983, the New Jersey Legislature passed a law providing up to $1,000 in cash assistance to workers who had been laid off and were facing imminent eviction from their homes.

“Like most Americans, these people were just one paycheck away from homelessness, from hitting the streets,” said Assemblyman David Schwartz, who proposed the $8-million program. “It seemed a hell of a lot cheaper to pay for someone’s rent and tide them over until they get back on their feet, than to pay thousands for someone to go into a shelter, maybe split up their family and put them on welfare.”

15,000 People Helped

Schwartz said the renters’ assistance program helped more than 15,000 people stay in their homes during its first year and is believed to have saved New Jersey cities thousands of dollars they would otherwise have spent on shelters, food and public assistance.

Other communities, faced with a growing number of homeless people in downtown areas, have pumped funds into the renovation of Skid Row hotels in hopes of preserving them as a source of cheap housing, however temporary.

In 1985, for example, the New York City Red Cross leased a 92-unit hotel in mid-town Manhattan and opened it to homeless families headed by women with children under 8. Caseworkers and other social service specialists have offices in the hotel and can reach out to their clientele on a daily basis.

Freeze on Hotel Rents

Some cities, including Portland and Los Angeles, have encouraged nonprofit organizations to take over these so-called Single Room Occupancy hotels and bring them up to code. Last week, the Los Angeles City Council passed a rent freeze on the hotels to keep prices down for the area’s estimated 10,000 to 15,000 homeless. The council also approved a ban on demolition of SRO hotels pending a review of its policies on Skid Row.

Housing, however, is not the only goal of programs for the homeless. Several cities have addressed the health needs of homeless men and women, many of whom suffer from some form of mental illness and are often unwilling to seek appropriate medical care.

Gleicher’s “Health Care for the Homeless” project in Baltimore has united business leaders, local government officials and community activists in an effort to reach thousands of homeless men and women who traditionally have not received first-class medical treatment.

Health-Care Grants

Baltimore, which was one of 18 cities to receive special health-care grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Pew Memorial Trust, opened full-time health clinics at its men’s and women’s homeless shelters in 1985. Since then, the organization has raised an additional $150,000 from private sources to rehabilitate a downtown building, and plans to open a new, centralized health clinic by Aug. 1.

The group’s $670,000-a-year health-care program provides a variety of services to an estimated 11,610 patients a year, including medical checkups, psychiatric counseling and gynecological exams. Before the clinics opened, many of their present clients had not received any kind of medical assistance for years, usually because they feared hospitalization or were not aware of the services available to them.

“None of this would have happened if we hadn’t been able to bring together the private sector with local government in a big way,” Gleicher said. “There’s been a strong sense of community, of local responsibility in the funding of this clinic.”

New Funds Sought

The clinic’s grant runs out next year, and Gleicher said the group is actively seeking new funds from state and local governments as well as Baltimore’s corporate community.

“But without some long-term federal assistance, I don’t know what would happen,” she said. “We may have to close.”

Elsewhere, some communities have relied heavily on the private sector to help train the homeless and find jobs for them. Denver is a case in point.

US West, one of the seven regional telephone companies created by the breakup of American Telephone & Telegraph Co., is joining with several social services groups to open a job training center for the homeless next year. The center will offer training classes, storefront space for future businesses to be run by the trainees and a temporary job placement agency for the homeless.

Donated a Building

US West launched the project last year by donating a 90,000-square-foot building worth $450,000 and has pledged an additional $395,000 to the venture, said Jane Prancan, director of community affairs. Several social services organizations will eventually set up shop in the building, she added, and local shelters have indicated they will be referring 40 to 60 homeless people to the center each month when it begins full operations.

“We think this is truly a communitywide effort to do something about the homeless problem,” said Prancan. “We’re documenting what we’ve done very carefully, because other cities might use it as a model.”

The private sector has been drawn into the homeless problem in other communities as well--but somewhat less willingly. After some bruising negotiations, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington recently persuaded developers of a luxury 880-unit high-rise to pay at least $14 million into a new city fund to construct low-income housing.

The deal also required the developers to join with a private agency to attempt to develop a 100-plus-unit hotel for the homeless. In exchange for their “contribution,” which may have been less than voluntary, the developers will get a $180-million, 40-year, low-interest loan from the city.

Strapped for Funds

Other cities, finding themselves strapped for funds, have relied heavily on the work of citizen volunteers to run programs for the homeless. Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston, S.C., said his community has been helped by the Interfaith Crisis Ministry, a public-private partnership that began running a shelter three years ago with volunteers.

“Each religious group in our community has one night a month” to man the shelter, he said. “My church, for example, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, has the first Tuesday of the month. Three of us go down at 8 o’clock and open it. Our people cook food and all that.”

Three years ago, the shelter accommodated 30 people each night, and the figure has since tripled, he said. Despite the strong volunteer effort, which includes running the food kitchen, Riley said, the city still has responsibility for administrative expenses and is worried about the high cost of running the center.

“The administrative costs of running something like this, even with its extraordinary volunteer involvement, is high,” he said. “We’re becoming increasingly concerned about the annual budget.”

Causes of Homelessness

Amid the profusion of programs offering medical aid, food and temporary shelter, a handful of cities have tried to grapple with the underlying causes of homelessness.

The disappearance of low-cost housing seems to be an irreversible trend in many American cities, but several communities are trying to build for the future.

In Seattle, voters last year approved an additional $50-million levy on their property tax bills to construct more than 1,000 low-income units. The heavily favorable vote was “extraordinary . . . a demonstration that people here recognize the problem and want to solve it,” said Joan Walters, who coordinates the city’s homeless programs.

Efforts to Expand

The new housing revenues will help Seattle create housing for special categories of the homeless, including alcoholics and the mentally ill, she added. Meanwhile, the city continues efforts to expand shelter space and renovate hotels that cater to the homeless.

Martha Dilts, executive director of the city’s Emergency Housing Service, said the $50-million levy was “crucially important because the federal government has been moving away from providing low-cost housing, and it was really up to us. It shows that people here are willing to put their own resources on the line.”

Other communities have experimented with allowing homeless people to aid each other. In San Francisco, city officials praised the work of the Tenderloin Self-Help Center, a 24-hour storefront that offers informal psychiatric counseling services to people who wander in off the street.

Although the clinic includes medical professionals, many of the people working in the center were themselves once homeless. The program, which consumes $500,000 a year in city and state funds, is designed for “a special class of people that traditional mental health care programs can’t reach,” said Steve La Plante, the mayor’s homeless coordinator.

“It’s for those homeless men and women who have some form of minor or serious mental illness but just won’t take part in a traditional mental health system,” he said. “They have extensive counseling sessions, rooms where they can go off one-on-one with people and try to help folks help themselves, just like in prison self-help programs.”

Cutback in Services

Despite the program’s apparent success, city budget cuts are expected to curtail the center’s 24-hour services soon and reduce the program’s staff. Tenderloin residents have angrily protested the cutbacks, saying the self-help center is one of the few city services on which they can rely.

Limited Resources

“It’s the same all over the country,” said Bob Prentice, who directs San Francisco’s medically indigent adult program. “Local governments have limited financial resources, and these innovative programs for the homeless are truly threatened.”

At present, the federal government provides aid to the homeless primarily through the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which has distributed $365 million since 1983 for use by local shelters and food banks across the nation. At the same time, the Reagan Administration has slashed funding for construction of rent-subsidized low-income housing units from 200,000 in 1981 to 25,000 this year.

For this and other reasons, more than 30% of the demand for space in emergency shelters is not being met, according to a survey of 31 major American cities this year by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. And the percentage of communities that fail to meet the need will grow in the next 10 years.

“What a terrible irony,” Prentice added. “The cities didn’t create the nationwide problems that led to so many homeless people, like unemployment and the disappearance of low-cost housing. But now they’ve got to face it on their own. It hardly seems fair.”

Contributing to this story were staff writers David Treadwell in Nashville, John J. Goldman in New York and Larry Green in Chicago; and researchers Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Lorna Nones in Miami, Eileen V. Quigley in New York and Leslie Eringaard in Detroit.