Homeless Get Help--and Houses

Taxpayers around the nation own tens of thousands of houses that are standing empty. At the same time, tens of thousands of American families with nowhere to live fill shelters and sleep on the streets.

Now the homeless and some of the publicly owned vacant housing are being brought together in a project that is housing families from the Minnesota cold, in a clandestine effort to renovate a Chicago apartment, and in New York City’s restoration of entire tumbledown blocks.

Activists, encouraged, are pressing housing officials to do more, and a major decision could come from a federal court Monday. They say the government is skirting a law that already pledges available space to those who have no homes.

“I think thousands of buildings could and should be usable,” said Robert Hayes, counsel to the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York, a city that owns, mostly through tax default, 5,000 empty apartment buildings and has about 60,000 homeless people.

One of the abandoned buildings was on Leggett Street in a sorry corner of the South Bronx, an area notorious for urban decay.

One of the homeless people was Susan Thomas. She was placed in a shabby welfare hotel in Manhattan a few years ago with her two sons, then 6 months and 2 1/2 years old, after she and their father separated and she ended up on the street.

“I used to cry ‘cause I didn’t want to be there,” she said. The hotel room was burglarized and drug dealing and fear were all around.

After 18 months, she boarded a city van for Leggett Street to see an apartment in a building that had been restored.

“I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” Thomas, 24, told a reporter visiting her tidy, bright two-bedroom apartment. Her boys played across a room that was still mostly bare of furnishings. It was her day off from her job in a nearby store.

Her building, where the tiled foyer smelled of cleaning fluid, had been a ruin not long before. Another Bronx building still is, but not for much longer. Five buildings that occupy a whole block are being converted into 220 apartments for families like hers.

Vince Campisi, construction supervisor, out-growled the demolition equipment as he described getting started: “You literally couldn’t get in for the junkies. . . . Crack? Vials by the garbage-pailful!”

Leading a reporter on a tour, Campisi crunched up rubble-strewn steps to the remains of--what, a parlor? The ceiling was burned through to the sky. A green upholstered sofa was upended in a corner. The windows let in the drizzle. “No air conditioning needed,” he deadpanned.

Still, he and others said, fixing up buildings that landlords have abandoned is often cheaper than new construction in a place like New York. The demo-and-rehab job Campisi is overseeing will cost the city $15 million. How much would comparable new buildings cost? “Maybe $50 million,” he said.

Halfway across the continent, in Minnesota, the vacant, publicly owned houses being readied for the homeless look different.

In Duluth, a three-bedroom ranch house seized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development when its owners failed to make the payments on a federally backed mortgage is being prepared for a family that has been living on the streets.

“We’re offering properties that are in good condition,” said Patricia Mack of the HUD office in Minneapolis, which hopes by next spring to offer 15 houses rent-free to nonprofit housing services.

Such efforts have strong public support, according to a survey taken earlier this year by the National Housing Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Orange, N. J. The poll-takers contacted 1,000 adults by telephone.

Eight in 10 of those called said they favored rehabilitating old and vacant buildings for homeless Americans, whose numbers are estimated at 450,000 by the government and at 3 million by housing-advocacy groups. About 60% said they would willingly pay an extra $120 a year in taxes to expand housing efforts.

“The need for permanent housing cannot be met,” the National Coalition for the Homeless said in a September report, without increasing federal spending on low-income housing. The figure was $7.5 billion this year, down 77% from $32.2 billion in 1981.

Beyond dollar allocations, however, an “enormous pool of unused (federal) property,” in the words of U. S. District Judge Oliver Gasch in Washington, is not being considered for use of the homeless, although a year-old federal law requires that surplus government property be made available to such people.

Gasch made that observation two months ago as he issued a preliminary injunction to stop HUD, the Veterans Administration and three other agencies from disposing of federal properties covered by the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987.

Few Properties Named

Maria Foscarinis, a lawyer representing the National Coalition in the suit, said “it seemed very peculiar” that agencies all over the nation, when pressed to identify unused or under-used government property, could find only 12 parcels and have turned over only four of them to groups trying to help the homeless.

“There are literally tens of thousands of pieces of property across the country. We can’t be watchdogs on every one. That’s why we need an aggressive order,” she said. The group hopes to win a permanent injunction from Gasch in a hearing scheduled for Monday.

“The winter is hard upon us,” the judge said in a Nov. 18 hearing on a request for an updated, complete accounting of under-used federal properties. “What the court is fundamentally interested in . . . is to make some housing available for these people.”

He added: “I know bureaucrats. . . . The thing you’ve got to do with bureaucrats is crack the whip and see to it that they do the job.”

Although thousands of houses the federal government owns through default on mortgages it guaranteed are not covered by the McKinney law, the advocates sought in a separate lawsuit to prohibit their sales until they can be considered for use for the homeless. Gasch turned this down, and an appeal is pending.

In fiscal 1988, HUD sold 80,164 foreclosed houses at an average price of $38,000.

Resales Recoup Losses

Currently, HUD holds more than 45,000 properties, according to department spokesman Rod Hiduskey, who noted that the revenue from such sales goes mainly to a fund that repays the lenders HUD guaranteed against loss.

HUD officials say that fund would be bankrupt by 1990 if sales of foreclosed houses were stopped.

There are federal programs that discount houses for agencies such as Mack’s in Minnesota and the agency’s Urban Homesteading Program. Hiduskey said that 200 federally owned houses have been sold at 10% below market value as part of another program for the homeless.

The advocates say it is not enough.

“Homes have been disposed of with agency coffers in mind, and not national housing goals,” the National Coalition for the Homeless said in its report. “By and large, programs to divert parts of the inventory to aid the homeless are unpromoted and unused.”

As a result, some relief advocates have become militant.

Michael Marubio of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless said his group is secretly rehabilitating an abandoned HUD-owned apartment and will turn it over to a homeless family.

A ‘Housewarming Party’

“Later on, we’ll have a housewarming party and we’ll ask HUD officials and anyone else who wants to come,” he said.

The federal government is not the only public landlord with vacancies, however.

According to Associated Press research, perhaps 60,000 empty or nearly empty dwellings may be in local government hands because of tax delinquencies.

Besides New York City’s empty and under-occupied buildings, there are 6,500 of them in Philadelphia, 3,000 in Detroit, 1,600 in Washington, D. C., and hundreds of others in Boston, Denver, Miami and other cities, housing officials say.

In Cook County, Ill., 41,000 residential properties have been declared tax delinquent for more than 5 years, according to Barbara Grau of the Chicago Rehab Network, a coalition of nonprofit developers in the Chicago area.

“If America put its mind to it,” Marubio said, “we could house the homeless.”

In the last 3 years, the Boston Public Facilities Department has turned 12 of 100 abandoned buildings into shelters for the homeless.

Philadelphia Plan

The purchase of 50 houses from the Veterans Administration is part of a $3.1-million Philadelphia plan to come up with 490 permanent dwellings for the homeless.

In New York City, “by 1993, every vacant, city-owned building that can be rebuilt will be renovated already or in a program to rebuild,” Catie Marshall of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development said.

In 1986, Mayor Edward I. Koch announced a 10-year housing plan with a price tag of more than $5 billion. That plan, meant to produce housing also for low-income and middle-income people, should be redrawn and directed more toward housing the homeless, Andrew Scherer, lawyer for the Housing Justice Campaign in its suit against Koch, said.

Even so, rehabilitating old buildings instead of putting up new ones “economically . . . makes sense,” Scherer said.

If those displaced by high rents and other factors are to be saved from the streets, he said: “The vacant, abandoned stock that the city has taken title to is the key.”