Census <i> Deja Vu</i> : Homelessness Still the Nation’s Most Visible Problem

There have been a few success stories among the homeless in the 10 years or so since Americans first recognized that, besides discharged mental patients and vagrants addicted to alcohol and other drugs, thousands of their fellow citizens were living on the streets because of economic circumstances beyond their control.

Jack’s story, in many ways, is typical--except that it has a happy ending.

Unable to find work in the Midwest where he grew up, Jack heard about jobs in Colorado. On the way there, his old car broke down and he finished the trip by hitchhiking. Finally, he was dropped off at the bus station in Denver.

“I had $2 and some change in my pocket. I was in a position in my life that I’d never been in before: I had no idea what to do,” said Jack, who wouldn’t give his last name because he doesn’t want fellow workers to know about his past.

“I prayed that night, I’ll tell you,” he recalled. Then, in a lottery for limited space, he won a bed--and a new start--in a shelter called Samaritan House.

The shelter’s employment program helped steer him into temporary work moving furniture while he looked for a job with a future. Samaritan House helped him save money, too, through budget counseling and by allowing him to stay on after he began earning money.

These days, Jack has his own apartment. He is shopping for furniture. He is a manager at a fast-food restaurant. Now, Kathy Rembert at Samaritan House said, “he calls me when he has openings.”

At the same time, there have been setbacks, even tragedies. Last November in Boston, a war veteran got off the streets and into a nursing home--after his frostbitten hands and feet had to be amputated.

The problem of homelessness is visible on the streets of every major city and hidden in the country in shacks without heat or plumbing. It persists after billions of dollars have been spent on shelters and emergency aid, after polls have shown that Americans want an urgent response from the government.

President Bush has called homelessness a national tragedy.

After years in which advocates for the homeless accused the government of indifference, the Bush Administration has pressed for full financing of programs under the Stewart B. McKinney Act, the main homeless-aid effort, which Congress passed in 1987, and has proposed other ways of reaching out to homeless mental patients, alcoholics and other addicts.

Those projects are part of a program called Home Ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE). Bush’s budget proposal for the coming year includes about $1.2 billion for this program, nearly $250 million of it earmarked for the “hard-to-serve” homeless. The rest would be used mainly for low-income housing.

The federal homeless program would provide for up to five years of rent subsidies for people in communities that match the assistance with rehabilitative services.

“The Administration is committed to ending homelessness,” said Anna Kondratas, assistant secretary of housing and urban development, “and we’re going to be prepared to do what it takes to get the homeless into permanent housing and to get them the kind of services they need to stay in that housing.”

Some homeless advocates are less than impressed.

“It’s a turn-around of extremely modest proportions” from the policies of the Ronald Reagan Administration, said Maria Foscarinis, who heads the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington.

The low-income housing portion of Bush’s proposal, she said, is “extremely small . . . when you consider all the cuts that have been made over the past few years.”

Critics say that reductions in federal appropriations for low-income housing in the 1980s contributed to homelessness, although HUD officials say that spending merely was shifted from new construction to rent subsidies.

Also mentioned as a contributing factors are the loss of formerly low-rent, rooming house-type apartments to “gentrification,” the release of thousands of mental patients from state institutions and “economic dislocation” due to massive unemployment forcing people to move in search of work.

The recent census of the shelters and streets was intended to improve the accuracy of estimates of the homeless population, currently put at between 250,000 and 3 million.

A U.S. Conference of Mayors survey last year found that demand for shelter space had risen 25% within one year; those involved in shelter projects say that trend is continuing.

“Seems like it’s a never-ending thing,” said Joe Flaherty, whose shelter in Little Rock, Ark., directed 254 residents to full-time jobs last year and 211 the year before. His shelter is expanding.

Evan Doss, who oversees a shelter in Port Gibson, Miss., spoke of rural homelessness: “We have people in abandoned cars and abandoned shacks . . . living without electricity, without heat, without plumbing.”

Since 1987, McKinney Act funds and other federal appropriations for the homeless have amounted to more than $1.78 billion, according to HUD statistics. Spending by states, communities and private donors have added millions to that total.

Still, said Fred Griesbach, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York, basic issues remain unaddressed.

Seemingly large allocations such as the HOPE project need to be seen in perspective, he said.

“People look at $250 million and say that’s a lot of money,” he said, but not when compared to the what is being spent on savings-and-loan failures. “They’re willing to put billions and billions to bail out the S&Ls;, because that was a ‘crisis.’ Homelessness is not perceived as a crisis.”

The Bush Administration’s response, Griesbach said, has been “a thousand points of hype.”

Although public sympathy for the homeless has been high, as indicated by polls, there are signs of frustration that after years of work and billions of dollars spent, homeless people still can be seen every day on street corners.

Minneapolis, Tulsa, Okla., and other cities have passed ordinances regulating panhandling. Merchants in Atlanta, Philadelphia and other cities have complained. In New York, a man was charged with manslaughter in the death of a beggar he said attacked him and his young son.

“Do I see a backlash in the country? Yeah,” said Ken Smith, who runs a shelter for homeless veterans in Boston. “Why? Because I think (public is) becoming aggravated by the fact that they can’t walk a city block without being asked for money.”