The Death of a Homeless Woman

What is it that turns an event into a paradigm? The California example of the moment is the Polly Klaas case; the kidnap-murder became a public torch of rage against revolving-door justice. What magnified the horror was that a home, a sanctuary, was invaded in the night and a child was taken from that normally secure spot. In Washington, D.C., the less familiar name of Yetta Adams and her far more anonymous death are prompting another kind of soul-searching.

Adams, 43, had no home. She succumbed on a cold night, sitting upright at a bus stop. But as in the Klaas case, the location had portent--it was across the street from the offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And to his great credit, HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, far from avoiding the symbolism, seized on Adams’ complicated life and sad death to generate a discussion of homelessness. He released funds for a District of Columbia program aimed at getting people off the street and made a point of attending Adams’ funeral.

But he also recognized the complication of the issue, reminding us that money alone can’t make the mentally ill well or the alcoholics and drug addicts clean and sober. Adams herself wasn’t broke when she died--she was carrying $300. And she had family willing to help, plus a social worker who pleaded with her to stay at a shelter. She was apparently far from mentally stable, however.

Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio, wrote in the Washington Post: “Yetta Adams’ death is not an indictment of her fellow Americans; it is an indictment of a system that evolved haphazardly to treat the symptom of homelessness and failed to address its underlying causes.” How utterly to the point.

A substantial portion of homelessness is economic--the cure is jobs and affordable housing. But various studies have shown that about one-third of the homeless are mentally ill. This stems from a well-meaning movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s to “liberate” the inhabitants of state mental institutions (some of which were, admittedly, horrors). The halfway houses and medical and social service support that might have enabled the mentally ill to regather the string of their lives never materialized. In that case, both state and federal governments dropped the ball. Courts and society have also done away with “drunk tanks” where publicly intoxicated people were confined.

So Cisneros is right in refusing to name villains. He’s equally right in saying we must approach the problem differently, more coherently: “If we are truly to help these people, we must address the problems that have rendered them homeless . . . to encourage and enable homeless people, as much as possible, to take responsibility for their own destinies.” HUD has earmarked $20 million to try some of these new approaches in Washington. The government’s job, as Cisneros sees so clearly, is to help point in the right direction.