Book Reexamines Roots of Homelessness : Public Policy: Alice Baum and Donald Burnes contend that the problem isn’t poverty, but drugs, alcohol and mental illness. They accuse advocates for street people of enabling them to die.
There isn’t much street life here. In fact, where Alice Baum and Donald Burnes live, there isn’t even much of a street--just a long dirt driveway off a curving hilltop road.
Trees. Blue sky. Chain saws.
It seems an incongruous setting for rethinking America’s homeless problem, but that is what Baum and Burnes, self-described poverty warriors and policy analysts, have been doing the last few years. The missives they have sent from this little slice of Eden have landed like so many cherry bombs in the middle of the nation’s debate over homelessness:
* The homeless aren’t like you or me.
* Housing isn’t the problem--drugs and alcohol and insanity are.
* Some of the very people trying to help the homeless are unwittingly enabling them to die.
None of these points are necessarily new. In fact, aside from the psycho-speak (“enabling”), they sound very much like the arguments made by some conservatives for years. Liberals even have a phrase for it: blaming the victim.
But Baum and Burnes say they aren’t conservatives--they’re old-fashioned liberals and homeless advocates who reached their tough conclusions only after working with the homeless day in and day out in a church-run program in Washington, an hour-and-a-half drive southeast of their home.
And they say they aren’t blaming the victims, only trying to help them in a way that makes sense.
“There is no doubt that in New York, Washington and other major urban areas, there is a severe shortage of affordable housing. No question about that,” Burnes said in a summation of the couple’s argument. “Our perspective is that in many cases, in fact in most cases, simply providing an affordable housing unit for a homeless family or individual isn’t going to work.”
What will work? In a word, treatment.
The question arises: So what? Who cares what they think?
But people do. Their book, “A Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness,” was published earlier this year and since has become “something of an underground sensation among professionals in the field of homeless services,” according to one review in a public policy newsletter.
Baum and Burnes are earnest, graying, chain-smoking policy junkies who have spent their careers working on civil rights, poverty and education issues in and out of government.
These days, they spend much of their time on the lecture and interview circuit. Their ideas seem to have hit at just the right time, when many middle-class urbanites are reaching the limit of their tolerance toward homeless panhandlers and derelicts.
And the couple have buttressed their argument with an impressive bulwark of statistics.
They argue that about 40% of homeless adults have a serious alcohol problem, nearly half suffer from drug disorders, and at least one-third suffer from severe psychiatric disorders.
Altogether, Baum and Burnes argue, between 65% and 85% of the homeless suffer from alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness or some combination of the three.
“What we say,” Baum said, “is that we want to make a very clear distinction between poverty and homelessness. Homelessness really is a condition of being disaffiliated--separated from all the normal helping systems of society: family, friends, networks, church, community.
“And we believe that disaffiliation happens . . . when you have untreated alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. We talk about stigma, the role that stigma plays. We stigmatize people who act funny, and they withdraw from us because they don’t want to be the recipients of the stigma. And so they are alienated. Those are the people who live on the streets and in shelters.”
The Baum and Burnes message has met a mixed response from people who study homelessness, or who devote themselves to the cause of the homeless.
Andrew Cuomo, son of the New York governor and a leading architect of the Clinton Administration’s budding homeless policy, has praised their book, which he called “required reading.”
Martha Burt, a homeless analyst with the Urban Institute in Washington, said Baum and Burnes offer a valid solution--to a flawed diagnosis. The authors are wrong about the percentage of “chronic, disabled homeless,” she said, but right about the need to treat them.
Treatment, she said, “might solve the street problem, but it will not solve the overall problem of homelessness.” For that, Burt said, the answer is jobs.
By far the most vitriolic response to “A Nation in Denial” came from Joel Blau, a professor of social policy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
In a review of their book, Blau accused Baum and Burnes of “tunnel vision,” of taking statistics out of context and using them as “a loaded gun that can be easily turned against poor people.” He drew the conclusion that they are “as much cultural as political conservatives.”
Baum and Burnes say this isn’t true. “We think this is a very progressive argument to get people who have no financial resources the kind of treatment that a caring society provides,” Baum said. “We are permitting mentally ill people who have brain disorders to die on the streets. That’s not a compassionate, humane society. We believe (ours) are progressive ideas.”
Progressive, conservative--whatever they are, they seem to have found an audience.
They are in demand by civic groups seeking to deal with “aggressive panhandling,” one of the more obnoxious manifestations of homelessness. And a recent cover story in New York magazine by Pete Hamill, a reporter with undeniably liberal credentials, took its cue from Baum and Burnes, arguing that the people trying to cure homelessness “have been trying to solve the wrong problem.”
“This is not a housing problem,” Hamill wrote. “It is a health problem.” He proposed establishing “homeless sanctuaries” in shuttered military bases that would treat and educate the homeless. Some people, he acknowledged, would call them concentration camps.
For Baum and Burnes, who perk up their lives in these bucolic hills with frequent trips to inner-city Washington, all the attention is flattering and exciting. Their next project, they say, will be a book on an even more sweeping problem: poverty.
Meanwhile, their message may be filtering down.
On New York subway trains these days, homeless panhandlers are likely to preface their remarks by insisting that they don’t drink or take drugs. “I don’t have a substance problem,” one man in slacks and a soiled sport shirt said recently. “I lost my job and now I’m on the streets. This could happen to anyone, ladies and gentlemen. This could happen to anyone.”
