PERSPECTIVE ON HOMELESSNESS : Really Cheap Housing on the Bottom Rung : A cubicle with a lock beats the street or the predatory open spaces of many shelters. And exchanging work for a room is better than panhandling.
Homelessness in the United States has at least tripled since 1980. Yet reversing this trend would not be as hard as most politicians pretend, so long as we concentrate on getting the homeless off the street.
The causes of increased homelessness are many.
During the 1970s, we stopped putting the homeless mentally ill in hospitals; that alone put about 100,000 people with serious mental problems on the streets by the end of the 1980s. We also tried to curb out-of-wedlock births by letting welfare benefits lag behind inflation, with a predictable result: By the end of the 1980s, roughly 50,000 single mothers and their children were living in shelters on an average night. But the biggest reason for increased homelessness is declining demand for unskilled workers. Their situation has deteriorated since the 1960s. It got much worse in the early 1980s and did not improve when the economy recovered. Millions of unskilled adults can no longer find a steady job that pays enough to support a family. Whenever that happens, some of the losers reject the work ethic and take to drink or drugs. Some also begin to support themselves by theft rather than work.
Recent studies in New York and Philadelphia found that 3% of the population used shelters at some time between 1988 and 1992. The Clinton Administration recently concluded that about 7 million Americans had been homeless at some time between 1985 and 1990. Most were homeless for short periods, so the nightly count averaged “only” 350,000 to 600,000. But homelessness is now an integral part of American poverty.
The only known long-term cure for these problems is to make the rewards of work more equal. But America is not moving in that direction. Union protection for unskilled workers has all but disappeared, Congress has let the purchasing power of the minimum wage fall and free trade is forcing many manufacturers to cut real wages or move overseas.
So how can we help the homeless? The Clinton Administration plans to ask Congress for another $900 million to help cities like Los Angeles rehouse the homeless. That should help. But the Administration wants cities to spend a lot of this money on therapeutic programs for the mentally ill and the chemically addicted homeless. This would make sense if successful treatment usually led to economic self-sufficiency. But unskilled workers now have trouble earning enough to live on even when they are sane and sober. As a result, relapse rates are high.
In today’s economy, we need more modest goals.
For most Americans, the top priority is to clear the streets. The police cannot do this alone, because they have nowhere else to send the homeless. So we have to give the homeless alternatives.
During the 1950s, the poorest of the poor often lived in skid-row flophouses, where they could rent a windowless 5-by-6-foot cubicle for as little as 50 cents a night (about $2 in today’s money). These were awful places, but almost everyone preferred them to the free shelters run by evangelists. A cubicle of one’s own was a refuge from strangers, a place to leave one’s possessions and was accessible 24 hours a day. Nor did flophouses try to improve their residents’ character.
As incomes rose, the old flophouses lost patrons and were torn down. Most cities also adopted building codes barring new ones. At the time, no one asked what would happen if extreme poverty began to spread again. When that happened, cities had nowhere to send the destitute. So they hoped the problem would prove temporary and tried to herd the homeless into shelters.
Shelters have two big defects. To begin with, big shelters where lots of people share a single room can never take everyone off the street at night. If shelters admit all comers, as they do in New York, predatory criminals will target the weak and the mentally deranged will often make sleeping impossible. As a result, a large fraction of the homeless will stay on the streets. Recognizing this, most private shelters exclude people who have caused trouble in the past or who are hallucinating, drunk or high on drugs. But that policy also leaves nearly half the homeless on the streets.
The second problem with shelters is that they seldom reduce daytime homelessness, which is what most worries the public. Almost all shelters evict residents during the day, hoping they will look for jobs. Lacking work, most have to spend the day in public places, where their presence upsets everyone else.
If we want to clear the streets, we have to offer everyone some private space of their own, like the old cubicle hotels. And if we want public support, we also have to ask the able-bodied homeless to do some work in return.
The simplest and cheapest solution would be to organize a day-labor market under public auspices. Anyone could show up early in the morning. If no private employer wanted to hire them, they would be entitled to four hours of public employment. In return, they would get vouchers for a cubicle and three cheap meals, plus a few dollars in cash.
Paying mainly with vouchers rather than with cash would keep jobless adults in conventional housing from swamping the system. Vouchers would also assure skeptical taxpayers that their money was not going for drugs or alcohol.
Such a system is no substitute for good jobs at decent pay, but it is something we could afford to do right now. Because we can, we should.
