Sheltering the Vulnerable

The 1999 death of a mentally ill street wanderer made news again last week when an independent audit concluded that Kevin Evans died because sheriff’s deputies went overboard in restraining him in Los Angeles County’s Twin Towers jail. Evans, a 33-year-old African American who also suffered from cerebral palsy, had cycled between the county jails, where he repeatedly landed on nuisance changes, and the streets of Lancaster, where he lived when homeless shelters turned him out. His story is a particularly shameful example of a woefully neglected urban problem: the lack of housing for the nation’s mentally ill indigents.

The core federal program for providing mentally ill people with places to live and social support is called Shelter Plus Care. A House subcommittee earlier this year decided not to renew a penny of its $100 million in annual funding. If the decision holds, it will guarantee more Kevin Evans cases, more shame for local officials.

Some Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration have said the program’s cost-effectiveness is unproven. That’s simply not true. A five-year study released earlier this year by the University of Pennsylvania found that providing housing and treatment cost taxpayers only “slightly more than leaving [the people served] to fend for themselves.”

Shelter Plus Care helps the chronically mentally ill find housing, requiring them to pay 30% of any income in rent and providing the rest. It also works with other federal programs created by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 to provide job training, peer counseling and other supportive services. These programs, managed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cost the government $1.2 billion a year.

Earlier this year, HUD Secretary Mel Martinez said he would refocus the agency on its “core mission: the development of housing” and move supportive services out of HUD and over to Health and Human Services. That idea sounds sensible. But Health and Human Services staffers say the agency is already overstretched in dealing with the ailing public health system and the new bioterrorist threat. Besides, the McKinney Act was meant to unite, not scatter, homeless services. The Bush administration did seek $100 million to renew Shelter Plus Care in 2002, but Martinez has yet to publicly pressure House leaders to restore the money in the final bill. He should.

This moment, when the world is watching to see what the United States really stands for, is not the time to send even more of our most vulnerable citizens off to live on the streets.