At the ‘Tipping Point’

On a visit to Los Angeles last week, a former peace-and-love-era band manager now working for President Bush announced that the administration was setting aside $70 million to move substance-abusing and chronic mentally ill people off the streets and into more hopeful lives. Applause is in order.

Reliable facts about how many Americans hole up each night in front of shops, next to freeway overpasses and in shelters are hard to come by. But the Bush administration acknowledges that this population is probably at its highest in at least a decade.

It’s no surprise that people get cynical seeing these legions grow despite a steady increase over the last decade in federal money to help them. Americans would be wrong, however, to conclude that the problem is intractable. And some of the cynicism would fade if more people could see the hopeful glint in the eyes of Philip Mangano as he speaks of meeting the president’s aim to “end chronic homelessness” in this decade.

Mangano, who once managed Buffalo Springfield and Peter, Paul and Mary, runs the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the federal crew responsible for deciding how taxpayer money should be spent on state and county efforts to help people find long-term shelter.

Unfortunately, two rigid views still monopolize the debate. One insists that only ending poverty will solve the problem of people sleeping on sidewalks; the other argues that sweeping these “vagrants” into jail would do the trick. Mangano could bridge the divide.

The gap is particularly wide in Los Angeles, where city leaders such as Councilwoman Jan Perry are dusting off anti- vagrancy ordinances and running headlong into advocates who, in fighting for society’s most vulnerable, often seem to be defending a “right” to defecate on sidewalks.

Mangano found Los Angeles’ skid row a “disgrace.” He wants to use the new grants, as well as billions more in annual Medicaid money, to coax, cajole, prod and perhaps even embarrass leaders until they stop shunting the underlying problems aside.

One of his models is Philadelphia, which five years ago passed a “sidewalk behavior ordinance” that criminalized street living but also required the city to respond to vagrancy promptly and humanely -- not by arresting people but by sending out a “rapid response team” of police and social workers trained to nudge people into shelters and treatment programs. Philadelphians can call an 800 number to rouse the teams. They usually show up within 20 minutes and have reduced the number of indigents in Philadelphia’s Center City from 850 to below 300. Only three people have been sent to jail.

Mangano’s optimism is fueled, in part, by his belief that the crisis of people living on the streets is at a “tipping point,” the moment when a problem becomes so huge that modest improvements can trigger massive change. How could anyone in Los Angeles doubt that the moment is now?