A Lack of Street Savvy

At a congressional hearing this month, legislators used Los Angeles’ skid row -- by far the nation’s largest concentration of homeless people -- as a starting point for discussing how to “end homelessness.”

It was an apt example. Thousands of homeless people congregate in downtown L.A., many of them suffering from chronic mental illnesses that make them all but impossible to employ. No government response to the problem has made much of a dent over the long term. Which is why members of the House Financial Services Committee, who are discussing homelessness funding as part of the effort to iron out the nation’s fiscal 2005 budget, might have gotten better ideas by actually visiting the place instead of just talking about it.

Neither of the two sweeping “solutions” to the “homeless problem” now before Congress is going to improve matters on skid row. We can quickly dispatch the first one -- a bill to “Bring America Home” through various impractical feats of liberal social engineering, such as creating a “universal living wage” -- because the bill is going nowhere in the GOP-dominated Congress.

President Bush, meanwhile, proposes to spend $70 million on a newly created Samaritan Initiative that would provide generous counseling, job training and other social services, but only to a small subsection of the homeless: people with chronic mental illnesses who have been homeless for at least one year or have experienced four episodes of homelessness over three years. The proposal is as stingy as the Bring America Home Act is impractical.

The initiative needlessly casts aside growing homeless populations, such as families with children, and offers help only to people whose lives have already spiraled out of control. Worse, the Bush administration is proposing the initiative in the same year it is calling for a $1.6-billion cut in Section 8 housing vouchers, which keep many low-income people off the street. Congress should reject the plan. The Samaritan Initiative would, by the administration’s own figures, serve at most a few hundred people in L.A. County, which regional officials say would not begin to compensate for the 5,336 housing vouchers lost if the Section 8 cuts go through.

Both the Bring America Home Act and the Samaritan Initiative suffer from a case of street naivete. They appear to have been written by people who, in their abstract quest to create the perfect social program, have forgotten the good that can come from improving the imperfect programs that are already up and running.