Point/Counterpoint
The federal government’s current fixation on local 10 Year Plans to End Chronic Homelessness — with HUD’s McKinney homeless assistance dollars — has many homeless people, service providers and housing developers shaking their heads in dismay. There’s one thing these plans have done that many of us have waited years to hear: the federal government is giving lip service to "ending homelessness."
Hey, it’s a start and a long way from where we started 20 years ago!
The trick now is to go from talking, meeting, planning and writing plans to end "chronic" homelessness to actually funding the housing, healthcare, education and employment programs ALL poor people need to avoid or escape homelessness. This is where the head-shaking comes in.
The Bush administration has invested millions and millions of tax dollars over the past six years going from town to town and state to state rallying business and government "leaders" and getting them to spend thousands of their own local dollars to write plans to end "chronic" homelessness in 10 years; meanwhile, a 25-year trend of defunding the very federal programs that local communities so desperately need to end homelessness continues.
McKinney homeless assistance funding is a miniscule allocation of approximately $1.4 billion this year; compare that to the $52 billion a year (in 2004 dollars) reduction in funding for affordable housing programs since 1979, and the word "miniscule" makes sense.
Before the re-emergence in 1983 of massive contemporary homelessness in the US, poor people in local communities faced many of the same obstacles homeless people face today, but they did have one thing they don’t have today: housing. Not always the best housing, certainly — often not very nice housing — but they had housing nonetheless.
When the federal government’s role in supporting housing opportunities was changed in Reagan’s reinvention of government, large numbers of people who were living in the not-very-nice housing found themselves with no housing at all. They became "the homeless," and 25 years later the Bush administration has chosen to focus on a subsection of "the homeless" that they call "chronic." From poor to homeless to chronically homeless, who will they want us to write plans on next? The left-handed blue-eyed homeless?
What happened to our humanity in addressing poverty? Homeless people are just that, people; they’re not "the homeless." They’re people just like anybody reading this. They love, they learn, they get pissed off, they have good days and they have some really, really bad days as well. They are people living their lives day by day. The only difference is that they live their lives without housing.
With all the silly studies that HUD loves to praise people like Dennis Culhane or Phil Mangano for, isn’t it ironic that HUD never praises people who study HUD? But they sure study the hell out of poor people without housing, they study social service programs, and every other week come up with a new "business-based best practices program." They especially love to study Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) to best "track and count the homeless," so long as "the homeless" being counted aren’t the 914,000 kids without housing in our Public School system.
With more than 480 5-year local Continuum of Care plans initiated by the Clinton administration and more than 300 (and growing) 10-Year Plans initiated by the Bush administration, it’s long past time for HUD to stop studying us and take a good long hard look in the mirror.
We’ll even save them the money of doing another study. Here are the facts:
The list goes on and on, and goes back to 1979. Emergency shelters opened throughout the country in 1982 and 1983, and by the time the Stewart B. McKinney Act passed in 1987, they were a pretty well-established part of local communities, as they are still today. Before Congressman McKinney passed away — and a reluctant President Reagan signed his bill — the McKinney Act was originally called the "Urgent Relief for the Homeless Act." Urgent relief from policy decisions created under the premises that the market would "take care of itself," and that government’s role is to subsidize the market rather then subsidizing places for poor people to live. The market would take care of them.
Before the Great Depression we were told that the market would take care of itself, but the rest of us have to take care of ourselves. After the crash, we — as a nation — put in place systemic safety nets for the poorest among us so that they wouldn’t fall when the market failed.
Homelessness is not an intractable human experience. It is not created by dysfunctional individuals. Homelessness is the result of dysfunctional social policy and funding priorities. When the federal government was investing in housing through HUD and USDA housing and community development programs, we didn’t need the urgent relief of McKinney homeless assistance funding. We had housing.
