The Real Face Of Homelessness

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Even as the problem worsens, there's little appetite in Washington for the large-scale solutions the Democrats have been advocating for 40 years: creating affordable housing and strengthening programs that attack the causes of poverty by finding people jobs, teaching them skills, giving them transportation to jobs, getting them off drugs, providing medical care--essentially trying to fix entire lives. Some homeless experts are beginning to wonder whether building shelters only exaggerates the numbers: they argue that poor people who wouldn't otherwise be homeless are attracted to shelters as a way of quickly tapping into government assistance. "It didn't take long for people to figure out that this was a way to scam the system," admits Andrew Cuomo, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Bill Clinton. Given all this failure and disgust, Republicans could deal with this problem however they wanted.

The first G.O.P. member to pick up on this was Susan Baker, who had the ability to get the White House's attention because she's the wife of James Baker, chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State to Bush's father and, more important, the guy who ran W.'s election-after-the-election campaign in Florida. Baker is co-chairwoman of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a cause in which she became interested in the early '80s, when she got involved in organizing D.C. food banks.

Baker read a 1998 study by University of Pennsylvania professor of social work Dennis Culhane that suggested that the most efficient solution to homelessness was to provide permanent housing to the "chronic homeless"--those helpless cases, usually the mentally ill, substance abusers or very sick--who will probably be homeless for life. The study found the chronic homeless make temporary shelters their long-term home; they take up 50% of the beds each year, even though they make up 10% of the homeless population. Culhane's idea appeals to conservatives: it has had proved results in 20-year-old projects across the country; it gets the really hard-to-look-at people off the street; and it saves money, because administrative costs make it more expensive to put up people at a shelter than to give them their own apartment (sheltering a homeless person on a cot in a New York City shelter, for example, costs on average $1,800 a month). It's similar to the problem faced by hospitals, where the uninsured use ambulances and emergency rooms as a very expensive version of primary care. Culhane's finding is also attractive in its simple if unspoken logic: because the mentally ill were put out into the street after the public discovered the abuses in mental hospitals and J.F.K. passed the 1963 Community Health Center Act, which deinstitutionalized 430,000 people, the plan really amounts to building much nicer, voluntary mental hospitals.

Three weeks after Bush named Mel Martinez his HUD Secretary, Baker landed a meeting with him. She sold him Culhane's research, arguing that with just 200,000 apartments, the Administration could end chronic homelessness in 10 years. The meeting went so well that the plan became Bush's official stance on homelessness: the 2003 budget has four paragraphs promising to end chronic homelessness in a decade.