Not Gone, but Forgotten?

This is not to say that government has turned its back on the problem. The Clinton Administration has spent $5 million on the homeless over the past six years--triple what was spent from 1987 to 1993. Most of the funding has gone into "continuum of care" programs that provide temporary housing and a range of services, from mental-illness treatment to job training. The approach has had some success in getting the chronically homeless on their feet, but it unsettles some advocates, who believe that the key to ending homelessness is still to boost the supply of affordable housing. In New York, 80% of homeless families who have been provided with subsidized apartments have remained intact, out of shelters and off the streets, regardless of their other problems. "No matter what is true about the homeless," says Mary Ann Gleason, executive director of the National Coalition of the Homeless, "they all have a lack of housing." That sounds like a return to the "housing, housing, housing" mantra that liberals sang in the '80s. Getting Americans to take the idea seriously again might require the return of liberalism itself.