Homeless, Homeless on the Range

  

Homeless, Homeless on the Range

An Urban Melody Laced with Urban Myths

I live in Los Angeles, the homeless capital of the United States. With a climate that makes winter tolerable, sheer size that makes multiple locations that can accommodate homelessness viable, and a number of foundations and charities dedicated to solutions for this sad toxicity, it is a city where homeless encampments are the new normal. Exacerbated by some of the highest rents in the country, homelessness is a severe reflection of income inequality, harsh local community reactions in a blue city and a history of uneven and failed housing experiments aimed at combatting the issue. Yet California governors and mayors have declared a war on homelessness.

We’ve been here before, perhaps not so pervasively. The march to subsidized housing exploded in the 1960s. Across the country, tax benefits were implemented to help incentivize building low-income housing. It was a big policy change. Federal legislation produced funds from the private sector toward then-President Lyndon Johnson’s vision labeled the “Great Society.” In 1968, after several major race riots, Congress reacted to LBJ’s call. Johnson called his proposed legislation “the most farsighted, the most comprehensive, the most massive housing program in all American history.” The statute was the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968. When Johnson signed that law, its goal was breathtaking: to replace within ten years every slum dwelling in the country by building six million homes for low- and moderate-income families.

When the law was passed, its impact was monumental. According to Alexander von Hoffman, a Senior Research Fellow and a Lecturer in the Urban Planning and Design department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, writing for Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (10/8/20014), “The great accomplishment of the 1968 act was to shift housing policy toward programs that used the private sector, not government, to create and run low-income housing. Until the law was passed, public housing was the nation’s principal social-welfare program. The public housing program dated from the 1930s and, as a creation of the New Deal, used government agencies to develop, own, and manage apartments that were rented to low-income people. In the 1960s, few federal programs used private developers to provide social housing, and those that did had produced only small numbers of dwelling units.”

Across urban America, these new apartment complexes went up, often generating additional local housing subsidies for impoverished residents. Most generated the unappetizing epithet, “the projects.” Some worked. Some became hotbeds for gangs and drug activity. But for many living in increasingly gentrified cities, they were home. The private sector investment was hardly altruistic. In many cases, the builders who were restricted from altering the low-income aspect of their subsidized endeavors, understood that after half a century (assumed to be the useful life of the apartment buildings they built), those restrictions would expire; builders would simply succeed to the buildings and land. That time occurred within the last several years.

Poverty expanded rapidly during the pandemic, but even after that, with income inequality reaching unparalleled heights, the homeless issue exploded. The problem has eluded government solution. Homeless encampments were never welcome. They lowered property values, crime rates often rose, the stench of human beings without access to bathrooms… even running water… only emphasized the problem. The mythology that almost all of these people were either mentally ill, drug addicts or alcoholics chafed at popular sympathies. Unfriendly cops, under order from frustrated majors, often swept through these camps, destroying everything in their path. But even turning abandoned buildings and unused hotel and motel rooms didn’t seem to make a dent. But a little ray of hope appeared… in San Francisco.

LA Times writer (December 25th) Doug Smith, outlined an experiment on 100 homeless individuals mounted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work: “If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?... The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.

“Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered… ‘I felt there was enough interest and the initial findings were compelling enough that it was important to get those results out,’ said Benjamin Henwood, director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at the Dworak-Peck School, who led the study… ‘It may not be earth-shattering that providing money is going to help meet basic needs, but I do think it dispels this myth that people will use money for illicit purposes,’ Henwood said. ‘We weren’t finding that in the study.’.. About 2% of the total went to alcohol, cigarettes and drug expenses — the largest portion of which was cigarettes, Henwood said. The program expanded…

“The study arose from Miracle Messages, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that sends volunteers to the streets and shelters to befriend homeless people and try to make connections with the loved ones who had lost contact with them. Next founder and chief executive Kevin F. Adler started Miracle Friends, matching homeless people to volunteer phone buddies for weekly calls.

“Adler didn’t think the volunteers should hand out their own money. But the idea of cash support appealed to him… After a pilot showed promise, Adler got a grant to expand to Los Angeles. He hired two recruiters to canvass homeless shelters. They enlisted more than 200 clients who met the criteria of being at least 18 years old and homeless and expressed interest in having a phone buddy… Rather than just give money away, Adler hoped to document its effect. He teamed up with Henwood, who devised the controlled study. The participants were divided randomly into two groups. One group of 103 received stipends. The others were told they were on a waiting list.

“After six months, only 12% of those who received funds reported being unsheltered at any time in the prior month, a dramatic decrease from 30% at the outset. Those on the waiting list also reported fewer unsheltered episodes, but by a much smaller margin, from 28% to 23%... The cash recipients also said they were better able to meet their basic needs. On a scale of 1 (completely) to 5 (not at all), they dropped from about 3.75 on average to just over 3.25. The control group did not budge from 3.75.” The results were positive but not earthshaking. They did dispel many myths about homelessness and suggested some solutions that are, on average, less expensive than many of the failed programs that addressed the issue. It’s time for some new ideas and big changes.

I’m Peter Dekom, and homelessness is as much an expression of societal failures and a political system that often simply demonizes the victims rather than addresses real solutions.