The Devil Wears Brooks Brothers

There was a time when I could self-induce a near stroke simply by Googling Philip Mangano, the Bush appointee who heads the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. I knew Phil in a former life when I was active in Boston. For awhile he was the Cambridge Shelter Commissioner. That was a sweet gig. No one really knew what he did, but he was great at it.

He also ran the Boston shelter providers trade association for awhile, which was not to be confused with the advocacy coalition that actually did things for poor people. This was the coalition that did things for service providers.

Phil was widely regarded as an oleaginous chameleon in a nice suit.

So when he got reinvented as the Bush administration's maverick crusader to end homelessness, it sort of made sense.

He and I had dinner together about five years ago, back when he was still new and I was still sort of giving him the benefit of the doubt. He had this stagey "down with the people" routine that I found really annoying, and would affect instant intimacy with anyone who was homeless as he asked for their story and felt their pain.

I guess he still does that.

He had all the elements of his rap down even then. There was the "Massachusetts Abolitionist" line. "Republicans ended slavery and they'll end homelessness too." I did my best to try to pin him down on whether he was a D or an R but he wasn't talking.

There was also the evangelical belief in the power of data and in Housing First, although back then he was still promising that the feds would offer resources. He's pretty much backed off of that one. He was also saying that federal housing policy should focus on those under thirty percent of median income. He doesn't say that anymore either.

When I asked how you could end homelessness without addressing deepening poverty or widening inequality, he said that affluence and poverty were unconnected.

I wonder if most Republicans think that? How convenient.

So, I'm a Phil watcher. It's astonishing to me that this guy can walk into a room full of homeless advocates anywhere in the United States and not get lynched. I used to go nearly apoplectic over his press.

Now I just think it's kind of funny.

Take this article, for instance, Abolitionist Apostle, where he was awarded Governing.com's 2006 public official of the year award. He compares himself to Saint Francis of Assisi. Phil Fucking Mangano, the guy who hobnobs with the powerful, is known for his finely tailored suits, always flies first class, and takes limos instead of cabs.

This article, like many, discusses how Phil's work is a "spiritual calling."

When I really want to torture myself, I read his Religion & Ethics interview, in which he utters the words "I think it simply reminds us that ultimately the issue of homelessness is a spiritual issue. It's not really an ideological issue, it's not a political issue, it's not an economic issue," and again refers to his "Franciscan nature." But if you're really looking to be entertained, skip to the part where he talks about Simone Weil. "She is a patron saint of mine, I would say. When I read her words, it's pretty much sacramental to me."

Another story from New Orleans captures his big vision, no substance style nicely.

"Those same voices have been around for a long time," he says, his voice rising as he heads toward a big point. Those same voices told Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that slavery wouldn't end and that women couldn't be equal, he says. They told Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn that the Iron Curtain would never fall, told Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu that apartheid would never end.

"They were wrong then -- and they're wrong now," Mangano says.

Nice. The day he can reconcile his boss' constant attacks on the poor end 'ending homelessness" will be the day he can invoke Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu without making me want to puke.

But no search is complete until you've seen the Philip Mangano Quote Page.

Here's one that you're better off not over-thinking: “We've been bailing the leaky boat of homelessness ... only to see more people fall in.”

Metaphor isn't one of his gifts.

Another of his favorite lines is that “The very definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” He stole this from Albert Einstein, but it's a good one.

The feds take $52 billion in federal housing dollars away and replace that with $1.5 billion in money for homeless programs, and then wonder why homelessness isn't going away. I'll bet Einstein could figure that one out, even if Phil can't.

Collaborating With The Enemy

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act, the landmark 1987 legislation that set the template for the federal response to homelessness. Twenty years ago, this legislation was the movement against homelessness’ biggest victory ever, but what should have been a beginning became an end in itself. McKinney-Vento has become a deal with the devil, and not an especially good one.

The past thirty years has seen a relentless assault upon the poor. Name a program that serves low-income people — Social Security Insurance, Medicaid, Community Development Block Grants — and you’ll see a history of steady attrition.

While the centerpiece of the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness is “Housing First,” federal funding for housing has been cut by $52 billion since 1979. Between 1996 and 2005, 100,000 public housing units have been lost. There has been no new funding for public housing since 1996. The federal strategy of devolving the responsibility for housing to the localities is seldom questioned.

For all our talk of "ending homelessness," advocates have grown appallingly complacent. We have settled for McKinney-Vento, an insider’s game designed to divide and conquer that has never exceeded $1.5 billion in annual funding. We win a battle here and there while the war on the poor rages on unchecked.

One routinely hears our "political realists" lament that the feds are simply out of the housing game and it's up to us locally to solve homelessness. Homeless and poor people deserve better than a self-defeating advocacy that decides the limits of the possible before even trying.

Our own Patty Murray chairs the Senate Housing committee, and is in a tremendously powerful position to influence federal policy. Murray should be the target of a grassroots national campaign to up the federal ante. And yet, she is not.

Homeless advocates (and I am tempted to put the phrase in quotation marks) have allowed the terms of the debate to be set by the representatives of the Bush administration. Does anyone really believe that the US Interagency Council on Homelessness is some sort of fifth column burrowing from within? That their agenda is somehow at odds with everything else that Bush does?

The struggle to end homelessness and poverty should be housing and wage led, and should link to the struggles of kids, the elderly, immigrants, people of color, working people, and prisoners. Homelessness is about economic insecurity, and almost everyone can relate to that.

But that's not what we're talking about, is it?

An end to homelessness will not be found in better data, more specialization, and an obsession with the personal dysfunctions of the poor. These priorities might be where the federal funding is, but they do not lead to economic justice or greater equality.

$52 billion lost in public housing funding. Steady cuts to other programs that serve the poor. And $1.5 billion gained in McKinney-Vento. This is the definition of winning the battle but losing the war.

Let's take that analogy a little further.

In war, collaboration with the enemy is a capital offense. But this, apparently, isn't a war at all. It's a cozy little Hyatt-Regency tea party of the well-paid and comfortable. And we don't just collaborate with the enemy. We invite him to keynote our conferences.

The Canadians Have Caught On

I've found a new hero in Canadian "street nurse" Cathy Crowe. This longtime health professional and homeless advocate worries that Philip Mangano has been spending too much time in Canada spreading the gospel of Housing First for the "chronic homeless" and public/private partnerships such as Project Connect.

Crowe totally has Mangano's number. Which doesn't mean Canadian politicians and human service bureaucrats won't be just as enamored of the corporate-friendly Ten Year Plan strategy to end homelessness as their technocratic brethren to the South. It just means that Canada still has homeless advocates who are willing to question the government.

And if our government isn't questionable, I don't know whose is.

Crowe describes Mangano's Canadian Ten Year Plan road show as promoting a punitive approach to homelessness that is hostile to emergency services and focused on victim-blaming approaches that offer cosmetic change while doing nothing to address root causes of homelessness.

Michael Shapcott and I had a chance to hear Mr Mangano in Calgary earlier in May. He really is a remarkable speaker — you could almost say evangelical — preaching the issues of health, economics and the social evils of homelessness. The trouble is that the American approach is obviously not working. It's a game of smoke and mirrors. So why on earth are our municipal and national leaders looking to the United States for solutions on homelessness?

As Michael Shapcott explains: "So, what's wrong with this picture? While Mangano has been piling up frequent flier points visiting every part of the US to convince state and local governments that they need to take up the responsibility for a "housing first" policy for the homeless, his political boss — President Bush — has been gutting the US federal government's funding for housing. This year alone, there are massive cuts to seniors' supportive housing and disabled housing funding. The US federal housing program for people with AIDS will help about 67,000 people this year — yet an estimated 500,000 people living with HIV / AIDS desperately need housing help.

The problem is so bad that even the rather staid Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University has proclaimed in its latest annual State of the Nation's Housing that affordable housing and homelessness have reached their worst levels ever, and funding cuts by the federal government are the chief culprit.

Crowe points out that homeless people in cities across America are under attack from law enforcement approaches that target sitting and sleeping in public, feeding people, using parks, panhandling, and other public activities to create an urban environment that is hostile to the visible poor, and says that Canada is beginning to catch America's cold.

In Canada it's the same thing. We are witnessing an almost fetishized emphasis on research, including street counts and investigations into panhandlers' needs, new by-laws against panhandling and by-laws restricting where homeless people can sleep, reduction of funding to programs that do outreach to people who are homeless, and a withdrawal of funding for emergency day and night shelters. Toronto alone has lost over 300 shelter beds just this past winter and it continues to rely on its Streets to Homes program as an answer to visible street homelessness. There are many reports that people who are housed through this program suffer greatly from hunger and isolation and remain at great risk of becoming or do become homeless again.

As we struggle to come to grips with homeless policy in America and break the USICH's growing hegemony over the issue of homelessness, maybe we need to keep a better eye on Canada. They're certainly looking out for us.