Seattle Rejects HUD Propaganda Offensive

If ever there was a government agency that deserved absolutely no credit for ending homelessness, it would be HUD. This is the agency that hasn't spend a dime on new public housing since 2001, and has actually lost 100,000 units since 1996. This week, they cooked some stats and shuffled around some dough to serve up big bowls of media pap about winning the war on homelessness.

Some ate less heartily than others. The Washington Post, which has apparently been reduced to simply editing government press releases for length before dropping them into the paper, was one of the worst. Their idea of balance was to use a quote from USICH lapdog National Alliance to End Homelessness:

"In the past few years, there has been a significant investment in ending chronic homelessness, both in time and resources," said Mary Cunningham, director of the Homelessness Research Institute at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

"Communities across the country are really working hard on this issue," she said. "It would be a major disappointment if the numbers were not going down."

Yeah. Totally major. Thanks for the critical perspective Mary.

The New York Times passed on it altogether and instead ran this utterly depressing but excellent piece of reporting on the escalating numbers of homeless veterans.

Special traits of the current wars may contribute to homelessness, including high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and traumatic brain injury, which can cause unstable behavior and substance abuse, and the long and repeated tours of duty, which can make the reintegration into families and work all the harder.

Frederick Johnson, 37, an Army reservist, slept in abandoned houses shortly after returning to Chester, Pa., from a year in Iraq, where he experienced daily mortar attacks and saw mangled bodies of soldiers and children. He started using crack cocaine and drinking, burning through $6,000 in savings.

“I cut myself off from my family and went from being a pleasant guy to wanting to rip your head off if you looked at me wrong,” Mr. Johnson said.

God I hate this fucking war. The LA Times also passed on the HUD propaganda-fest and picked up on an AP version of the homeless vets story as well, and the Boston Globe took a similar route.

The NAEH just released a new report, Vital Mission: Ending Homelessness Among Veterans, which says that one in four homeless people are vets and contains this factoid: "approximately 89,553 to 467,877 veterans are at risk of homelessness. At risk is defined as being below the poverty level and paying more than 50 percent of household income on rent. It also includes households with a member who has a disability, a person living alone, and those who are not in the labor force.

The DC poverty pimps published an important report and managed to eclipse a HUD non-event in the process. Kills me to say it, but ... nice work. In the face of all this, the USICH website, which carries the HUD press release and links to their favorite story (USA Today), says they have homelessness among vets on the run as well. Here's my favorite quote by USICH poo-bah Phil fucking Mangano.

"When McKinney-Vento was first passed, this technology developed in the mental health system of response was not in common use. Today communities across the country are targeting this technology to those experiencing chronic homelessness and achieving 80-85% retention rates on average."

He's talking about housing there. Where does he get this stuff?

Here in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer story was admirably critical, and SKCCH Executive Director Alison Eisinger was Kennedy-esque on KUOW.

Jeremy Rosen over at the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness did a really nice job of banging out a quick fact-check of the HUD press release, and here's what he had to say:

In July of 2001, then HUD Secretary Mel Martinez declared a goal of ending “chronic” homelessness by 2011 – a modest goal considering that the “chronic” homeless population is at most 10% of the overall homeless population over the course of a year. HUD and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness declared that this goal could be met by providing 150,000 new units of permanent supportive housing. Beginning in 2002, HUD began working to achieve this goal, primarily by shifting existing resources from programs serving other homeless populations, but also through targeting of the new homeless assistance grant funding provided each year.

Between 2002 and early 2007, HUD frequently asserted that “chronic” homelessness was being reduced, but no data was released to support this claim. In February, HUD released its first “Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.” Citing January, 2005 data collected as part of Continuum of Care applications, the number of chronically homeless persons was listed as 169,879 persons. This is a different number than the 175, 914 people who HUD’s press release cited as being “chronically” homeless in 2005. Since HUD did not release any data to support the numbers listed in their press release, it is hard to account for this variance. But whichever number you take, it would certainly appear that “chronic” homelessness did not decline between 2001 and 2005.

With respect to the ”new” 2005 to 2006 data, both national and local advocates have noted methodological concerns. In a USA Today article, staff for the National Alliance to End Homelessness commented that it can be difficult to determine whether or not an individual living on the street is disabled and that some cities have seen increases in “chronic” homelessness even as other cities have seen declines. HUD’s release acknowledges this, stating that over 1,500 of 3,900 communities reported decreases in “chronic” homelessness, meaning that 2,400 communities showed increases.

And in a Daytona Beach News-Journal article, Volusia/Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Lindsay Roberts dismissed the HUD announcement, attributing any decreases in “chronic” homelessness to HUD’s changing standards for how communities have been instructed to count homeless persons. According to Roberts and local officials, their area’s point in time count of all homeless people, which includes the category of “chronic” homeless persons, dropped from 2,660 to 1,478 – not because of new housing opportunities but instead because HUD required them to use new methods for estimating the extent of homelessness in their community. Among these changes, HUD no longer allowed them to “count homeless people who were in jail or hospitals more than 30 days, or people sharing places with another person in a hotel.” As Roberts concluded, “If you torture the numbers enough, you can make them tell you anything. I think they would really like the picture to be rosier. I think it's justification of not providing adequate funding to address the genuine need. Skewing the numbers doesn't make these people go away." Without more information from HUD on how rules for counting homeless persons have changed, any reported decrease in “chronic” homelessness remains suspect.

In addition, HUD efforts to focus federal homeless assistance resources on the “chronic” homeless population have had a profound impact on homelessness among children, youth, and families. At the same time that New York City cited a decrease in “chronic” homelessness, the city also reported a record number of homeless families. Similar issues have occurred in Philadelphia, where funding for successful housing and services programs for homeless families was reduced in order to focus on “chronically” homeless individuals – an effort that even organizations serving the homeless street population have criticized. Increases in family homelessness help to explain why HUD is unable to report any overall decrease in homelessness.

So, what does this reported 11.5 percent drop in homelessness mean? Not all that much. Mostly, it means that some people are desperate enough to show success that they don't care how much damage they have to do to truth to get there. Alison nailed it:

"While we would applaud a genuine decrease in either chronic homelessness or homelessness, because after all that is what we are all working night and day to accomplish, we would really appreciate fewer press conferences and more investment in additional Section 8 vouchers and in substantial changes to how we house the people of this country."

From the Horses Mouth

This week I came across Chronic Homelessness: Emergence of a Public Policy, a 2003 article that long-time homeless researcher Martha Burt wrote for the Fordham Urban Law Journal on recent homeless policy shifts toward focusing on chronic homelessness. Burt, along with Dennis Culhane, is one of the main researchers whose work helped bring Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness into vogue.

Fan of 10YPs that I am, I expected to find something to disagree with. Oddly, I didn't. I was amazed to discover that, in her dispassionate academic way, Burt sees the problems as well as the possibilities. It seems that where we've gone wrong is to adopt a sort of Ten Year Plan boosterism that pretends we can have the good parts while ignoring the troubling barriers that get in the way, as if these issues will somehow resolve themselves.

This has the effect of reducing the whole thing to a bit of a resources shell game that boosts the budgets of some human service providers at the expense of others while focusing on the visible homelessness that urban downtown interests find most troubling. It's a convergence of interests, but it's not "ending homelessness."

Let's start with the good parts. Burt says the research is clear: those who have been homeless long term opt for housing with supportive services when it is available, and, for the most part, they stay in that housing. It's expensive, but no more expensive than the cost of not doing so. Even better, the estimated total number of these people who need to be housed — roughly 150,000 to 250,000 people in a given year — is within the means of a concerted, long-term effort to achieve.

It's interesting that her research shows a more or less break even cost-benefit relationship, as opposed the the savings factors of two or three that we hear from Mangano and company. This strikes me as a more honest assessment.

While this is good news, it's qualified good news. Even as she expresses enthusiasm for the Ten Year Planning strategies then unfolding through the USICH and NAEH, she also cites numerous problems.

The first is that while its no more expensive and more humane to provide housing with services than to leave people on the streets and in shelters, these costs are born by different bureaucratic entities, and a savings realized by one does little to offset an expense borne by the other.

This brings us to the political will issue, and the difficulty of sustaining said will over time.

Finally, even the narrow approach of solving chronic homelessness will take more resources than seems to be politically possible at the moment. The rest of the homeless — families, working poor, etc — are unaffected and may even receive less attention than before as a result of the policy shift.

These problems alone are enough to give any prudent person pause. But the biggest issue is that the structural realities of rising housing costs, low wages, growing inequality, and diminished government support for programs that assist the poor essentially undermine the foundation upon which progress through the means of Housing First would be realized. Burt concludes:

First, housing has to become more affordable. The simplest way to do this is to subsidize housing; research indicates that the public policy that would do the most to reduce the risk of homelessness is subsidizing housing. This involves no need to build more units, no struggles over project siting or zoning or not in my backyard behavior. All it takes is providing those people with the most disparate housing costs in relation to their income the financial resources to remain in place. In addition, new housing needs to be created that is affordable by people earning relatively little despite working regularly — renewed incentives for producing affordable rental housing would greatly help the current situation of inadequate housing supply.

It is also essential that people who are poor today, and their children, have the educational and training opportunities to assure that they are not poor tomorrow. That is, we have to increase the ability of the poorest people in this country to afford housing without requiring subsidies in the future. The problem is, these steps are not in political favor at this time, being seen as the old anti-poverty agenda. Instead, present federal budget proposals actually offer significant cuts in public and subsidized housing — actions that in the long run will work against the federal commitment to end chronic homelessness. Ultimately, the solution to chronic homelessness will rest on the solution to homelessness in general; the latter begets the former. Only a few communities so far have committed themselves to this larger goal.

Seattle is one of those communities, but rather than embracing the challenges of what it truly means to end homelessness, we have over time moved toward a more limited focus on street homelessness. This is inevitable, in that ending homelessness would take political courage and imaginative organizing across class and issue constituencies. We need a broad-based organizing effort that can change the definition of the possible. What we have instead is a lowest common denominator effort that is directed from the top. That's just not going to do it.

Families: The Next Big Thing

The news from Massachusetts this week is that family homelessness is up dramatically. There is a "right to shelter" law in that state that requires an accurate count of families in shelter. In other states, the numbers are less clear, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Massachusetts, where the number of homeless families is now up to 1,800 from 1,400 in June of last year, is not unique.

Not surprising. Federal funding priorities in recent years have been targeted to the elimination of visible homelessness, and local efforts have largely followed the funding. Meanwhile, the sorts of supports that make the difference between mere poverty and homelessness — food stamps, housing assistance, childcare support, access to health care — have all lost ground.

The argument has often been made by the Bush Administration's US Interagency Council on Homelessness and their lap dogs at the National Alliance to End Homelessness that ending homelessness is much easier than ending poverty or solving the housing crisis.

This is true. But only if you're talking about visible homelessness. If you're at all concerned with the other, more invisible, ninety percent of homeless people who don't look like winos, then things get a little more complicated.

When a community commits to housing with services for those with the most severe addictions and mental illness, visible street homelessness will most certainly decrease. When this is combined with intensified policing of the poor, as is the case in nearly all Ten Year Plan cities, you can get those numbers down even further. The business of ending homelessness is good for business.

But this isn't ending homelessness. It's reducing the evidence of homelessness while poverty increases and affordable housing becomes more scarce. It's classic Bush administration perception-management smoke and mirrors.

The next load of shit coming down the pike from the USICH will be Ten Year Plans to End Family Homelessness. This promises to be a good deal trickier.

The first planning conference, sponsored by the NAEH will be hosted right here in Seattle this February. Philip fucking Mangano is already telling us how solving family homelessness will be all about the data.

The overall number of homeless people is up from a few years ago, Mangano said, but nobody can pinpoint an exact number of families because reporting requirements vary widely from state to state.

“Our desire would be to have many more states step up and track the data,” Mangano said. “Research and data, that’s what should drive the resources that we make available. Instead it’s often anecdote, conjecture and hearsay that does that.”

Here's a radical idea. Maybe solving family homelessness isn't so much about the data as it is the resources. Maybe if the feds weren't doing their best to kill public housing and routinely slashing other supports for low-income people, fewer families would be in such desperate situations.

Maybe, if we spent less time tracking data and engaging in gut-busting bureaucratic exercises to chase a few crumbs of federal funding, and more time demanding the government be less beholden to corporations and the wealthy and more concerned for the welfare of ordinary people, we'd see finally some real results.

If it were up to me, one message would come through loud and clear this February. No Resources, No Plan. The feds don't get to put us through their hoops and look all concerned and active on the issue of family homelessness unless they start walking their talk. Otherwise, it's just more smoke and mirrors.

The Explainer

This from the National Alliance to End Homelessness website. It's from their fact sheet series The Explainer. I can't find where I got this again, but you can get it here.

Isn't it great how Bush is the Decider and NAEH is The Explainer?

The factsheet shows how if you look hard enough, the federal government is spending more on homelessness than it first seems, but they're still not doing jack on housing, even though that's all they ever talk about.

But then The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offers this less than promising summary of the President's budget, and it's long-term impact on domestic discretionary spending. Note that the largest cuts are in community development and job training.

It looks like The Explainers still have some explaining to do.

The WRAP Blog

Wednesday I had a conference call to talk about raising money for the Western Regional Advocacy Project, and in my typically diplomatic way I said that our website sucks, and offered to build a blog to replace it. So here it is.

I hope people use it. WRAP has this vision of building an alternative way of doing homeless advocacy and organizing that isn't about victim-blaming and ignoring inequality, and all six groups in the coalition have been around the block a few times and have mostly left their dogmas behind. We could learn a lot from each other.

We can also see what the pattern is, and it's the obsession with chronic homelessness by advocates and increasingly harsh laws being pushed by downtown interests. This isn't something you hear a lot about. That's because all the air has been sucked out of the room by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, and now they get to define everything about homeless advocacy.

A few months ago a friend was visiting who has hated the NAEH for far longer and much more virulently than I. She's been working on me for years. She won.

We were talking about the Ten Year Plan thing when I wondered aloud how well their siamese twin thing with the US Interagency Council on Homelessness had paid. I Guidestarred their 990's and the 2003 and 2004 tax returns tell an intriguing story. In 2003, NAEH income was about $1.7M. This was typical of previous years. In 2004, the budget jumps to almost $7M.

It's not often that organizations achieve that sort of extraordinary growth. I've heard that most of it was attributable to a $5M Fannie Mae grant, but haven't checked to see if it's true. It sounds about right.

But I was talking about the blog wasn't I? Anyway, there's some amazing organizations in WRAP doing some great work, and there really has to be a way of doing homeless advocacy that doesn't sell out the poor to boost the property values of the rich. I don't think that's what any of us are here for.

Neutralizing Homelessness

Several weeks ago, I posted some thoughts on an article by Columbia University's radical urban planner Peter Marcuse that ran in Christianity and Crisis in 1988. This was an abbreviated version of the influential Neutralizing Homelessness, which was published in Socialist Review in January, 1988. Finding the original took awhile, but the interlibrary copy service eventually came through, and a PDF is now posted here at my streetpaper class wiki.

Given that most people are too lazy to read a 25-page article from a socialist academic journal, however accessible, brilliant, and completely relevant that article might be, even nearly 20 years after its publication (Yes, I am taunting you to read it. DO IT NOW!) I will summarize the highlights.

Marcuse says that the widespread existence of homelessness in a society as affluent as our own is a moral outrage that challenges the legitimacy of the social and economic order itself. Homelessness, therefore, must be ideologically neutralized.

Homeless people, then, are both physically isolated from mainstream daily life and contact, and politically isolated from the larger economic context. We have the odd phenomena, therefore, of talking a great deal about homelessness, while taking no effective action to actually solve the problem.

To address the root causes of homelessness — a profit driven housing system where "those who cannot provide others with profit get no housing," a deindustrialized global economy wherein homeless people are "the surplus of the surplus" within a system based on the existence of surplus people, and a neo-conservative free-market ideology that still insists that supply side economics is in the best interest of all of us — would be, well, revolutionary.

Revolutionaries being in short supply these days, what we get instead are neo-liberal palliatives that do more to mask the problem than to solve it.

I asked my class to consider the Bush administration's advocacy for Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness even as they continue to wage war on the social programs that alleviate poverty as a zen koan: a seemingly absurd, irresolvable dilemma that, considered long enough, may offer a breakthrough to some form of enlightenment.

I feel like I'm finally beginning to understand,

"If government does not deal with homelessness," says Marcuse, "it appears illegitimate and unjust; if it does try seriously to alleviate homelessness, it breaks the link between work and reward that legitimizes wage labor. Neither horn of the dilemma is a comfortable resting place."

Solutions, therefore, are "aimed more at dealing with ordinary (housed) people's reactions to homelessness than with homelessness itself." Again, isolate the problem intellectually. Isolate the people physically.

We've seen all of the techniques Marcuse outlines:

DENY: Find creative ways to low ball the numbers. Narrow the definition so as to exclude. Minimize.

BLAME THE VICTIM: Focus public attention on the most stigmatized members of the homeless (mentally ill, addicted, alcoholic) and place the blame on character defects, as opposed to, oh, structural unemployment and unaffordable housing.

SPECIALIZE: Data and subpopulations. Baffle us with bullshit. Marcuse quotes neo-conservative Thomas Mann saying solutions to homelessness should be in the form of "separate policies for separate subpopulations" rather than focusing on universals such as housing, wages, and access to social services.

ISOLATE: Ghettoizing homeless people outside of mainstream society in shelters and such while criminalizing public displays of extreme poverty with no-sitting ordinances, forbidding public feeding, criminalizing park sleeping, etcetera, all of which are on the rise nationwide.

Sadly, his prescriptive solutions of twenty years ago didn't really take. The militant Union of the Homeless that so inspired him in 1988 pretty much flamed out within a few years. A direct-action based demand for housing mostly ended with the 1990 suicide of Mitch Snyder. The National Coalition for the Homeless, which once carried the torch for a more structural approach to homelessness, is a shadow of its former self, and has been entirely eclipsed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which operates hand in glove with the Bush administration's United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

It's time for homeless advocates, housing activists, and everyone else who is talking so much about ending homelessness these days to seriously re-examine our work. The good news is that expectations have been raised. Everyone's talking about ending homelessness. The bad news is that the strategies we've been offered won't work.

For those of us who are in the game, it's time to seriously up the ante.

Ending Homelessness, Reconsidered

As our Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness nears the end of its second year, many of us feel a great need to reassess. While the rhetoric of no longer managing homelessness — of working instead toward its demise — is enormously attractive, there is great fear that the federal strategy may be a diversion from the real issues.

Here in Seattle, the Plan has clearly created additional support for housing and services at all levels of government. While many fear that this commitment comes at the expense of support for emergency shelter, what we've seen so far looks mostly like progress.

Here’s the problem. Local resources are finite, and the issue is national. While Democrats have more power in D.C. now than has been the case for 12 years, the reality there is complicated, and action on housing can be measured in baby steps.

This means, basically, that all progress is local. In the absence of a strong grassroots lobby for increased housing and services for the poor, further gains in support are likely to stall with the next economic downturn.

This is the problem with policies that are driven from the top. At some point, people turn around, and no one is behind them.

A United Way King County poll reveals homelessness to be the number three concern of local residents, behind schools and traffic. This is good. Too bad nobody’s organizing them.

Missing the point
Real solutions to homelessness begin with true recognition of the causes.

Over the late-70s and the 80s, the numbers of homeless people across America tripled and quadrupled. In the last decade alone, despite Seattle’s strong commitment to putting people first, we’ve seen the local numbers double.

Globalization and other changes in the economy made large numbers of people who lack technical skills superfluous to the workforce. Wages declined, along with the bargaining power of labor.

A variety of policies turned housing into a speculative commodity that more and more of us can no longer afford. Meanwhile, the Federal government spends three times as much on housing-related tax breaks for homeowners as is does on Section 8 vouchers and public housing combined.

Finally, the policy of bankrupting government with a permanent war economy and tax breaks to the wealthy has been very effective in undermining whatever will exists to mitigate the harsh realities of the marketplace. The “safety net” is in shreds, and more so all the time.

And this has become normal. Homelessness and poverty in America is allowed to exist because we have been convinced that poor people are responsible for their own degradation. They are seen as lazy, irresponsible, dangerous, and undeserving. And that lets us off the hook.

Given this, the fact that few people seem keen on welcoming the poor and homeless as their neighbors should surprise no one.

Yet, weirdly, our discussion takes place mostly within the parameters that have been deemed acceptable to the Bush administration. This, perhaps, is Philip Mangano’s greatest achievement. The colossal failure of moral and political imagination that is federal housing policy has been successfully reframed as a local issue.

Homelessness has been demoted, and is no longer discussed as an issue of social and economic justice. It is merely a matter of technocratic legerdemain.

Toward a Reality-based Solution
There are many parts of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness that are easy to support. The needs of many homeless people are more humanely and cost-effectively met by housing with services than through a patchwork of shelters, jails, and emergency rooms. This is an old idea that has fresh currency, and broad political backing.

Additionally, we need to stop the use of shelters as a convenient dumping ground for every other system: hospital recovery rooms, jails and prisons, foster care, and mental health systems. It will take resources to fix what’s broken there, but we need to start.

We can all get behind these priorities, but we must go beyond them as well. We can create the space for a broader vision of what is possible as we build grassroots support for these goals.

We need to find the courage and clarity of vision to organize for deeper solutions.

Meanwhile, the criminalization of behaviors associated with extreme poverty — panhandling, sleeping and eating outdoors, public urination — is on the upswing. So is homelessness.