Answers At Last

By NANCY GIBBS

There was a time in public memory when Americans imagined that the homeless were refugees of a kind, on their way from somewhere to somewhere else, residing temporarily in the tunnels and doorways between here and there. Some people were uprooted after the War on Poverty was fought to a draw, when their rents went up, their wages went down, and the safety net turned out to be full of holes. Others were in transit from mental asylums that didn't heal them or to halfway houses that didn't exist. Still others were maimed by drug abuse. Communities from coast to coast quietly wished that the living clutter would all go away. Yet during the past 10 years it has only multiplied.

Who could have imagined, in so smugly prosperous a decade, that shantytowns would become tourist attractions? Until the mayor evicted them last summer, homeless people in San Francisco drew busloads of photo-snapping foreign tourists to their refugee camp in front of city hall. There, the visitors found a second city of cardboard condos, clogged with the traffic of shopping carts through makeshift living rooms, outfitted with easy chairs and dresser drawers. The waterless fountain steamed with stale urine; a sun-scorched lawn sprouted cigarette butts.

Over the years no social issue has looked so easy and proved so hard to resolve. It looked easy because merely building houses is simpler than, say, curing a deadly disease or cleansing a polluted ocean or handing out hope to the poor. But it turned out to be a nettlesome problem, for homelessness is not the same as houselessness. Each disaster has its own genealogy; the problems of the street people only begin with the need for shelter. Perhaps that is because homelessness is a symptom of every other social ill: drugs, crime, poverty, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, violence, even the decline of compassion during the me-first '80s.

When the street people first appeared in force a decade or so ago, they inspired shouts of dismay and calls for action. Cities hurriedly opened shelters; churches converted their basements into temporary dormitories; soup kitchens doubled their seating capacity. When the problem only grew worse, city officials across the nation sought to drive beggars from their tunnels and parks and public doorways. The homeless became targets; sleeping vagrants were set afire, doused with acid and, in a particularly horrific attack in New York City last Halloween, slashed with a meat cleaver. Finally came resignation. After years of running hurdles over bodies in train stations, of being hustled by panhandlers on the street, many urban dwellers moved past pity to contempt, and are no longer scalded by the suffering they see.

"Society lost faith that there were solutions," says Paul Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a source of funds and faith for grass-roots rescue efforts. A poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion shows that 75% of Americans believe the homeless problem will worsen or remain the same. The irony is that the loss of hope has occurred just when hope may be at hand. In city after city, advocates of the homeless can point to programs and policies that are tailor-made, cost effective, time tested. Now if adequate funds are provided, they will know what to do with them.

San Francisco could end up setting an example. When last year's earthquake nearly leveled a few crumbling flophouses, the city resisted building the standard emergency homeless shelters. Instead, officials used almost $12 million in federal relief money to build state-of-the-art multiservice centers where homeless people can live, get health care, see a social worker, treat their addictions, receive job training -- whatever is necessary to meet their needs and return them to independent living. "If you give me the money, we have the chance to end sleeping on the streets," says Mayor Art Agnos. "I'm willing to be the first mayor in America to say so."

It may seem such an obvious prescription -- build housing, and then help people hold on to it. But it has taken a long time to strip homeless policy of its mythology. For years, whenever the congressional committees or the network-news programs took up the cause, they would call Robert Hayes, founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, and put in an order for an intact white family recently evicted from a Norman Rockwell painting -- people, they said, with whom others could identify. Yet in cities like New York, such families account for less than 10% of the homeless population, a tiny proportion compared with the homeless who are drug addicts, ex-convicts, alcoholics, single mothers, mostly black and Hispanic. Homeless advocates admit to a well-intentioned whitewash: in their search for support and sympathy, they conspired to uphold the sanitized image of the deserving poor, in fear that if the more complex truth were known, the public would blame the victims and walk away.

And who could know the truth anyway? Estimates of the number of homeless people have ranged from 300,000 to 3 million. There may never be an accurate national figure: for the first time, this year census takers tried to include the street people in their count, but some advocates fear that the tallies could be too low by as much as 70%. No city is typical. In Norfolk, Va., 81% of homeless people are thought to be families with children; in Minneapolis, 76% are single men, according to the 1989 Conference of Mayors Survey. Nationwide, anywhere from one-half to two-thirds are either substance abusers, mentally ill or both. Up to a quarter have been in jail. With such a great range of needs, it was all but impossible to cook up a comprehensive national policy that would fit into a 10-second sound bite.

So when advocates were pressed for a solution, they answered the congressional committees and task forces and think tanks with a sharp demand: "Housing, housing and housing." And in a way, they were right. It was no secret that a main cause of homelessness in the '80s was the poor being squeezed out of the housing market. In the 1970s and '80s, the average rent grew twice as fast as the average income. Manufacturing jobs disappeared: of the 12 million new jobs created since 1979, more than half pay less than $7,000 a year, and many provide no health insurance. One serious illness, and a worker could spiral into poverty and onto the streets. Meanwhile, a 1981 change in welfare laws meant that a quarter of a million families with children lost all their public assistance, and an additional 200,000 had benefits reduced.

Rising rents in a tight real estate market were enough to cast these borderline workers and welfare families out of their homes. For young people approaching the housing market for the first time, there was no point of entry. In Massachusetts cities, a renter must earn $13.65 an hour -- more than three times the minimum wage -- to afford the $800-a-month average rent on a two-bedroom unit in decent condition. Under the Reagan Administration, the Federal Government cut housing assistance 75%, and much of what was left was wasted. The Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped subsidizing new housing and handed out rent vouchers instead. This increased demand without increasing the supply and set off a scramble for the cheap units that remained.

When people began to compete fiercely for affordable housing, the ones to lose out were the least resourceful: the teenage mothers, the addicted, the abused, the illiterate, the unskilled. The explosion of crack use in the '80s did immeasurable damage; once people were addicted, what employer or landlord would touch them? "Ronald Reagan and the housing cuts are a convenient way to look at the homeless problem," says Mike Neely, an engineer in Los Angeles, who squandered all he had, including his home and family, on cocaine before he turned his life around and founded the Homeless Outreach Project. "I think it's a drug problem. You can't pay the landlord and the dope man at the same time."

Perhaps the most vulnerable of the abandoned people were the mentally ill, who moved through the cities like a great muttering army, foraging, frightening, fearful. In a stunning social blunder, patients were released from public institutions and given no place to go -- no halfway houses, no local clinics, no community care. Between 1960 and 1984, the population in mental institutions fell from 544,000 to 134,000. But deinstitutionalization alone did not create the homeless problem. Many released patients survived for a time in single-room-occupancy hotels, where they at least had a fixed address and could receive monthly benefit checks. It was the 1980s real estate boom, during which developers eliminated half of all the nation's SROs, that emptied the mentally ill onto the streets. Meanwhile, the government cut nearly 500,000 mentally ill people off the welfare rolls.

When wave after wave of newly homeless people rolled through the cities, emergency shelters seemed the surest and quickest way to get them off the streets. So most of the money allocated by Congress and by states went toward emergency, rather than preventive, care. Only rarely was there money for rental assistance, tenant-landlord mediation or short-term crisis loans to help the near homeless keep the roofs over their heads. Public money paid slumlords $2,000 a month to put up families in "welfare hotels." But this did nothing to ease the families' desperation, fight their addictions or restore their dignity. The emergency shelters grew up like weeds in the cities because there was no time to plant anything else.

Though they were never supposed to become a part of the landscape, the temporary shelters soon began to look like permanent poorhouses. Architects studied how to build better shelters; interior decorators worked to beautify them. The late Mitch Snyder, the ubiquitous crusader, created a vast Washington shelter that was considered a model of its kind. "It is the best shelter in the world," he once said of his creation, "but it is an abomination and should be destroyed."

Every shelter may be an abomination in theory, but many were in fact as well. Half the people residing for more than two years in New York City shelters test positive for tuberculosis. Men sleep with their shoes wedged under the legs of the cots so they won't be stolen. At least one-third of all homeless women have been raped. "You don't get to sit and relax when you're homeless," says Catherine, 62, a homeless woman in Seattle. "God help your behind while you're out there."

When cities tried to move families out of shelters, they discovered just how deeply scarred the victims were. In an effort to empty its disgraceful welfare hotels, New York City renovated old public housing and moved in homeless families. No one anticipated the invisible quarantine: shunned by their neighbors, the families had no sense of community, no help for the problems that had put them on the streets in the first place. Many parents still had no jobs, still drank too much, still beat their kids. Within a year, some of the buildings had been looted or burned, and drug dealers were moving in. At city- council hearings, tenants testified repeatedly that rehabilitating the buildings was not enough. The city had to "rehab people."

Other cities were having the same experience, until it became impossible to sustain the illusion that all a pregnant, crack-addicted teenage prostitute with AIDS needed was a place to call home. From that admission was born the concept of linkage. Rather than merely providing a shelter, homeless advocates are weaving a web. By combining detoxification programs, job training, day care, parenting classes, health care and social services under one roof, they can help the street people who are unwilling or unable to travel all over town to find the services they need -- if those services exist.

Not only are such multipurpose centers more humane than warehousing people in welfare hotels, but they can also cost about half as much. Each city, even each neighborhood, can custom-design its programs. Areas with a desperate AIDS problem can focus on providing outpatient care. For single adults, SROs with on-site services may be a permanent answer. For homeless families, transitional housing can cushion their re-entry into the private market.

In the absence of leadership from Washington, local governments and private groups have spent countless millions of hours and dollars on this problem. Because the homeless population varies so greatly from city to city, community groups often devise the most ingenious solutions -- especially when they can enlist the help of corporations, banks and local government. In New York, America Works trains welfare recipients for jobs and pays their salaries for the first four months; if the employer is satisfied and hires a worker permanently (usually about 70% of trainees make it), America Works collects a $5,000 fee from the state. Employers get a trained employee, the state reduces its welfare bill, and the worker becomes self-sufficient.

Leading the private-sector initiative is developer James Rouse's Enterprise Foundation, a sort of brain-trust godparent to housing efforts all across the country. Rouse's idea was to combine government incentives, benign capitalism and community energy to build decent, affordable housing. One key to the organization's success is Rouse's knack for persuading corporations to get involved and for pointing out the tax incentives that make it worth their while. If a company invests $1 million in a financing pool for low-income housing, over 15 years it could realize $2.3 million in tax savings.

But the risk that comes with private success is that it gives the Federal Government an excuse to applaud the local initiatives and then bow out. In Washington itself, with a huge homeless population, private groups are struggling to "hold the situation together with gum and baling wire," says Jack M. White Jr. of the city's Coalition for the Homeless. Even Washington's most ebullient convert to the cause -- Housing Secretary Jack Kemp -- is full of ideas but inevitably short of funds. His latest initiative, Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere, would promote home ownership for low- income tenants and support local nonprofit groups. But its total funding is only $750 million next year. The 1987 McKinney Act allotted $596 million this year to states and cities for homeless programs. But even that amount pales next to what the cities are spending. New York City's human-resources administration will spend $146.4 million on the homeless next year; its portion of McKinney funds will total only $5.95 million.

Finally, perhaps the single greatest source of help for the homeless comes from volunteers. Frustrated, angry, ashamed that a country so wealthy should ignore such poverty, volunteers give money and their time to manning the soup kitchens, supervising the church basements at night, distributing information, teaching reading, running clothing drives. In the process, they are learning invaluable lessons about what works and what does not. For example:

-- Go beyond shelter. Providing a roof for the night is not enough, and in many cities the shelters are not full. Homeless people need a place that is safe and that addresses their needs. Drug addicts need treatment; the mentally ill need guidance; single mothers need help with child rearing; most homeless people need job training and health care. Don't make them commute all over town to get it.

-- Have a plan. To avoid duplication and red tape, city policymakers and charities must coordinate their efforts. Officials in Portland, Ore., devised a 12-point plan for coordinating services that has been widely copied by other communities. Each city must study its own homeless population to understand its nature and needs, then devise a strategy for solving the problem.

-- Involve the private sector. Private corporations allied with pioneering charities can make public money stretch a long way. In 1986-87 some 460 nonprofit community groups created 23,120 units of low-income housing, compared with nearly 20,000 for HUD.

-- Build communities. When it is time to move homeless people into permanent housing, do not isolate them. City officials must resist the temptation to congratulate themselves with signs on the buildings, like those that have appeared in New York City, that in essence announce that this is where formerly homeless people live. Homelessness carries a terrible stigma, particularly for children. Its veterans must be allowed to return to the community without carrying that stigma with them.

-- Have services, will travel. Even if social services are available, many homeless people cannot or will not use them. So more and more cities are mobilizing their resources. Food vans carry soup and sandwiches to the bridges and parks. Boston's Health Care for the Homeless program sends nurses out knocking on doors in family shelters, offering parents and children preventive health care.

-- Build more housing. It is only the start of a solution -- but the problem will never be solved without it.

When foreign visitors come to American cities, their reaction is almost invariably astonishment, and sorrow, at what they see on the streets. America is a wealthy nation of conspicuous ideals, one that presumes to have something to teach infant democracies all around the world. By failing to act creatively, generously and mercifully on behalf of its most desperate citizens, a country loses more than its credibility; it weakens its character. After such a long and ambivalent search for answers to this problem, Americans should rejoice that there is at last an opportunity to act on the principles they so proudly proclaim.

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Boston and James Willwerth/San Francisco