Module 4: Discussion

Housing the Homeless Can new government policies end homelessness?

A lthough homelessness has fallen almost continu-

ously since 2007, about 1.5 million Americans use

a shelter in a given year — and advocates for

the homeless say that figure badly understates the

problem. Unemployment, cuts in funding for mental health care

and the psychological effects of war on veterans all have helped

fuel the homeless crisis. The Obama administration vows to end

homelessness among veterans and individuals by the end of 2015

and to eliminate it among families by 2020. But experts are divided

on whether “rapid rehousing” programs that provide short-term

rental aid will keep individuals and families from becoming home-

less again. Meanwhile, many cities are trying to banish the homeless

from their downtowns by enacting anti-vagrancy laws — an ap-

proach opposed by those who say living on the street should not

be treated as a crime.

A homeless man seeks help in downtown Chicago. The Obama administration aims to end homelessness among veterans and individuals by the end of 2015

and among families by 2020.

CQ Researcher • Oct. 10, 2014 • www.cqresearcher.com Volume 24, Number 36 • Pages 841-864

RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE u AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD

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THE ISSUES ....................843

BACKGROUND ................848

CHRONOLOGY ................851

CURRENT SITUATION ........855

AT ISSUE........................857

OUTLOOK ......................858

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................862

THE NEXT STEP ..............863

THISREPORT

Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. www.cqresearcher.com

842 CQ Researcher

THE ISSUES

843 • Does unemployment cause most homelessness? • Is Housing First the best way to keep people from reverting to homelessness? • Should homeless families get bigger housing subsidies?

BACKGROUND

848 “I Ain’t Got No Home”The Great Depression triggered a rise in homelessness, lead- ing the government to act.

849 Emptying AsylumsEfforts to get the mentally ill out of “insane asylums” backfired.

850 The “New Homeless”The 1980s saw a longtime problem grow in scope and complexity.

852 New StrategiesIn 2002 the first new anti- homelessness initiative since 1987 was adopted.

CURRENT SITUATION

855 Arresting the ProblemHawaii cracks down on homelessness.

856 Alternate ApproachLos Angeles treats homeless- ness as a social problem, rather than a law enforce- ment issue.

OUTLOOK

858 “A Human Right”Experts are hopeful the goal of ending homelessness can be achieved.

SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS

844 Majority of HomelessLives in 5 States California has largest homeless population.

845 Homelessness Fell DespiteEconomic Woes The one-night count of homeless people fell to 610,000 in 2013.

848 Over One-Fifth of Home-less Are Children Nearly 23 percent of U.S. homeless in 2013 were under 18.

851 ChronologyKey events since 1933.

852 Albuquerque Struggles toHelp the Homeless Needs far exceed the capacity of current services.

854 Motels Become TransitionalHousing “Families crowd into rooms, living week to week.”

857 At Issue:Is Housing First the best ap- proach to ending homeless- ness?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

861 For More InformationOrganizations to contact.

862 BibliographySelected sources used.

863 The Next StepAdditional articles.

863 Citing CQ ResearcherSample bibliography formats.

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

Cover: Getty Images/George Rose

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Oct. 10, 2014 Volume 24, Number 36

Oct. 10, 2014 843www.cqresearcher.com

Housing the Homeless

THE ISSUES K

imberly Mahan had just spent her remain- ing $3 on a large pack-

age of Ramen noodles. It was 2012, and Mahan was stuck in Farmington, N.M., pushing a stroller stuffed with six clothes- filled backpacks for herself and her two young children.

Mahan realized she had no idea how to reach Albuquerque, the state’s biggest city, where she hoped to restart her life. She also had no idea of what she was going to do once she got there. “I looked up to the sky and said, ‘OK, God, what am I supposed to do?’ ” she remembers.

A few days later, Mahan made it to Albuquerque, thanks to strangers who gave her rides and money after spotting the family on road- sides. Police officers picked up Mahan and her children and took them to Joy Junction, an evangelical Christian family shelter that provides food, clothing and Bible-based counseling.

Mahan’s 180-mile journey began when her husband left, she says, de- priving the family of its breadwinner. Mahan, 40, had worked for years in stores and fast-food restaurants but quit after her second child was born. Now, after nearly two years at Joy Junction, she wants to land a job and rent an apartment.

“I hope to have me and my kids back on our feet pretty soon,” she says, citing the shelter’s policy of allowing residents time to rebuild their lives.

“Typically, you’re not going to see [homeless families] on the street,” says Carmela J. DeCandia, director of the National Center on Family Homeless- ness, a think tank in Waltham, Mass.

Homeless single people, on the other hand, can be found in the streets and parks of cities big and small, often to the despair and outrage of residents, business owners and politicians. In the tourism mecca of Honolulu, Mayor Kirk Caldwell calls street people a threat.

“It’s time to declare a war on home- lessness, which is evolving into a crisis,” Caldwell, a Democrat, wrote in The Hon- olulu Star-Advertiser in June. “We cannot let homelessness ruin our economy and take over our city.” 1

But street people represent only the public face of a socioeconomic tragedy that has been intensifying since the early 1980s, when several developments came together. Those include a punishing re- cession; rises in the divorce rate and

number of single-parent fam- ilies; and changes in mental health care that resulted in more mentally ill people be- coming homeless.

Ambitious goals set in the 2000s by the George W. Bush administration to end chronic homelessness within 10 years remain unfulfilled, in part be- cause of the steep recession of 2007-09.

With homelessness en- trenched in the national land- scape, the debate has focused on the most basic of ques- tions: What exactly is home- lessness? Should the definition be limited to street people or include those temporarily liv- ing with friends or relatives? The answers lead to an even bigger question: How can homelessness be ended?

Counting the homeless pop- ulation remains an inexact sci- ence. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment (HUD) conducts an an- nual one-night “point-in-time” count of the homeless. Accord- ing to HUD’s figures, about

610,000 Americans were homeless on a single night in 2013 — a 9.2 percent drop from 2007. HUD also found that between 2012 and 2013 the homeless population fell 3.7 percent. 2

According to another HUD assess- ment, nearly 1.5 million Americans used a homeless shelter at some point in 2012 — down since 2007, despite a jump be- tween 2009 and 2010. And 36 percent of those were homeless families — the same percentage that showed up in the “point in time” census. 3

But HUD’s point-in-time count “un- derestimates the scope of the problem because it misses many people who have found their own refuges outside of formal shelters,” says Marybeth Shinn, a social psychologist and the chair of

BY PETER KATEL

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A Times Square church offers sanctuary from the cold to a homeless man in New York City. Street people

represent only the public face of homelessness. Since the early 1980s, large numbers of single-parent families, veterans and mentally ill people have become homeless.

844 CQ Researcher

the Human & Organizational Devel- opment Department at Vanderbilt Uni- versity’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development in Nashville, Tenn., because it misses many people who have found their own refuges outside of formal shelters.

Shinn helped conduct a study that concluded a point-in-time count in New York City in 2005 missed up to 41 percent of homeless people who were not living in shelters. 4

HUD itself acknowledges that its numbers fall short of producing a full picture. While HUD-funded housing programs — from shelters to permanent housing — aid more than 1 million people a year, “the total number of persons who experience homelessness may be twice as high,” HUD said. 5

Apart from the difficulties of phys- ically counting the homeless, the HUD numbers reflect a definition of home-

lessness that some consider too narrow. HUD includes people who are:

• Living in dwellings unfit for human habitation, in emergency shelters or in temporary housing; or

• Leaving such a place; • Facing loss of their housing within

14 days; • Living in families with children

or unaccompanied youths who haven’t had a lease in the past 60 days and have moved two or more times during that period;

• Fleeing domestic violence. 6

“HUD does not include . . . people who are doubled up,” says Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a Washington-based advocacy and re- search organization, using the term for people who lose their homes and move in with family or friends. “It includes people in imminent risk of homeless-

ness, but we just haven’t figured out a way to count people who would have to leave where they are within 14 days.”

Yet, for many people, doubling up is the last step before homelessness. HUD’s 2012 annual shelter-based count noted that 66 percent of homeless adults with children had lived with family or friends before entering shelters. 7

Although not counted by HUD, some of those doubled-up people are tallied by the U.S. Department of Education, which reported that 1.3 million children were homeless during the 2012-13 school year, the most recent figure available. Seventy-five percent of those were doubled-up, 6 percent were in motels and 16 percent in shelters. 8

“It’s a subterranean problem,” says Lauren Voyer, a senior vice president at HAPHousing, a Springfield, Mass.- based nonprofit that helps people rent or buy affordable housing. “A lot of families working in low-wage situations who can’t get the money together to get an apartment are living in motels. If you are in that situation, you are living without a home.”

But others worry that expanding HUD’s definition to include doubled- up people could overwhelm the ca- pacity of programs for the homeless. “Doubled-up is its own problem,” says Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Calling it homeless doesn’t solve it. We have a lot of people in this country living in unaffordable, crowded housing,” he continues. And relabeling it would only increase “the competition for the tiny resources we have.”

Scarce resources, in fact, are the core problem, experts agree. “We still don’t have enough affordable housing,” says Eric Tars, senior attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, an advocacy and research organization in Washington. However, as his organi- zation and others advocate, if the federal income tax deduction for mortgage

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

Less than 1%

1-2.9%

3-6%

Greater than 6%

Alaska

Hawaii

Majority of Homeless Lives in 5 States

California accounted for more than 20 percent of the nation’s homeless population in 2013, and 13 percent lived in New York. Collectively, those two states, along with Florida (8 percent), Texas (5 percent) and Massachusetts (3 percent), had 51 percent of the total.

N.Y.

Ohio

Texas

Va.

Minn.

Iowa

Mo.

Calif.

Nev.

Ore.

Colo.

Wash.

Idaho

Mont.

Utah

Ariz. N.M.

Wyo.

N.D.

S.D.

Okla. Ark.

La.

Ill.

Miss.

Tenn.

Ga.

Conn.

Mass.

R.I.

Maine Vt.

W.Va. N.J.

Del.

Md.

Ala.

Fla.

Wis.

Mich.

Ind.

N.C.

S.C.

N.H.

Kan. Ky.

D.C.

Neb. Pa.

Source: Meghan Henry, Alvaro Cortes and Sean Morris, “The 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress: Part 1 Point-in-Time Estimates of Homeless- ness,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, November 2013, p. 8, http://tinyurl.com/qd89wa8.

State Shares of National Homeless Population, 2013

Oct. 10, 2014 845www.cqresearcher.com

interest were reduced, as has been pro- posed by some economists, “we could take the savings and reinvest them in affordable-housing programs.”

The Obama administration is trying several things aimed at reducing home- lessness. On a broad scale, its “Opening Doors” strategy — a sequel to the Bush administration’s plan to end homeless- ness in 10 years — calls for eliminating family homelessness by 2020 by pro- viding affordable or subsidized housing in various forms. It also calls for veterans and homeless individuals who have spent years on the streets to be housed by the end of next year, mainly by placing them in facilities with mental- health and other services. 9

For the “chronically” homeless, HUD’s Housing First doctrine makes providing permanent housing as quickly as possible the top priority, with no qualifying re- quirements, such as first achieving so- briety. Housing First programs also pro- vide mental health and other services.

Lori Thomas, a professor of social work at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, says data from Housing First programs for chronically homeless adults show that getting them from shelters into real homes should be the first step. “They need housing to stabilize them to get them working on substance abuse and other issues,” she says. “They could never get to that before, because their basic needs were not being met.”

Thomas has been assessing the re- sults of a “permanent supportive hous- ing” operation in Charlotte aimed at helping chronically homeless men. That model, with on-site services, embodies the Housing First approach for per- manently disabled people. By contrast, other programs — called transitional housing — offer short-term housing aid for up to two years to individuals and families. 10

Back in Albuquerque, Mahan has now found a part-time job and is hop- ing for a range of help as she seeks a home for herself and her kids. She stresses she’ll need rental assistance

from somewhere, as well as psycho- logical aid. “Before I leave here,” she says, “I need a support system.”

As lawmakers, homeless advocates and academics try to end homelessness, here are some of the questions they are debating:

Does unemployment cause most homelessness?

Experts agree that poverty is the main cause of homelessness. But poverty has many dimensions. Economic factors, in- cluding a combination of poor education and joblessness or underemployment, can lead to poverty and homelessness. And social problems such as substance abuse or mental illness can make it dif- ficult to keep a job or afford housing.

An interim HUD report last year on an ongoing study of 2,307 homeless families showed that only 17 percent of the adults were working at the outset of the study, and many of those were working 30 hours a week or less. Like- wise, a 1999 study by the Urban In- stitute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, found that only 29 percent of homeless families had paid work in the past month. 11

Shinn of Vanderbilt University says economic factors — particularly income inequality and rising housing costs — drive many into homelessness. “There are lots of people who are very poor and paying way too much of their in- come toward rent or are doubled up with other people because they can’t afford independent housing,” she says.

Data on what causes family home- lessness are inconclusive, says Shinn, a principal researcher in the ongoing HUD study. But homelessness became a bigger national issue some 30 years ago, when economic conditions changed, she notes. Many economists say Reagan-era tax cuts contributed to widening disparities in income as the economy continued its march from an industrial model with plenty of well-paid union jobs to an economy dominated by non-union service-oriented jobs. “The change is in- come inequality and the rising cost of housing,” Shinn says. “Anything you can do to raise incomes at the bottom and lower housing costs at the bottom will reduce homelessness.”

Peter Gagliardi, president and CEO of HAPHousing, the Springfield non- profit, notes the loss of traditional jobs

Homelessness Fell Despite Economic Woes

The number of homeless Americans fell from nearly 672,000 in 2007 to 610,000 in 2013, a decline of 9 percent, despite the 18-month recession that began in December 2007.

* Calculated as “point-in-time counts,” which are one-night estimates of both sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations measured during the last week of January each year.

Source: Meghan Henry, Alvaro Cortes and Sean Morris, “The 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress: Part 1 Point-in-Time Estimates of Homeless- ness,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, November 2013, p. 6, http://tinyurl.com/qd89wa8.

Number of Homeless People in the U.S., 2007-2013*

600,000

700,000

800,000

2013201220112010200920082007

846 CQ Researcher

that used to define once-thriving factory towns in New England and elsewhere. In Springfield, for instance, several “big employers in the heart of the city that allowed people to walk to work” are now gone, he says. Those employers included board-game-maker Milton Bradley and the Springfield Armory, a then-government-owned firearms man- ufacturer. Nowadays, he says, “when jobs exist they don’t pay enough to cover housing, food and health care. There is a huge, almost unseen, group of families who are in the worst-case housing situation.”

Yet, social factors are important, too. DeCandia of the National Center on Family Homelessness says economic trends only partly explain homelessness. “There is a complex interplay between factors like lack of housing and poverty and trauma, domestic violence,” she says.

Having a disability or a disabled family member can keep a homeless adult from working, contributing to the low employment rate among adults in homeless families. One study found that 39 percent of homeless adults in families were themselves disabled and/or caring for a relative with a dis- ability that limited the caretaker’s ability to work, compared with only 4.5 per- cent of adults ages 18-44 in the popu- lation as a whole. 12

DeCandia says some families “don’t report major mental health issues or major trauma,” but they can be “really struggling on the poverty cliff.” One thing, she says, “can send them over the edge: loss of a job, or they’re hit with a health crisis in the family and can’t work regularly.” Her organization studied 294 female- headed homeless families in four metro- politan areas of upstate New York and found that 93 percent of the mothers had a history of trauma, most the result of physical assault. 13

Jessica Williams, who is staying at Albuquerque’s Joy Junction with her husband, their newborn son and two older sons, says low wages, combined with a landlord’s dishonesty, played a

part in their homelessness. “He was going to rent us a house,” she says, “and he took our $500 deposit and called us later and said he’d found somebody else.”

Williams acknowledged that she had been addicted to cough syrup with codeine, which hurt her employability. Still, both she and her husband found jobs in stores, which allowed them to stay in motels for several weeks. At one, she says, she met someone else who had lost money to an unscrupulous landlord.

“If it’s not addiction,” she says, “if it’s not the economy, it’s people.”

Is Housing First the best way to keep people from reverting to homelessness?

The name of the doctrine sounds common-sensical and humane. “Hous- ing First” programs are based on the belief that problems a homeless indi- vidual or family faces cannot be solved until they are no longer living in the street or a crowded shelter. Hence, people should not be subject to sobriety or drug tests or other requirements as a condition of obtaining housing. 14

The strategy originated in New York City in 1992 with a program called Pathways to Housing, which provided subsidized permanent housing com- bined with psychiatric care or drug treatment for chronically homeless in- dividuals. The model later was ex- tended to other categories of homeless persons. 15

Housing First helps people find long- term housing — other than shelters — as soon as possible and sees that as essential to preventing them from re- maining homeless or returning to home- lessness. Under that broad concept, a more tactically focused approach, called Rapid Re-Housing, provides short-term financial assistance to allow homeless people or families to acquire temporary housing within 30 days of becoming homeless and to enter a homeless as- sistance program. The idea is to deal with the immediate burden that finding

a rental can place on financially stretched people. Subsidies can be a flat amount or income-based, with households pay- ing a fixed percentage of their earnings for rent. Subsidies typically run for four to six months. 16

HUD and other agencies — among them the Justice Department, which helps homeless victims of domestic vi- olence and related crimes — use both the Housing First and Rapid Re-Housing approaches. HUD alone serves about 1 million people, including chronically homeless adults and families at immi- nent risk of homelessness. 17

Thomas, of the University of North Carolina, says shelters can be counter- productive because of the lack of privacy and the mandatory schedules that par- ticipants must abide by. “I’ve had people tell me they’d rather be in the street,” she says. In shelters, “people surrender a lot of their dignity” because of strict rules.

The fundamental idea behind Hous- ing First and Rapid Re-Housing, Thomas says, is that homeless people “need housing to stabilize them, to get them working on substance abuse or other issues. We are going to try to get [you] into housing that you can stay in for the rest of your life, not contingent on following anything but minimal rules — no harm to yourself or others.”

But families struggling with poverty, employability and lack of education don’t qualify for lifetime supportive housing, so rapidly rehousing them may not keep them from another bout of homelessness, some experts argue.

Ralph da Costa Nunez, president and CEO of the Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness in New York City, says Housing First does not work as a one- size-fits-all strategy. “Housing First is ter- rific for those ready to be housed first,” he says. “Eighteen to 22 percent of fam- ilies in shelters are working poor, with a long work history, and you’ll never see them again.” Another group of fam- ilies needs help polishing their job skills and can move into permanent housing relatively quickly, Nunez continues.

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

Oct. 10, 2014 847www.cqresearcher.com

But he sees an inherent problem with the relatively short-term nature of assistance available under Rapid Re- Housing models. “The hard-core group churns through the system forever, and it’s growing larger and larger,” says Nunez, who advocates turning shelters into temporary housing with educational, job-training and other services on-site. “We do them an injustice by simply putting them in housing and seeing them come back. This is not simply a homeless issue; we have to face that.”

Culhane of the University of Penn- sylvania responds that homelessness is exactly what the word says. “The homeless system is not equipped to solve the problems of poverty,” he says, even though homeless people, and poor people in general, may have acute needs, ranging from mental and physical health care to education and financial- management advice.

Homelessness agencies can connect people with services, he adds. But he argues against trying to duplicate those services by, for example, setting up dental clinics in homeless shelters. “The homeless system’s job should be to solve the home- less problem,” Culhane says. “The person is without shelter and should then be returned to some kind of housing.”

DeCandia of the National Center on Family Homelessness takes the opposite stance. “Homelessness is not just about lack of housing,” she says. “It is em- bedded in a pattern of residential in- stability. It is a crisis of housing, but it is not separate from other issues.”

Debate should not center on where services are provided, DeCandia says. “There are things that a shelter system and a homeless system can do in the way they create an environment that sup- ports people when they move on, whether that is in a week or three months.”

Should homeless families receive bigger or longer-lasting housing subsidies?

The inability of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder to afford

housing is at the heart of homelessness, whatever the other contributing factors may be.

Federal Section 8 programs — cre- ated in 1974 to provide subsidies for low-income renters — and similar, smaller-scale subsidy programs have only enough funds to help about 23 percent of the population that is eligible for assistance, according to two Wash- ington think tanks: the liberal Center

on Budget and Policy Priorities and the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center. 18

In Massachusetts, for instance, 5,400 families are at the end of their two-year state-funded HomeBASE rental assistance. “If I could figure out a way to pay market rate, I would,” a homeless Boston mother of two, Altia Taylor, told a state legislative committee last year. “If I could own my own home, I would. I would have done it a long time ago.” 19

Waiting lists for state-administered Section 8 funds are years long. To solve that problem, Republican and Democratic members of a housing strat- egy panel assembled by the Bipartisan Policy Center recommended last year

that “our most vulnerable households, those with extremely low incomes . . . [be] assured access to housing assistance if they need it.” 20

Many congressional Republicans dis- agree. “Yes, there are some people that probably need and do need housing assistance,” Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, said last year at a hearing of the House Financial Services Commit- tee. “But this [Section 8] program is

on a course that’s not sustainable.” He cited a 10 percent increase between 2003 and 2013 — from 3 million to 3.3 million — in the number of families participating in the two main Section 8 programs. 21

Advocating tax cuts and rollbacks of federal regulations on business as ways to stimulate economic growth — and criticizing Democrats for opposing such measures — Neugebauer said, “More and more people are falling off the economic ladder. . . . And so just making the net bigger and bigger is not the long-term solution for many of those families.” The long-term solution for those families, he said, “is to keep them

Formerly homeless Air Force veteran Barbara Barnes once slept in one of these bunks at the women’s quarters at the New England Center for Homeless

Veterans in Boston. Nationwide, nearly 140,000 vets stayed in shelters at one time or another in 2012, down from nearly 150,000 in 2009. The administration is planning to expand its programs for veterans housing to serve 200,000 vets annually. “We’re not going to stop until every veteran who has defended America

has a home in America,” President Obama said in August.

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on the economic ladder, so that they don’t need a safety net.” 22

Democrats on the committee insisted that immediate prevention of home- lessness should take priority over longer- term anti-poverty measures. “Full funding of these programs will help keep im- poverished Americans, most especially the future of our country, our children, from being pushed onto the streets or forced to live out of cars,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. 23

Maloney denied that Democrats op- pose easing regulations on business, but said that leaning too far in that direction, by loosening supervision of the financial industry, could lead to a repeat of the stock market crash of 2008 and thus increase poverty. In any case, she said, homeless people are not in a position to pull themselves up the ladder. “If you don’t have and you can’t afford housing,” she said, “you can’t afford going to school.”

Others homeless advocates question whether Section 8 subsidies by them- selves can do anything more than en- sure housing. “I’d like to say that we just need more housing subsidies,” says Gagliardi of HAPHousing. “But, ulti-

mately, the solution has to be to address poverty head-on.”

That effort, he says, must involve creating or teaching skills for jobs that pay more than minimum wage. “A Mc- Donald’s job, a Wal-Mart job — if it’s a second job, it’s sustaining, but if it’s the only one, it doesn’t work,” he says. Citing the Massachusetts minimum hourly wage of $8, he adds, “You just have to do the math.”

Those concerns aside, some home- lessness and housing experts argue that experimenting with various forms and levels of rent subsidies, including temporary subsidies to families under Rapid Re-Housing programs, could ex- pand the beneficiary pool.

However, Shinn of Vanderbilt Univer- sity asks: “Is a short-term subsidy enough?

“Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true; then there would be much more to go around.”

Shinn urges researchers to look into whether smaller subsidies, which provide less assistance than Section 8, would keep beneficiaries housed while allowing more people to enter the program. The idea, she acknowledges, is “heresy” among advocates for the homeless. But,

she says, “I think it’s worth experimenting with different structures.”

BACKGROUND “I Ain’t Got No Home”

In Elizabethan England, they wereknown as the strolling poor: vagabonds who took to the highways in search of food, shelter and jobs. In colonial America, village watchmen were responsible for shooing away the wandering poor before they could enter town and become a burden to town charities. 24

Things were little better in an in- dustrializing America, which saw the emergence of large slums populated by growing numbers of homeless mi- grants and workers. Single men labeled as “tramps” and “hobos” — the latter looking for work, the former uninter- ested in working — traveled throughout the country in the late 19th century.

After the stock market crashed in 1929, thousands of banks failed, causing the Great Depression, massive unem- ployment and a spike in homelessness. By 1933, 1.2 million people were without homes, according to a nationwide census by the private National Center on Care of the Transient and Homeless. 25

Nature added to the misery: The Dust Bowl — a combination of drought, heat and howling wind that struck the Great Plains — destroyed farms and led some 400,000 people from Okla- homa, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri to flee to California’s fertile Central Val- ley in the mid-1930s. 26 Californians reacted much as their colonial forebears: They tried to keep out the migrants, whom authorities lumped together as “Okies” and “Dust Bowl refugees.”

Even without formal anti-Okie policies, police in California earned a reputation for brutal treatment of homeless migrants. In the words of folk singer Woody

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

Over One-Fifth of Homeless Are Children

Nearly 23 percent of all homeless people in the United States in 2013 were under 18, and teenagers and children made up nearly a third of those living in shelters. Eighty percent of those living on the street were 25 or older.

Source: Meghan Henry, Alvaro Cortes and Sean Morris, “The 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress: Part 1 Point-in-Time Estimates of Homeless- ness,” HUD, November 2013, p. 6, http://tinyurl.com/qd89wa8

Share of U.S. Homeless Population by Age Group, 2013

Under 18 years old 18-24 years old 25 and older

UnUnU 118

10.1% 22.6%

9wa8

2 2 25 118

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

80%

22.6% 11110.10.11 1%1%%%

UnshelteredShelteredAll homeless

67.3%

9.9%

29.8%

60.3%

10.5%9.5%

80%

Oct. 10, 2014 849www.cqresearcher.com

Guthrie, who together with novelist John Steinbeck, was one of the best-known chroniclers of the migration: “I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ‘round/Just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town/And the police make it hard wher- ever I may go/And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.” 27

In 1939, three California district attor- neys began enforcing a 1933 state law, the Indigent Act, which made it illegal to help destitute persons enter the state. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1941 over- turned that law, making clear that states could not bar people from entry. 28

Elsewhere in America, the Roosevelt administration’s “New Deal” recovery measures financed federal construction projects that would provide shelter and jobs for millions of unemployed “tran- sients” roaming the countryside. 29 Perhaps the best-known was the Civilian Con- servation Corps (CCC), open to boys and men ages 16 to 24, as well as up to 25,000 World War I veterans. Participants received housing in newly built camps, food and a small wage for working on flood protection, dams, road-building and other infrastructure projects. By the time the program ended in 1942, about 3 mil- lion had served in the CCC. 30

In a second anti-homelessness mea- sure, Congress appropriated $500 mil- lion for grants to states to provide shel- ter, jobs and other “necessities of life to persons in need . . . whether resident, transient, or homeless.” The latter phrase, writes Neil Larry Shumsky, a history professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, marked the first time the federal government explicitly recog- nized homelessness as a social ill, and it authorized states to help people who were not residents of those states. 31

The law setting up the fund also created the Federal Transient Program, designed to help states establish relief projects. The program created camps similar to those established by the CCC, but it was a short-lived effort, lasting only until 1935.

Emptying Asylums

In the 1950s, a time of relative pros-perity, homelessness again was seen as a problem largely confined to al- coholic single men. President John F. Kennedy undertook some anti-poverty programs in the early 1960s, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, expand- ed those efforts into his signature War on Poverty program.

Under the program, defined by large- scale nationwide anti-poverty efforts, private and public agencies attempted to end homelessness by broadening the range of services available to the predominantly male homeless popu- lation. But projects to reduce the num- ber of people living in poverty took precedence.

Those efforts coincided with another government initiative: decreasing re- liance on state psychiatric hospitals (known as “insane asylums” and “mental institutions”) for treating mentally ill people. Often dubbed “snake pits,” the hospitals had reputations for squalor and abuse or neglect of patients, making legislators increasingly reluctant to fund them. Meanwhile, doctors’ associations were promising that new-generation tranquilizers would make hospitalization unnecessary for most patients.

However, “deinstitutionalization,” as the process became known, had the unintended consequence of significantly increasing the homeless population. 32

The effort was championed by Kennedy, who had a developmentally disabled sister. The Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 sought to re- place “custodial mental institutions” with “therapeutic centers,” Kennedy said when signing the legislation. 33

Experts viewed the initial results of the statute and subsequent similar mea- sures as successful. From 1956 to 1980, the hospital population of mentally ill patients dropped from 559,000 to 154,000. 34 But the strategy depended on

the availability of space in community- based treatment centers. And by the 1970s, evidence was mounting that nonhospital mental health treatment facilities were in short supply. Two big states, New York and California, saw motels, boarding houses, jails and streets fill up with people discharged from psychiatric hospitals. 35

In late 1980, shortly before losing his re-election bid, President Jimmy Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act, designed to expand the number of community mental health centers. But upon taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan got Congress to repeal the law. Funds destined for federal mental health centers were combined with other mental health care grants into “block grants” to states, with few conditions for the states to meet. The Reagan administration also launched a review of disability-payment cases, leading to the removal of about 500,000 people from the rolls, many of them mentally ill. However, Congress passed the Disability Benefits Reform Act of 1984, which made such removals more difficult. 36

Reagan was skeptical of community mental health centers and of services for homeless people, whose situations, he suspected, often reflected personal choice rather than underlying economic or psychological problems. 37

But the number of homeless people continued to climb due to the effects of deinstitutionalization and the cutback in community mental health services. By 1988, the National Institute of Mental Health reported that between 125,000 and 300,000 people with chronic mental illness were homeless. 38

Myriad economic problems and pro- found socioeconomic shifts during the early 1980s added to the homelessness problem. The recession of 1981-82 — the most severe since the 1930s — saw the unemployment rate soar to 10.8 percent in late 1982. Meanwhile, high interest rates and, later in the decade, the failure of more than 700

850 CQ Researcher

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

of the nation’s savings and loans in- stitutions made homeownership even tougher for the working poor. 39

Reagan and Congress responded to the recession and the subsequent eco- nomic boom by cutting taxes in a series of measures culminating in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The same period saw the beginning of the widely doc-

umented growth in income inequality, though experts argue over whether the new tax structure created the trend, or — as some say — failed to soften the effects of changes occurring in the economy.

At the same time, the number of single-mother families was increasing at a time when the number of man- ufacturing jobs was decreasing. Plus, a rising divorce rate and widespread adoption of no-fault divorce laws left many divorcees destitute if they lacked marketable job skills. 40

The “New Homeless”

As the 1990s began, cities beganfilling up with homeless people to an extent not seen since the De- pression. A 1991 study led by Martha Burt, a longtime researcher on home- lessness at the Urban Institute, found

that between 1981 and 1989 the overall homelessness rate, based on the avail- ability of shelter space, in the nation’s 182 largest cities (with populations of 100,000 or more) tripled — from 5 per 10,000 residents to 15 per 10,000. By 1989, 45 cities had rates higher than 20 per 10,000, and seven (including Washington, D.C., and New York) had rates of more than 40. 41

The rise in homelessness spawned political and legal movements to pro- vide services, prevent homelessness and protect the homeless from what advocates considered repressive police

measures. As early as 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that vagrancy laws, long used as an enforcement tool against the homeless, encouraged “arbitrary and erratic arrests and con- victions.” 42

In 1979, when New York City was experiencing the first effects of what would become a national trend of growing homelessness, lawyer Robert Hayes won a crucial class-action lawsuit on behalf of six homeless men. The suit — which attacked a city policy of forcing homeless people to find shelter — cited a Depression-era amendment to the state constitution that said “aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and . . . its subdivisions.” 43 The initial court victory led the city to acknowledge its oblig- ation to provide shelter to all homeless men (and, later, women). By 1988, New York shelters could take in up to 10,000 people. 44

In 1987, advocacy campaigns coupled with the growth in homelessness led to passage of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which created so-called Continuum of Care programs designed to help the homeless acquire housing. 45

But the law was based on a de- finition of homelessness that some experts criticized as too limited. It defined a homeless person as some- one without a “fixed, regular and ad- equate nighttime residence,” or some- one of low income whose nighttime residence was a shelter. That defin- ition excluded “doubled-up” persons living with relatives or friends. The definition did include people at im- minent risk of losing their homes within seven days, but advocates ar- gued that many at-risk people did not meet that seven-day requirement. In effect, that definition severely lim- ited programs designed to help peo- ple who were at risk of becoming homeless. 46

Continued on p. 852

Homeless people sleep on the sidewalk in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. The city’s new anti-homelessness initiative, Operation Healthy Streets, marks a break with Los Angeles’ past and the enforcement-heavy anti-homelessness approaches taken by other cities. The initiative provides immediate services for homeless people, such as mental health appointments and enrollment in Medicaid.

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Chronology 1933-1941Great Depression causes mass home- lessness, triggering government programs to combat it.

1933 With some 1.2 million people homeless, Congress creates, at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Civilian Conservation Corps, putting jobless men to work on federally funded projects. . . . Congress provides $500 million for state programs to aid the needy.

1935 Families made homeless by the Depression and the Dust Bowl begin trekking to California.

1939 Three California prosecutors begin enforcing a law prohibiting indigent people from entering the state.

1941 U.S. Supreme Court strikes down California law barring indigents.

•

1963-1984 Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and cuts to safety- net programs for the poor lead to surge in homelessness.

1963 President John F. Kennedy signs Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, designed to treat the mentally ill in community clinics instead of “insane asylums.”

1970s As deinstitutionalization takes effect, New York and California see former- ly hospitalized people flood cheap lodgings, jails and streets.

1979 New York State Supreme Court rules the state must provide shelter for the homeless.

1980 President Jimmy Carter signs Mental Health Systems Act to expand community mental health centers to treat deinstitutionalized patients.

1981 At the urging of President Ronald Reagan, Congress repeals the com- munity mental health centers law, consolidating all mental health program funding into block grants for states to administer.

1984 Reagan says some people are homeless “by choice.”

•

1987-1996 Homelessness becomes part of national landscape, prompting various aid measures.

1987 Growth in homelessness prompts Congress to pass McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, designed to help the homeless find housing by creating job-training programs.

1988 Up to 300,000 mentally ill people are homeless, the National Institute of Mental Health reports.

1991 Urban Institute says that homeless- ness tripled between 1981-89.

1992 A New York program pioneers Housing First strategy, combining permanent housing with mental health treatment.

1996 Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds Seattle ordinances against sitting or lying on downtown side- walks at certain hours.

•

2002-Present Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan focus new attention on homeless veterans, as federal strategy shifts to ending homelessness.

2002 George W. Bush administration establishes strategy of ending chronic homelessness in 10 years.

2010 Obama administration continues the end-homelessness strategy, vowing to end chronic and veteran home- lessness by the end of 2015, and family homelessness by 2020.

2012 Department of Housing and Urban Development reports the number of people using homeless shelters is down 6.3 percent since 2007. . . . Department of Education counts 1.1 million homeless public school students in 2011-12 school year.

2013 One-night “point-in-time” count shows 7 percent drop in number of homeless veterans and a 3.7 percent overall decline in homelessness.

2014 Hawaii’s Oahu enacts ordinances designed to keep homeless people out of tourist areas. . . . Police in Albuquerque, N.M., kill homeless schizophrenic man who was camping illegally. . . . Homeless Iraq veteran is arrested for trying to break into the White House.

852 CQ Researcher

New Strategies

The first major new anti-homelessnessinitiative since the 1987 McKinney- Vento Act was adopted in 2002. Bor- rowing the idea from a 2000 proposal by the National Alliance to End Home- lessness, the George W. Bush admin- istration declared a goal of ending one form of homelessness — chronic home- lessness — within 10 years. It assigned this ambitious task to a revived U.S. In- teragency Council on Homelessness, which had been inactive for six years. 47

The council’s director, Philip F. Mangano, enthusiastically adopted the Housing First doctrine, to the applause of some mayors whose cities were

struggling with homelessness. “When you ask the consumer what they want,” he said at the end of the Bush ad- ministration, “they don’t simply say a bed, blanket and a bowl of soup. They say they want a place to live.” 48

For chronically homeless individuals, permanent supportive housing — low- rent dwellings with access to substance- abuse counseling and mental health treatment — was seen as the best ap- proach. HUD adopted a policy, still in effect, of favoring Homeless Assistance Grant applicantions from organizations or agencies that provide permanent sup- portive housing for disabled individuals or families with a disabled adult. That policy effectively addressed the chron- ically homeless, the nonpartisan Con- gressional Research Service found, be-

cause individuals with a disability are often the ones who are homeless for long, recurring periods. 49

But Bush’s overall housing policy also included efforts to increase homeown- ership for low- and moderate-income people. Those efforts, supported by Democrats and the lending industry, eventually helped to trigger a housing bubble and the financial crisis of 2007- 09, when home prices and the mortgage market collapsed and 2.8 million homes were foreclosed in 2009 alone. 50

The number of people in homeless shelters rose less drastically, by 2.2 per- cent between 2009 and 2010, largely because those who lost their homes initially went to rental housing or to stay with friends or family. 51 “We didn’t see a lot of foreclosed families ending

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

Continued from p. 850

O n a hot September morning in Albuquerque’s hard- scrabble South Valley, a group of 30 homeless men and women sit in a large dining hall at a family shelter

and talk about how Jesus is helping them rebuild their lives. “I’m still healing,” says a woman in her 40s. “God has shown

me how wonderful and merciful he is; my addiction and behaviors made me lose a lot.” The shelter’s chaplain, Gene Shiplet, leads the program from his desk on the stage, reading Bible passages about leaving bad associates behind. He encourages his flock to participate, complimenting them on their testi- monies.

Welcome to the “Life Recovery” program at Joy Junction, New Mexico’s largest shelter for homeless families. Staff of the donor-funded project, which opened in 1986, say they won’t turn away non-Christians or the nonreligious. But for those who stay, the religious message is unavoidable.

“Things get so bad in peoples’ lives that they turn to abuse of alcohol or drugs to escape the pain and dull their senses,” says founder and CEO Jeremy Reynalds. “You have to give someone a replacement, a reason for living, someone or something they can turn to to make life worth living. For us as evangelicals, that means having a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

A few miles north, in downtown Albuquerque, the head of the state’s biggest service center for the homeless is also a man of God. But the Rev. Russell “Rusty” Smith, an Episcopal priest and the executive director of St. Martin’s Hospitality Center, takes a secular approach to the center’s work.

“Religion doesn’t belong in basic human care,” Smith says at a coffee shop staffed by a St. Martin’s client who is learning job skills. “This is a human response to a human need. I am so opposed to introducing preaching to people in need.”

Regardless of whether help comes with Bible readings, no one disputes the need for homeless services in New Mexico’s biggest city. Its history has been intertwined with homelessness since the 1930s, when the city was a key stop on Route 66, the fabled highway used in the 1930s by migrants heading to California to escape the Dust Bowl. 1

“66 is the mother road, the road of flight,” John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, as he traced the highway from Arkansas to California, where it wound through “Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexican mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe.”

But the Dust Bowl refugees were only passing through. This year in Albuquerque, a schizophrenic homeless man, James Boyd, was shot dead by police, and two homeless Navajo men, Allison Gorman and Kee Thompson, were bludgeoned to death, allegedly by teenagers, as they slept. 2

Extraordinarily, one of the accused teenagers had been home- less himself. “It’s so hard that he could do that to someone where . . . I mean, like I said, we came from there,” Victor Prieto, the father of a 15-year-old who is charged with killing the Navajo men, told Albuquerque’s KOB-TV. 3

According to the city’s count, Albuquerque typically had 1,170 homeless people on any one night last year — in a city with

Albuquerque Struggles to Help the Homeless Needs far exceed the capacity of current services.

Oct. 10, 2014 853www.cqresearcher.com

up in shelters,” says Gagliardi of HAP- Housing.

However, later research showed that about 20 percent of foreclosures hit rental properties, and 40 percent of families facing eviction from foreclosed apartment buildings were renters, the National Center on Homelessness & Poverty said in 2012. “The problem may only continue to worsen as renters represent a rising segment of the U.S. population,” the center concluded. 52

For children, consequences of fore- closures include frequent moves that tend to lower academic performance, as well as family stress that can bring on “negative behaviors,” a former poverty specialist at the federal Health and Human Services Department concluded in a report for the Brookings Institution think tank. 53

Congress responded in 2009 with the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, which expanded the definition of homelessness to include people staying in motels or hotels at the expense of a government agency or a charity. 54

Under the new definition, unsuitable places to sleep included cars, parks, abandoned buildings, bus and train sta- tions and campgrounds. And the seven- day limit on loss-of-housing risk was doubled to 14 days. People fleeing do- mestic violence, sexual assault or other such dangers, and who were unable to find new housing immediately, also were added to the definition. 55

The increase in homelessness in 2008- 09 prompted the Obama administration to adopt and expand its predecessor’s objective of ending homelessness. In a

2010 strategy document, “Opening Doors,” the administration set a five-year timetable for ending homelessness among the chronically homeless, as well as vet- erans. The administration also announced a plan to end homelessness in 10 years for families, youth and children. 56

“In many respects, this current period of economic hardship mirrors the early 1980s, when widespread homelessness reappeared for the first time since the Great Depression,” the strategy docu- ment said. 57

The administration also has focused on reducing homelessness among vet- erans, through services such as HUD’s Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program (VASH).

“Since 2008, we’ve housed more than 73,000 veterans through the HUD-VASH

about 556,000 people — down 28 percent from 2011. But under the U.S. Department of Education’s more expansive definition of homelessness (see p. 844), Albuquerque’s public schools enrolled more than 6,000 homeless students during the 2011- 12 academic year, according to the school system’s Homelessness Project. 4

Support services in Albuquerque are “highly fragmented [and] underfunded,” making it difficult for people to navigate multiple services, according to the New Mexico Coalition to End Home- lessness, which includes St. Martin’s.

Substance-abuse counseling is one of those services. Reynalds says nearly everyone who shows up at Joy Junction comes with a tormented personal history that usually involves alcohol or drugs. “The BBC came to do a segment retracing The Grapes of Wrath, and they wanted to find people who were at Joy Junction purely for lack of money,” he says. “We were able to scrape up three people.”

For the homeless, Smith argues, substance abuse can be a vital form of survival. “If I was living on the streets, I’d be blitzed every day,” he says. “Eating pizza from a dumpster, you can only do that if you’re drinking.”

St. Martin’s offers substance-abuse counseling and other mental health services, along with a day lounge, showers, a laundry and storage space. However, says Monet Silva-Caldwell, the center’s development director, “that is not what St. Martin’s is all about. We want to get them into housing.”

To that end, St. Martin’s screens willing clients for a variety

of small-scale housing programs that are available. They include “permanent supportive housing” — 142 apartments with mental health services on-site — and subsidized housing for as long as two years in 10 two-bedroom apartments. A new program funded by United Way offers three months of rental assistance and job- search help to people in imminent danger of homelessness.

But the staff at both St. Martin’s and Joy Junction say the needs far exceed the capacity of current services. St. Martin’s has registered 6,200 people for its day services since August 2013. Joy Junction houses about 300 men, women and children a night.

While Reynalds acknowledges the evangelical nature of Joy Junction’s therapeutic services, he draws some lines. “There is a proclivity in some religious missions to say, ‘Have your gospel, and then we’ll feed you,’ ” he says. “I have always been strongly opposed to that. We want to take care of your physical needs and then feed you spiritually.”

— Peter Katel

1 John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939), http://tinyurl.com/nyas79c. 2 Ryan Boetel, “Teenage attacker to homeless victims, ‘Eat mud,’ ” Albuquerque Journal, July 23, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ly6mg5j; Rick Nathanson, “James Boyd’s dark journey,” Albuquerque Journal, March 30, 2014, http://tinyurl. com/knkw5rr. 3 Quoted in Lindsey Bever, “One teen charged with killing two homeless men was once homeless himself, his father said,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/mge76l4/. 4 “A Community Response to Homelessness in Albuquerque 2013-2017,” New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, updated September 2014, p. 5, http://tinyurl.com/mv5h6fq.

854 CQ Researcher

program, which provides housing vouch- ers to help homeless veterans pay for permanent, stable housing,” first lady Michelle Obama wrote in an op-ed in July. 58 Nearly 140,000 veterans stayed in shelters at one time or another in 2012, down from nearly 150,000 in 2009. 59

But that number is still large. And, at a time when 1.4 million Afghanistan and Iraq vets are no longer on active duty, studies of past veteran cohorts show that psychological effects of wartime service often show up as late as 10 years after leaving the military. 60

Culhane of the University of Penn- sylvania, who is a consultant to the Department of Veterans Affairs, says the agency is planning to expand VASH and other programs to serve 200,000

people a year. Results so far show that “homelessness has gone down dra- matically among veterans,” he says.

“We’re not going to stop until every American who has defended America has a home in America,” President Obama said in a speech to the American Legion in August. 61 The administration’s goal is to end homelessness among veterans next year.

But some congressional Republicans and homelessness experts doubt that target can be met and question how much progress is being made. “There has been an incredible outlay of re- sources, and other than VA statistics, we really don’t have specifics on the pro- grams’ effectiveness, outcomes and sus- tainability,” Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chair-

man of the House Veterans’ Affairs Com- mittee, told The New York Times. 62

In the fiscal year ending this past Sep- tember, the VA has budgeted $5.4 billion for clinical health services for homeless vets, and $1.4 billion on other programs for the homeless. For the new fiscal year, the administration wants a 17.8 per- cent increase for the VA’s homelessness efforts, including $1.64 billion for hous- ing and homelessness-prevention pro- grams. Overall, since 2010, the adminis- tration has spent $4 billion on homeless-vet housing programs, includ- ing apartment rentals. 63

Homelessness among veterans has been an embarrassing issue since the Vietnam War ended. VA research based on 2009 data concluded that veterans

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

W hen the Democratic Party held its national convention in Charlotte, N.C., in 2012, homeless shelters saw a sudden influx of families.

“We had a big displacement of homeless families,” says social work professor Lori Thomas of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, because they were shut out of where they’d been living — motels. As anyone involved in the world of the homeless knows, motels play an important role for those who have lost their housing.

“Over the years, I’ve seen motels end up becoming their housing,” says Carmela J. DeCandia, director of the National Center on Family Homelessness in Waltham, Mass., “because they can pay night to night or week to week and because there is no security deposit or credit check.”

“People in motels are shelter people,” says Ralph da Costa Nunez, president and CEO of the Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness in New York City.

But Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, says families with no resources who can’t find room at a shelter are likely to sleep at a friend’s or relative’s house, or in a car. “People in motels have got money, though they’ve probably got a cash flow problem,” she says. “They need help but probably have income.”

The motel-living trend got national exposure three years ago, when “60 Minutes” ran a hard-hitting piece on families in Central Florida whose incomes were too low for them to live anywhere except in motels. “In Seminole County, near Orlando, so many kids have lost their homes that school buses now stop at dozens of cheap motels where families crowd into

rooms, living week to week,” CBS reporter Scott Pelley said. 1

In Albuquerque, N.M., as in Orlando, some incomes leave people very close to the edge. Jeremy Reynalds, a pastor and the director of Joy Junction, an Albuquerque family shelter that sends a food truck to serve families living in local motels, says some of those who eat the free meals have only enough to pay for lodging. Jessica Williams, a Joy Junction resident with her husband and their newborn, says they stayed at a Motel 6 “until we ran out of money and came here.”

The Albuquerque mayor’s office cracked down on substandard motels in 2008, reducing, at least for a while, the stock of available motel housing, Reynalds remembers. 2 “I sympathized with what they were doing,” he says, because some of the motels had safety hazards. But he adds, “It’s like payday loans; they take advantage of the poor, but if they weren’t there, what would take their place?”

No one knows how many homeless people are living in motels nationwide. The closest thing to a census of that population is the U.S. Department of Education’s count of 64,930 public school students living in hotels and motels during the 2011-12 school year. That figure does not include the students’ parents and preschool- age siblings, or any motel-dwellers not attending school. 3

Massachusetts appears to have the best data of the states, because a state law guarantees homeless families a “right to shelter,” and Massachusetts turned to motels when shelters filled up. Last year, the state was housing more than 2,000 families, including 2,008 school-age children, in motels and hotels, at a cost of $48.1 million, according to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. 4

Motels Become Transitional Housing “Families crowd into rooms, living week to week.”

Oct. 10, 2014 855www.cqresearcher.com

were overrepresented among the home- less, and that the possibility of a veteran becoming homeless rose after the draft ended in 1973. Male veterans were 1.25 times more likely to be homeless than non-veterans, and women veterans were 2.1 times more likely than non- veteran women. 64

The most extensive research so far on veteran homelessness is several decades old and focused on Vietnam vets, the Congressional Research Service reported. That 1984-88 study did not find a direct connection between post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and homelessness. However, some of the issues contributing to PTSD — including substance abuse and unemployment — were risk factors for homelessness.

Data on the mental health of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans do point to a high po- tential for homelessness in their ranks. Two studies found that between 14 percent and 17 percent of those veterans showed signs of PTSD and depression. 65

CURRENT SITUATION Arresting the Problem

Several new ordinances in Hawaiiaim to crack down on the growing

number of homeless people, seen as a threat to tourism — the economic lifeblood of Oahu Island, home to Hon- olulu, Pearl Harbor and the famous Waikiki beaches.

One law makes it a crime to sit or lie on sidewalks in the Waikiki area, punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to 30 days in jail. Another law makes it a petty misdemeanor to urinate or defecate on Waikiki’s streets or in other public places on the island.

These realities clash with the island paradise image promoted by tourism business leaders. “There’s an expectation for Waikiki, for Hawaii. It’s a dream,” said Helene “Sam” Shenkus, marketing director of the Royal Hawaiian Center, a popular shopping mall. “And because

The nine-member family of Sergio and Rosa Serrano was living in a Days Inn in Shrewsbury. For the children, “it’s not good, but what are you going to do?” Sergio Serrano, an un- employed and partially disabled construction worker, told the center. “They want to be outside, but they can’t. They have no place to play.” 5

New York City also requires that the homeless have shelter. The city, which has the state’s greatest number of homeless residents, at one point took over buildings whose owners were in default on tax obligations. One shelter near John F. Kennedy International Airport is a former Best Western motel. 6

At the other end of the country, San Jose, Calif. — another city with a large homeless population and high housing costs — is planning to pay motel bills for “transitionally homeless” people. The motel subsidies could last up to one year for those with good employment prospects who have qualified for rental- assistance vouchers but can’t find a place to live. 7

The paucity of affordable housing in places like New York, Massachusetts and San Jose, which as home to the lucrative high-tech industry has famously high housing costs, makes it difficult for families working at the low end of the job market.

“We have a lot of families working in low-wage situations who can’t get the money together to get into an apartment, and who are living in motels,” says Lauren Voyer, a senior vice president at HAPHousing, a Springfield, Mass.-based nonprofit that helps people rent or buy affordable housing. “If you’re in that situation, you’re living without a home.”

— Peter Katel

1 Scott Pelley, “Homeless Children: The Hard Times Generation,” “60 Minutes,” June 20, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/pwwvmwc. 2 Dan Mckay, “Mayor Brings in New Team,” Albuquerque Journal, July 8, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/ntp79r2. 3 “Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program,” U.S. Department of Education, updated August 2013, http://tinyurl.com/osbmbwq. For back- ground, see Marcia Clemmitt, “Homeless Students: Should Aid Programs Be Expanded?” CQ Researcher, April 5, 2013, pp. 305-328. 4 Rupa Shenoy, “Homeless in motels: How some families are hanging on,” New England Center for Investigative Reporting (in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette), Feb. 23, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/qdfnafk. 5 Quoted in ibid. 6 Ian Frazier, “Hidden City,” The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/npr83gk. 7 Alice Yin, “Homeless Programs Take Different Paths to Address Crisis,” San Jose Inside, Aug. 27, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ndulwu5.

Theresa Muller, a homeless woman in Kissimmee, Fla., prepares to move out of the cluttered motel room she shared with her boyfriend, father and three children.

They were planning in August to move to a home in a neighboring county.

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they’re families, and it’s their money, they don’t have to come here.” 66

Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell pushed through the ordinances after announcing measures to open more public restrooms and add more shelter space for homeless people. Still, Oahu has 4,400 beds for an estimated home- less population of 4,700.

The County of Honolulu, which in- cludes the entire island, is planning to expand homeless shelter space, and when proposing the measures Caldwell described them in humane, rather than punitive, terms. But the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii said the “sit- lie” ordinance criminalizes “basic human functions [and] in the absence of options for shelter violates the Eight Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.” 67

While Honolulu’s status as a tourism mecca made its homelessness crack- down newsworthy, less glamorous cities have been adopting similar measures for years, especially after the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996 rejected a challenge to Seattle’s ordi- nance banning aggressive panhandling and sitting or lying on downtown side- walks at certain times. 68

According to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 53 percent of U.S. cities now ban sitting or lying in certain public places; 65 percent prohibit loitering in specific places; 43 percent prohibit sleeping in vehicles; 57 percent bar camping in certain public places and 34 percent ban all camping within city limits.

Although such anti-homelessness laws may restore some degree of order in cities, they can have other conse- quences. A mentally ill homeless man shot and killed by police in Albu- querque last March was illegally camp- ing in the Sandia Mountain foothills at the eastern edge of town. The shooting of James Boyd, 38, added to discontent over the police depart- ment’s reliance on force and raised questions about the effectiveness of

services for homeless people with mental illness. 69

The Rev. Russell “Rusty” Smith, an Episcopal priest who is executive director of the St. Martin’s Hospitality Center in Albuquerque, which offers a variety of aid to the homeless, but not overnight shelter, said Boyd had frequented the center but had refused services. Smith said he couldn’t disclose details of Boyd’s history. But schizophrenics who take medication often quit when they feel better, Smith added. In any event, “the reason that he was up in the hills is that he felt safe there,” Smith said.

Ordinances designed to keep the homeless out of downtowns and parks often are enacted in response to citizens who say they feel threatened by the proximity of large numbers of homeless people. In San Francisco, enforcement of the city’s anti-homelessness ordi- nances is lax, and public urination and defecation and screaming at passersby is common, according to the San Fran- cisco Chronicle. “If you’re very tolerant of inappropriate behavior, you’re pretty likely to keep getting more of it,” Bill McConnell, a former behavioral health division staffer for the city, told the newspaper in June. 70

But Tars of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty says, “Crim- inalizing [homelessness] is at least three times as costly as providing shelter or housing.” However, officials would have to allocate a budget line to housing or shelter, he points out, while the costs of criminalization can be hidden in police, court and emergency room budgets.

In any case, not all municipal en- forcement efforts to curb homelessness are successful in the courts. In June, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a Los Angeles ban on living in vehicles. 71

Alternate Approach

Los Angeles, as it happens, has em-barked on an anti-homelessness

strategy that marks a break with its own past and with enforcement-heavy options chosen by other cities.

“I don’t consider homelessness break- ing the law,” Los Angeles Police Capt. Mike Oreb told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re not the homeless police.” 72

In September, a month after Los Angeles city and county launched a drive to remove health hazards and provide immediate help to the 3,500 homeless people who live on Skid Row, officials said the effort had suc- ceeded in providing emergency housing for 42 people; removing 3.5 tons of waste and hazardous material, including syringes, needles and knives; and grant- ing approval for six people to obtain permanent housing. 73

The Skid Row sweep also identified 80 people who needed immediate med- ical care and 27 who required mental health attention. 74

The Operation Healthy Streets pro- ject will involve further sweeps of the area, both to remove trash and provide immediate services such as mental health appointments and enrollment in Medicaid, the state-run, federally subsidized health insurance program for low-income Americans. 75

Some experienced police officers had been calling for a new approach, one that doesn’t rely on police to be mental health workers. “The police have been asked for years to be the answer to the issues stemming from mental illness in the communities we serve,” Deon Joseph, a Los Angeles Police Department senior lead officer with 16 years’ service on Skid Row, wrote in the Los Angeles Downtown News.

“It is not the LAPD that has failed the mentally ill or the public,” he wrote. “It is our society that has failed them. A society that has closed down hospitals. A system that is slow to create more housing-plus-care loca- tions.” 76

Continued on p. 858

no

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At Issue: Is Housing First the best approach to ending homelessness?yes

yes NAN ROMAN PRESIDENT AND CEO, NATIONAL ALLIANCE TO END HOMELESSNESS

WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, OCTOBER 2014

r esearch indicates that Housing First is the most effectiveand least costly way to end homelessness for a majority of people. The strategy, which helps people experiencing home- lessness to quickly obtain housing, supported with rental assis- tance and services, eliminates lengthy and costly stays in home- less programs. Data indicate that Housing First prevents relapses into homelessness better than any other approach.

Housing First is based on two premises: that homelessness is traumatic and damaging and should be as brief as possible, and that all people benefit from the stability of a home. The importance of a home is backed by evidence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that housing is essential to good health. Children do better in school when they have a permanent place to live, and services and treatment are more effective when people are in a home.

For families, homelessness is typically an economic issue. They are poor, and housing is expensive. In the past we ad- dressed their homelessness by providing a temporary place to stay and social services that did little to help them with their immediate problem — the lack of a home. Today, Housing First for families reverses this process by helping families move back into housing after a short stay in a shelter and then providing them with services. It works. Housing First shortens the time families are homeless by up to 50 percent and does a better job of preventing returns to shelter than any other approach we have tried.

Housing First also works for those with more persistent problems. A minority of homeless people, mostly single adults, are disabled. It is neither realistic nor humane to expect them to address their challenges while living in shelters or on the streets. Housing First gets them into permanent supportive housing — housing with services attached — and studies in- dicate that it is significantly less expensive than leaving them on the street ($29,000 a year per person less in one Seattle cost study).

There is, of course, no one-size-fits-all solution to any problem, and Housing First is no exception. Youths and young parents experiencing homelessness, as well as people who need a sober recovery environment and some victims of domestic violence, may benefit from specialized transitional housing.

But on the whole, people who become homeless want, and need, to be housed again. And that is exactly what Housing First does.no

RALPH DA COSTA NUNEZ PRESIDENT AND CEO, INSTITUTE FOR CHILDREN, POVERTY & HOMELESSNESS

WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, OCTOBER 2014

as an across-the-board solution to the problem ofhomelessness, no. Individuals and families becomehomeless for a variety of reasons, and to assume that one approach is going to work for everyone is misguided.

Housing First is a well-intentioned approach: get people out of shelter and into housing as quickly as possible. How- ever, the implementation of a Housing First approach has varied widely between communities and among various popu- lations, and it has had some unintended consequences.

For chronically homeless individuals, Housing First has usu- ally meant placement into housing with long-term assistance, such as permanent supportive housing with ongoing services. Once placed, individuals have a reasonable expectation that they will be able to remain housed.

However, for families, this is simply not the case. For them, Housing First has generally taken the form of rapid rehousing: usually a voucher or subsidy that offers short-term rental sup- port, as well as help finding housing. Services are usually limited in scope and duration, if they exist at all, and rarely address the underlying causes of their homelessness. For some families, this is the right amount of support. But for many others who struggle with limited educations and job skills, domestic violence or mental health challenges, rapid rehousing offers at best only brief stability.

New York City has spent almost 10 years and unknown millions of dollars rapidly rehousing families. There is daily proof that this approach does not work. Two-thirds of all families who enter a shelter have been there before. It is hard to argue that these families were ever truly helped or cost-effectively rehoused the first time around.

Although proponents of rapid rehousing often claim im- pressive success rates, these outcomes are usually conveniently measured at the six- or 12-month mark, while rental supports are still in place. The real proof of success will be if these families remain housed over the long term. Until those results are measured, governments will continue spending millions of dollars on an unproven idea. Only time and data will tell.

Sadly, the unintended consequences of Housing First for America’s 1.8 million homeless children are yet to come. Housing instability has proven not only to have negative effects on their education and health, but also increases the likelihood that they may themselves become homeless as adults. When Housing First puts the long-term needs of families last, the more important question to ask is, Can we afford to pay that price?

858 CQ Researcher

OUTLOOK “A Human Right”

Homelessness experts have accu-mulated vast experience in human suffering. But some of them are hopeful, citing the new federal emphasis on ending homelessness as a recognition that homelessness should not be seen as an unsolvable problem.

“We have been doing a lot of work on housing as a human right, and after

many years of feeling that we were banging our heads against the wall, the federal government has become more responsive [to our argument],” says Tars of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. He cites the U.S. Interagency Council on Home- lessness’ adoption of the doctrine. 77

Eventually, Tars says, acknowledg- ment of housing as a fundamental right will combine with the pressure created by the shortage of affordable housing

to force the government to fill the gap. “We don’t have to go all the way to subsidized housing or public housing for every American,” he says. “It can be done in a market-based system, with a safety net that ensures that no one is without that essential human need.”

Tars and others advocate getting the business sector involved by providing incentives for builders to construct af- fordable rental housing — similar to the mortgage interest income tax deduction that encourages taxpayers to buy a house.

“The private sector is very good at building housing,” Sheila Crowley, pres- ident and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said in a

telephone conference call for journalists in March. But under current conditions, she added, “if you could make money housing people [with very low in- comes], somebody would have figured out how to do that by now. You can’t make money at it. It has to have a public subsidy in order to be able to achieve that goal.”

If the amount homeowners can deduct in mortgage interest payments were reduced even slightly, she said,

the resulting increased revenues could be used to “solve the housing problems of the very poorest.” 78

Other developments are perhaps more promising. Smith of St. Martin’s Hospitality Center said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — known as “Obamacare” — has made an enormous and imme- diate difference to the homeless men and women he sees by expanding eli- gibility for access to Medicaid, reducing reliance on a local nonprofit, Albu- querque Health-Care for the Homeless. “It has been life-changing,” he says. “A year and a half ago, most of our clients received medical care through Health- Care for the Homeless and the emer- gency room, and when they were deal- ing with a chronic illness they didn’t go. Now, at least 30 percent of our clients have signed up with the ACA.”

Gagliardi of HAPHousing in Spring- field, Mass., points to a small resurgence of jobs that pay more than minimum wage. “This area used to be known for precision manufacturing, then it all went away,” he says. “Now it’s coming back, and they can’t find enough qual- ified people. Community colleges and vocational schools are out to produce them. If, in fact, there really is a return to work for people at a decent wage, that will make a huge difference.”

Culhane of the University of Penn- sylvania praises the development of rapid rehousing and permanent sup- portive housing projects. “From the treatment perspective, these are very good cures,” he says. “We need to scale that up, and we are seeing that happen incrementally every year.”

Da Costa Nunez of the Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness in New York is similarly optimistic about the centers operated by Homes for the Homeless, a nonprofit that he also heads, which combine transitional housing with after-school and jobs programs. The non- profit already operates four “family inns” along those lines for New York City.

The institute also is building a major center in the Bronx, whose job training

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

Continued from p. 856

St. Martin’s Hospitality Center in Albuquerque, N.M., the state’s biggest service center for the homeless, does not provide housing but offers other assistance,

such as hot meals and substance-abuse counseling.

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efforts will include an on-site culinary training institute as well as educational and child-care programs open to the surrounding community. “We are not building shelters,” he says. “We are building something that is part of the community. It’s time to take the word ‘shelter’ out and think of it as a resi- dential community resource center.”

Yet the poverty underlying homeless- ness remains severe. “We need to revisit the adequacy of welfare payments to families, especially those with preschool- age kids,” Culhane says. “Poverty among young families remains a problem. But these are things that can be solved.”

Others stress the need to expand the stock of affordable housing. “If we don’t do something about that, people are going to keep losing housing and being homeless,” says Roman of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “But I do think we could end home- lessness in the way we know it now, and make it a very brief, rare one- time-only event.”

Notes

1 Quoted in Adam Nagourney, “Honolulu Shores Up Tourism With Crackdown on Home- less,” The New York Times, June 22, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/pcmuvcm. 2 “The 2013 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress: Part 1, Point-in- Time Estimates of Homelessness,” U.S. De- partment of Housing and Urban Development, p. 7, http://tinyurl.com/qd89wa8. 3 “2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, Volume II,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, September 2013, pp. 1-7, 3-7, http://tinyurl.com/l6j268s. 4 Kim Hopper, et al., “Estimating Numbers of Unsheltered Homeless People Through Plant-Capture and Postcount Survey Methods,” American Journal of Public Health, August 2008, http://tinyurl.com/oan68g3. 5 “Homelessness Assistance,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, undated, http://tinyurl.com/d5kejj3. 6 “Changes in the HUD Definition of ‘Home- less,’ ” National Alliance to End Homelessness,

Jan. 18, 2012, http://tiny url.com/pswbcak. For background, see Mar- cia Clemmitt, “Home- less Students,” CQ Re- searcher, April 5, 2013, pp. 305-328. 7 Ibid. “Changes in the HUD Definition,” p. 41; “The 2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress,” Vol. II, op. cit., pp. 3-14. 8 “Education for Home- less Children and Youth Program: Consolidated State Performance Re- port Data,” National Cen- ter for Homeless Edu- cation, September 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ktbh bhh; “Laws & Guidance/ Elementary & Secondary Education — Part C — Homeless Education,” U.S. Department of Ed- ucation, updated Sept. 15, 2004, http://tinyurl. com/36jhv5x. 9 “Opening Doors: Fed- eral Strategic Plan to Pre- vent and End Homeless- ness,” U.S. Interagency Council on Homeless- ness, 2010, p. 4, http:// tinyurl.com/n6z52dn. 10 “Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing: Continuum of Care Pro- gram, A Rule by the Housing and Urban De- velopment Department on 7/31/2012,” Federal Register, July 31, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/pro9 rwa. 11 “Interim Report: Fam- ily Options Study,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment, March 2013, p. xiv, http://tinyurl.com/mto hsek; Martha R. Burt, et al., “Homelessness: Programs and the People They Serve,” Urban Institute, August 1999, p. 29, http://tinyurl.com/lx7o62u.

12 Ibid., “Interim Report,” p. 56. 13 Maureen A. Hayes, Megan Zonneville and Ellen Bassuk, “The SHIFT Study: Final Report,”

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860 CQ Researcher

HOUSING THE HOMELESS

National Center on Family Homelessness, 2010, pp. 18-19, http://tinyurl.com/m3t9uhc. 14 “Rapid Re-Housing: A History and Core Components,” National Alliance to End Home- lessness, April 22, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/n8u 5w7p. 15 Libby Perl, et al., “Homelessness: Targeted Federal Programs and Recent Legislation,” Congressional Research Service, Feb. 3, 2014, p. 23, http://tinyurl.com/l5x3tma; “Housing First,” National Alliance to End Homelessness, undated, http://tinyurl.com/qcu7qvw; “McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Success Stories,” National Alliance to End Homelessness, February 2006, http://tinyurl.com/n3ubo5q. 16 “Rapid Re-Housing: A History and Core Components,” National Alliance to End Home- lessness, April 22, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/n8 u5w7p; “Rapid Re-Housing: Creating Programs that Work,” National Alliance to End Home- lessness, July 2009, pp. 41-43, http://tinyurl. com/k887hp5. 17 “Homelessness Assistance,” U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, op. cit.; Perl, et al., op. cit., summary, p. 13. 18 “Chart Book: Federal Housing Spending Is Poorly Matched to Need,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Dec. 18, 2013, http://tiny url.com/nxgpdyc; “Housing America’s Future: New Directions for National Policy,” Housing Commission, Bipartisan Policy Center, February 2013, pp. 10-11, http://tinyurl.com/mm9tum6. 19 Quoted in Steve LeBlanc, “In Mass., A Tough Quest to End Family Homelessness,” The Associated Press, Jan. 1, 2014, http://tiny url.com/k435udf. 20 “Housing America’s Future,” op. cit., p. 11; “Policy Basics: Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance,” Center on Budget and Policy Pri- orities, Jan. 25, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/qe4x8eo; “Policy Basics: The Housing Choice Voucher Program,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 14, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/mrjcxkm.

21 “Rep. Jeb Hensarling Holds a Hearing on Sustainable Housing Finance System,” House Committee on Financial Services, CQ Tran- scriptions, July 18, 2013. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (1998), p. 8. 25 Martha R. Burt, Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s (1993), p. 3. 26 James N. Gregory, “ ‘The Dust Bowl Migration’ Poverty Stories, Race Stories,” http://faculty. washington.edu/gregoryj/dust%20bowl%20mi gration.htm. 27 Woody Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home,” 1938, http://tinyurl.com/plt3dp6; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). 28 James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (1989), pp. 98-99; Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160 (1941), http://tinyurl.com/mbbzyha. 29 Ella Howard, Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (2013), Kindle edition, no page numbers. 30 Neil Larry Shumsky, Homelessness: A Docu- mentary and Reference Guide (2012), pp. 147- 151;“CCC Brief History,” CCC Legacy, undated, http://tinyurl.com/cbgc6oz. 31 Quoted in ibid., p. 150. 32 Chris Koyanagi, “Learning From History: Deinstitutionalization of People with Mental Illness As Precursor to Long-Term Care Reform,” Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, August 2007, http://tinyurl.com/lxmwgp6; Richard D. Lyons, “How Release of Mental Patients Began,” The New York Times, Oct. 30, 1984, http://tiny url.com/b894wpq. 33 “Remarks on signing mental retardation fa- cilities and community health centers con- struction bill, Oct. 31, 1963,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, http://tiny url.com/lget9yx; Martin Weil, “Rosemary Kennedy, 86; President’s Disabled Sister,” The

Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2005, http://tinyurl. com/yb47jgo. 34 Koyangi, op. cit., p. 4. 35 E. Fuller Torrey, “Ronald Reagan’s shameful legacy: Violence, the homeless, mental illness,” Salon, Sept. 29, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/lr4s422. 36 Ibid.; for background see Barbara Mantel, “Mental Health Policy,” CQ Researcher, May 10, 2013, pp. 425-448. 37 Quoted in Howard, op. cit. 38 Torrey, op. cit. 39 For background, see “The S&L Crisis: A Chrono-Bibliography,” Federal Deposit Insur- ance Corporation, http://tinyurl.com/masdhwx. 40 Howard, op. cit.; Marc Labonte, “The 2007- 2009 Recession: Similarities to and Differences from the Past,” Congressional Research Service, Oct. 6, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/msqquca; David Kocieniewski, “Since 1980s, the Kindest of Tax Cuts for the Rich,” The New York Times, Jan. 18, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/ou3tg6e; William A. Gal- ston, “Stop Blaming the Tax Code for America’s Inequality Problem,” The New Republic, via Brookings Institution, April 19, 2012, http://tiny url.com/qgzmp78; “History of the US Tax Sys- tem,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, undated, http://tinyurl.com/79oer4b. 41 Martha R. Burt, “Causes of the Growth of Homelessness During the 1980s,” 1991, from “Understanding Homelessness: New Policy and Research Perspectives,” Fannie Mae Foundation, 1991, 1997, pp. 182-183, http://tinyurl.com/lrzckm2. 42 Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972), http://tinyurl.com/mh95nlp; ibid., Burt, “Causes of the Growth.” 43 Quoted in Ian Frazier, “Hidden City,” The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/ npr83gk; for background, see Peter Katel, “Housing the Homeless,” CQ Researcher, Dec. 18, 2009, pp. 1053-1076. 44 Ibid., Katel. 45 Shumsky, op. cit., pp. 234-235; “Continuum of Care (CoC) Program,” HUD Exchange, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, undated, http://tinyurl.com/o2myeut. 46 Rosemary Chapin, Social Policy for Effective Practice: A Strengths Approach (2010), p. 177; Maria Foscarinis, “Homelessness in America: A Human Rights Crisis,” Journal of Law in Society, Wayne State University, 2012, p. 517, http://tinyurl.com/of6rrl2. 47 Libby Perl, et al., “Homelessness: Targeted Federal Programs and Recent Legislation,” Congressional Research Service, Feb. 3, 2014, pp. 22-24, http://tinyurl.com/l5x3tma. 48 Quoted in Derek Kravitz, “Homelessness Official Wins Praise With Focus on Permanent

About the Author Peter Katel is a CQ Researcher contributing writer who previously reported on Haiti and Latin America for Time and Newsweek and covered the Southwest for newspapers in New Mexico. He has received several journalism awards, in- cluding the Bartolomé Mitre Award for coverage of drug traf- ficking from the Inter-American Press Association. He holds an A.B. in university studies from the University of New Mexico. His recent reports include “Mexico’s Future” and “U.S. Global Engagement.”

Oct. 10, 2014 861www.cqresearcher.com

Housing,” The Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/lbd766q. 49 Ibid., pp. 23-24. 50 Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton, “Bush drive for home ownership fueled housing bubble,” The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/7emvj3z. 51 “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009: the for- gotten victims of the subprime crisis,” National Coalition for the Homeless, 2009, http://tinyurl. com/mknpp3. 52 “Eviction (Without) Notice: Renters and the Foreclosure Crisis,” National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, December 2012, p. 6, http://tinyurl.com/l7ebrxa. Les Christie, “Record 3 million households hit with foreclosure in 2009,” CNN Money, Jan. 14, 2010, http://tinyurl. com/ybqrkje. 53 Julia B. Isaacs, “The Ongoing Impact of Fore- closures on Children,” Brookings Institution, April 2012, pp. 5-6, http://tinyurl.com/pw8feh3; Julia Isaacs, [professional biography], Urban In- stitute, http://tinyurl.com/jvqauv7. 54 Ibid., pp. 4-5; Christie, op. cit. 55 Perl, et al., pp. 5-6. 56 Ibid., pp. 24-25; “Opening Doors,” op. cit., p. 4. 57 Ibid., “Opening Doors.” 58 Michelle Obama, “Let’s end veteran home- lessness once and for all,” McClatchy News- papers, July 30, 2014, www.mcclatchydc.com/ 2014/07/30/234885_lets-end-veteran-homeless ness.html?rh=1. 59 “The 2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, Vol. II,” op. cit., pp. 4-7. 60 Libby Perl, “Veterans and Homelessness,” Congressional Research Service, Nov. 29, 2013, p. 39, http://tinyurl.com/n6sncq4. 61 Quoted in Erica E. Phillips and Ben Kesling, “Number of Homeless Veterans in the U.S. Falls Over Past Four Years,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 26, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/mhw5dv2. 62 Quoted in Dave Philipps, “Many Veterans Adapt to a Strange World, One With Walls,” The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2014, http://tinyurl. com/lfokh8h. 63 Ibid.; Phillips and Kesling, op. cit.; “Proposed Fiscal year 2015 Budget Fact Sheet: Home- lessness Assistance, U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, undated, http://tinyurl.com/ lnmb8lg. 64 Perl, “Veterans and Homelessness,” op. cit., pp. 12-14. 65 Ibid., pp. 16-17. 66 Quoted in Cathy Bussewitz, “Honolulu Ap- proves Plan to Move Homeless,” The Asso- ciated Press (via Minneapolis Star-Tribune),

Sept. 11, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/mnen5hz; Mileka Lincoln, “Mayor Caldwell signs homeless bills into law,” KGMB, KHNL, Sep. 17, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/n22pxv7. 67 Quoted in Lincoln, ibid., “Mayor Caldwell”; Kirk Caldwell, “Together we can resolve prob- lem of homelessness in Honolulu,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, June 1, 2014, http://tinyurl. com/ok2g4rt; Bussewitz, ibid. 68 “A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities, Case Summaries,” National Coalition for the Homeless, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, January 2006, http://tinyurl.com/ol32u9y; Heather Knight, “San Francisco looks to Seattle: Did sidewalk sitting ban help?” San Francisco Chronicle, in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 29, 2010, http:// tinyurl.com/ohyjxef. 69 Russell Contreras, “Albuquerque Police Re- lease New Video of James Boyd Shooting,” The Associated Press (via The Huffington Post), June 12, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/qdozuvc; Rick Nathanson, “James Boyd’s dark journey,” Al- buquerque Journal, March 30, 2014, http://tiny url.com/knkw5rr. 70 Quoted in Heather Knight, “A decade of homelessness: Thousands in S.F, remain in crisis,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, 2014,

http://tinyurl.com/ncb94my. 71 Quoted in Maura Dolan and Gale Holland, “Appeals court panel ends L.A. ban on home- less living in vehicles,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/oxfye5v. 72 Quoted in Gale Holland, “L.A. leaders are crafting new plan to help homeless on skid row,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2014, http://tiny url.com/kmsh8rg. 73 Gale Holland, “Skid row sweep finds many homeless with medical, psychiatric needs,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 11, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ o7c5d4p. 74 Ibid. 75 Holland, “L.A. leaders,” op. cit. 76 Deon Joseph, “Skid Row Cop: Downtown Is in a Mental Health State of Emergency,” Los Angeles Downtown News, June 30, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/nbh5ckq. 77 “U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Statement on the U.S. Participation in the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Re- view,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/qhec7kq. 78 “The National Low Income Housing Coalition Holds a Teleconference on a Report Regarding the Affordable Rental Housing Shortage,” SEC Wire, March 24, 2014 (via Nexis).

FOR MORE INFORMATION Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness, 44 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003; 212-358-8086; www.icphusa.org. Think tank that researches links between homelessness and poverty and its effects on families.

National Alliance to End Homelessness, 1518 K St., N.W., 2nd Floor, Washington, DC 20005; 202-638-1526; www.endhomelessness.org. Advocacy group and research center that helped popularize the idea of ending homelessness, rather than simply sheltering the homeless.

National Center on Family Homelessness, c/o American Institutes for Research, 201 Jones Rd., Waltham, MA 02451; 781-373-7080; familyhomelessness.org. Think tank that explores causes and effects of homelessness on parents (single mothers, for the most part) and children, and effectiveness of treatment methods.

National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 2000 M St., N.W., Washington, DC 20036; 202-638-2535; www.nlchp.org. Opposes laws that penalize homeless people; advocates that housing be defined as a human right.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 810 Vermont Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20420; 877-424-3838; www.va.gov/homeless. Runs a separate site with information on programs aimed at homeless vets.

U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, 1275 1st St., N.E., Washington, DC 20002; 202-708-4663; www.uscih.gov. The coordinating arm of federal anti-home- lessness efforts that publishes updates of strategy on fighting homelessness.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

862 CQ Researcher

Selected Sources

Bibliography Books

Howard, Ella, Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. A history professor at Armstrong State University in Savannah,

Ga., chronicles homelessness and government responses to it from the late 19th century on, focusing on New York’s Bowery.

Reynalds, Jeremy, A Sheltered Life: Take It to the Streets, West Bow Press, 2013. The English-born founder of a homeless shelter in Albuquerque

recounts his own brief homelessness and describes the lives of some of the people he and his colleagues have helped.

Shumsky, Neil Larry, Homelessness: A Documentary and Reference Guide, Greenwood, 2012. A history professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg depicts

the course of homelessness throughout the country’s history.

Articles

Frazier, Ian, “Hidden City,”The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/npr83gk. A detailed first-person account by a magazine writer describes

the lives of New York City’s homeless.

Joseph, Deon, “Skid Row Cop: Downtown Is in a Mental Health State of Emergency,”Los Angeles Downtown News, June 30, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/nbh5ckq. A Los Angeles police officer writes about the horrific

conditions in which thousands of the city’s mentally ill homeless people live, calling it an indictment of American society.

Knight, Heather, “A decade of homelessness: Thousands in S.F. remain in crisis,”San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/l8s7bye. Despite a 10-year-old pledge by the city’s then-mayor to

end homelessness, San Francisco continues to struggle with the problem.

Nathanson, Rick, “James Boyd’s dark journey,”Albuquerque Journal, March 30, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/knkw5rr. A mentally ill homeless man shot to death by Albuquerque

police had shuttled between jails and a psychiatric hospital for years.

Olsen, Hanna Brooks, “Homelessness and the Impossibility of a Good Night’s Sleep,” The Atlantic, Aug. 14, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/oykcjn7. A Seattle writer explores an unknown facet of homelessness:

the debilitating effects of never getting a restful night’s sleep, whether the person is in a shelter or on the street.

Phillips, Erica E., and BenKesling, “Number of Homeless Veterans in the U.S. Falls Over Past Four Years,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 26, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ mhw5dv2. The number of homeless veterans has dropped sharply, but

ending it by next year (as the Obama administration wants) seems unlikely.

Shenoy, Rupa, “Homeless in motels: How some families are hanging on,” New England Center for Investigative Reporting, in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Feb. 23, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/qdfnafk. Journalists investigate the difficulties of family life in a motel

room and the Massachusetts state government’s attempts to meet its obligation to shelter homeless families.

Reports and Studies

“Meeting the Child Care Needs of Homeless Families — How Do States Stack Up?”Institute for Children, Poverty &Home- lessness, July 2014, http://tinyurl.com/lz8zsr2. A New York-based think tank reports that child care, needed

by homeless mothers who must work to acquire housing, receives little attention in most states’ homelessness programs.

“No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities,”National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, July 2014, http://tinyurl.com/plgfed2. Cities are passing laws that effectively penalize homelessness,

reports a Washington-based advocacy organization that opposes the trend both as inhumane and a waste of money.

Abt Associates, “Family Options Study, Interim Report,” U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, March 2013, http://tinyurl.com/l9cxnpx. The first installment of a study of more than 2,300 homeless

families reports on their characteristics and the services that are available to them. A second installment is intended to provide data on which services are most effective as permanent solutions to homelessness.

Henry, Meghan, Dr. Alvaro Cortes, and Sean Morris, “The 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Con- gress, Part I: Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness,” http://tinyurl.com/qd89wa8, and “The 2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, Vol. II: Esti- mates of Homelessness in the United States,” Office of Community Planning and Development, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, September 2013, http://tinyurl.com/l6j268s. These annual reports detail point-in-time counts and data

on shelter use.

Oct. 10, 2014 863www.cqresearcher.com

Government Policies

Ho, Catherine, “Judge: Agencies have been ‘hiding’ federal properties that could be used to house services for home- less,” The Washington Post, April 7, 2013, http://tinyurl. com/pgngbvx. Thousands of federal buildings can be converted into homeless

shelters and clinics, according to a U.S. District Court ruling.

Landen, Xander, “More cities across the U.S. consider homelessness a crime,” PBS News Hour, July 19, 2014, www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/homelessness-now- crime-cities-throughout-u-s/. A growing number of cities have been restricting loitering,

begging and sleeping in public since 2009, according to a report by an advocacy group for the homeless.

Saul, Michael Howard, “Homeless Costs Shifted,” The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2013, http://online.wsj. com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732386960457836 6442091851444. Increased federal funding for family shelters has saved both

New York City and New York state millions of dollars since 2011.

Low-Income Housing

Blidner, Rachelle, “Public Housing Safety Policy Can Hit Whole Family,”The Associated Press, Sept. 14, 2014, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/public-housing-safety-policy- can-hit-whole-family. Federal officials are slowly changing policies that evict

families from public housing if any member engages in criminal activity.

Lagos, Marisa, and HeatherKnight, “S.F. Supervisor Breed’s plan: Put homeless in public housing,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 2014, www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ S-F-Supervisor-Breed-s-plan-Put-homeless-in-5404805.php. A San Francisco supervisor urges the city to ignore federal

rules and convert 172 rundown public housing units into housing for homeless families.

Newman, Bruce, and Mark Emmons, “San Jose poised to close ‘The Jungle,’ ”San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 22, 2014, www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_26594781/san- jose-poised-close-jungle. San Jose, Calif., will dismantle a 68-acre encampment for

the homeless known as “The Jungle” and place the occupants in public housing.

Recessions

Ellis, Blake, “Student homelessness hits record high,”CNN, Oct. 24, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/24/pf/

homeless-students/. Continuing economic struggles in the wake of the 2007-09

recession are causing more students to end up homeless.

Lurie, Stephen, “The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America,”The Atlantic, Aug. 26, 2013, www.theatlantic. com/business/archive/2013/08/the-astonishing-decline- of-homelessness-in-america/279050/. A writer credits the 2009 stimulus package with helping

the homeless.

Toppo, Greg, “Homeless population dips,” USA Today, Sept. 3, 2013, www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/ 2013/09/01/homeless-homelessness-housing/2730301/. A journalist looks at the impact of the 2008 recession and

how homelessness fell in the aftermath despite the tepid economic recovery.

Veterans

Huetteman, Emmarie, “State and Local Officials Vow to End Homelessness Among Veterans,”The New York Times, June 4, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/us/politics/ state-and-local-officials-vow-to-end-homelessness-among- veterans.html. President Obama promises to end veteran homelessness

by the end of 2015.

Zauzmer, Julie, “From the Pentagon to life in a van,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 6, 2014, http://articles. philly.com/2014-01-06/news/45885460_1_veterans-day- homeless-veterans-hogg. A former Pentagon aide who spent 30 years in the military

becomes one of 60,000 homeless veterans in the United States.

The Next Step: Additional Articles from Current Periodicals

CITING CQ RESEARCHER Sample formats for citing these reports in a bibliography

include the ones listed below. Preferred styles and formats

vary, so please check with your instructor or professor.

MLA STYLE Jost, Kenneth. “Remembering 9/11.” CQ Researcher 2 Sept.

2011: 701-732.

APA STYLE Jost, K. (2011, September 2). Remembering 9/11. CQ Researcher,

9, 701-732.

CHICAGO STYLE Jost, Kenneth. “Remembering 9/11.” CQ Researcher, September

2, 2011, 701-732.

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