The visible helping hand
Does a person who repeatedly relies on a government safety net forfeit the moral right to independence the rest of the time?
How we hope it works.
A change in the answer to that question underlies an important policy shift being driven by
WASHINGTON, July 17 — Beginning an aggressive push to reduce the number of people living on New York City’s streets, the city will start pressuring homeless men and women to leave makeshift dwellings under highways and near train trestles and will raise barriers to make those encampments inaccessible, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday.
The city has found 73 of those sites inhabited by groups of chronically homeless people, the mayor said.
While we tend to be coy about phraseology, the chronically homeless are those who have severe behavioral problems — mental illness, substance abuse. Mayor Bloomberg has decided not simply to take them off the streets, but to force them to change one way or another:
“Humanely, respectfully and firmly, we’ll work to get these men and women to enter supportive housing, enroll in treatment programs or go into shelters,” Mr. Bloomberg said to a gathering of government officials and social service providers from around the country.
The reality of a homeless shelter
In simple terms, the mayor is demanding that the chronically homeless demonstrate that they want to change, and will embrace help.
The changes amplify the mayor’s longstanding effort to steer the city away from its emphasis on emergency shelter for the homeless, and toward providing permanent housing and using social services to prevent homelessness.
“While everyone has a right to emergency shelter, that doesn’t always make emergency shelter right for everyone,” Mr. Bloomberg said, adding that his administration was working to replace “the dead-end model of managing homelessness with the new goal of ending it.”
As I have previously posted, anyone with an urban public-transport commute knows that the chronically homeless make little progress.
54 proof, and sold everywhere
One comes to recognize the same faces, whether drinking Listerine for the alcohol, sleeping in their urinal doorways, or squatting among themselves at the back entrance of fast-food joints and convenience stores, hoping for a few free calories.
Homeless dinner.
If we have concluded that we must offer them help (such as emergency shelters), out of charity, legal pressure, or otherwise, does our provision of this safety net entitle us to prescribe their behavior?
Now, working with community and faith-based organizations, the city plans to work more aggressively to persuade people to leave those areas and enter housing, treatment programs or shelters.
The largest group of street homeless identified by city workers, 195, is in
The city estimates that it will take six months to a year to clear the often-squalid locations, which will then be secured with fencing or other methods, said new [Department of Homeless Services commissioner Robert] Hess, who appeared with the mayor at a news conference after Mr. Bloomberg’s speech.
Even so, within a few months thereafter, new homeless encampments will have sprung up. This will prove to be an ongoing effort.
Homeless in
Are the homeless being forced?
Both men emphasized that they would not forcibly remove people, pointing out that there are legal barriers to doing so.
“The objective is not in any way to force people from one area to another,” Mr. Hess said. “It is to take a social service intervention strategy approach to help people make a decision to move from these very unhealthy encampments.”
Have you made your decision for change?
There is the doublethink: we offer a choice, knowing that even as they querulously protest their independence, they are not.
The vigorous focus on the street population is an unusual approach that Mr. Hess brings from his time supervising services to adults in
Even the Department’s name is faintly Orwellian — service implies request, and the ability to decline.
The strategy, which officials say has been tried in only a few cities, reflects a growing consensus that a small number of long-term, chronically homeless people account for a large share of the medical care and other services required by the homeless population over all.
The decision to change policy is based not just on a social-justice belief it is a better way to help these people, but also a sober economic calculation that under the current system, they consume vast resources, and make no difference.
Mr. Bloomberg faced a receptive audience, which interrupted his speech with applause more than a dozen times. As if to anticipate criticism of his efforts, he used the address to take several jabs at some advocates for the homeless, who have been a frequent thorn in the side of his and previous administrations, suing the city to force it to change its policies.
“To rid our society of homelessness we must first liberate ourselves from the chains of conventional wisdom, from the fetters of political correctness, from the tyranny of the advocates and their unwillingness to admit that we’re ever making progress,” the mayor said.
Or to admit that the current cycle is making no progress.
If you force change, you must offer hope, and the Bloomberg Administration is certainly promising hope:
Over the past four years, officials said, the administration has worked to shift its focus from improving and expanding shelters toward more permanent solutions. That effort has included the use of supportive housing — or housing that affords a range of on-site social services — and a program called HomeBase, which offers flexible subsidies or other support for people at risk of homelessness.
Though homelessness is an isolated state, it is part of the continuum of urban housing — the worst end, the end of the line — so anti-homelessness initiatives need to be coordinated with initiatives all the way up the continuum:
Mayor Bloomberg cited his administration’s program to create 12,000 units of supportive housing, which offers social services like mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment.
The element of behavioral-change support is critical; without it, a shelter is simply a night-time warehouse.
And he announced plans to expand another program, which helps people on the verge of homelessness hold onto their homes.
Let there be no mistake, however. To induce the chronically homeless in to the new programs, the old haunts will be dismantled:
[DHS] has identified 73 makeshift encampments, including 30 in
Most of the encampments are little more than collections of cardboard boxes, or tarpaulins hung over a beam, officials said.
One site, near
An encampment of homeless people in
Lately, it has been home to at least four people, including Gladys Anderson, 44, who sleeps on a discarded bed propped on milk crates. Monday afternoon, sitting on a red velveteen bedspread, she said she would gladly accept the mayor’s offer of more permanent housing.
She said it was “time to be out” of the cave.
“I will drop it like it’s hot,” she said. “This is not no life adventure for me. We’re just passing through.”
City outreach workers stopped by a few days earlier, she said, and had the people in the encampment fill out paperwork needed to get apartments.
Her boyfriend, who would give his name only as Country, was more skeptical of the offer.
“This is
Living off the land? (More moving photos at www.epath.org/blog/.)
