This month marks the 20^th anniversary of the 1987 Stewart B. McKinney Legislative Act, the Federal government’s first and still dominant program to alleviate homelessness in America. Why then, do we still see so many homeless people on our streets? Why are there hundreds of thousands more we do not notice—“invisible homeless”—individuals and families who have lost their homes and had to move in with others, sleep in cars, or bounce from motel to shelter to hotel?

The short answer is that there is not enough affordable housing. Since 1979, the Federal government has reduced subsidized affordable housing by $52 billion. Between 1996 and 2005, 100,000 public housing units were lost, with no funding for new public housing since 1996. When people can no longer afford the cost of housing, they must live without housing—they become homeless.

But there is a longer answer. The McKinney Act had its hands tied from the very beginning. It was never given the power to stem the growing tide of poor people newly created by cutbacks in Federal agencies responsible for addressing poverty.

Here is how it worked. The last 20 years have seen massive cutbacks in the Social Security Insurance rolls, widespread job losses through the North American Free Trade Agreement, a stagnant minimum wage still below poverty level, and other cuts to poverty programs. As financial support disappeared for more and more people, poverty spread, and at the same time the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s affordable housing programs were decimated. The McKinney legislation was never designed to deal with these underlying causes of homelessness.

When McKinney was signed into law in 1987, emerging homelessness was just beginning to be recognized as a national issue. Local communities had already established emergency shelters and services, and many had set up task forces or councils to coordinate services and write plans.

It was in this environment that the McKinney Act was born. It first focused on the immediate emergency needs of homeless people in local communities—beds, blankets, and band aids. It did not regulate how long people had to be homeless to qualify. It did not require communities to discriminate between families and individuals. It did not pretend to be a housing program.

Over the years, however, with mushrooming numbers of poor people, McKinney applications have forced a variety of homeless subpopulations to compete for woefully inadequate funds. For example, now HUD’s system for scoring communities’ applications for McKinney funds are weighted in favor of housing ambiguously-defined “chronically homeless” individuals versus homeless families with children. In fact, HUD scores a community’s plan to create and succeed in creating permanent beds for people who are chronically homeless, but does not even require communities to include strategies for creating permanent housing for families with children, or individuals who are not chronically homeless. Communities new to the McKinney funding world received no funding this year in part because they prioritized assisting families with children.

It has become a zero-sum game, with families and single individuals competing against each other. As housing and services are made more available to one group, resources are drained from others. It is a classic example of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It shifts homelessness, but has no chance whatsoever of ending it, and it puts cruel burdens on local communities.

So 20 years on, what can we say? McKinney has done some good for some people, but it has not significantly reduced homelessness across the country. How could it? A $1.4 billion a year homelessness budget cannot compensate a $52 billion per year reduction in affordable housing.

Its original name, the “Urgent Relief for the Homeless Act,” makes clear that it was never intended to be a comprehensive solution for homeless people. HUD has that responsibility, but cuts to HUD’s budget for affordable housing have been relentless. Tinkering with McKinney to determine who wins and who loses accomplishes nothing toward ending homelessness. Nor, for that matter, will punitive new laws against panhandling or sleeping in public, or poverty courts that serve only to remove the more visible homeless people from public view.

Urgent relief is needed. What’s to be done? As a private citizen, what can you do?

1. You can insist that any candidate seeking your support explain how he or she would return McKinney to its “urgent relief” function for all homeless people, as originally intended.
2. You can insist that any candidate seeking your support explain how he or she would ensure that HUD and the Federal Departments of Health, Education, and Labor will revitalize programs that once served poor people. We need to get this country back to the days before so many people needed “urgent relief.”
3. You can write, e-mail, or call both your favored candidate and her or his party’s national committee and demand that a comprehensive plan to end mass homelessness in America be a crossbeam in the 2008 party platform.

We need a true comprehensive Federal government plan to take effect immediately. Think New Deal.

WRAP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.