The Plan to Nowhere?

Larry Govea pulled himself off the streets of Seattle and out of homelessness 10 years ago. He was sick of sleeping in his car and of living in high-rise crack houses, as he calls some of the homeless programs in which he's lived. Govea has no better than a sixth-grade education but nowadays reads Plato and Diogenes. But in three weeks, he faces the prospect of being forced from his small one-bedroom cottage in West Seattle, his home for 10 years, and back onto the streets.

"I don't think I can do it again," he says of possibly sleeping in his old yellow Ford van. "It'd make me crazy. I don't want to go crazy," says Govea, 63, who lives on disability payments and a housing subsidy.

The consolations of philosophy can only take a person so far.

This is not supposed to be happening. Scores of cities and counties around the country have recently adopted plans to end homelessness within 10 years. Yes, end.

King County, Seattle, and other area cities ceremoniously rolled out their version of the plan last summer. It calls for permanent housing for the homeless instead of a mat on the floor of a traditional homeless shelter. Its intent is to prevent people like Govea, who are at risk of homelessness, from ending up on the streets.

It's the largest experiment to end homelessness since the latest wave of homeless hit America's streets in the mid-1980s. For the past 20 years, attempts to end homelessness have been largely motivated by ethics and a general sense that it's shameful for 3 million people to be homeless in the world's richest country. But good intentions in the form of a fragmented, gridlocked system of homeless shelters, transitional housing, and soup kitchens have not fixed the problem.

"The very definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results," says Philip Mangano, executive director of the Bush administration's Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Mangano's definition of sanity is to recognize that it is far cheaper to provide homeless people with permanent housing than to let them bounce from the streets to jail to a hospital emergency room. Housing First, as the approach is known. It's supposed to be better, faster, and cheaper. Mangano and others argue that, enlightened by potentially billions of dollars in cost savings, policy-makers, Congress, and state legislatures will open the public purse and fund permanent housing projects and medical services. The experiment is broadly known as "The 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness," the by-product of President George W. Bush's call for an end to homelessness in his 2003 budget message.

But while touting a new approach, the Bush administration is already undercutting the experiment by making crucial cuts to housing and medical programs, especially ones serving the mentally ill, needed for ending homelessness. The city of Seattle, too, is making service cuts. As a result, St. Martin de Porres, a downtown homeless shelter that houses 212 older men each night, will close two days a week—and those men, many disabled, will hit the streets.

The federal cuts also put people like Govea in a serious bind. On April 1, he is expected to lose his Medicaid coverage and his housing, owing to federal regulations. He won't be alone. About 250 other King County residents are caught in the same fix and are threatened with the same outcome. They would join the county's 8,000 other homeless people, the majority of them in Seattle. Homeless in Seattle, they'll inevitably run into the Seattle police, who are often pressed into service trying to unlock a gridlocked system of social services for them. On a recent night, Seattle police sent a special squad into the streets to coax the most hardened of the homeless into an emergency shelter on one of the coldest nights in years. Led by SPD Sgt. Paul Gracy, the police ran into the same kind of disconnects that have Govea sitting up late at night.

It sure is a funny way to start a social experiment, particularly when Seattle and King County are considering spending hundreds of million of dollars to build a new home for the Seattle SuperSonics.

Life After Hooverville

The last time America made such a sweeping social experiment was in the 1980s. President Reagan had been voted into office in 1980 to go after the Soviet Union, cut taxes, and disembowel the so-called welfare state. Soon after, the Reagan administration oversaw the deinstitutionalization of hundreds of thousands of mentally ill from state hospitals and offered these same helpless people no housing. That's because Reagan was cutting tens of billions from public-housing programs, aimed at the working poor and the medically indigent. One homeless advocacy group estimates that the feds have cut public housing by $52 billion over the last 25 years.

It was the imperfect storm and created a problem. America was the country that had learned from the Great Depression—when cities like Seattle had their own Hoovervilles—that it was unconscionable to kick your fellow countrymen to the curb. President Reagan cut the safety net.

By the late '80s, millions of Americans were living on the streets, camping in canyons, and sleeping in cars. No one seemed to have the answer for what to do about it. It became such a moral crisis that President George H.W. Bush proposed a system of "a thousand points of light"— in essence, trying to solve the problem through private charity and volunteerism. Hollywood celebrities organized fund- raisers. Politicians went to great lengths to show how much they cared about the homeless. San Diego's mayor costumed herself as a homeless woman and slept on the streets one night in a cardboard box.