If you're like me, you scratched your head upon reading the news that a new HUD report shows homelessness in the United States decreased by 30 percent between 2005 and 2007. The Bush administration is chalking the improvement up to Housing First, an innovative homelessness-fighting strategy adopted from the U.K., where it was called the Rough Sleeper Initiative and succeeded in reducing homelessness by two-thirds. We'll have to await more analysis on whether HUD's numbers are correct; such studies are infamous for under-counting the homeless. But initial evidence suggests there has been a substantive absolute decrease in homelessness, even in the midst of an economic downturn and a housing crisis.
To get some perspective on what can arguably be called one of the Bush administration's only progressive policy successes, I spoke to Douglas McGray, a San Francisco-based journalist and fellow at the New America Foundation. McGray has done some in great in-depth reporting on Housing First, including an Atlantic profile of the program's czar, Bush appointee Philip Mangano.
DG: What is Housing First? How is it different from more traditional programs to alleviate homelessness?
DM: For a long time the way that government and the social service world worked to help homeless people was through a range of services and interventions that tried to help people on the street, tried to get them into shelters, tried to provide them with substance abuse or job counseling. This whole idea became known as the "continuum of care" -- a continuum of services.
Housing First is a really different idea. The idea is that you want to get people into housing as quickly as possible, especially people who would be considered chronically homeless. You have a small population of people who are persistently homeless and may not be able to get out of homelessness without serious, ongoing help. These people use an enormous amount of resources. They take up an enormous number of shelter beds. The idea is that you find a permanent solution for these people, it immediately reduces the number of homeless people on the street, it helps the people who are most in need, and then in theory, it frees up the resources that might be wasted on them for people for whom sort of a quick bit of intervention, a little bit of counseling, a leg up, might get them back on their feet and independent.
One of the critiques of Housing First is that by going for the most desperate, disabled people, the program misses out on helping families with children who may be in tenuous economic and housing situations, and who make up about a third of homeless people.
It's a mistake by policy makers and it's a mistake by critics to view it as an either/or situation -- that either you help only the chronically homeless or you help children and families. The reason I would find fault with that critique is just that I think the economics of Housing First are probably going to work out a little bit better. If all of your shelter beds are being used for people who are essentially living in shelters, it's not really a temporary shelter anymore. It's just a really bad place to live.
If you take that chronic population out of the picture and stabilize them, then the shelter can go back to being what it was meant to be, which is a place for someone to crash for a few weeks while they're going through a hard time, and get some services, and get back on their feet. I think Housing First applied properly frees up resources to help children and families.
It's surprising that the Bush administration has been so successful around an issue traditionally embraced mostly by liberal activists and grassroots community groups, such as churches. What do you think informs Bush's leadership on this issue?
Here's what's fascinating to me about Bush's work on homelessness: His main guy, Philip Mangano, doesn't really fit the mold of the Bush appointee. He hasn't known Bush for 20 years. He's not an ideological warrior. He's not a political warrior. I've often wondered if he's been able to do what he's able to do because homelessness is a marginal issue. Maybe someone like Mangano doesn't get appointed to a higher profile position. I don't know how this issue ranks on Bush's list of priorities; I don't know why he would be more or less interested in it. All I know is that I think he made a really smart appointment.
--Dana Goldstein
