Those in Tent City are Shelter Bound
Date Published: February 20, 2008
Publisher:
The Times-Picayune
Author: Katy Reckdahl
Region: Louisiana
Before month's end, City Hall officials say, police and social workers will dismantle the tent city downtown and move its homeless denizens to a huge tent in Central City, where they will sleep in triple-decker bunks and must stay clean of drugs and booze.
The move marks a departure in philosophy and in nonprofit partners. The city now plans to partner with the New Orleans Mission, rather than UNITY for the Homeless.
While UNITY has focused on moving the homeless into permanent housing -- a relatively new tactic national experts say produces results -- the mission will employ a more traditional sheltering approach. The switch has ignited a local debate about the methods, mirroring arguments waged nationally.
The mission aims to provide communal housing until people can save for their own apartments.
UNITY's approach, often called "housing first," may be in vogue, but does not address the causes of homelessness, said the mission's director, Ron Gonzales.
Many national experts disagree, including Philip Mangano, director of the White House's Interagency Council on Homelessness, who supports UNITY's strategy.
"We now can solve anyone's homelessness," he said, with a hubris reflecting the contention of many national poverty experts, that the study of homelessness and its cures has advanced to hard science -- that it can be solved.
What New Orleans most needs, they say, is a coordinated, long-term plan that uses field-tested methods -- like those used here by UNITY -- that have produced impressive declines in homelessness in dozens of cities, including New York, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Dallas and St. Louis.
"All the individual initiatives, as well-intended as they are, don't get the job done," he said.
The mission's plan does have a key advantage: moving society's undesirables out of sight as the rag-tag camp at Claiborne Avenue and Canal Street starts to degenerate. An open-air crack-cocaine market has made life miserable for the rest of its denizens, many physically or mentally disabled.
Unlike UNITY, the mission will not rack up bills for interim hotel rooms, Gonzales said. The triple bunks are cheaper.
And unlike UNITY's 200 caseworkers, Gonzales will clean out the camp with a handful of staff, volunteers and police.
"We'll get all of them out from underneath that bridge one way or another," Gonzales said.
Cleaning up the 'mess'
Calling the scene a "mess," Mayor Ray Nagin said he wants the tent city gone. Recovery czar Ed Blakely announced just before the NBA All-Star game that the encampment would be gone by the end of the week. That plan apparently sputtered, mostly because the mission's big tent, behind its headquarters on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, had not yet passed fire code.
The mission plans to house 130 men in the Quonset-hut-shaped tent, about a dozen women in a nearby house and, if necessary, as many as 80 more men in the mission's barn-like emergency shelter. There, Claiborne-Canal exiles will live together while they grapple with their mental illness, substance abuse and other problems, he said.
Anyone with severe untreated mental illness will be referred elsewhere, he said. Blakely, who toured the shelter along with Nagin this month and spoke with Gonzales for about 90 minutes, also told WWL radio last week that people entering the mission "must be clean" and that those who did not qualify would be offered drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Blakely did not specify, however, how such a rule might be enforced or treatment financed. It also was not clear where -- in a city with scarce mental health and drug-treatment beds -- they would get care.
Some will move into the mission's transitional programs, housed in an adjacent facility or part of the shelter itself for four to eight months, until they can save enough money to pay rent.
Approach changing
The mission's approach, used for decades -- if not centuries, remains common. But research emerging since the 1990s asserts it does not work well.
"They'll be able to save some people, but they will lose a lot," said Urban Institute researcher Martha Burt, a part-time Bywater resident who has been researching homelessness since 1983.
The sheltering approach does not work for the many homeless who are mentally ill or addicted, and often resist getting sober or taking medicine, she said.
The notion of ending homelessness first began in the 1990s, when graduate student Dennis Culhane tracked homeless people in New York City and Philadelphia. He found that the "chronically homeless," who have lived for years on park benches, make up only 10 percent of the homeless population, but consume the bulk of services.
According to estimates by Culhane, now the head of a University of Pennsylvania social-service research lab, the chronically homeless ran up annual public-service bills topping $42,000 as they cycled through emergency rooms, jails, courts, hospitals and shelters, where one bed runs about $10,000 a year.
For about $1,000 more, Culhane found, the city could place these vulnerable people into permanent "supportive housing" -- government-subsidized apartments, combined with intensive social services.
His findings, and those of subsequent researchers, have transformed the fight against homelessness. Rather than target the most able people, agencies now focus on the chronically homeless, seeking to "end" rather than manage the problem.
Nationwide, agencies now focus on swiftly moving even the most ill, vulnerable homeless people into permanent housing, supporting them with intensive casework.
In the end, policymakers and researchers have found that what homeless people most need is "shockingly, a place to live," Mangano said. "We thought that homeless people couldn't sustain housing."
Revolving door
Darrell Stewart, 30, with some help, stabilized his life and started supporting himself. Single adults like Stewart make up about half of the people who become homeless each year. Most enter and leave homelessness fairly quickly. Studies of shelters have found that 80 percent of single adults stay just more than a month.
Yet homeless populations do not decrease, because people like Stewart get quickly replaced by others. Research shows that a typical shelter bed, cardboard box or tent changes hands four or five times a year.
Stewart ended up living under the bridge last year because of a heroin habit, he said.
After four months, he put himself in a church's rehab program, got a job at a po-boy shop and rented an apartment in eastern New Orleans.
Still, Stewart, like many formerly homeless people, maintains ties to people he met at the Claiborne-Canal camp. For some, that is because many family and friends remain displaced across the country. In Stewart's case, it is because he "burned a lot of bridges" as a junkie that he is just starting to rebuild.
"I come down here because I know everybody," Stewart said.
Philosophies differ
Alex Clay, a grizzled-bearded 54-year-old who lives at Canal and Claiborne, sits in an antique pink armchair near the mattress he dragged from the curb. A house painter and handyman by trade, Clay lived on Gordon Street in the Lower 9th Ward, in a house that floated away, he said. He can not remember where he was displaced after the flood. Arkansas rings a bell, he said.
Stewart's family lived three blocks from Clay. As a child, he rode his bicycle by the house Clay owned. But Stewart found a way to leave the camp.
"A lot of people have short homeless spells," said Nan Roman, head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "They get it together and then they leave; that's the most common experience."
That means any intervention will have some success, she said.
Months later, Clay remains at Canal and Claiborne, with no idea what to do next. Clay, like others, was drawn to the overpass because do-gooders visit there, bringing blankets, clothes and food. Few would fault such charity, but Mangano said he believes that the efforts that go toward such "drive-by feedings" could be better channeled into getting people housing.
In Denver, Mangano said, the mayor asked the city's roughly 1,000 congregations to put up money to get one person out of homelessness and help them maintain housing for a year. More than 250 congregations responded, he said.
In New York, a groundbreaking program called Pathways to Housing showed that it is more effective to give people housing first, then work with them on rebuilding their lives, Roman said. Other programs have since repeated that success. The opposite tack does not work, she said.
"Think of how ridiculous it is to tell people with mental illness who have to leave their shelter at 6 a.m., 'You should get it together. Stop drinking, and start taking your meds,'¤" she said.
But Gonzales said his threadbare budget has no room for such monthly rental subsidies. Further, he does not believe it works.
"Once someone pays their rent, many people won't want to pay rent anymore," he said. "That's not a popular philosophy, but it's the truth."
