My View: A clear view is needed on homelessness

September 28, 2008
Sacramento Bee
 By Robert V. Tobin

Damage caused by the senseless shooting of an innocent victim in downtown Sacramento by someone obviously mentally ill is only enlarged by its equally senseless misinterpretation.

In search of logical explanations, Marcos Bretón last week wondered what the perpetrators of such crimes are thinking when it is obvious that the person allegedly involved, like the majority of homeless people, have some combination of mental health problems. Significantly, Stanford University Medical School has concluded that such issues are at least as often a consequence of the trauma of homelessness as they are its cause.

Mr. Bretón further wondered why a homeless person can't find a job. As California's unemployment rate rose from 5.5 percent to 7.7 percent in the past year, is it hard to understand why someone who doesn't have an address to put on the job application, no place to put belongings while seeking work, no place to get a phone call to be told they got the position and no way to get to the job after they get it (except, dare I say, by panhandling) might not be deemed by employers as most likely to succeed?

Bretón speculated in a previous column about why homeless people don't avail themselves of existing service programs. Can he be unaware of what every homeless person already knows: that Sacramento has shelter beds available for only half its homeless population?

This virtually assures that only the most capable individuals secure shelter, leaving those people who are excluded to become more dysfunctional and – much to the chagrin of Bretón and others – more desperate.

Nobody should be shocked that Sacramento's street survey shows its homeless population growing by 20 percent as the nation's economy deteriorated in recent years. With one contracted service program shut down in each of those years, the number of unsheltered homeless people rose by 96 percent during that span.

As the causes of the financial meltdown become revealed, not only are some of our citizens becoming desperate, the programs that serve them are, too. Because federal contracts withheld cost-of-living increases for over a decade as inflation rose over 30 percent, and offer 75percent less reimbursement for administrative expenses than other government or foundation grants, a recent report to Sacramento's Homeless Policy Board concluded that current homeless services projects are starving.

Like the presidential campaign and the state budget crisis, focusing on sensational aspects of the homeless problem only draws attention from its resolution. For example, over three-quarters of those who successfully graduate from Sacramento's award-winning projects like Quinn Cottages and Serna Village are moving, in the words of one alumnus, from tax-taker to tax-maker. Every dollar spent on the expansion of such programs to help homeless parents who have children in foster care while on probation or parole for nonviolent offenses would save taxpayers $25 in avoided costs. Yet billions of dollars continue to flow to more- expensive and less-effective institutional systems rather than being invested in proven community-based alternatives.

Other factors obviously contribute to the impact of homelessness on individuals and their communities. Hindsight recognition of the housing bubble starkly reveals an unintended consequence of three decades of urban removal, as demolished downtown hotels that housed thousands of extremely low-income people were never adequately replaced.

Of course, bureaucratic inefficiency doesn't help: Earlier this year, approximately 3,600 nights of available shelter for homeless families went unused for months while our county's housing agency figured out how to process rent-subsidy applications.

The reality that there is truth to every stereotype further undermines efforts to understand and address homelessness. For example, Sacramento's first and largest survey of homeless people found that 11 respondents did in fact say "yes" when asked, "Do you want to be homeless?" However, the remaining 279 (96.2 percent of those asked) said "no."

Similarly, having the accused perpetrator in this shooting just get off the Greyhound Bus seems to reinforce the long-held misperception that all homeless people are transients. To the contrary, nearly half those responding to this survey had lived in Sacramento at least five years; one-fourth lived here over 25 years. Almost 40 percent had not been homeless in the previous 10 years; most of them had lived in their previous residence for years before homelessness occurred.

Perhaps most unsettling for Bretón as he contemplates layoffs in his own industry and others: Over half this survey's respondents identified job loss as the reason they lost housing; for another 15 percent, the stated reason was the domestic violence that often correlates with economic hardship.

Unsettling developments both foreign and domestic have fostered our growing recognition of how fear alters our perceptions and attitude toward others.

It is exactly in what Mr. Bretón calls these "less than Christian times" that our beliefs are tested and when, by our action as well as attitude, are we measured.