Mountain Express Letter, June 19, 2006
Daily Planet
May 31, 2006 (Page 1&4)
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Citizen-Times
May 14, 2006 (Page C2)
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Please note that there is a factual mis-statement in this article, "Although most at the meeting supported the plan, ..." It is the position of the Asheville Homeless Network, and has been since the 10-Year Plan was being formulated in 2004, that there are major problems with the 10-Year Plan as currently formulated. We do, however, support the work of Amy Sawyer, and hope that she can find a way to help solve those problems. This statement could have been cleared up if the writer had interviewed any of the people at the meeting.
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Beachcomber
Long Beach, CA
May 12, 2006 (Page 4)
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Urban News and Observer
April, 2006 (Page 4 - Article includes picture on cover and all of pages 3-5, this is an excerpt)
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Asheville Disclaimer
March 8, 2006 The '10-Year Plan to End Homelessness' at a glance: Year One: Take away all their crack.
Year Two: Provide matching 401K to panhandlers.
Year Three: Distribute neckties and blazers (for women, blouses and sensible work shoes).
Year Four: Take away their crack again.
Year Five: Hire a highly trained Shakespearean acting coach to take the homeless and hammer them into well-oiled, finely tuned, professional thespians; Release them into the park and let them rake in the dough.
Year Six: How can they afford all this crack?
Year Seven: Pritchard Park Thunderdome: Two go in, one comes out.
Year Eight: Engage in spirited election-year finger-pointing about why this isn't working.
Year Nine: Distribute funds in one-dollar increments so that all those people who are this close to being able to get out of town will get out of town.
Year Ten: Pat selves on back for making good progress on the newly revised "50-Year Plan to End Homelessness." [The Asheville Disclaimer is parody/entertainment. Please visit www.ashevilledisclaimer.com. For comment & submissions, contact them at: PO Box 15837, Asheville, NC 28813, (828) 216-2231 or editor@ashevilledisclaimer.com.
New Yorker
February 13, 2006 Million-dollar Murray
by Malcolm Gladwell Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-marine, six feet tall and heavyset, and when he fell down which he did nearly every day it could take two or three grown men to pick him up. He had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they called him Smokey. He was missing most of his teeth. He had a wonderful smile. People loved Murray. His chosen drink was vodka. Beer he called horse piss. On the streets of downtown Reno, where he lived, he could buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle of cheap vodka for a dollar-fifty. If he was flush, he could go for the seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle, and if he was broke he could always do what many of the other homeless people of Reno did, which is to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables. If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day, Patrick O'Bryan, who is a bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. And he's gone on some amazing runners. He would get picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and start up again. A lot of the guys on the streets who ve been drinking, they get so angry. They are so incredibly abrasive, so violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great sense of humor that we somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we'd say, "Murray, you know you love us," and he'd say, "I know" and go back to swearing at us. "I've been a police officer for fifteen years," O'Bryan's partner, Steve Johns, said. "I picked up Murray my whole career. Literally." Johns and O'Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years ago, he was assigned to a treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house arrest, and he thrived. He got a job and worked hard. But then the program ended. "Once he graduated out, he had no one to report to, and he needed that," O'Bryan said. "I don't know whether it was his military background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he accumulated savings of over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did everything he was supposed to do. They said, 'Congratulations,' and put him back on the street. He spent that six thousand in a week or so. " Often, he was too intoxicated for the drunk tank at the jail, and he'd get sent to the emergency room at either Saint Mary's or Washoe Medical Center. Marla Johns, who was a social worker in the emergency room at Saint Mary's, saw him several times a week. "The ambulance would bring him in. We would sober him up, so he would be sober enough to go to jail. And we would call the police to pick him up. In fact, that s how I met my husband." Marla Johns is married to Steve Johns. "He was like the one constant in an environment that was ever changing," she went on. "In he would come. He would grin that half-toothless grin. He called me 'my angel'. I would walk in the room, and he would smile and say, 'Oh, my angel, I'm so happy to see you.' We would joke back and forth, and I would beg him to quit drinking and he would laugh it off. And when time went by and he didn't come in I would get worried and call the coroner's office. When he was sober, we would find out, 'oh, he's working someplace,' and my husband and I would go and have dinner where he was working. When my husband and I were dating, and we were going to get married, he said, 'Can I come to the wedding?' And I almost felt like he should. My joke was "If you are sober you can come, because I can't afford your bar bill.' When we started a family, he would lay a hand on my pregnant belly and bless the child. He really was this kind of light." "In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the newspapers, and the police department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The crackdown on panhandling amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren't an imposition on the city; they were just trying to get by. One morning, I'm listening to one of the talk shows, and they're just trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is," O'Bryan said. "And I thought, Wow, I ve never seen any of these critics in one of the alleyways in the middle of the winter looking for bodies." O'Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald's fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was anything but harmless. He and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like Murray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren't the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a "One down" call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap. O'Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. "We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often, " O'Bryan said. "We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he'd only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars and that's at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It's pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand." The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O'Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors' fees, and other expenses Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada. "It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray," O'Bryan said. Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language of statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.'s troubles had a "normal" distribution that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically. But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything. Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The N.Y.P.D. receives about three thousand such complaints a year.) A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a "power law" distribution where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme. The Christopher Commission's report repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight "use of force reports" (that is, documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting. Another had six excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five. Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed, beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach. The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren't working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department s troubles fell into a normal distribution, you'd propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle like better training or better hiring when the middle didn't need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn't be nearly strong enough. In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them? Then, fifteen years ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation. A few months later he went back, and was surprised to discover that he couldn t find any of the people he had recently spent so much time with. "It made me realize that most of these people were getting on with their own lives," he said. Culhane then put together a database the first of its kind to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. "We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly," he said. "In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back." The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent the group at the farthest edge of the curve that interested Culhane the most. "They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges it's this group that we have in mind." In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane's database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade - which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless. It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless. "It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of these shelter beds," Culhane said. "We're talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next cot." Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, a leading service group for the homeless in Boston, recently tracked the medical expenses of a hundred and nineteen chronically homeless people. In the course of five years, thirty-three people died and seven more were sent to nursing homes, and the group still accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits at a minimum cost of a thousand dollars a visit. The University of California, San Diego Medical Center followed fifteen chronically homeless inebriates and found that over eighteen months those fifteen people were treated at the hospital's emergency room four hundred and seventeen times, and ran up bills that averaged a hundred thousand dollars each. One person - San Diego's counterpart to Murray Barr - came to the emergency room eighty-seven times. "f it s a medical admission, it's likely to be the guys with the really complex pneumonia," James Dunford, the city of San Diegos emergency medical director and the author of the observational study, said. "hey are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their lungs and develop a lung abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they'e out in the rain. They end up in the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical infections. These are the guys who typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a neurosurgical catastrophe as well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their head and getting a subdural hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them, and it' the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars. Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit, because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we re doing is making them capable of walking down the block."
The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.' bad-cop problem. It s a matter of a few hard cases, and that s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.
The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is Philip Mangano, who, since he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the programs of twenty federal agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a magnetic presence, who got his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. In the past two years, he has crisscrossed the United States, educating local mayors and city councils about the real shape of the homelessness curve. "Simply running soup kitchens and shelters,"he argues, "allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it's a problem at the fringe it can be solved." So far, Mangano has convinced more than two hundred cities to radically reëvaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless. "I was in St. Louis recently," Mangano said, back in June, when he dropped by New York on his way to Boise, Idaho. "I spoke with people doing services there. They had a very difficult group of people they couldn t reach no matter what they offered. So I said, 'Take some of your money and rent some apartments and go out to those people, and literally go out there with the key and say to them, 'This is the key to an apartment. If you come with me right now I am going to give it to you, and you are going to have that apartment.'' And so they did. And one by one those people were coming in. Our intent is to take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homeless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness." Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening to old Malcolm X speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the civil-rights movement and the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. "I am an abolitionist," he says. "My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it." The old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver is on Sixteenth Street, just east of the central business district. The main building is a handsome six-story stone structure that was erected in 1906, and next door is an annex that was added in the nineteen-fifties. On the ground floor there is a gym and exercise rooms. On the upper floors there are several hundred apartments brightly painted one-bedrooms, efficiencies, and S.R.O.-style rooms with microwaves and refrigerators and central airconditioning and for the past several years those apartments have been owned and managed by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. Even by big-city standards, Denver has a serious homelessness problem. The winters are relatively mild, and the summers aren t nearly as hot as those of neighboring New Mexico or Utah, which has made the city a magnet for the indigent. By the city's estimates, it has roughly a thousand chronically homeless people, of whom three hundred spend their time downtown, along the central Sixteenth Street shopping corridor or in nearby Civic Center Park. Many of the merchants downtown worry that the presence of the homeless is scaring away customers. A few blocks north, near the hospital, a modest, low-slung detox center handles twenty-eight thousand admissions a year, many of them homeless people who have passed out on the streets, either from liquor or as is increasingly the case from mouthwash. "Dr. Tichenor's - Dr. Tich, they call it - is the brand of mouthwash they use," says Roxane White, the manager of the city s social services. "You can imagine what that does to your gut." Eighteen months ago, the city signed up with Mangano. With a mixture of federal and local funds, the C.C.H. inaugurated a new program that has so far enrolled a hundred and six people. It is aimed at the Murray Barrs of Denver, the people costing the system the most. C.C.H. went after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a criminal record, who had a problem with substance abuse or mental illness. "We have one individual in her early sixties, but looking at her you d think she's eighty," Rachel Post, the director of substance treatment at the C.C.H., said. (Post changed some details about her clients in order to protect their identity.) "She s a chronic alcoholic. A typical day for her is she gets up and tries to find whatever she's going to drink that day. She falls down a lot. There s another person who came in during the first week. He was on methadone maintenance. He'd had psychiatric treatment. He was incarcerated for eleven years, and lived on the streets for three years after that, and, if that's not enough, he had a hole in his heart." The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had laid out in St. Louis: "Would you like a free apartment?" The enrollees got either an efficiency at the Y.M.C.A. or an apartment rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided they agreed to work within the rules of the program. In the basement of the Y, where the racquetball courts used to be, the coalition built a command center, staffed with ten caseworkers. Five days a week, between eight-thirty and ten in the morning, the caseworkers meet and painstakingly review the status of everyone in the program. On the wall around the conference table are several large white boards, with lists of doctor's appointments and court dates and medication schedules. "We need a staffing ratio of one to ten to make it work," Post said. "You go out there and you find people and assess how they re doing in their residence. Sometimes we're in contact with someone every day. Ideally, we want to be in contact every couple of days. We've got about fifteen people we re really worried about now." The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. The idea is that once the people in the program get stabilized they will find jobs, and start to pick up more and more of their own rent, which would bring someone s annual cost to the program closer to six thousand dollars. As of today, seventy-five supportive housing slots have already been added, and the city's homeless plan calls for eight hundred more over the next ten years. The reality, of course, is hardly that neat and tidy. The idea that the very sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. Some of them plainly won't be able to get there: these are, after all, hard cases. "We've got one man, he's in his twenties," Post said. "Already, he has cirrhosis of the liver. One time he blew a blood alcohol of .49, which is enough to kill most people. The first place we had he brought over all his friends, and they partied and trashed the place and broke a window. Then we gave him another apartment, and he did the same thing." Post said that the man had been sober for several months. But he could relapse at some point and perhaps trash another apartment, and they'd have to figure out what to do with him next. Post had just been on a conference call with some people in New York City who run a similar program, and they talked about whether giving clients so many chances simply encourages them to behave irresponsibly. For some people, it probably does. But what was the alternative If this young man was put back on the streets, he would cost the system even more money. The current philosophy of welfare holds that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But someone who blows .49 on a Breathalyzer and has cirrhosis of the liver at the age of twenty-seven doesn't respond to incentives and sanctions in the usual way. "The most complicated people to work with are those who have been homeless for so long that going back to the streets just isn t scary to them," Post said. "The summer comes along and they say, 'I don t need to follow your rules. Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of those ten caseworkers in the basement of the Y.M.C.A." That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that's just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom's time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency. We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don't give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality. But the Denver homelessness program doesn t help every chronically homeless person in Denver. There is a waiting list of six hundred for the supportive-housing program; it will be years before all those people get apartments, and some may never get one. There isn't enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit to observe the principle of universality isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don't solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both. A few miles northwest of the old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver, on the Speer Boulevard off-ramp from I-25, there is a big electronic sign by the side of the road, connected to a device that remotely measures the emissions of the vehicles driving past. When a car with properly functioning pollution-control equipment passes, the sign flashes: Good. When a car passes that is well over the acceptable limits, the sign flashes: Poor. If you stand at the Speer Boulevard exit and watch the sign for any length of time, you ll find that virtually every car scores: Good. An Audi A4: Good. A Buick Century: Good. A Toyota Corolla: Good. A Ford Taurus: Good. A Saab 9-5: Good, and on and on, until after twenty minutes or so, some beat-up old Ford Escort or tricked-out Porsche drives by and the sign flashes: Poor. The picture of the smog problem you get from watching the Speer Boulevard sign and the picture of the homelessness problem you get from listening in on the morning staff meetings at the Y.M.C.A. are pretty much the same. Auto emissions follow a power-law distribution, and the air-pollution example offers another look at why we struggle so much with problems centered on a few hard cases. Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that s just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution. "Let's say a car is fifteen years old," Donald Stedman says. Stedman is a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. "Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It s the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions the computer s not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst died. It s not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It's not just old cars. It's new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year." In Stedman's view, the current system of smog checks makes little sense. A million motorists in Denver have to go to an emissions center every year take time from work, wait in line, pay fifteen or twenty-five dollars for a test that more than ninety per cent of them don't need. "Not everybody gets tested for breast cancer," Stedman says. "Not everybody takes an AIDS test. On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and fixing the few outliers. Car enthusiasts with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars have been known to drop a clean engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register their car in a faraway town without emissions testing or arrive at the test site hot having just come off hard driving on the freeway which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be clean. Still others randomly pass the test when they shouldn't, because dirty engines are highly variable and sometimes burn cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says, that the city s regime of inspections makes any difference in air quality." He proposes mobile testing instead. Twenty years ago, he invented a device the size of a suitcase that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the emissions of cars as they drive by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of Stedman's devices. He says that cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them on freeway off-ramps around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who fails the test. A half-dozen vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same twenty-five million dollars that Denver s motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city could identify and fix twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few years cut automobile emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent. The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it. Why don't we all adopt the Stedman method? There's no moral impediment here. We're used to the police pulling somone over for having a blown headlight or a broken side mirror, and it wouldn't be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to their list. Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and presto the air gets better. But Stedman doesn't much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn't so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It's a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution? That's what made the findings of the Christopher Commission so unsatisfying. We put together blue-ribbon panels when we're faced with problems that seem too large for the normal mechanisms of bureaucratic repair. We want sweeping reforms. But what was the commission's most memorable observation? It was the story of an officer with a known history of doing things like beating up handcuffed suspects who nonetheless received a performance review from his superior stating that he "usually conducts himself in a manner that inspires respect for the law and instills public confidence." This is what you say about an officer when you haven't actually read his file, and the implication of the Christopher Commission's report was that the L.A.P.D. might help solve its problem simply by getting its police captains to read the files of their officers. The L.A.P.D.'s problem was a matter not of policy but of compliance. The department needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that's not what a public hungry for institutional transformation wants to hear. Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It's hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that we didn't want to know better. It was easier the old way. Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort. In Denver, John Hickenlooper, the city's enormously popular mayor, has worked on the homelessness issue tirelessly during the past couple of years. He spent more time on the subject in his annual State of the City address this past summer than on any other topic. He gave the speech, with deliberate symbolism, in the city's downtown Civic Center Park, where homeless people gather every day with their shopping carts and garbage bags. He has gone on local talk radio on many occasions to discuss what the city is doing about the issue. He has commissioned studies to show what a drain on the city's resources the homeless population has become. But, he says, "there are still people who stop me going into the supermarket and say, I can t believe you re going to help those homeless people, those bums." Early one morning a year ago, Marla Johns got a call from her husband, Steve. He was at work. "He called and woke me up, Johns remembers. He was choked up and crying on the phone. And I thought that something had happened with another police officer. I said, 'Oh, my gosh, what happened?' He said, 'Murray died last night.' He died of intestinal bleeding. At the police department that morning, some of the officers gave Murray a moment of silence." "There are not many days that go by that I don t have a thought of him," she went on. "Christmas comes - and I used to buy him a Christmas present. Make sure he had warm gloves and a blanket and a coat. There was this mutual respect. There was a time when another intoxicated patient jumped off the gurney and was coming at me, and Murray jumped off his gurney and shook his fist and said, 'Don t you touch my angel.' You know, when he was monitored by the system he did fabulously. He would be on house arrest and he would get a job and he would save money and go to work every day, and he wouldn't drink. He would do all the things he was supposed to do. There are some people who can be very successful members of society if someone monitors them. Murray needed someone to be in charge of him." But, of course, Reno didn t have a place where Murray could be given the structure he needed. Someone must have decided that it cost too much. "I told my husband that I would claim his body if no one else did," she said. "I would not have him in an unmarked grave." Return to TopMountain Xpress
http://www.mountainx.com/news/2006/0104news.php
Jan 4, 2006 / vol 12 iss 23 Filling in the cracks The Asheville Homeless Network was literally founded on Moss Bliss's couch in April of 2004 by Bliss and Gwen[n] Parr (now McCourry), a homeless acquaintance of Moss' whom he was letting sleep there. As Moss explains it, Parr (who has since left the area) had felt that the existing local organizations helping the homeless weren't coordinating their activities effectively or communicating with the homeless population they were serving. "There are a lot of problems dealing with the homeless in this town; a lot of holes, a lot of cracks," says Moss. "We didn't want to be another agency, but we wanted to help fill in the cracks." AHN's members include the homeless, the formerly homeless and their allies. Among the organization's goals are: (a) getting information to the homeless population about what help is available and where; (b) making information available about their rights and the local laws that affect them; © lining up organizations and churches to help individuals directly; (d) changing the public's perception of who the homeless are; and (e) educating city and county officials about homeless people's needs. A little more than a year-and-a-half later, AHN (whose tag line is "Helping the Homeless Help Themselves") already has more than a few accomplishments under its belt. The group now boasts 63 members, was recently certified as a nonprofit corporation, has its own Web site (www.ashevillehomeless.org) that features a wealth of information, has endorsed candidates for City Council (all of whom have since been elected), and is part of the Asheville-Buncombe Homeless Coalition. But those are just baby steps for the group, says Moss. Its longer-term goals include building or buying a handcart that, once licensed by the city, would be used to sell handicrafts made by local homeless people; erecting a "tent city" (with porta-potties and possibly showers) on surplus city property, to provide low-cost shelter; and encouraging local shelters to more effectively and humanely meet the needs of the homeless. "Some of us have extreme needs [and] some of us have fallen off the mental-health wagon," Moss concedes. But "at least half of the homeless have jobs. They just don't have good enough jobs to afford housing – to be able to live anywhere." There are a myriad ways people can support the organization, he notes. Church and civic groups are encouraged to "adopt" a homeless person for two months through AHN's Adopt A Homeless Person program. Other needs include: donations of fabric, yarn, and sewing and knitting supplies members can use to create handicrafts; camping equipment and bicycles for a lending library; and storage space for donated items. Gifts of money can be made directly through the PayPal button on the Web site or via AHN collection jars (which can be found downtown at the Grove Corner Market, Vincenzo's and The Sword & The Grail), and indirectly by buying items online from one of the group's affiliated companies, such as Target, Wal-Mart, Office Depot or Cingular Wireless (all of which donate a percentage of sales to the organization). The Asheville Homeless Network holds meetings every Thursday at 2 p.m., upstairs in The Perch at the Grove Corner Market in downtown Asheville. For more information, call 254-7449. - Lisa Watters Return to Top
Christian Science Monitor
USA - Society & Culture
from the December 21, 2005 edition Backstory: In St. Paul, putting less heat on the homeless In a novel move, police and social-service providers team up to find a better way to deal with those on the street. By Amanda Paulson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor ST. PAUL, MINN. – Sgt. Paul Paulos hasn't been on duty 10 minutes when some disturbing activity on a street corner catches his attention. He quickly pulls a U-turn on a cold night in downtown St. Paul. A man in a red jacket is passed out next to a battered radio and a half-empty vodka bottle. After calling an ambulance, Sergeant Paulos takes a quick assessment: He rubs the man's chest, eliciting moans, and finds a lump on the back of his head. "Ron! Ron!" he calls. Paulos knows the man. He's a Vietnam vet with mental-health issues, "one of our local homeless," he says. Later, he helps emergency workers load the man on a stretcher and empties the vodka in the bushes. On one level, the incident underscores the dual role police often play with the homeless: They act as their protectors from dangers on the streets, and enforcers who keep them from bothering others. But Paulos's sensitivity also hints at a deeper shift under way in this upper Midwestern city - one that advocacy groups trumpet as a national model. In an unusual move, police here are teaming up with social-service providers to find a better way to deal with the homeless. Historically, the relationship between the two has been defined by distrust rather than time spent chatting over doughnuts. What's emerging, according to officials on both sides, is a system that is more effective and humane in dealing with one of America's most stubborn social problems. "There's been a trend with a few police departments becoming more sensitized toward the needs and issues that the homeless population face," says Michael Stoops of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C. He cites Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla., in addition to St. Paul as examples. "These are the kind of partnerships we support." The move comes as many cities have criminalized homeless behavior like loitering and camping on sidewalks. Even St. Paul, traditionally a liberal redoubt, made the National Coalition's "Mean City" list just a few years ago. *** On one typically raw Minnesota night, I join Paulos on his rounds. After the encounter with Ron, he threads his car through the relatively quiet streets of St. Paul, past tidy high-rises and through the grittier Rice Street corridor. Paulos sees a couple of panhandlers and politely tells them to leave. Later he checks in with people lingering in a downtown park. No problems. From the passenger's seat on this night, it might seem like St. Paul doesn't have much of a homeless problem. Compared with New York or Chicago, it doesn't. But an estimated 1,500 people are without shelter here at any moment. Many are concentrated in the downtown area, which has undergone a renaissance, making the problem more visible. As Paulos sees it, dealing successfully with the homeless mostly boils down to giving respect and expecting it in return. "At one time, they didn't know me, and they tested me daily," he says. "They test, they find out how you'll deal with a situation, then they develop a relationship." Paulos has been on the beat for 12 years. He's polite and clean-cut. When we stop by the Listening Center, a local shelter, he greets people warmly. "Look at you! You're a good-looking guy when you clean up," he kids another homeless person named Ron, who has trimmed his beard. Paulos almost shot Ron one night when the man threatened him with an unknown object - a lighter, it turned out - in his pocket. "Ron and I have gone toe-to-toe, but he's pretty cool," he says. The Listening House, packed with people watching TV, using computers, or just keeping warm, laid the foundation for the police-social-service collaboration. Rosemarie Reger-Rumsey, the center's director, noticed that police never felt comfortable coming into the shelter unless they needed to make an arrest. One day she invited a beat officer to stop by for coffee. "He accepted, and then introduced us to his partner," she recalls. "Then we extended the offer to his commander." Eventually, she suggested formalizing a partnership between police and a variety of social-service providers - shelters, medical staff, housing experts. The idea meant overcoming prejudice on both sides, but the first meeting, held about a year ago, was well attended. "I really hold those two officers up as being the start of it all," she says. One still comes by regularly to play cards. Ms. Reger-Rumsey and Paulos agree that the most important outcome is simply the improved trust and communication. "We're trying to change a culture here," she says. "We've had officers call and say, 'so-and-so is hanging out with a tough crowd.' It gives us an opportunity to sit the person down and talk." *** There have been concrete changes, too. When police mentioned they were spending too much time shuttling homeless people to detoxification centers, one shelter, the Dorothy Day Center, agreed to admit people with higher alcohol levels. The result: police have more time to patrol streets and handle emergencies. Dozens of police attended two days of training on how to deal with the mentally ill. They, in turn, held a session for providers on the use of force - when and why it's necessary. The next time Paulos found himself fighting off an antagonistic man, one social-service worker stopped and wished him well. "Now they understand what we're doing," he says. Commander John Vomastek first saw the partnership's potential when someone forwarded an e-mail sent to the mayor's office: A resident of a new condo development was upset about a man with a shopping cart throwing trash along the river. "Instead of giving it to the [police] squad, I called a guy who works with the homeless camps.... He found the guy, who was mentally ill, and got him to the hospital," he says. The guy who sent the e-mail "loved it. And we spent zero police time on the whole thing." As Paulos navigates the streets, we check out an encampment by the railroad tracks. There, surrounded by shacks of scrap metal and tarps, and an astounding array of pots, pans, and bikes, two men build a fire and open a can of Dinty Moore chicken stew with a knife. One, Rich, says he lost his job as a retail manager over a year ago. A former addict, he avoids shelters since they have drugs. His friend, Paul, says he's been homeless for two months. He was laid off from his truck-driving job and had to sell his house. Both men are articulate and thoughtful. As we leave, Paulos muses that the next training session should introduce officers to the homeless who have had jobs, been to college, and, through some misfortune, ended up on the streets. "They're no different from you or I, just a different path of life was dealt," he says. Return to Top
from The Asheville Disclaimer, March 2005: City Council announces plan to end Asheville homelessness within 10 years Mumpower¹s "catch and release" plan earns praise, shaves nine years off plan By Fennis Swinethrob
Asheville Disclaimer staff writer Homelessness in Asheville will soon be completely eradicated, thanks to a unanimous decision by city council to implement a "catch and release" program whereby the city¹s underclass will be relocated to other states. Council member Carl Mumpower, the author of the plan, explained how it will be implemented. "Off-duty city buses will be equipped as mobile soup kitchens beginning at midnight and patrol downtown looking for likely candidates," the vice-mayor said. "When the driver feels he has 'bagged his limit' for the night, he heads for Tennessee." "The soup will of course be laced with some harmless barbiturate to keep the clientele from entering into a general state of upset," said council member Jan Davis. "The way we see it, if you don¹t have money to spend on housing, food or tires, you might as well be in Sevierville." Mumpower deflected criticism of his plan as heartless and inhumane, saying, "When you¹ve worked as hard as we have to revitalize this area, you don¹t want a bunch of smelly non-entities screwing it up for you. You¹ll be thanking city council with every uninterrupted sip of your double espresso." Return to Top
Saturday, August 14, 2004
Report calls tent cities a King County necessity
By Leslie Fulbright
Seattle Times Eastside bureau
BRIAN CASSELLA / THE SEATTLE TIMES A citizens panel says tent cities, such as this one, should not be a permanent solution to homelessness, and faults the county for not adequately addressing the problem and for its lack of emergency shelters or affordable housing. Tent cities are necessary until a permanent solution to King County's problem with homelessness can be found, according to a report released yesterday by a county commission on homeless encampments. Thirteen members of the Citizens' Advisory Commission on Homeless Encampments (CACHE) voted that the encampments are needed but made clear that is only because King County has not done a good job of addressing and ending its homeless problem. Four voted that the camps are unnecessary. The commission was created in June to conduct a needs assessment for tent cities and to suggest guidelines for county decision making. The 22 voting and nonvoting panel members represent each of the County Council's 13 districts, as well as church groups, social-service agencies, government, business, suburban cities and law enforcement. The main message in the report was that tent cities do not offer a permanent solution. Those who supported the camps requested they be phased out when there is no longer a need and said in the meantime they should get careful management and oversight. A majority of the commission members agreed the encampments should be allowed on both public and private land. Most said there should be an opportunity for public comment if the encampments are on public land. King County should specify parcels that could potentially be used for encampments and they should be no less than 25 miles apart, they said. The group unanimously agreed that any organization that sponsored a tent city should notify the local government and community about when the encampment will begin, how long it will stay, how many people will be allowed to live there, the location and the date and time of community meetings. Most members agreed that anyone living within two blocks of a public site should receive 14 to 30 days notice of an encampment. The commission agreed there should be no more than 100 residents at an encampment and that there should be suitable buffers from surrounding properties. How parking and the environment would be affected must be considered, the report said, and an encampment should not stay at one location longer than three months at one time or six months within two years. Members agreed there are not enough emergency shelters or affordable housing for the estimated 3,400 homeless people each night in King County. "Even a working couple earning $7.50 an hour can't afford the average rent for a one-bedroom in King County," the report states, citing a United Way report. The commission made its recommendations after seven meetings, two open to the public, and after hearing testimony from dozens of tent-city residents, neighbors, advocates and opponents. The commission said it did not have time to come up with specific long-term solutions but praised the number of local programs working on the problem of homelessness. County Executive Ron Sims announced in April that Tent City 4 would open on county-owned land near Interstate 405 in Bothell and was greeted with public outcry. Metropolitan King County Council members expressed concerns over the legality of the Brickyard Road Park & Ride site, which is set aside for transit projects. Tent City 4 opened instead at St. Brendan Catholic Church. It stayed 90 days and is set to move to city-owned property in Woodinville today. The ordinance that created CACHE prohibits the county from identifying county-owned land for a tent city before Sept. 15. Leslie Fulbright: 206-515-5637 or lfulbright@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company www.seattletimes.com Return to Top
Otis White, Urban Commentator: What Works with the Homeless -
Between Coddling and Criminalizing Homelessness is a destroyer of urban areas. If your city's sidewalks are filled with sleeping men, drug abusers, the mumbling mentally ill and aggressive panhandlers, it's in big trouble. Tourists won't come, conventions will steer clear, downtown businesses will decamp, and residents won't put up with the smells, sights and hassles; they'll move to the suburbs. Cities know this and have tried two general approaches: coddling and criminalizing. Neither works. So, is there anything that does work, that actually moves homeless people into safe, clean environments and eventually to productive society? Yes, and the pioneer for this middle way is Philadelphia. As much as any big city, national experts say, Philly has solved its chronic homelessness problems. In the mid-1990s, it had 4,500 people living on its streets. Today, there are about 130. How did Philadelphia perform this minor miracle? By doing three hard things: It built enough supportive housing units to take care of its homeless population (supportive housing has services on demand for drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and other problems), created a central intake authority to assess and place homeless people into appropriate programs (and, importantly, track their progress), and launched an innovative outreach program to persuade—but not compel—the homeless to leave the streets. The outreach program may be Philadelphia's greatest innovation. The city has 20 workers on the street around the clock, looking for homeless people. Some are welfare workers, others are police officers with special training. If a regular officer sees a homeless person sprawled on the sidewalk, he can call the outreach unit and within 20 minutes, a worker will be there to question the person and talk about life on the inside. What does this cost? Philadelphia spends $60 million a year on homeless services. While that's not cheap, others spend more and get much less. San Francisco, for instance, spends $104 million a year on direct services and has one of the worst homeless problems in the country. Footnote: There are two additional keys to Philadelphia's success, says Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied efforts to deal with homelessness around the country: Philly targeted the hardest cases, not just the easy successes, and stayed committed. That's important because it took about four years to see dramatic improvements. "People have to realize a problem like this doesn't go away in 12 months," Culhane said, "and it won't go away at all unless you have a real commitment by the city and the public. You have to keep your eye on the prize." From Governing.com
Posted June 22, 2004 Return to Top
From "The Indie", April 2004 Now It’s Our Turn . . . The Asheville Homeless Network Starts Up
by Jason Klein Adequate protection against environmental conditions is absolutely necessary for sustainable living. Many people take for granted such simplicities as bathing, a warm bed, and a safe place to keep one’s possessions. Although it’s always been my good fortune that as one residential experience ended, my next housing opportunity conveniently opened up before me, I do realize, however, that not everyone is as lucky as I’ve been. The estimated population in our community who find themselves in a condition of residential instability - whether living under a bridge, in a shelter/car/tent, or couch-surfing with friends - currently runs from a wintertime low of 500-700 to a summertime high of 1500-2000. The issue represents a multi-layered dilemma for everyone, including our government, businesses, other residents, and, most especially, for the homeless people themselves. Many questions arise: Are the civil and human rights of the homeless adequately represented in the overall community? Are the needs of the working homeless and married couples taken into account by the shelters? What behaviors are tolerated and what resources are provided by the municipal and other social agencies, and what’s not? Essentially, how do we - all residents of Asheville, the beautiful, courageous, magnificent place that it is - choose to deal with this vitally important issue in our midst? The Asheville Homeless Network is an organization of the homeless, the formerly homeless, and our allies who have joined together to share our collective resources and knowledge; to advocate on local homeless issues; and to support one another. There is an urgency to our work because we’re dealing with the very basic necessities of daily survival: adequate food and shelter; medical and mental health; responsible and irresponsible behavior. We look forward to working cooperatively with City and County municipal and social service agencies, the economic sector, and the other residents of our region in order to facilitate all manner of improvements in our community, from directing the newly-arrived Rainbow tribe hippie to the Food-not-Bombs gathering; to assisting our fellows in their search for safe, affordable shelter and worthwhile employment; to serving as an outlet for the police and businesses to turn to about neighborhood criminal activity. In this and many more ways, we hope to encourage an alternative perception of the homeless: as contributing members of the community. Our first major initiative is the Adopt-a-Homeless-Person program. AHN would screen and place local homeless people with interested church and civic organizations, who would, in effect, “adopt” the person for a period of two months. By providing such basic necessities as a place to bathe, emotional support, a monthly bus pass, and a phone number for potential employers to call (we are NOT asking that the homeless person actually be housed by the adopting group), we hope to offer people an opportunity to lift themselves off the streets – teaching them “how to fish”, as it were. This is just the first of our simple, cost-effective proposals for transforming present social burdens into future social boons. Asheville has been grappling with the “problem” of its homeless population for many years, sometimes with a sense of compassion and cooperation, and sometimes with prejudice and violence. Due in part to the general state of the national economy, and in particular to several recent factory closings in our area, we can only expect the situation to worsen (even the Federal government acknowledges that most Americans are less than 6 paychecks away from homelessness). By working together, we may alleviate some future pitfalls and dangerous friction. I believe that only through dedication, honesty, and respect can we create a community we can be proud of. Once again, the participation of all segments of Asheville’s family would be genuinely appreciated. To learn how to become more involved, please visit our Website, ashevillehomeless.org. Jason Klein lives in Montford. Return to Top
Transcript of AHN meeting on WLOS (March 13?, 2004): "(TAMMY) PEOPLE LIVING ON THE STREETS OF ASHEVILLE SAY THEY WANT THE CITY TO SERVE THEIR NEEDS. GOOD AFTERNOON, I'M TAMMY WATFORD. (SCOTT) AND I'M SCOTT WICKERSHAM. HOMELESS PEOPLE FORMED AN ORGANIZATION CALLED THE "ASHEVILLE HOMELESS NETWORK." THEY HOPE TO GET HELP FOR PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH LIFE ON THE STREETS. NEWS 13'S MICHELLE BOUDIN JOINS US NOW FROM ASHEVILLE. MICHELLE... (MICHELLE) THERE ARE MORE THAN 700 HOMELESS PEOPLE IN ASHEVILLE.. SOME SLEEP AT SHELTERS, SOME IN THEIR CARS, AND STILL OTHERS LIVE IN TENTS... THEY ARE ALL TRYING TO COME TOGETHER TO IMPROVE THEIR PLACE IN THE COMMUNITY. ((MICHELLE BOUDIN REPORTING)) GWENN PARR IS HOMELESS. 28:36Since January my husband and I have been living in a tent sometimes uncomfortably, depending on the weather. THAT'S WHY PARR STARTED THE ASHEVILLE HOMELESS NETWORK. SHE HOPES TO BEGIN A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THOSE ON THE STREETS AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS WHO CAN HELP THEM. ONE OF HER BIGGEST CONCERNS...FINDING A SHELTER THAT WILL LET COUPLE'S STAY TOGETHER...AND A SHELTER THAT DOESN'T FILL UP BY THE TIME THE WORK DAY IS THROUGH. 30:32We need a shelter for the working pople...where you don't have to make a choice between having your job or sleeping on the street." THE GROUP ALSO WANTS THE COMMUNITY TO COME UP WITH A SPACE WHERE PEOPLE CAN LEGALLY LIVE IN A TENT OR PARK A CAR THEY MAY BE LIVING IN. ASHEVILLE POLICE SAY THEY SEE THE PROBLEMS OF THE HOMELESS EVERY DAY. ( Capt. Ted Lambert ) 52:47We're just constantly in a struggle...what they can do that's not legal to survive in the community." Jason Klein 50:12THIS is about survival..it's about food, whether or not people are freezing." JASON KLEIN SAYS HE'S DEPENDED ON FRIENDS FOR A PLACE TO SLEEP FOR THE PAST 12 YEARS. THAT'S WHY HE HOPES THIS GROUP WILL BECOME IMPORTANT IN HELPING THE HOMLESS ADVOCATE FOR THEMSELVES." (all text unedited from WLOS-TV) Return to Top
Jason Klein
from "The Indie", March 2004
Savannah offers insights into homeless issues
By Jennifer Brevorka, STAFF WRITER
Asheville Citizen-Times
Jan. 28, 2003 11:58 p.m. At first glance, the mountain city of Asheville and the coastal city of Savannah, Ga., don't appear to have much in common. One region embraces the arts, New Age philosophy and the outdoors, while the other showcases its genteel 19th- century Southern heritage. Asheville has a population half the size of Savannah. But each city attracts more than 5 million tourists a year, and each has recently cracked down aggressively on panhandling as a response to concerns about safety. "Savannah is built to loiter," said Craig Cashman, executive director of the Chatham-Savannah (Ga.) Authority for the Homeless. "You have so many parks that are built for people to hang out in, and the weather encourages people to loiter outdoors that downtown becomes a popular destination and gathering point. And it tends to attract many tourists." Savannah police, like Asheville law enforcement officers, can make arrests for panhandling, open containers of alcohol or sleeping in public areas. Both cities have officers who patrol downtown areas on foot and bicycle with police keeping a close watch on tourists, businesses and potential lawbreakers. But in Savannah, officials went a step further in their efforts to make downtown safe when a veteran police officer traded his downtown beat to become a homeless resource officer. In February 2002, Cpl. Charlie Fields began his work on the streets. Fields patrols the squares of Savannah daily. He knows many of the homeless by first name and refers to the people living on the streets as "my people" when talking about his work and his clients' concerns. "I'm trying to achieve a balancing act between the interests and needs of the homeless, and the community's needs and interests," Fields said. "I started the program because I saw a way to deal with the issues differently than they were being dealt with before." On a typical day during winter, Fields will check on the homeless camps in Savannah, making sure no one needs medical attention or food. Then, he goes to shelters to see if they, or any of their clients, need anything. Fields spearheads food and clothing drives out of his downtown district, and helps homeless navigate the courts, social service programs and medical offices. In addition to Fields' work with the homeless, Savannah police are taking other measures to address safety concerns in their downtown, according to police spokesman Bucky Burnsed. Historic streetlights set up along commercial corridors ensure businesses are well lit, and park benches divided into sections by armrests discourage people from sleeping in public spaces. But balancing the rights of downtown residents, tourists, businesspeople and the homeless is a delicate act, Cashman said. City leaders meet monthly to discuss how groups can make mutual improvements in downtown. "There is a solution to make downtown safe and attractive for everyone," Cashman said. "But, the solution isn't just jailing someone or putting them up for a night." Contact Brevorka at 232-2938 or JBrevork@CITIZEN-TIMES.com Return to Top
CLEAN SWEEP ASHEVILLE
by Mickey Mahaffey FWD Mountain Xpress Series on Culture Clash in Asheville [NC, USA]
[Jun 9, 1999] Mickey Mahaffey comments on Asheville's cleansing of undesirables. "Unless individual citizens get more personally involved in solving our problems, the politicians, the police and the merchants will solve them for us." -- Mickey Mahaffey When I first heard the term "Clean Sweep Asheville" I assumed it was in reference to Mayor Sitnick's litter campaign -- a thematic slogan adopted at the mayor's first roundtable, last fall. Since I'm not a taxpayer, I decided to offer my services to the city as a volunteer litter-picker-upper, targeting the immediate downtown streets as my focus area. I'm a native of the WNC mountains, so I wanted to do my part in sweeping Asheville clean of all its litter, and maybe thereby earn my simple right to be here. However, I soon learned that "Clean Sweep Asheville" has nothing to do with litter. One morning last fall, as I sat alone on a bench in front of the Merrill Lynch building, a policeman approached me and ordered me to move along, claiming, "Chief Annarino doesn't want anyone sitting in this area." Within minutes of my refusal to leave the public bench, two squad cars -- blue lights flashing -- arrived on the scene, and three policemen threatened me with handcuffs and jail for refusing to move, as I'd been ordered to do. Fortunately, one of the officers took the time to inquire within the Merrill Lynch building as to whether the bench was on public land or private property. While I waited for my fate to be determined, the first officer who approached me said he'd heard I was a preacher. With his finger in my face, he demanded, "Don't you know God's Word says you're to obey the laws of the land?" When they were convinced that all I was doing was sitting on a public bench, they left the scene of the crime, saying, "We'll have to find something else on him." That's when I first understood the true meaning of Clean Sweep Asheville: The trash is ME. Now, in conjunction with the Greater Asheville/Buncombe Clean Up, the APD is being ordered once again to sweep the downtown streets. I applaud Mayor Sitnick and all the volunteers for their efforts to pick up litter. I also commend city management for honoring the desires of the merchants in ridding our streets of people like my friends and me -- who have caused such a disturbance in town that many merchants are now on the verge of bankruptcy. At their behest the APD is scouring our streets clean -- of the hardened criminals who brazenly play musical instruments without the sanction of the police/merchant alliance; of those rebellious troublemakers who dare to feed the poor in public places like Pritchard Park, where the members of the status quo have to look at them; and of the notorious bicycle terrorists, who dare to impede the mass flow of vehicles by "going too slow" (the police are also to be commended for maintaining zero tolerance toward cursing in public). I publicly confess that I've transgressed the law in this land of the free and the home of the brave by cursing, but I've made a solemn vow -- to the police and the people at City Hall who orchestrate Clean Sweep -- that I will refrain from doing so in the future and will warn others to curb their tongues, too. I used the word "ass" in front of an officer who was chasing away a group of scoundrels who had the audacity to serve free food without a permit. I was arrested, handcuffed and jailed -- under $200 bond. The officer informed those of us present that he "works for the merchants," which makes my crime even more hideous. (The police have also been known to refer to the merchants as their "customer base.") I guess I should've been more sensitive to the possibility of insulting tourists and potential investors, who might now take their dollars to a less crime-ridden city. While I was being booked, I humbly accepted my punishment -- which not only involved jail time and a police record (for the first time in 46 years), but also the mockery, ridicule and curses of my arresting officer (because he, too, had heard that I'm a preacher). I don't claim to be a preacher, but perhaps I will now consider taking up the calling, as a way to atone for my heinous crime. Maybe I'll direct my first sermon at the woman who was arrested and incarcerated the same time as I was. When one of the officers noticed the woman being escorted into the jail, he called to the other men in the back offices, "We've got us a woman!" Another concerned officer yelled back, "Is IT any good?" The disappointed officer responded, "No, IT ain't no good." How dare she presume to be a human being when, clearly, she is only an IT! I have another idea: I'll organize refugee camps for my undesirable friends, who are being systematically cleansed from many cities across the country. I'll study the tactics used against the Cherokees and learn how to set up reservations. Or maybe I'll review the procedures used when the white people cleansed The Block and set up projects for its residents, at the edges of town. Or else I'll just learn more about pogroms. Then, when we're settled in our camp, I'll remind my powerless friends that, in fact, we DESERVE our banishment. Just because the police got the order from City Hall to selectively enforce very arbitrary and vague laws at their whim is no excuse for us to engage in civil disobedience or resistance of any kind. We deserve to be treated like pigs for the slaughter, for daring to question their authority and civil right to remove us from their public parks and from the center of their shopping mecca. Get it into your head once and for all, fellow ITS: In Asheville, N.C., poverty, homelessness and freedom of expression are crimes which simply will not be tolerated. Before we're all cleansed from the area, however, there are just a few favors I'd like to ask from those in charge of our fine city. Would you consider auctioning off just one police car, to pay for a decent public toilet? I know you would only be enabling these diseased and worthless people to continue their wretched existence if you accommodated them, but maybe it would help keep those of us who smell out of your restaurants and coffeehouses. There are 20 to 30 marked squad cars parked in the police lot at all times, so it doesn't seem like you'd miss just one. I know it's important for the police to spend more than a quarter of a million dollars on the latest computer gadgetry, but with officers' lives in jeopardy on our crime-ridden streets, maybe you could invest more of your millions in humans, instead of machines, and give these officers better training in the art of capturing drunks, prostitutes, teenagers and other worthless people without it looking so much like cultural apartheid. In a forward-looking city like Asheville, some of the more squeamish might take offense if they knew the truth about "Clean Sweep." One more thing I'd like to suggest: There are anywhere from 12 to 30 foot police (not to mention all the squad cars and undercover cops) patrolling the streets of downtown, with very little to do, and I know how boring it must be for them. So, in the times when there's no one to harass and intimidate, maybe they could help the community by picking up litter. Return to Top
This page last updated September 29, 2006, and is copyright © 2005, 2006 by Asheville Homeless Network. Individual articles are copyright by their authors and the publications they appeared in.