New Tactic on Homelessness in America

Portland and several other cities launched an experimental strategy three years ago to put the most troubled of the nation's 750,000 homeless into permanent housing, rather than a shelter, to see if that makes it easier for them to stabilize their lives. Early data suggests it does.

PBS conducted interviews with a few of the winners in a drawing contest for government subsidized housing. However, the focus is on the chronically homeless (those who spend at least a year on the streets or have been homeless more than once in that year). Portland Housing Commissioner Erik Sten made a good point. It's hard to get back onto your feet without a place to call home. Seems obvious enough, and whatever legislation obviously hasn't been working in the past as homelessness in America has become a large problem, especially in more urban areas. The statistics don't lie: Miami's homeless population dropped 30 percent last year with the new approach. In Dallas and San Francisco, 28 percent. And costs?

Doctors at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego
Police Department studied 15 chronic homeless and found, in a year and a half,
the government spent an average of $200,000 per person in treatment, law
enforcement, jail and court costs, hospital visits.

PHILIP MANGANO,
Interagency Council on Homelessness: The other finding of the study was, at the
end of that 18 months, those 15 people were in the same condition and same
situation as before. They were still on the same street corners and the same
doorways.

LEE HOCHBERG: The Bush administration's point man on homelessness,
Philip Mangano, says housing these people not only helped stabilize them but
actually costs government less.

Portland found, for example, that even with
the cost of housing 1,000 of its homeless, its overall expenditures on the
homeless dropped by 35 percent as arrests of its homeless fell 47 percent, and
emergency room visits at hospitals declined. Four hospitals actually contributed
$300,000 for housing so their discharged patients have somewhere else to
go.

This is huge. And I'm glad to see that cities are starting to do something for the homeless. Despite the costs, this will do wonders for not only the appearance of the cities, but of attracting people to live there and motivate them to work.