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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 3, 2012)
12 Street roots Aug. 3, 2012 McKinney-Vento turns 25; homelessness still grows Paul Boden is the executive director of WRAP, the Western Regional Advocacy Project. W RAP is a consortium of organization along the West Coast, including Street Roots, working to expose and eliminate the root causes o f civil and hum an rights abuses o f people experiencing poverty and homelessness in our communities. BY PAU L BODEN C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T assed in 1987, McKenny-Vento was intended to address the emergency needs of homeless people while the federal government worked to restore the funding which had been cut from HUD’s affordable housing programs. But it didn’t work that way. McKinney- Vento has spawned an endless array of continuum-of-care plans, 5-year plans, Temporary responses 10-year plans — an endless system of to homelessness that writing, planning, and researching which fail to address the “best practices” should be used to end systemic causes of homelessness. At the same time, the federal homelessness. government has continued to defund, dismantle, and sell-off affordable housing units, thus ensuring that more and more people become homeless. 360,000 Section Periodic calls for 8 and 210,000 Public Housing units have local homeless been lost since 1995. It is a shameful trade that robs Peter to plans based on the pay Paul. newest policy. McKinney-Vento homeless assistance programs have increasingly become a catch all system for people who were once permanently housed by mainstream federal programs such as HUD and USDA. Yet even as affordable housing has been decimated (over 800,000 units lost in 25 years), eligibility criteria for McKinney-Vento homeless assistance have been tightened. instructed HUD to create a new And to add insult to injury, we are seeing bureaucratic definition of who is homeless. a massive PR campaign by federal agencies By implicitly admitting defeat that the such as HUD and the Interagency Council McKinney-Vento model has any chance of on Homelessness to convince everyone — or stopping the growing wave of homeless perhaps to convince themselves — that with people, the HEARTH act instead redefined just the right coordination, facilitation, and “homelessness” out of existence for cooperation, they will actually end thousands of families and people without homelessness. This is self-deception. homes. A 105-page HUD memorandum Anyone who has done the math would know. describes who is homeless and establishes welfare-oriented criteria that determine who The ongoing new guidelines, new initiatives, and newly named target populations suggest will qualify. It is particularly hard on families who live doubled up, tripled up, or in SROs. that people overseeing this system clearly Advocacy organizations — be they local, know it is not working. statewide or national — that continue to To provide a context: in the 25 years focus on McKinney-Vento will never be since McKinney-Vento passed in July 1987, catalysts of the change we need. Their two major events severely impacted the funding is too contingent upon being seen numbers of poor people finding themselves as legitimate by whatever administration is homeless. in power, a dependence that moves those in The first was the 1998 Contract with power even further away from the actual America during the Clinton Administration lives and experiences of poor and homeless when the Housing Act of 1937 was changed people. from “remedy...acute shortage of decent, Consulting and research firms have safe and sanitary dwellings” to declaring probably benefited the most from that “the federal government cannot... McKinney-Vento funding because HUD provide housing of every American, or even bureaucrats like justifying their proposals by the majority of its citizens.” paying researchers. We need no further The second was in 2009, the last time consulting or research to understand the McKinney-Vento was reauthorized in direct and obvious correlation between Congress. Renamed the HEARTH Act, it P The Vicious Cycle of Homeless Policy Increased homelessness. Stereotypes of homeless people as degenerate. Premise that homelessness is caused by the deficiencies of homeless people. gver-changing policies geared toward fixing different sub- populations of homeless people. WESTERN REGIONAL ADVOCACY PROJECT: WITHOUT HOUSING Fallen Off the Edge A new book by A rt Garcia "Fallen Off the Edge" Is a chronicle of one man's experiences after returning from the Vietnam War. Told through the eyes of Street Roots columnist Art Garcia, this book celebrates the major victories born from a series of questionable choices. Art's jocular storytelling takes the reader along with him in and out of the California prison system over the course of 10 years until he found the strength and courage to pull himself up from the fall. The book is available online at www. blurb.com under searchword Art Garcia. W R A P G R A P H IC massive affordable housing cuts since 1978, the opening of emergency shelters in the early ‘80s, and the continued and growing existence of homelessness today. In 2006 and updated in 2010, WRAP issued a carefully researched analysis on the systemic causes of homelessness called Without Housing. Had other studies looked closely at the underlying cause-and-effect issues connected with massive numbers of people without housing, they should have been able to connect the dots. But they seem not to have looked. We need to be honest: too many organizations and departments, in and out of government, turn away from the simple connection between the absence of affordable housing (cause) and the increasing numbers of homeless people (effect). No amount of coordination or redefinition is going to end homelessness. McKinney-Vento was created to address the effects of homelessness and it is time for HUD and USDA to step up and address the cause of homelessness. If the past 25 years have taught us anything at all, it is that nothing ends homelessness like a home. S is te rs 0) The R ood c r e a tin g c o m m u n ity , c r e a tin g c h a n g e , t o g e t h e r SISTERS OF THE I ROAD XX X , We ore— } } } } Hospitality & friendship Community change through the Dorothy Day Community School Working together for nonviolence & justice And don’t forget: fun! A ll o re w e lc o m e - M o n d a y-F rid a y, 10am - U O p m 133 NW 6th Ave. in Portland 503-222-5694 w w w .s is te r s o fth e r o a d .o r g Don’t miss a single issue! Visit our web site at www.streetroots.org, friend us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get regular updates.
