After a decade of halfhearted stabs at the homelessness problem, many city dwellers are coming to the reluctant conclusion that it is, like backed-up sewers and windblown litter, a permanent scourge. Winter is about to swell shelter populations. With dozens of families forced to camp overnight in welfare offices, New York Mayor David Dinkins announced another reshuffling of his program last week trying to get roofs over heads as quickly as possible. But a small, stubborn group of private financiers–with some help from Dinkins-think they have found a more permanent solution, an idea called “supportive housing.” Now they’re raising $200 million to test their theory.
A first step was the remodeling of the once-decrepit Chicago apartment house called the Malden Arms, which Mahaffey moved into last fall. Malden Arms and other scattered experiments around the country have proven that small, well-managed housing complexes can salve wounded spirits in a surprisingly cheap and efficient way. Three major foundations, Pew, Ford and Robert Wood Johnson, responded in April with an unprecedented $10 million grant to create the New York-based, non-profit Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). The new group is organizing a national package of foundation money, bank loans and tax credits.
So many mental institutions were depopulated and so many cheap hotels torn down in the last two decades that people with alcohol, drug or mental problems make up about 70 percent of the country’s homeless. So far they have been offered little more than noisy temporary shelters, overcrowded hospital wards and-the most popular new dumping ground-the local jail. CSH leaders say modest sums spent on renovating old buildings can create small, cozy communities.
“We help people move in, set up their apartments, meet other tenants and learn the neighborhood,” said Tony Hannigan, executive director of Columbia University Community Services, a model program. Newcomers are invited to stay as long as they like, their rent usually covered by welfare and disability programs. Each supportive housing complex ideally has no more than 40 residents with mental illness or abuse problems, perhaps mixed with other low-income tenants. Each building comes equipped with a social worker and a few paraprofessionals who help ensure that checks arrive and medication doses are right.
Danny Hosch, a former resident of a supportive-housing project in New York, says the method contrasts nicely with the traditional approach-“treating people like animals and then wondering why they act like animals.” At places like Access House, Libby House and Club Access, run by Community Access, a nonprofit agency in New York’s Lower East Side, residents learn how to care for their apartments, sweep the halls, run the front desk and t at cooking, writing and other skills. “When I came here I was a mess,” said Joseph (J.J.) Burns at Club Access. “I was out on the street, mixing drugs, alcohol and medication. Anything that can pull a person up like this, I’m all for it.”
Julie Sandorf, the founding president of CSH, says “a decent apartment alone is no magic wand.” But, like a mother’s embrace, it lulls the mentally ill into a comforting, familiar routine. New York City, exhausted by its huge homeless population, has been the most willing to funnel mental-health and housing funds into the experiment, with encouraging results.
Columbia University Community Services assisted in placing 254 mentally ill clients in supportive housing in New York last year and found after six months that 215 of the group had stayed, with nine moving on to even more independent housing. Other supportive-housing projects around the country report retention rates of as much as 95 percent, and the three-year-old Harold Washington SRO in Chicago shows why. The $1.7 million renovation of a once leaky, mouse-infested hotel throbs with the fleshpressing style of manager Lynn Cooper, a former development-company executive who grew weary of throwing poor people out of their apartments. Residents gather in the first-floor community room, with the tasteful air of a suburban health club, or enjoy their small apartments. “I was ecstatic,” said new resident Dionne Thompson. “It’s very simple, very clean and neat.”
Annual staff costs at a supportive-housing complex like New York’s 15-unit Access House are just $5,000 per tenant, compared to $14,000 per tenant at a large city armory shelter. Sandorf has raised another $6.6 million beyond the initial $10 million, three-foundation grant and, in partnership with the National Equity Fund, plans to collect $20 million from corporations seeking the federal tax credit for investments in low-income housing. CSH is helping fund the construction or renovation of 1,568 units at 18 complexes in New York, Chicago, New Haven, Conn., San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., and expects to build still more.
There are risks. Steven R. Coe, executive director of New York’s Community Access, grumbled about a client who came to a meeting noticeably high. “He’ll get a talking to,” Coe said. He will also suffer the galvanizing possibility that his neighbors might ask him to leave. Residents of the new complexes celebrate the chance to discipline themselves, and take credit for creating havens of quiet reflection. “This building is for people who want to get ahead, not the riffraff,” Mahaffey says of the Malden Arms. “If you want to think, you can think without being disturbed.”
