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By Kevin Fagan
San Francisco Chronicle
The number of chronically homeless people across the United States has dropped by 11.5 percent thanks to an increased focus on providing counseling and housing rather than police crackdowns or emergency shelter beds, federal officials said Wednesday.
The drop was reflected in a report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development showing that between 2005 and 2006, the number of chronically homeless people in America’s streets declined from 175,900 to 155,600. The data came from homeless counts conducted in 3,900 cities and counties, including San Francisco and other Bay Area cities.
Declines in individual cities included 43 percent in Dallas, 36 percent in Denver and 15 percent in New York. In San Francisco, chronic homelessness actually increased 4 percent between 2005 and 2007, but federal and city officials attributed that to a more thorough count in 2007 when twice as many people were used to conduct the count.
There was no homeless count in San Francisco from 2002 to 2005, when Mayor Gavin Newsom revived the practice. City and federal officials pointed out that between 2002 and 2007, the number of chronically homeless people in San Francisco dropped 38 percent, from 4,535 to 2,771.
Chronically homeless people are defined as the most troubled of the homeless population, suffering from mental or addiction troubles and living on the street for at least a solid year.
"These are the numbers we’ve been waiting for a quarter of a century," said Philip Mangano, director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness - President Bush’s national homelessness czar.
"We have gathered together over the past several years an unprecedented number of innovative ideas, public will and resources so that now, for the first time, we can actually see the numbers drop," he said. "And San Francisco has a lot to do with that. It has served as a real model of some of the best practices in our nation, showing that you must not simply continue to manage homelessness, but you must abolish it."
Mangano’s agency reported at a national summit last year in Denver that the number of street people in cities across the country had dipped, citing individual community homeless counts portraying declines. However, Wednesday’s HUD report is the first time a national aggregate number has shown such a decline since homelessness first emerged as a national crisis in the 1980s.
As examples of San Francisco’s positive models, the director pointed to aggressive creation of supportive housing, the popular bimonthly Project Homeless Connect, and expansion of on-street outreach counselors. Supportive housing is supplying homes with counseling services on site to address the addiction or mental problems that typically cause hard-core homelessness.
San Francisco Human Services Agency chief Trent Rhorer said the city still has a huge uphill battle to end homelessness, but the techniques named by Mangano have made headway.
He said the city, primarily through the Care Not Cash program that diverts welfare grants for homeless people into housing, has created 1,531 supportive housing units since the end of 2003. Some 2,519 homeless people have been sent away from the city to live with friends or family since 2005 under the Homeward Bound bus-ticket program. And Project Homeless Connect, during which volunteers gather in an auditorium to connect homeless people with vital services, has been replicated in 135 cities around the country.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, said she doubted the federal figures were as sunny as presented.
"HUD putting out a report like that is a cruel hoax when all they’ve done for years is do massive cuts in affordable housing," she said. There are 54,000 families or individuals in San Francisco waiting for Section 8 federal rent-subsidy vouchers or spots in public housing, she said.
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November 8th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Project Homeless Connect has served the community well by implementing many resources under one roof. It would be great to see this valuable tool accessible to the homeless population in San Francisco on a daily basis. I am amazed when I attend this event as a participating non-profit, how many people are able to help this population. I would hope that other San Franciscan’s would start to see how such a small contribution, one day a month, every other month would affect change for so many peoples’ lives. It would be great if more people participated on some level and supported this great program. I constantly see people whining and complaining about the problem but they really don’t do much else. PHC gives everyone the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and do something good for someone else. This is the beauty of this program, the ability to give back to community with a sense of purpose and integrity and knowing that at least one person will walk out Bill Graham Auditorium with some hope. PF
November 25th, 2007 at 9:41 am
solving the homeless problem is simple; if parents didn’t kick their kids out of the house as much as they do, then we would need less senior housing - www.likroper.com