Gimme shelter

The state's economy is thriving. Everybody has a job. So why is our homelessness problem worse than ever? Peter Cullinane and Ginny Hamilton-Ashé of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless have some answers.

by Jason Gay

The holiday season always seems to provoke a quick public heartbeat of compassion for the less fortunate, whether it's dimes dropped in the Salvation Army jar or city officials handing over truckloads of frozen turkeys to the disadvantaged. But these fleeting gestures, while welcome, do little to offset the seriousness of social epidemics -- particularly an epidemic such as homelessness, which continues to be a major, expanding problem throughout Massachusetts, especially in the wake of 1995's welfare reform. Right now, there are more than 50,000 homeless people in Massachusetts -- 20,000 of them families. This past Tuesday, more than 5000 families were dropped from the welfare rolls as the state's two-year time limit for receiving benefits ran out. Advocates, some of whom were arrested in a sit-in protest at the State House Monday night, believe a good number of these families will wind up in shelters.

But Massachusetts's homelessness crisis continues to be disguised by the state's robust, build-everything, jobs-for-everyone economy, which dupes the public into thinking that everyone is enjoying the same kind of prosperity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not everyone is making it in Massachusetts; in fact, a good number of people are hardly making it at all.

The Phoenix sat down with Peter Cullinane, recently installed executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, and Ginny Hamilton-Ashé, the coalition's housing-policy coordinator, to discuss the realities of homelessness. What they described is a crisis that is very real and growing every day -- but that, to a large extent, remains dangerously hidden from view.

Q: How would you assess the state of homelessness in Massachusetts in 1998?

Peter Cullinane: Many people still have the view that a homeless person is a 45-year-old alcoholic man. But more and more, it's families -- we see many more families being pushed to the edge because of the increasing rental market and their inability, due to educational requirements, to be able to make enough money to maintain a living in the community. As rents rise, they are being pushed out of the rental markets. It's pretty tough.

Ginny Hamilton-Ashé: Back in the 1980s, when homelessness became a crisis on the national level, there was a lot of talk about deinstitutionalization -- people being released from institutions, and a large influx of single adults, predominantly men, on the streets who had mental-health issues, who had substance-abuse issues. And certainly the AIDS crisis added to that.

But in the 1990s, homelessness is about the deinstitutionalization of the social safety net -- [especially] the Republican Contract with America, which ended welfare as we know it. By taking away our country's guarantee that people who need help are going to get it, we have deinstitutionalized support for families, and as a result we're seeing a drastic increase in family homelessness.

A study that UMass Boston is releasing next week shows that the average homeless person is a single mother with one or two children under age six. You don't see those folks. You don't see them because they are not sitting outside the subways most of the time. They are bouncing between friends' and families' living-room couches.

Q: What's the extent of the state's homelessness problem? What kind of numbers are you seeing right now, especially with regard to families?

Hamilton-Ashé: According to the UMass study, an estimated 20,000 families statewide do not have their own home -- they're people who are either in the shelter system, or people who are bouncing [among] relatives, doubled up in completely substandard conditions. HUD [the US Department of Housing and Urban Development] released a study in May showing that in Greater Boston, there are 83,000 households that are either paying more than half their income in rent or living in completely substandard conditions. And those are HUD's numbers from 1995, before the end of rent control and the beginning of welfare reform.

Q: Since welfare reform was enacted, of course, those numbers have gone up. Wasn't welfare reform supposed to be about making people who can work, go back to work? If people worked, the theory went, they shouldn't have trouble finding homes.

Hamilton-Ashé: Many of these [homeless] people are working. And I think that's a piece of information that's difficult for people to picture. There are numerous working families that cannot afford housing of their own and are therefore homeless. For example, according to numbers from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, in order to afford a basic two-bedroom apartment in Boston at minimum wage, you've got to work 131 hours a week.

Cullinane: And that's a two-bedroom apartment. Most families need more than two bedrooms -- so that gives you an idea of what it takes at the minimum-wage level.

Q: These struggles are happening amid what is supposed to be a new era of prosperity -- we have a robust economy, joblessness is low, and development continues to be white-hot. But homelessness is on the rise. How do you account for the paradox?

Cullinane: The economy has grown stronger, but the basic services for people in need haven't grown along with it. We have families that are homeless because they don't make enough money to pay for an apartment, but since they are making more than the [$6.16-per-hour maximum income needed to qualify for a family shelter], they aren't eligible for a shelter bed. Because of this, many people are struggling for the basic necessities to live in Boston.

Q: But doesn't a stronger economy mean that there's more available cash -- surplus money for tackling needs like affordable housing? Why isn't this happening?

Hamilton-Ashé: That should be the case. But look at the election that just passed. In his acceptance speech, [governor-elect Paul] Cellucci said that people in the Commonwealth voted with their pocketbooks and voted for tax cuts. I think that his win -- a narrow win -- goes along with the idea that money is going back to people through tax cuts, as opposed to being returned to strengthen the economy for everyone.

Just look at programs that have been cut significantly over the past six, eight, ten years under the Weld and Cellucci administrations -- programs that supported folks who were falling through the cracks. When Governor Weld came into office, he demoted the Department of Housing and Community Development from being a cabinet-level position. As a result, this Commonwealth has not had a public-housing policy pretty much since 1990. That's made a drastic difference in terms of what has happened, and especially since the loss of rent control in 1995.

Cullinane: Homelessness is a very complicated problem. We need to attack a number of areas at the same time. That's not happening from the state and public-policy level, from the governor, at least. His plan has been the death penalty, testing of teachers . . .

Hamilton-Ashé: . . . and the Patriots . . .

Cullinane: . . . and no new taxes. When the state is sitting on a surplus now, we really need the plan to address the issues. People have been moving from welfare to work. They have been moving into permanent housing, but they are not necessarily going to do it in a two-year stretch. There needs to be that sort of flexibility that everyone else has in terms of being able to move out and become more independent.

Hamilton-Ashé: A seven- or eight-dollar-an-hour job isn't going to cut it in this housing market. It's too tight for someone. When you have a lot of students or young professionals -- where folks are sharing an apartment with two or three incomes for a three-bedroom -- you can afford rents in this area. But when there is only one wage earner in the household that needs those three bedrooms, the numbers just don't add up. And I think that's something that's hard for most people to picture -- that especially for family homelessness, there isn't the issue of substance abuse. There isn't the issue of mental health. Certainly those issues are there, as they are in the general population, but the reason that families are homeless is that they don't make enough money to afford housing.

Q: Still, aren't statewide housing initiatives particularly expensive?

Hamilton-Ashé: Not at all. In fact, a lot of the programs that we propose -- both short-term and long-term measures -- are much less expensive than the Band-Aids that the state ends up putting on these problems. For example, it costs about $3000 a month to keep a family temporarily sheltered, and it's only about $560 a month to keep them in a permanent-housing subsidy. So just doing the numbers, housing subsidies make sense.

Similarly, it costs more to add more shelters than it does to [establish programs to help] people move out. This August, we saw shelters at full capacity -- before it started getting cold -- and they've been at capacity since then. We've proposed using some of the state's money to help families that have been lingering in shelters to move out -- give them some assistance with rents, help them get on their feet again, and free up some of those beds for other people. But the state didn't exercise that option; instead, it actually put more emergency beds on line, which costs more and just ends up bottling people up.

Q: What about alternative sources of revenue -- outside-the-state private contributions, business, matching gifts? Do those kinds of sources exist?

Cullinane: There are other sources of money coming in that provide a safety net -- the United Way, for example, as well as a number of foundations that contribute money to both the Mass Coalition and other programs. But the state has a responsibility. The Department of Transitional Assistance has a mandate to provide funding to make sure that basic human needs are met, so we do have a transition from the shelter into permanent housing, and from unemployment to employment. Yes, it's a big problem. But there's a basic public responsibility to make sure it happens.

Other sources of money can't provide all the funds necessary to make sure families can move from an emergency situation into a community where they have permanent housing. The need is there. In 1995, there were 41,000 people on the welfare rolls; now [after state welfare reform], it's down to 6000 or so. That's a lot of people who have moved off. More than half have gotten jobs, but there are still a number of people who need assistance.

Again, we are finding people making just over the minimum wage who can't afford an apartment but can't qualify for a family shelter bed [because their hourly wage is too high]. These are people -- families and individuals -- who could use a shelter bed for a while to save some money. But they are sort of being punished for working.

Q: This seems obviously unfair, but when you tried to open shelters to families making more than $6.16 an hour, you were rebuffed by the legislature, particularly by the governor. Why?

Hamilton-Ashé: A number of representatives were interested and understood that that policy [change] would make sense. There was definitely some concern over what that would cost, and some confusion over how many families would access that program. But in terms of the state senate, there was overwhelming support -- I believe 30 out of the 40 senators did endorse this campaign. So we were actually quite surprised when it didn't make it into the final budget. We knew it was something the governor wasn't interested in because it went against his entire approach to welfare reform, but with the support that we had elsewhere, it was a surprise. And I think it had a lot to do with House leadership not wanting the proposal for whatever reason. But we are taking up the campaign again. Now that the first wave of folks has hit the two-year time limit for welfare, there's going to be a bigger push of folks who are going to work, and since there is not any new housing policy on the horizon, it seems this is a necessary short-term campaign.

Q: Where does Massachusetts rank nationally in terms of its programs for homelessness?

Hamilton-Ashé: It depends on the issue. In terms of issues such as affordability compared to minimum wage and stuff, Massachusetts ranks in the top 10 of the least affordable places to live. In terms of services that are provided, it depends on where you look. Massachusetts, actually, is one of the better states in terms of the amount of public and subsidized housing that we have, and especially at the private-development level -- the community-development corporations and small local nonprofits that build and rehab low-income housing -- we're really a leader nationally.

But the state [government] has not really done anything; in fact, we've lost ground in the past 10 years. We're kind of riding on what was done in past decades. So, in terms of comparisons with other states doing innovative things with federal and state money, we're definitely falling behind.

Q: Give us an example of an innovative state program elsewhere.

Hamilton-Ashé: New Jersey is actually using some of their TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] block-grant money to fund temporary rent subsidies for people who are leaving welfare for work and need some short-term assistance to help them get on their feet and make the transition a permanent one. They have the option of doing that. It's a successful program, and we have looked at doing it here, but the [Cellucci] administration has said firmly that it will not use that money for housing, which seems really shortsighted.

Cullinane: Particularly with a surplus. Keep in mind that there's been a surplus and the, quote, welfare rolls have been [thinned] drastically, so it's not an issue of needing to generate more money -- the money is there.

Q: What's the Mass Coalition's mission in all this?

Hamilton-Ashé: The coalition was started in the early 1980s by a group of shelter providers who realized that from their own positions, they could not have the impact on public policy that was necessary -- and they didn't want only to be providing service on an issue that needed more comprehensive work. That's why the coalition began and has grown since then into a permanent nonprofit organization. We get the vast majority of our funding from individual members, corporate donors, nonprofit foundations, and fundraising events. That gives us the freedom to be able to take public-policy stands without concern about [government cutbacks]. And this way, people who do not work in the direct-service community have a voice in public policy through the membership in the coalition.

Q: Do you think part of the hesitation toward addressing homelessness head-on may be a result of our growing interest in cleaning up urban areas -- the "quality of life" revolution under way in America's cities? Last year, the Boston City Council passed a statute banning "aggressive panhandling." Are we trying to sweep homelessness under the rug?

Cullinane: Look at the experience in New York City, where they had a huge campaign to develop "business enterprise zones" so they could move people out of public parks and the downtown area. But the public then assumes that the problem has been cured -- if you move people out of town, they are out of sight, out of mind.

I don't see the positive impact of doing any of that, and it speaks more and more to the need for a full-scale public policy [on housing and homelessness]. You just can't move people off the street and think that the problem has gone away. It really needs to be put in a public forum, where people can talk about homelessness -- whether it be in Leominster, Worcester, Fall River, Springfield, or Boston. That public level of discourse needs to happen. That's going to generate interest in changing policy and making people aware -- not panhandling laws.

Hamilton-Ashé: I think the same thing happened with welfare reform. When welfare reform passed in this state in 1995, all the talk was about ending welfare as we know it. We have ended welfare as we know it. We have not ended poverty. And I think that's what's really disturbing about all of the information that the DTA [Department of Transitional Assistance] and the governor's office put out about how successful welfare reform has been. The numbers look good -- people are leaving welfare. However, where are they going? It's done nothing to alleviate family poverty -- in fact, it's made it much worse in many situations. But the numbers look good, so they've been putting a good [spin] on it.

Q: Isn't it fair to say that things are only going to get worse in the short term? With the way development and the economy are going, aren't the costs only going to go up?

Hamilton-Ashé: I think that's true. And that's where community activism and responsible public policy can help alleviate that danger for low-income people. What we're seeing in South Boston right now is what we saw in the South End 20 years ago. There was active community organizing and support to make sure that low- and moderate-income individuals and families could stay in that neighborhood. And you see the same thing happening in South Boston. If the developers are coming in, if this is going to become the Seaport District, housing needs to be a part of it. Families that have lived here for generations are now seeing their rents and retail values going through the roof, and they need some support. That's the city's and the Commonwealth's responsibility -- to make sure that people have a place to live.

Q: Doesn't it really boil down to a moral argument? Thinking about homelessness is fashionable at the holidays, but is it really acceptable to tolerate this kind of housing crisis in such prosperous times?

Cullinane: Look at where Massachusetts is going, with the economy so strong and so many people benefiting in huge amounts in terms of their personal wealth. And yet we, side by side, have people who are struggling to be able to stay out of a shelter. These people have a right to decent housing. There's a right to be able to have control of their lives and get the best shot they can. And there is a moral dimension to that, but it's also basic human rights that people need in order to have a decent life. And it really takes a community response to look at that. We measure our society by how we take care of all of us. And we're not doing that right now.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.