Cities Seek Solutions to Dilemma of Homelessness

MIAMI —  Alvah Chapman’s office in the Miami Herald building, where he is director of the board of Knight Ridder Newspapers, looks out over Biscayne Bay. On one side of the bay rises a luxurious apartment tower with units that rent for $2,000 a month. On the other, shanties are home to some of the poorest of the city’s poor.

Chapman moved recently, and his commute now takes him past the Mud Flats, one of Miami’s grubbiest homeless encampments.

“Exposure to that made me think I had to get involved,” he said.

His involvement is helping push Miami to adopt an ambitious strategy, including a special tax, to get the homeless out of the encampments that had become eye-arresting stains along the waterfront and highways.

In Miami and across the nation, people are increasingly fed up with parks and sidewalks turned into campsites by the homeless, increasingly tired of panhandlers who seem to hassle them on every street corner. They are pressing for action--not only to help the homeless but also to get them off the streets.

In Santa Ana, the City Council in late 1992 adopted an ordinance prohibiting camping in public places, a move prompted when homeless people began crowding into the Civic Center at night. An appeals court last week, in a sternly worded ruling, declared the ordinance unconstitutional.

Other governments, including Miami’s, are reaching for responses that draw on public and private resources. Beyond providing food and shelter, some programs are seeking to treat people for the causes of their homelessness.

Some cities have adopted initiatives that look a lot like the police sweeps of the past.

In San Francisco, where the available 1,903 shelter beds fall far short of meeting the needs of a homeless population estimated at 12,000, police arrest, ticket and fine homeless people for being menaces to public sanitation and safety.

In between are cities such as Orlando, Fla., whose residents and officials worried that a growing population of street people do not belong in the city of Disney World. They answered with a screened-in pavilion where homeless people can be found sleeping round the clock.

“People are tired of homelessness,” said Marcia Martin, who monitors the situation for Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros. “We are at a point in this nation where we can’t afford the homeless crisis anymore. It’s affecting who we are and how we look--and we look terrible.”

Many federal and local officials have said they believe that the homelessness problem has grown so huge--the number of people on the streets or in shelters each night is estimated at 700,000--that the traditional patchwork of soup kitchens and other efforts is no longer adequate.

In Los Angeles, an already massive homeless population--1993 estimates were 80,000--is expected to become even larger because of the Northridge earthquake. While there are some very innovative local services, the demand far exceeds the supply, officials said.

For the first time, the federal government is pushing cities to formally adopt strategies to address the problem--and it is claiming a significant role for itself. Federal funding jumped from $570 million in 1993 to $823 million this year, and the Administration is expected to ask for nearly double that amount for 1995.

Cisneros said he hopes to make a measurable difference by giving federal grants of $20 million each to a few cities developing comprehensive strategies to tackle the problem. Los Angeles and Washington have already been tapped as recipients, and Miami is likely to be named soon, Cisneros said.

Miami officials say they are hoping to attract a chunk of the new federal dollars.

Until recently, the city had done almost nothing to shelter homeless people. Instead, police arrested or hassled them for breaking laws against sleeping and eating in public.

Then a federal judge ordered the city to find a solution to the problem or create safe zones where homeless people could build their own shelters. That was exactly the kick in the pants that homeless advocates wanted.

“Homelessness was not a priority in this city, but we’ve made it a priority,” said Alex Penelas, the Dade County commissioner orchestrating the new homeless policy. “Why? Because a federal judge slapped us with an order and said: ‘Do something about it,’ business leaders got fed up with it, and it became an issue for opinion-makers.”

Under the plan, the encampments will be cleared out and the occupants moved to three yet-to-be-constructed shelters, which will house 250 to 300 people each for seven to 30 days. Caseworkers will evaluate and counsel residents and send them to treatment centers for substance abuse or mental illness, if needed, or to transitional housing and jobs.

To pay for the plan, the county has passed a 1% tax on food and beverages at large restaurants, a measure that is expected to raise more than $21 million in three years. Chapman and other private citizens have committed to raising $8.5 million to supplement the public money.

Dade County has already cleared out the Mud Flats and placed almost 100 of its former residents in treatment programs or transitional housing, such as the Palms Motel. One of the success stories at the Palms is 54-year-old Sid Morris, who said he has been without a home for a dozen years.

“I did not decide to come here,” Morris said. “Miami forced me.”

Morris is glad it did: “I have a roof over my head, TV, telephones and three meals a day,” he said, lounging in a chair. “Those are things I can look forward to now.”

He said he goes to substance-abuse classes and has cut down on crack, which he has used for a decade. “I use a whole lot less now than when I was on the Mud Flats.”

Officials conceded that the Mud Flats effort is too expensive--$40 per person per day--to replicate on a large scale but said they expect to bring costs down as more of the plan goes into effect.

Federal officials and some advocates for the homeless are critical of Miami’s decision to build such large shelters--which they believe are less effective than smaller facilities--and for spending too much on shelters rather than on treatment programs and transitional housing. But county officials and Chapman say their plan is the only affordable way to reach all the homeless people who need help.

Caseworkers also say it is the most humane solution. “It may sound tough, but it’s not,” said Cynthia Hall, who works to aid Dade County’s homeless population.

While Miami is trying “tough love,” other communities are just being tough. Like Miami, San Francisco is rooting people out of its parks and off its sidewalks--but it is not offering anywhere to go.

Thousands of citations have been issued since August, when Mayor Frank Jordan directed police to arrest and issue $76 tickets to people for sleeping, camping or urinating in public or otherwise disturbing the “quality of life.”

“They’re out of the parks, but they’re in the streets and the alleys,” said Ray Masterson of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. The shelter system falls so short of meeting the need, he said, that people have no other choice.

The coalition is a party in a class-action suit to bar the mayor from ticketing the homeless when they have no other place to live. It is one of a growing number of such suits across the country.

“At the same time these actions have increased, so have the legal challenges to them,” said Maria Foscarinis, director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. She named San Francisco, Seattle and Atlanta as examples of cities with anti-homeless policies but stressed that “this is a problem in cities across the country.”

Orlando was particularly troubled by the hundreds of homeless people who slept in its parks and in the heart of its downtown, which looks like a Western frontier town.

“It was a real moral dilemma,” Police Chief Tom Hurlburt said. “We’re Orlando, Florida, the home of Mickey Mouse. We’re friendly to everyone.”

The city’s solution--a campus for the homeless--has caught the eye of public policy-makers across the nation.

As many as 500 people a day stay in Orlando’s screened pavilion, which has a heated concrete floor with yellow lines resembling parking places. Late last year, Orlando opened a more comfortable facility--with barracks-like accommodations for women and single rooms for families--that holds about 180 people.

The price tag--$350,000 to build the pavilion and operating costs of $1.3 million a year--was reasonable, officials said.

“This is the only place I know that helps us out,” said Edward Krieck, 49, who said he was released from prison three months ago after serving 15 years for murder. The $425 a month he receives in disability benefits is not enough to live elsewhere, he said.

But some local advocates for the homeless and some of the homeless themselves say the shelters are dehumanizing.

Skipper Tompkins, 34, said the shelter helped him to survive but not to put his life together. “I believe places like this make people weaker, keep people down.”

Michael Poole, the facility’s director, defended the pavilion as a safety net for people who do not want to help themselves and whom society does not want to help.

“This is a place to come and flop,” he said. “It’s better than the streets--it’s not as good as a shelter. What we’ve been able to prove to this community is that it makes dollars and sense to provide some type of minimum help.”

But, he conceded, “I’m not sure this is the right minimum. We’re in a new frontier.”