The Non-Profit Battle Against Homelessness
by Tony Chavira
A federal report came out last Wednesday that showed that in the year 2009 there was a drop in the rate of homeless people nationally by 5% (which is awesome, in case you didn't know). However, the same report found that the number of homeless families increased by 7%, which is clearly just plain sad.
The report stated that the decrease in the overall number of homeless people can actually be attributed to supportive housing efforts on the part of government and non-profit agencies, and it's nice to know that our legislative efforts are paying off in some ways. Equally important, the foreclosure crisis wasn't the main reason there was an increase in the number of homeless families... which is something that I would have otherwise assumed. It makes perfect sense though: these days, if you lose your home you can still pay rent elsewhere. Instead, the reason there was a huge upturn in the number of homeless families is the recession... simply, people would lose their jobs and not be able to afford to live anywhere else. If these weren't the circumstances, a second group were found to have become homeless for no other reason than they were kicked out of their host homes... sort of like guests who had overstayed their welcome.
If you can pull anything useful from this report, it's that permanent supportive housing works to get otherwise chronic homeless people off the streets. Just as good, it's less expensive and less contentious than other, less permanent programs. For example, the city of Colorado Springs began a program with the El Pomar Foundation where they would pay fixed rates for chronically homeless people to live in motels throughout the county. It all seemed like a good semi-permanent idea for them, especially since a ban was enacted by local officials to keep the homeless away from campgrounds. Recently though, the price tag for these services re-arose and created a situation that's putting politicians between a rock and a hard place:
To continue keeping the homeless in motel rooms, the executive director of Homeward Pikes Peak wants $50,000 in taxpayer revenues from the city and $50,000 from the county. He hopes the $100,000 will pay the bill for three more months. In recent months, the homeless have lived in motel rooms with a generous $100,000 private grant from the El Pomar Foundation.
Public money for motel rooms will thrill taxpayers who have been told that their hard-earned tax dollars aren’t enough to keep streetlights on or trash cans in parks.
But taxpayers and their elected servants may have little choice when it comes to motel room for the poor. If city leaders want to enforce their new camping ban, and they want to impede a private campground for the homeless, they might have to pay motel bills for the foreseeable future. It’s the least they can do.
It's easy to see what was short-sighted about this program though: the El Pomar Foundation (despite their good intentions) developed a totally unsustainable solution which was simply way too rooted in depending on the market for housing services (in this case, motel rates). A single foundation can only make so many donations before the government needs to step in and do something (like build public housing of their own). Bless their hearts, the El Pomar Foundation tried but hasn't yet been able to convince Colorado Springs officials to buckle down and take homelessness seriously enough.
However, it's an interesting point that the El Pomar Foundation had the contingency to give any money at all. More people are realizing that, in many ways, it's smarter to give money donations and expect results from well-run local foundations than to city governments or the homeless directly. It's sad to say for local governance, but these non-profits are run well because they are run by knowledgeable executive officers and a comprehensive and well-qualified board of directors. Our FourStory directors (for example) are both thoughtful people and very knowledgeable about the issues of homelessness and affordable housing today, and in a lot of ways that gives us the freedom to be open about issues of fairness and social justice... simply put, they trust us to stay informed and write well-thought-out opinions.
On the other side of the coin, a recent campaign in Minnesota is actually advocating that people not give their extra dollars and quarters to homeless people on the street, and instead give larger doses of cash to local, well-organized non-profits that are working to completely eliminate homelessness as an issue:
Heading Home Hennepin, a joint city and county project to end homelessness by 2016, and the Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District are launching a tough-love campaign to discourage people from giving spare change to panhandlers. The campaign resembles an effort planned three years ago that never got off the ground.
Instead of tossing a few coins or bills at someone, officials say, make out a check to local nonprofits that reach out to the homeless and help them find stable housing. That's the cure that treats the disease and not the symptoms.
And yes, that includes the guy quietly holding a sign at a busy intersection, as well as the more aggressive sorts who get in the face of pedestrians downtown (which is a misdemeanor in Minneapolis).
Their website, GiveRealChange.org, is an online place where donations can be linked to non-profits directly. Except for the fact that many people decide to hand money to the homeless directly on a whim and they might not as whimsically donate a larger check to a non-profit organization, this would seem like a good idea (needless to say, handing money directly to the homeless might not be such a hot idea). It's sad when you have to think about depending on non-profits to take action when local government doesn't (and worse when you think that local government doesn't receive donations for programs while non-profits do), but such is the way of the world right now. But just as the Colorado Springs example pointed out, non-profits only have so much power and money to allocate on their own... at some point, local government just needs to step up and take care of business more permanently. Besides, it's easier to hold government officials accountable and fire them right away than to hold a corrupt non-profit executive accountable for their mistakes. You don't get a vote in non-profit actions.
Ultimately, you can end up with crooked non-profit managers who might have taken money from the organization for years just as easily as you can have badly-thought-out or counter-intuitive government assistance programs. The point is that we just need to be careful about how we spend our money to stop the problem. Giving money is just as important as the research that goes into where we allocate it, and we've gotta be strategic if we want to end this problem once and for all.
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