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Is There Help for the Homeless?

Think Tank Transcripts: Hope for the Homeless?

ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, unlockingthe secrets of life through cellular and molecular biology. At Amgen,we produce medicines that improve people's lives today and bring hopefor tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theWilliam H. Donner Foundation, the Randolph Foundation, and the JMFoundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello. I'm Ben Wattenberg. Who are the homelesspeople living on our city streets? How did they get there and how canwe help them?

Joining us to sort through the conflict and the consensus aresociologist Christopher Jencks of Northwestern University and authorof the new and widely acclaimed book, 'The Homeless'; Alice Baum, coauthor of 'A Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness'; and asubstance abuse counselor who has worked with the homeless, DouglasBesharov of the American Enterprise Institute and author of'Recognizing Child Abuse'; and Heather Mac Donald, contributingeditor of the City Journal and affiliated with the ManhattanInstitute.

The question before this house: Is there hope for the homeless?This week on 'Think Tank.'

For years they were called hobos or vagabonds or tramps or bums orworse. But during the 1980s, they came to be called the homeless.Suddenly it seemed that there were more of them than ever before, andfor the first time since the Great Depression, they became asignificant political issue.

Today we are going to ask three questions: Who are the homeless?Why are they homeless? And what can we do about it?

Many liberals have argued that homelessness was the result ofcutbacks in social programs under the Reagan administration. It wasasserted that as many as three million Americans were on the streets.Meanwhile, many conservatives claimed that the new street people werein part the unintended consequence of well meaning welfare programsthat discouraged personal responsibility. Conservatives claim thatliberal activists vastly inflated the number of homeless in an effortto discredit Reagan administration policies.

But without doubt, homelessness did grow. Panelist ChristopherJencks, taking a look at the best evidence available, estimates thatthe numbers went up from 125,000 in 1980 to 324,000 in 1990. That's asizable and tragic increase, to be sure, but many fewer than thehorror show numbers offered by some of the homeless advocates.

Panel, ladies and gentlemen, let me begin, if I might, withProfessor Jencks, and ask you a few questions to sort of set thestage. How many homeless are there today in America as you reckon it?

MR. JENCKS: How many homeless there are really depends on how youcount, of course. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, how do you count?

MR. JENCKS: The counts that I've done usually are to try to countthe number of people who are homeless on any one night, and if youlook at that, probably the low estimates these days are around300,000, and the high estimates are 600,000. I come out on the lowside of that, but that's a reasonable range.

MR. WATTENBERG: There is a new report out from the Department ofHousing and Urban Development, and they say 600,000.

MR. JENCKS: Six hundred thousand is a figure that the UrbanInstitute came up with in 1987. The counts were probably a littlehigher in 1987 than they are now. And I would say that's a high endestimate, but it's not an unreasonable figure for a one night count.

MR. WATTENBERG: During the early '80s, there was a figure tossedaround of three million. That's out of the ball park?

MR. JENCKS: I think that's much too high, although the Clintonadministration is now also citing a figure of seven million, which isthe number of people who were homeless over a five year periodbetween 1985 and 1990.

MR. WATTENBERG: At any given moment during that five years, theyare claiming that there were

MR. JENCKS: They're claiming that seven million people werehomeless at some time between 1985 and 1990. And that's probablycorrect.

MR. WATTENBERG: But it's a very different sort of a number.

MR. JENCKS: Yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Now, let me just--a couple of fast factualquestions, Sandy Jencks. Who are the homeless? How would youcharacterize them demographically and by I guess you'd call it bycausation--why are they there?

MR. JENCKS: Well, the most obvious thing about the homeless, ofcourse, is that they have very little money. But then you have toask, sort of, what kinds of people are they and why is it that theydon't have much money?

The things that have most sort of struck the public are, first,that a large fraction of them have various kinds of mental problems,some very severe and some not so severe, but still serious enough soit makes it hard for them to hold a job. A large fraction of themalso are either doing a lot of crack or alcohol or both. And ofcourse a very large proportion of them don't have any job of anykind, and that's the main reason why they don't have the money to beable to afford shelter.

MR. WATTENBERG: Are they men or women? Are they singles orfamilies? Are they whites or minorities?

MR. JENCKS: Probably something like four out of five are singleadults. Most of those single adults are men. Most of the men are outof work, and a very large proportion are either substance abusers orare mentally ill. The minority of families, which is maybe somethinglike 20 percent of the total, of course get a lot more attention andmore support from the system. Almost all of them are in shelters, butthey are a particular concern because there are children there.

MR. WATTENBERG: I saw one figure--and then I will open thisdiscussion up that said over 80 percent of the homeless are drugabusers, alcohol abusers or mentally ill. Does that sound aboutright?

MS. BAUM: That's right.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Now, Alice Baum, you heard Sandy Jencks.What do you think of that?

MS. BAUM: Well, I disagree with what Sandy says, not so muchbecause of what he says, but the emphasis--on which he places. Thereason that people are homeless is not only because they are withoutjobs. They are without jobs for the same reason they are homeless,which is that they suffer from the treatable conditions of chronicalcoholism, drug addiction and chronic, serious psychiatric illness,mental illness. Or--in fact, there are many, up to 50 percent of thepeople who suffer from mental illness, it is suggested that they alsouse alcohol or drugs in some amount, and in any amount that causestheir difficulties to be that much worse.

MR. WATTENBERG: So their difficulties are principally drug,alcohol and mental illness, and that's what causes them not to have ajob.

MS. BAUM: Well, that's what causes--it's even more complicatedthan that. That is what causes them--if these conditions, which arecommon to all Americans in various percentages and proportions, ifthese conditions are left untreated, if the downward spiral is notarrested by treatment, people not only use up their own resources,their physiological resources, but they also use up their helpingsystems.

Even the poorest of Americans have always had helping systems offamily, neighborhood, church, employers, jobs, friends to help themin times of economic crisis. The homeless people have lost theirnetworks of social affiliation, so they end up on the streets.

MR. WATTENBERG: Heather, what do you MS. MAC DONALD: Well, I thinkanother way of characterizing who they are is that they are all theunhappy beneficiaries of a cultural revolution that began in the '60sthat challenged and in many cases destroyed norms of behavior thatare essential for a stable society. If you look at each group: thementally ill--they were the beneficiaries of the notion that it isoppressive to keep the mentally ill in state hospitals. As a result,they were released to nonexistent treatment in the community.

MR. WATTENBERG: That was part of the sort of civil libertiesrevolution.

MS. MAC DONALD: Exactly. They also won the right to refuse medicaltreatment. Doctors now have to go to court if they want to medicate apatient over his or her objection.

MR. WATTENBERG: There was a fact involved at that time, as Irecall. They said, well, Thorazine, this new drug, could deal withthis, so it was all right to let these people out of theseinstitutions.

MS. MAC DONALD: Right, but then this was taken one step further.We have the drugs, but it is also considered oppressive to treatpeople against their consent. So what you have on the streets of NewYork and in many other big cities are mentally ill patients that arewalking around that are not being treated because to treat them wouldbe a violation of their personal liberty.

Another group: welfare mothers. These were the victims, or thebeneficiaries, depending on how you look at it, of the welfare rightsrevolution that de stigmatized illegitimacy.

And finally, addicts came out of a generation that celebratedtuning in, turning on and dropping out, and we've seen how far theydropped.

MR. JENCKS: Well, there's some truth in that.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hold on. Let me just go to Doug for a moment.

MR. BESHAROV: Well, you know, we're going to have an argumentabout, you know, what the interaction is and whether the drug abusecame first or the homelessness came first. I think there is anoverriding point to realize here, and that is, unlike theconversation of 10 years ago, we're arguing here about how sick thehomeless are, not whether they're just like you and me. And we're nottalking about some Hollywood couple who were in a fine house with apicket fence, and suddenly the world fell apart and they were on thestreets, and we should all shudder because we could all be in thatcondition.

We're talking now about nuances of data, and we should justrealize that the political discourse ought to catch up. That is tosay, we ought to realize that homeless people have vast needs, andthey are not just like the rest of us.

MR. WATTENBERG: When you look at those three conditions of mentalillness MS. BAUM: Drug addiction.

MR. WATTENBERG: --drug addiction and alcoholism, I mean these aretragic human conditions.

MS. BAUM: That's right.

MR. WATTENBERG: That's what we're talking about. We're talkingabout people in tragic circumstances, that they not only have thesevery serious diseases, but they have no place to park themselves.

MR. JENCKS: I think it's important to remember that those are notnew conditions, though. I mean all of these things are causing peopleto be homeless now, but these are not--mental illness didn't beginrecently.

MR. WATTENBERG: With Ronald Reagan.

MR. JENCKS: With Ronald Reagan. He had many sins on his head, butthat is not one of them. If you go back to Chicago in the late 1950s,we have a very good study of skid row in Chicago in the late '50s.Twenty percent of the people there are mentally ill at the time.Probably 35 percent are alcoholic. But almost none of them werehomeless, a very small minority.

So it's not just the question that people have alcohol problems orare mentally ill. It's also that the income support and the housingcosts that those people face have changed in ways that have made itharder for them to keep a roof over their heads.

MR. BESHAROV: The income support is a very crucial thing. Iactually used to live on the Bowery in the days when they called thembowery bums. And I used to go to a local bar, and often would sitwith these older guys who we would now call homeless. But theyweren't homeless; they lived in SROs.

MR. WATTENBERG: Wait, wait. What is an SRO?

MR. BESHAROV: Single room occupancy, which is larger eitherapartments or hotels that have been progressively--the rooms havebeen progressively cut up into smaller living areas, often not muchlarger than a bed.

Well, I remember asking one of these fellows, you know, what didhe do for money? And his answer

MS. BAUM: He panhandled.

MR. BESHAROV: No, no, no. His answer was his daughter from GreatNeck, which is an upper middle class area in Nassau County justoutside of New York, would send him $25 a week. And that was enoughin those days--I won't tell you how old I am, when I was in school,and so forth--but that was enough to pay for his SRO room, to pay forwhatever food--there weren't that many soup kitchens in those days,and still so that he could go to a bar and buy booze.

MR. WATTENBERG: Now, let me ask you a question. Just two days ago,I was walking up Wisconsin Avenue, which is a nice boulevard inWashington, and right on the corner was a man who had set up a ratherelaborate tent.

MS. BAUM: I've seen it.

MR. WATTENBERG: And he lives there. Now, in the old days,people--as Doug was saying, they lived on a skid row, they lived in abowery; there were always bums, vagrants, hobos. What did we changein the law that suddenly allowed a man on public property to put up apermanent tent?

MS. MAC DONALD: Society has lost the will to enforce ordinancesthat have been around for 200 years that protect public order. Nowfor the last 20 years, police were told you cannot enforce vagrancy,you cannot enforce loitering laws, because this would be to penalizebehavior that was seen as an expression of self liberation. So wehave lost both the law enforcement element

MR. WATTENBERG: But is it really legal to set up a tent on astreet corner, or are we just not enforcing an existing law?

MS. MAC DONALD: That depends on the city. There have been a numberof challenges to cities' attempts to enforce such laws. Some havebeen--the challenges have been upheld. Other cities, though--more andmore progressive cities are deciding that they are going to try andrevive old laws, and many are being upheld in court.

MS. BAUM: But there is a deeper philosophical question. We deinstitutionalized, we closed down the mental hospitals in the earlystarting in the early 1960s because we believed, we had the hope thatmodern medical science, modern psychiatry could treat mental illnessso that people could be treated for their illness outside ofhospitals.

And the progression of the anti psychiatry movement, the notionthat to have mental hospitals was to impinge on people's freedom waspart of the movement to eliminate the whole system for caring forvery sick people.

MR. BESHAROV: But isn't it the case that many of those what wecall de institutionalizations, the reduction of the number of peoplein mental health facilities or in mental hospitals, was in largemeasure not only long overdue, but a real reform. It's just that itwent too far.

MS. BAUM: Yes, it did. It went too far, and it didn't count on theinflux of an enormous number of mentally ill people because of thebaby boom.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me just wrap up this part of this discussionby asking Sandy why I guess principally during the 1980s were thesenumbers so exaggerated?

MR. JENCKS: I think people have a big stake in making any problemthat they want to solve seem like a big problem. The DefenseDepartment used to tell us about what the Russian threat was. Everytime the budget came up, they said, oh, gee, the Russians are doingthese terrible things. And then the people who are trying to getmoney for support of programs to help the homeless do exactly thesame thing. And educators do the same thing. We say if we don't havemore money, the sky will fall.

MR. WATTENBERG: Next thing you know, you'll be saying that peoplein public television do it. (Laughter.)

MR. JENCKS: I'm sure they do.

MR. WATTENBERG: Didn't you use the phrase to describe this, 'lyingfor justice'?

MR. JENCKS: I did not event that phrase. I borrowed it from abook.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is that what you're talking about?

MR. JENCKS: I think that to describe this as lying is a littlemisleading. When Mitch Snyder said there were three million people onthe street, he didn't have any idea how many were on the street. Itwasn't that he knew that there were 200,000 and said there were threemillion. He didn't know it and he didn't much care, if the truth betold. He knew it was a big problem and three million was a bignumber, and it seemed to him that if you had a big problem, it shouldhave a big number attached to it, and that was good enough.

MS. BAUM: But Mitch Snyder also said that those three millionpeople were, as Doug mentioned earlier, just like the rest of us, andthat we were all in fact only a paycheck away from being homeless.And I think that's what's important to understand, that's not true.The people who do live on the streets and in shelters, who are thehomeless that we're talking about now, suffer from untreated medicalconditions, diseases, mental illness, alcoholism, and serious drugaddiction, and other physiological problems.

MR. WATTENBERG: As we move now into this idea of why this ishappening, how important has been the role of this sort of rollercoaster economy that we have had? It was down in the early '80s, andthen it went up and then it went down, and people say there was noaffordable housing and that jobs had moved from the cities. Andthere's a whole economic argument.

And you all are stressing so far non economic--you're talkingabout drugs and mental illness and alcohol and combinations thereof.Doug, why don't you take a first crack at that? How important are theeconomic aspects of this?

MR. BESHAROV: Well, I feel as if I'm borrowing from Sandy's work,but

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me assure you, that has been done before onthis program.

MR. BESHAROV: But I think Sandy speaks for most of the analystswho have looked at this from a dispassionate point of view, which isto say that it's not that there was a dearth of affordable housing,it was that we had a change in the needs of these very special peoplewho we're talking about. And they didn't have the kinds of livingfacilities or arrangements available to them that they had had in thepast, whether these were single room occupancy, whether it was amental hospital, whether it was family.

We haven't yet talked about this precisely, but many of the peoplewho we now label as homeless moved out from a family, eitherrelatives--I mean either brothers and sisters, parents, or whatever.And they moved out in part because they couldn't get along with them,but also in part because with all this talk about homelessness andshelters, there are now alternates for them.

A young mother with children living with her sister and hersister's family who decides that she's going to leave that home, inmany cities now, goes to the head of the public housing queue. Thatmeans that in some places, not all, she's almost wise to leave if shefits into the waiting list for public housing in the right way. MR.WATTENBERG: Next question to the panel, very simple one: What shouldwe do about it? Professor Jencks, surely--you've written a book aboutit, you must know what we should do about it.

MR. JENCKS: Well, you need to do different things for differentpeople, obviously, is the first thing. No one policy is going tosolve this problem for everybody. I mean, what you do for

MR. WATTENBERG: So when a politician gets up there and says, We'llsolve the homeless problem by creating more jobs, jobs, jobs--don'tbelieve it.

MR. JENCKS: Well, don't believe anyone will solve the wholeproblem. That's a good start. But if we set out to cut this problemin half or cut it by three quarters, I think that could be done overa reasonable period of time.

MR. WATTENBERG: That we could the homeless by three quarters?

MR. JENCKS: I think that could be done if you had, say, a 10 or 15year time horizon.

MR. WATTENBERG: How?

MR. JENCKS: Well, the first thing you would do, because it's themost obvious, is you would change the way we deal with the mentallyill. The second thing you could do, which is

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, what would you do?

MR. JENCKS: Well, you would provide them, at a minimum, withhousing vouchers that they couldn't go and spend on something else sothey would have a place to live, and then you would have rules thatthey had to not live on the street, but had to live in the housingthat was available to them.

MR. BESHAROV: You should use the 'L' word.

MS. BAUM: Yes, use the word.

MR. BESHAROV: The 'L' word in this context is lock them up if youhave to.

MS. BAUM: No, the 'I C' word--involuntary

MR. JENCKS: No I don't think--you might lock them up if you hadto.

MR. BESHAROV: Yeah, if you have to.

MR. JENCKS: But most of the homeless mentally ill don't have to belocked up. They have to be given housing. A few of them have to belocked up. MS. BAUM: They have to be given medication and monitoring.

MR. WATTENBERG: Alice Baum, what about community alternatives?

MS. BAUM: Community alternatives are appropriate. However, theyhave to be very specific kinds of community alternatives. People haveto be coaxed indoors, without a doubt. They do not have to be coaxedinto hospitals, but they must be indoors. They have to be offeredpsychiatric treatment. Mental illness is a psychiatric disorder.There are medications that can treat the symptoms to help people feelbetter and become stable and more rational, but the medications haveto be monitored.

Mentally ill people need varying levels of structure once they getinto the system. Some can do so well that they can in fact liveindependently.

MR. WATTENBERG: Do you believe in housing vouchers?

MS. BAUM: Vouchers don't--for somebody who is seriously mentallyill, a voucher won't do any good. What I thought Doug was going tosay was not the 'L' word, but the 'I C' word--involuntary commitment.There are some people

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, he says the 'L' word is lock them up,and you say it's 'I C', involuntary commitment. What I meant bycommunity alternatives, I happen to have a daughter who works up inMontgomery County, where they take small groups of people, put themin a small house with intense social work and psychiatric work andhelp them get a job and really take care of them in small groups.They do, I think, a wonderful job.

MS. BAUM: They do. Those are exactly

MS. MAC DONALD: Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

MR. WATTENBERG: Oh, yeah, okay. What do you think we should do?

MS. MAC DONALD: Well, New York social fabric has been ripped apartby poorly run, excessively libertarian services and facilities forthe mentally ill. In many cases, it does no good to the mentally ill.

MR. WATTENBERG: So what should we do?

MS. MAC DONALD: Well, I would say we have to look again at perhapsreopening some of the state mental hospitals that have been closeddown.

MR. BESHAROV: And more are closing. You know, in New York statethey're going to reduce the mental hospital capacities by 40 percentin the next few years to save money. Lord knows what they're going tospend at the other end.

But I think we gave Sandy's idea here a little short shrift. Ifyou go to places, sunny places like San Diego, where you see howgeneral assistance with a work requirement works, you see these menwho we call homeless working a day or two a week so that they haveenough money for the rest of the week. They don't like to work fulltime, they like to be on the streets, they like to drink, they likethe rest of their lives.

I think, again, if we separate the populations, some substantialnumber would respond to a voucher system because, again, they justwant a place to live.

MR. WATTENBERG: So you think some of the homeless are there bychoice?

MR. BESHAROV: Choice is a funny word.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, you're saying that they're kind of beachbums, that they work a day or two for, you know, enough for threesquares, and then they take off for five days and booze it up.

MR. BESHAROV: That sanitizes it a little much, but it is the lifethat they choose to live, for whatever reason. And if we can providea humane way for them to be housed and for their life situations tonot get worse, that is an appropriate goal of policy.

MS. BAUM: I disagree with that. I

MS. MAC DONALD: It's a goal, but it's not a sufficient goal. It'snot a sufficient goal. There will remain a hard core of mentally illindividuals that will refuse shelter, and that's why a lawenforcement component is essential. There should not be a right tolive on the streets. Either--it's destructive both for the peopleinvolved as well as for the communities. And unless America wakes upand realizes that, we're going to lose our cities.

MR. JENCKS: I don't think we have the right to live on the streetsnow. The law generally doesn't give you that right. What we have is afailure of enforcement of rules which already make it impossible tolive on the streets.

MR. WATTENBERG: Sandy, you and Heather are in agreement. You aresaying we should lock up people or force them not to live on thestreets; and you are saying we can do that, we should do that, wejust don't do it.

MR. JENCKS: No. I'm saying we can do that legally. What we can'tdo at the moment is get all those people off the streets because wedon't have anyplace to put them. And until you find places to putmost of them, you can't get the hard core group who won't leavelocked up because there are too many of them. MS. MAC DONALD: I thinkthere's a question of why is it 'we' that has to put them someplace?The whole system for the last 20, 30 years has represented increasingstate involvement; as we've mentioned before, the breakup of thefamily. It's no longer clear, I think that it is the nationaltaxpayer's fault and responsibility to provide housing. The systemhas not worked.

MR. WATTENBERG: That is the concluding note. Thank you,Christopher Jencks and Heather Mac Donald, Doug Besharov and AliceBaum. And thank you.

You know, this is a new program, and we appreciate hearing fromyou very much. Please send us your comments to the address on thescreen.

For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, inassociation with New River Media, which are solely responsible forits content.

'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, bringing better,healthier lives to people worldwide through biotechnology. Additionalfunding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the William H.Donner Foundation, the Randolph Foundation, and the JM Foundation.END

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