THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 28, 1995 TAG: 9507270196
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
Unfortunately, programs that try to improve people's skills, modify their chemical intake or deal with their psychoses have rather mixed records of success.''
- Sociologist Christopher
Jencks, in ``The Homeless''
The Homeless Advisory Committee has sent City Manager Jim Spore its recommendation: Spend an $800,000 federal grant for ``capital costs connected with innovative homeless activities'' on a permanent homeless shelter. That recommendation comes before City Council next month. No way should Council base a decision on this skimpy report.
Nowhere in it does the committee support its recommendations. Do the homeless here reflect the national profile - mostly single, mostly male, more than half substance abusers, more than a quarter mentally ill? If so, are there better ways to assist them than a permanent shelter - vouchers for residential drug treatment, supervised group homes or reinstitu-tionalization for the mentally ill? Are there better ways to help the sober and skilled than bunking them with the intoxicated - say, subsidizing single-room-occupancy hotels with shower and phone? Are there better ways to help homeless single mothers and children than a room or two in a clearinghouse/flophouse for all homeless? ``Flophouses'' faded with a bad rep, but they met the need of homeless singles better than lean-tos in the woods.
The homeless have varying problems requiring varying solutions, and some beyond solving. Yet the committee would lump them in a facility that purports to be all things to all homeless people. It only reluctantly makes obvious distinctions that greatly affect a program's success. An ex-ample: The ``human right'' of one individual to fair treatment by shelter officials seems to have concerned the committee far more than the human right of the other occupants to freedom from the unruly and threatening.
There is the right, too, of the larger community to be heard about what its taxes buy. The committee, concerned about tipping its hand to prospective sellers and tipping off wary neighborhoods, suggests five locations for the shelter. It describes each vaguely enough to delay the NIMBY response. It also leaves you wondering what common cri-te-ria these sites could possibly have met: Proximity to the homeless? To transportation? Distance from subdivisions very vocal about plans for their back yards?
The committee presumes that the need for the shelter it recommends, the purpose, the policies, the operating budget and the results all go without saying, and presumably without argument. Not so. Council may have a hard time posing impudent-sounding questions. But getting the answers is prudent. So is reading Christopher Jencks' little book. by CNB