For the past 25 years, many organizations that serve the homeless in America have been able to do so with a free supply of real estate: surplus federal property that the government no longer wants. Old warehouses have been turned into food banks. Small agency office buildings have been converted to counseling centers. Decommissioned military housing now sometimes shelters the homeless. But in a reality of the recession, as America’s homeless ranks have risen, so too has the pressure in Washington to make a buck by selling these properties. “The issue has kind of devolved into a ... Read More
Mentally Ill Homeless Improve With Group Living
April 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In 1990, a research team in Boston launched an ambitious experiment with some of the city's sickest residents — the chronically homeless and severely mentally ill. With $13 million in federal funding, the team recruited 118 volunteers from the shelters and randomly placed them in group homes and independent apartments. The group homes were envisioned as a kind of utopia, in which the mentally ill clients — up to 10 in each of six homes — would become "active agents in shaping their future." By the end of 18 months, they were supposed to replace the paid staff. The project team, led by ... Read More
Squat to Own
October 5, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade — and hope that life hands you some sugar, too. When life hands you foreclosed houses, make them homes. That was the point of Pam Kelley's recent Miller-McCune.com article on Habitat for Humanity buying some fixer-uppers on the ultra-cheap and turning them into affordable housing for low-income working people. In Miami, notes Miller-McCune.com contributor Kirk Nielsen, they're cutting out the middleman and allowing homeless people just to squat in foreclosed homes vacated by their erstwhile buyers but not yet spiffed and resold by their genuine ... Read More
Hospitals Save Money with Homeless Outreach
May 27, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Dr. Laura Sadowski knows how homeless people can be treated by hospitals. She's seen the occasional taxicabs from another hospital drop off homeless patients at the door to the nearby teaching hospital where she works. While never as dramatic as the homeless patient "dumping" by Kaiser Permanente and others in Los Angeles, as an internal medicine physician at Stroger Hospital in Chicago, Sadowski had enough of an idea to know that hospitals in her area could probably do more to help the homeless. When The Chicago Continuum of Care, a nonprofit advocacy group, asked Sadowski ... Read More
The Homemakers
March 31, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
What makes Keith Wallach's apartment extraordinary is not the least bit evident at first. The kitchen of his lower Harlem studio is diminutive but tidy. The furnishings — a queen-size bed, a considerable couch and a bureau — dwarf the space but look nearly new. Surfaces are cluttered in a way that suggests once something is put down, it stays there for years. Yet the place is clean. In fact, the most remarkable attribute of Wallach's home is that he is in it, because for years he was part of a small but conspicuous segment of the population: People who live on the streets, suffer from ... Read More
Is Criminalizing Mental Health Wise Policy?
November 18, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Part II of a four-part series looking at the sorry state of treating the mentally ill — beyond warehousing people in institutions or prisons — and the tentative efforts to improve the situation. Part I looked at the scope of the problem and the downbeat assessments by experts. In her worst nightmares, Linda Stewart-Oaten never dreamed her son Chris would murder her cousin Sylvia. Chris, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has been in state prison ever since that day he shot his mother's cousin 14 years ago. "Of course, ... Read More
Feeding the Meter, Helping the Homeless?
June 2, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
American cities have tried many ambitious methods to "fix" their homelessness problems, from San Francisco's "care-not-cash" program, which cut welfare funds in exchange for expanded access to shelters, to The Bridge, Dallas' just-opened center that aims to take the novel approach of treating the homeless like consumers. Now, it appears the latest craze in homeless policy takes its cue from Lovely Rita, Meter Maid. Earlier this month, San Francisco became the latest in an expanding list of cities that have converted downtown parking meters into collection boxes, with the coins deposited by ... Read More
