Being poor or homeless is not a crime.

The Town Council has gotten a spate of letters lately complaining about panhandlers downtown. One in today's mail implores, "Please enforce the laws against panhandling, so decent people are not subjected to intimidation and unpleasantness on our main street."

Our town is not unusual. There are more homeless people lately. Some of them turn to panhandling. And for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Billie Guthrie a housing coordinator for OPC Area Program, calls our attention to a new report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, "A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities." It begins,

The housing and homelessness crisis in the United States has worsened in 2005, with many cities reporting an increase in demands for emergency shelter. In 2005, 71 percent of the 24 cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported a 6 percent increase in requests for emergency shelter. Even while the requests for emergency shelter have increased, cities do not have adequate shelter space to meet the need. In the 24 cities surveyed in the U.S. Conference of Mayors Hunger and Homelessness Homelessness Survey for 2005, an average of 14 percent of overall emergency shelter requests went unmet, with 32 percent of shelter requests by homeless families unmet. The lack of available shelter space – a situation made worse by the Gulf Coast hurricanes - leaves many homeless persons with no choice but to struggle to survive on the streets of our cities.

Too often, the response to this crisis is to criminalize the homeless. Atlanta's draconian anti-panhandling ordinance is one example. In some cities you can even get into trouble for feeding the homeless:

Cities have been further targeting homeless persons by penalizing those offering outdoor feedings for homeless individuals. These city restrictions are frequently aimed at preventing providers from serving food in parks and other public spaces.
In Dallas, beginning in September 2005, a new ordinance penalizes charities, churches, and other organizations that serve food to the needy outside of designated areas of the city. Anyone who violates this ordinance can be fined up to $2000.

Recently Dallas has refined this ordinance with designated official feeding sites. The idea is to cut down on litter. Also, volunteers have to register and take food-handling classes.

The panhandlers are virtually regulated out of sight and yet if you feed them you have to be certified? Something doesn't add up.

Dallas is one of the top 20 meanest cities for 2005. The criteria are "the number of anti-homeless laws in the city, the enforcement of those laws and severities of penalties, the general political climate toward homeless people in the city, local advocate support for the meanest designation, the city’s history of criminalization measures, and the existence of pending or recently enacted criminalization legislation in the city." These are cities in which "punitive practices . . . impede true progress in solving the problem."

I'm not proud of our nighttime panhandling ban and would not have voted for it. It was supposed to solve the problem of aggressive panhandling. But it hasn't. Instead, it's just made the situation confusing. How is a person on Franklin Street at night supposed to know that it's against the law for him to ask out loud for money (but that it would be OK if he put it on a placard)? It's not working here any better than it has turned out in Fort Lauderdale.

I am proud of our Community Initiative to End Homelessness for its recent receipt of a HUD grant of more than $270,000 to fund housing and basic services for the homeless.

The Community Initiative is associated with, but is not the same thing as, the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness (which needs a better web site). The Partnership is in the data-gathering stage, and focus groups are being organized. I think one of the first steps on the way to getting those nagging panhandlers off the street has to involve thinking seriously about why they are there, about real ways to tackle their problems. Surely there's at least some small relationship between the homeless and the excessively homed.

Ending homelessness

Here are two stories about yesterday's announcement by Orange and Durham Counties of a commitment to end chronic homelessness in 10 years.


Craig Chancellor, Triangle United Way; Sen. Ellie Kinnaird; Philip Mangano, U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness; Martha Are, N.C. Interagency Council for Coordinating Homelessness Programs.


Orange County Commissioner Moses Carey; Philip Mangano; Durham Mayor Bill Bell; Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy; Durham Mayor Pro Tem Cora Cole-McFadden; Craig Chancellor.
Philip Mangano, head of the federal homelessness initiative, is an impressive voice for the voiceless. (I didn't take notes, but here's a representative stump speech.) For twenty years, he said, the community response to homelessness has been to manage it, to contain (or hide) people as best it could be done, with the hope that the problem would go away. But something has changed:

We're no longer satisfied with managing the problem, maintenancing the effort, or accommodating the response. We have a new standard. Abolishing homelessness.

That's right, he's an abolitionist, and he embraces the obvious comparison.

Billie Guthrie, chair of the Orange County Community Initiative to End Homelessness, reported the results of the annual homeless count just conducted.

Total Number of Homeless People Counted in January 2005: 230

Homeless people in families: 59
--Homeless families with children are among the fastest growing segments of the homeless population. Indeed, in one year in Orange County, there has been a 40% growth in this population.

Homeless individuals: 171

Homeless children: 38
--Represents 16.5% of our total population.

Homeless people with a history of domestic violence: 48
--Battered women who live in poverty are often forced to choose between abusive relationships and homelessness. This population represents 21% of our total homeless population.

Chronically homeless people: 70
--Most startling and most telling statistic is that the chronic homeless now represent 30% of our total population, well above the national average of 10%. These folks are disabled individuals who remain continuously homeless or constantly cycling in and out of homelessness. Research shows they are also very hard to serve and consume a disproportionately large amount of costly community resources (i.e. emergency shelter resources, police and EMS resources and hospital visits).

We have our work cut out for us. There's reason to be skeptical, with the Bush administration slashing one useful program after another (Section 8 housing vouchers for example). But there are also real reasons for hope.

Seeking volunteers for Project Homeless Connect

On Thursday, October 25, Project Homeless Connect will take place at the Hargraves Center. This exciting event is sponsored by the Project to End Homelessness in Orange County. Similar events in Wake and Durham County will take place the same day.

Project Homeless Connect is not an "information fair." It is a time and a place where people who are homeless or at risk of being homeless can get "connected"--right then and there--to services they need: housing and employment assistance; health and dental care; counseling for mental health, developmental disabilities, and substance abuse; Social Security assistance; and more.

The event is supported by grants from the Triangle United Way and the Stroud Roses Foundation, as well as by the Town of Chapel Hill, which, in addition to donating the Hargraves space, is allowing town employees to take paid time off to volunteer on the 25th. My hope is that its success will be a model for new ways in which we can serve the homeless year-round.

Jamie Rohe is heading up the project, bringing to it tremendous energy and dedication. Now is the time when she needs folks to volunteer. I'm passing on the following from Jamie:

Volunteers Needed to Assist Homeless

Volunteers are needed at Project Homeless Connect Orange County, a one-day, one-stop center to be held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, to provide homeless people with a broad range of services including housing, employment, health, dental and mental health care, social service benefits, disability and veterans’ benefits, legal services, meals, and personal care (haircuts and foot care).

Organizers anticipate serving more than 150 homeless people at the Orange County event, with the help of hundreds of volunteers. The event will be held at the Hargraves Community Center, 216 N. Roberson St.

Volunteers are needed to escort homeless guests through the event, serve as greeters, conduct intake and exit interviews, serve as parking attendants, direct foot traffic, and set up before and clean up after the event.

If you are interested in participating or would like to learn more about the event, please contact Meredith Costa, mcosta@hiddenvoices.org or (919) 923-2559.

Please consider donating an hour or two of your time to this worthy event.

November: focus on homelessness

For the National City Network, November's turn toward winter weather prompts a focus on homelessness.


Photo by Lisa Scheer of a homeless woman's camp in Greensboro.

At a downtown safety forum yesterday morning, sponsored by the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, I gave an overview of the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness. I cited data from the National City Network indicating the broad diversity of the estimated 600,000 people who are homeless in the richest country on the planet:

34 percent of homeless service users are members of homeless families
28 percent of homeless persons state that they sometimes or often do not get enough to eat
66 percent of homeless report indicators of alcohol, drug abuse and mental health problems
44 percent of homeless individuals did paid work in the last month
49 percent of homeless individuals are in their first episode of homelessness

As I always try to do, I encouraged folks at the forum to think about homelessness from the point of view of being homeless--for I myself find it really a challenge to imagine. When you don't have a home, you essentially don't have a position from which to be heard in the civic sphere, I pointed out, citing, as I have before, the philosopher David Schrader. For Aristotle, the state was made up of households (not roving individuals). The home affords privacy, which is essential to autonomy: "autonomy against the authority of society." The homeless have no defenses and few advocates.

But what people wanted to talk about was not homelessness but its near cousin, panhandling, and the blight it contributes to downtown. Can't we outlaw it even further? some asked. Legally we probably could was my reponse, but that would not make it right. Glad to see the that downtown outreach committee agrees and is choosing instead to work on education and . . . outreach.

UPDATE 11/21: Editorials in the Chapel Hill Herald and the Daily Tar Heel register concern about overregulation of panhandling.

He knew not what he said.

Minneapolis Start Tribune columnist Nick Coleman must be used to criticism, but even he was stunned by the reaction he got from a comparison he made in a column on homelessness (subscription only).

They all had names and they all had gifts, the homeless Minnesotans who died in 2004. There may have been 100 who died alone, without homes, without care, without a safety net. But they represent more than just the dead.

They also represent the living: The thousands of Minnesotans--many of them women and children--who remain homeless and hidden amid the plenty of the holidays.

And further,

It would be easier on our conscience, maybe, if the homeless were all loners or losers, alcoholics or misfits. If you think labels can tell a human story, perhaps you can take satisfaction in the fact that many of the dead fit those descriptions. But, sorry: There aren't any easy outs.

But he didn't stop there. If we can't attend to the needy during the holidays, he concluded,

you have to wonder what we're celebrating this Christmas. After all, once upon a time, a homeless couple came to Bethlehem, looking for shelter.

Whoops! Coleman had quit preaching and gone to meddling. His next column (ditto) describes the reaction he got from his "fellow Christians" who "took time from worship to criticize":

They didn't write to tell me about their concern for the 8,000 homeless in Minnesota or the fact that half of them are women and kids or that 100 of them died this year.
No, they wrote to say that even though we will always have the poor with us, as Jesus said, that doesn't mean those poor buggers shouldn't get out of the way of our SUVs.
"These homeless are bums, nothing but leeches on society," wrote a guy who signed himself Trav. "If we could push a button and make the homeless die and disappear without repercussions, nearly everybody would do it. I would. Good riddance."

Moreover, he had his facts wrong:

"Your allegation that Mary and Joseph were homeless is just a plain lie," wrote Jerry. "They were no more homeless than you would be if you showed up at a posh hotel without a reservation and were turned away."

"All I was trying to do," Coleman explains, "was draw a timely connection between the poor and the Christmas story. This was a connection the nuns drew sharply for me in my formative years." But then on second thought,

I guess the point these compassionate Christians are trying to make is that Jesus wouldn't give the homeless a second glance if he came back. And you know what? They might be right. Jesus might walk right past the homeless, the poor and the sick, and march straight into our churches.

Because he'd have a lot of tables to overturn.

PATHs home

The 2005 North Carolina Conference on Homelessness, sponsored by the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness, is taking place through tomorrow in Raleigh. I went to today's luncheon, where Mayor Foy and County Commission Chair Cary accepted an award for leadership in establishing a partnership to create a 10-year plan for ending homelessness in Orange County; and I attended the afternoon session for elected officials.

I learned a lot at that session--for one thing, that Gastonia has a great mayor. Jennifer Stulz is making things happen. Last year, the Gastonia police department won an award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police for community police work with their homeless population.

The community policing unit has worked closely with faith-based organizations to help address the problem of homelessness. Though on a small scale—only about 30 people in the downtown area are chronically homeless and 3 people successfully went through detox and halfway house programs—the project demonstrates how to share information and build partnerships.

Mayor Stultz talked about what the police actually do: they will talk to a homeless person, ask where their family is, what their problems are, and finally, whether they could use some help. Next thing, the police officer may be escorting the person to the detox center and, eventually, driving the person to distant places to be with loved ones.

Like Chapel Hill, Gastonia has a central business district where the homeless population has been considered a serious problem. Mayor Stultz' achievement was to convince the business community that the homeless were an economic development problem: that was the key step in enlisting their support.

Another great idea I learned about was the "one-stop" model of providing services to the homeless. Kay Ferguson and David Harris of Wake County talked about their experience with Katrina victims. In a span of 24 hours, 385 people were evacuated to Raleigh. Some didn't even know where they were. (When told he was in North Carolina, one man commented that at least the barbeque was good.) Quickly the county leased a space, an unused Nortel facility, and set up shop. In one location these people could sleep and eat, but also they could talk to HUD folks, and FEMA, and get medical attention, and more. We learned that this was the intuitive way in which Katrina relief sites were being set up all over the country: it just made sense, and it worked.

So why not do something like that with permanent homeless populations? It is being done: see the PATHMall in Los Angeles. Take the tour, dig the colors! I'd like to see our IFC evolve into something like this. IFC director Chris Moran, who was at the conference but not at this session, said he liked the idea too.

Even without having a "one stop" facility in place, communities are figuring out ways to approximate the result, if only for one day every couple of months or so. Last year San Francisco pioneered Project Homeless Connect, a day-long event in which volunteers go out into the community, find homeless people, and direct them to the services they need. This year, December 8 is National Project Homeless Connect Day. There's not enough time to organize one for Chapel Hill, but it's something to think about.

Invisible homelessness

For a period of months a year or so ago, an old blue van was parked in our neighborhood at regular intervals. It seemed to show up before 10 a.m., and then sometime late at night it disappeared. (Except on weekends, when it didn't show.) Occasionally you could glimpse the driver as he walked up a gravel road back toward the van from, presumably, some place down on Morgan Creek. A homeless man working a night shift? So I would have been willing to guess, but we didn't know. Then he was gone.

His usual parking spot was just around the corner from this house (which is still on the market, if you're interested).

A person living out of a car and holding a job might well not show up on an annual count of the homeless. Indeed, he or she might take great pains to disguise the fact. How similar, I wonder, is the story of the man in the van to this one offered by William Alford, a homeless man in Northern Virginia?

During the day, I am among you, taking special care to seem no different. I bathe, shave, wear clean clothes daily, and otherwise keep a low profile. That requires effort. The suburban homeless quickly learn to make no offensive, intrusive, or otherwise attention-drawing manifestations of any kind. Tom Star-King, a 30-year off-and-on homeless “veteran” from Fairfax County explained it on a 2002 segment on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly titled “Homeless in America”: “You’re gonna get discriminated against if you appear to be homeless. That’s why you have to keep up a façade.”
Indeed, you’re not going to see the urban variety of homeless here in the ’burbs. If you make a nuisance of yourself, you’ll end up locked away in a jail cell or doped up in a psych ward. We don’t want to live indoors that badly.

Alford hates shelters. (He's not the only homeless person I've heard to say this.)

Of the nice, clean shelters where the truly offensive are screened out—such as the Embry Rucker Community Shelter in Reston—most are likely dormitories clustered with guys of varying standards of hygiene snoring, farting, yammering, and thrashing in their bunks. If you can deal with that, bully for you.

He prefers to take his chances in his car, exposing himself to "a certain cadre—mostly young males—who simply cannot abide leaving unmolested those who seem vulnerable."

Alford's remarkable story relates his fall from a CAD drafter for a defense-related corporation to a cab driver not quite making it on his own, his putting himself through college where he was able to polish his considerable writing skills, and a marriage that fails for lack of money. Degree in hand, he looks for work but faces blatant age discrimination. Graduate school tantalizes but is not an option. Finally he is back on the streets, or rather the unwelcoming shoulders of suburban roads.

Homeless: the word on the street

I met some interesting people at the homelessness conference in DC last week. One of them was Koki Smith, editor-in-chief of Street Sense. Street Sense is a newspaper written by and for the poor and homeless of Washington. It is sold on the streets by poor and homeless men and women. They buy the papers for 25 cents each and sell them for $1. Jesse Smith is this week's featured vendor:

Jesse Smith, 57, was born on Feb. 24, 1950, in the Gallagher Hospital (now D.C. General) in Washington, D.C. He spent most of his life in the D.C. area. He attended Dunbar High School, graduating in 1968. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia) in 1974 before entering graduate school at the University of Maryland in 1984.
Married in 1969, he moved to Clinton, Md. in 1974, where he owned a house with his wife and two children until 2002.
He was employed as a technician for many of the companies under the parent Bell System, the C&P Telephone Company, AT&T and Lucent Technologies for 27 years, and a major consulting firm employed him for one year. He served as president of the Committee to Save Franklin Shelter. He is now employed as the vendor manager for Street Sense and is a member of the National Coalition for the Homeless Speakers Bureau.
How did you become Homeless?
My becoming homeless was the result of a divorce. When I went through that process as far as I was concerned the world had ended. I was one of those persons who believed in marriage until death do you part. Unfortunately my ex–wife didn’t see things that way. During the proceedings, I relinquished all claims to property and financial remunerations and just walked away with the clothes on my back, which resulted in my being left without a place to go.
Why do you sell Street Sense?
I sell the paper because it serves a real need for this community, speaking of the condition of the disenfranchised, the homeless and the general population that is ignored by the mainstream media.

Other vendors tell their stories.

Focusing on homelessness

Last week, the steering committee of the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness made an important decision. Up until then, it had not been determined whether the goal was to end all homelessness in the county in 10 years, or only to end chronic homelessness. Martha Are, North Carolina's homelessness czarina, gave a presentation similar to the one she gave to the Town Council earlier, citing, among other things, Malcolm Gladwell's article on the "power law" dynamics of homelessness. After a healthy discussion, we decided to emphasize the chronically homeless in our planning (but not at the expense of current efforts to help all the homeless).

The 10-year planning processes come out of a federal initiative that is really aimed at chronic homelessness, using a definition issued by HUD: "an unaccompanied homeless individual with a disabling condition who has either been continuously homeless for a year or more or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years."

This definition is less than comprehensive. It leaves out families; it leaves out children. Also it says nothing about the transitionally homeless, those who will experience homelessness for less than a year. And as it happens, all of that is most of the homeless population. Because it seems kind of stingy, there is considerable resistance to the HUD definition.

All over the place--not just in Orange County--there's a noticeable slippage between the goal to "end chronic homelessness," which seems as if it might just be possible, and that of "ending homelessness," which can only be what judges and law professors call aspirational. Of course, it would be great to end homelessness. At the same time, there's much to be said for a goal that is realistic.

I think the committee made the right decision to focus on chronic homelessness. We may not like the HUD definition, but it is what it is, and to an extent, we are following the money. Further, as Martha Are and others are bringing real-world evidence to demonstrate, programs that start by getting the chronically homeless off the street are having better success in attracting funding to respond to all levels of homelessness.

Representing Mayor Kevin Foy, last month Adam Schaefer attended a National Summit for Jurisdictional Leaders on ten-year plans to end chronic homelessness held in Denver. More on that conference from the front page of today's Times.

Homelessness plan moves into action phase

At tonight's meeting of the executive team of the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County, we will declare ourselves off to the start of our 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness. We haven't hired a plan coordinator yet--finalizing the job description is one of our agenda items--but there's already real work going on that is having an impact on homeless people. Tonight we will hear from some of the people doing this work:

• Jamie Rohie, heading up the planning for Project Homeless Connect on October 25
• Liz Parham, executive director of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, to talk about the "Real Change from Spare Change" initiative planed for Franklin Street
• Terry Allebaugh and Julie Ransford, from Durham's Housing for New Hope, to talk about the street outreach program that is already under way

Project Homeless Connect, a one-day, "one-stop" offering of services to the homeless, is happening because of a $3,500 grant that the staff working group for the Orange County Partnership secured this spring. That represents just one way in which the 10-year plan promises to enable us to leverage new resources as well as to better coordinate existing ones.

Since November 2004, when the community held a forum on homelessness that attracted more than 300 people, it has been clear that there's a tremendous amount of public interest in working constructively to help the homeless in our midst. In September 2005, we kicked off the project of creating our 10-year plan. "Our challenge is to make an enduring difference," said Mayor Foy at that meeting. "It is possible to have a society as rich as our based on moral values that does not accept that people will be homeless."

Now it is time to act. Please give your support in whatever way you can to our "bold proposal."

Homelessness: required reading

OK, for you it's optional, but I'd like to make this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell required reading for the steering committee of our Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness. Thanks to Anton for the pointer.

Gladwell's point sneaks up on you. He starts out with one of those "faces of homelessness" cliches: Murray Barr of Reno, Nev., is a homeless person, and guess what, he's a real person just like you. But it turns out that Murray Barr is part of a statistical argument. He is one of the "chronically homeless," and from his story, Gladwell turns to tell us about the Ph.D. student who wrote the dissertation that determined that while only 10 percent of the homeless are chronically homeless, they cost the rest of us an awful lot of money. Between substance abuse treatments and ER visits, Murray Barr "probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada."

So the point is bound up with the objectives and strategies of the national initiative to end chronic homelessness: it makes economic sense to put people like Barr directly into housing. It's cheaper than the alternative. But what's valuable about Gladwell's article is the way he shows us that what makes economic sense does not intuitively make moral sense. What about the transitionally homeless? where is the immediate help for them? What about the people at risk of homelessness? where is their housing subsidy? Why does an alcoholic bum deserve a place to live anyway? Isn't this a "special treatment" plan, plain and simple? Such solutions, Gladwell writes, "have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis." Still, he concludes, "helping a few people a lot" can have a significant impact.

In Orange County, before we get too far down the road on crafting our 10-year plan, we are going to have to make some policy decisions about how to allocate limited resources. Which problem are we trying to solve? Only the problem of the chronically homeless (as the federal goverenment would hope)? Or is our work broader than that? What kind of plan will have the best chance of helping the most people?

Atlanta: Handling the panhandlers

Maybe you've heard that Atlanta just passed some kind of ban on panhandling in its downtown area. Most of the stories start out something like this:

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin says she expects to sign a measure to ban aggressive panhandling in parts of downtown Atlanta by week’s end.

Or this:

The measure was pushed by business owners who say the area is awash in aggressive beggars . . .

Who wouldn't favor outlawing obnoxious, unruly panhandling? The trouble is, that's not what it's about. Laws already exist, even in Atlanta, to handle aggressive panhandling, fraudulent solicitation, public drunkenness, and other types of street misbehavior.

The Atlanta ordinance (.pdf from Aug. 15 City Council agenda) prohibits--among other things--all panhandling in a large central area designated the "Tourist Triangle." The Tourist Triangle includes a new state aquarium funded by Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot. At the 11th hour it was augmented to include the area near the MLK Center "after some critics said the original proposal was neglecting tourist areas of interest to blacks." In many ways the ordinance resembles Chapel Hill's nighttime panhandling ban, which I opposed.

Let's call a spade a spade. This is an ordinance designed to get panhandlers out of sight. The preamble to the ordinance couldn't be more clear about it, actually:

WHEREAS, the City of Atlanta wants to protect and enhance the City’s attractions to citizens, tourists and visitors; and

WHEREAS, the City of Atlanta wants to continue to attract businesses to, and retain the current businesses in, Downtown Atlanta; and

WHEREAS, commercial solicitation causes a sense of fear and intimidation, particularly at night or in confined areas; and

. . .

WHEREAS, commercial solicitation in Downtown Atlanta impacts tourism and retail and causes a decrease in generated revenues to the City and its business community; and

WHEREAS, commercial solicitation has a negative impact on the retention of businesses in Downtown Atlanta and discourages businesses from locating in Downtown Atlanta; and

WHEREAS, commercial solicitation in Downtown Atlanta contributes to the negative perceptions of the City of Atlanta, which discourages tourism and retail and contributes to the lack of enjoyment of public places; and

WHEREAS, commercial solicitation throughout Downtown Atlanta is a common presence and disturbance to residents and businesses;

WHEREAS, commercial solicitation drives customers away from businesses in Downtown Atlanta, therefore affecting business transactions and threatening potential economic growth . . .

Panhandling has been recognized as a form of speech. In Loper v. New York City (1993), the 2nd Circuit held that beggars were engaging in protected speech, going on to note that “[e]ven without particularized speech, . . . the presence of an unkempt and disheveled person holding out his or her hand or a cup to receive a donation itself conveys a message of need for support and assistance.” And a sidewalk is a "quintessential public forum." So, restrictions on first amendment rights on downtown sidewalks are subject to "the highest scrutiny." The city "must show that its regulation is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and that it is narrowly drawn to achieve that end."

Until recently, the "compelling state interest" that cities claimed was public safety. Ordinances restricting aggressive panhandling are designed to keep the peace, and by definition--since they focus on behavior--they don't impinge on the panhandlers' speech rights. So they are usually upheld. On the other hand, bans that reach beyond aggressive behavior can be stricken down if the court perceives them as broader than necessary for the given "state interest" of public safety.

In 1993, the City of Fort Lauderdale tried something different. It banned panhandling along a 5-mile strip of beachfront development, claiming as its "compelling state interest" not public safety but the protection of the recreational tourist trade. The argument was persuasive in the 11th Circuit: "Without second-guessing that judgment, which lies well within the City's discretion, we cannot conclude that banning begging in this limited beach area burdens 'substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government's legitimate interest.'" The city has a legitimate intertest in protecting its tourist trade, panhandlers are bad for said trade, therefore all is well. We don't know whether the court would have liked to second-guess the city's judgment, but it doesn't matter. The courts give a wide berth to city leaders.

Protestors of the Atlanta ordinance have vowed to appeal. But--this was not lost on the city--Atlanta too is in the 11th Circuit. The Atlanta ordinance is modeled on Fort Lauderdale's. Indeed, the preamble, jarringly out of synch with the PR spin, reads more like an argument to the court.

Meanwhile, here's the news from Fort Lauderdale:

A dozen years later, the sun-bleached city, with its palm trees and house-sized yachts, still attracts hordes of homeless people who hope for an easier life — and, presumably, still pose a threat to tourism.

Yet the panhandling ban goes unenforced.

In recent interviews, it was clear that many didn't even know of its existence, including police officers and those who work with the homeless.

"I'm not really sure we have a panhandling ban," said Laura Hansen, a leading advocate for the homeless in Broward County, which contains Fort Lauderdale.

Although the city fought in court for six years to keep the ban — battling all the way to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta — it ultimately proved of little use as a tool to control beggars and homeless people, said Scott Walker, the assistant city attorney in charge of prosecuting nuisance crimes.

Walker found that traditional laws, such as prohibitions on trespassing, were more helpful for controlling the homeless population. "I don't really go out of my way to enforce panhandling anymore," he said.

Panhandlers, beggars, whatever you call them--and whether they are homeless or not--are a serious problem in our communities. But fearfully legislating them out of sight is not the solution.

Outdoors

On Friday night, the UNC Campus Y hosted a "homelessness awareness vigil" in the Pit. Chris Moran of the IFC was there with two of his clients, homeless men. I was there representing the Town Council. The original plan for the vigil was to bring sleeping bags and sleep outside, right there in the Pit. But the threat of rain changed that. James Jolley, the student who asked me to speak, was apologetic: truly homeless people don't have that luxury, he knows.

The rain held off. More students than I might have expected showed up. A group called "Sweater Weather" played some John Lennon, we held votive candles, we spoke, we sat in silence.

After giving the better part of my stump speech on the subject, I read this passage from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye:

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing--unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one's own kin outdoors--that was criminal.

There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Out peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with--probably because it was abstract. But the concreteness of being outdoors was another matter--like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Dead doesn't change, and outdoors is here to stay.

I was encouraged to see these college students, so many of them, really, outdoors on a damp dreary Friday night, empathetically engaged in thinking about how to tackle homelessness. But there is so much to do. The Bush Administration giveth to the homeless with one hand, but with the other it taketh away:

The cuts to HUD are guaranteed to widen the nation's already increasing economic inequality. While eliminating the HOPE VI program for 2006, the President has also requested Congress to rescind the $143 million it had already approved in the 2005 budget. HOPE VI helps agencies create mixed-income communities by replacing severly distressed public housing and also provides housing assistance for AIDS victims and the disabled. The unspoken mantra of this administration appears to be hardworking, disadvantaged citizens cannot turn to their government for assistance.

In an effort to combat critics, HUD said it would boost funding for homeless assistance to $1.4 billion. This conciliatory gesture, however, is a disservice to the fastest growing segment of the homeless population--families and children. The lack of affordable housing is the greatest cause of homelessness, yet the allocation of this money goes to warehousing people in shelters instead of placing them in more permanent housing. For countless of low-income families who spend half their income on rent, cuts in HUD will make living in previously affordable housing impossible.

A rendering of a HOPE VI project

There seemed to be so much real hope invested in our little votive candles. Where is the national political will to turn that hope into meaningful investments in solutions to this moral dilemma?

The opposite of homed

As I remarked last fall at our homelessness roundtable (quoting authorities better versed in it all than I), to call someone "homeless" is distinctive and telling. To be homeless is to be defined by a lack, the lack of a home. In prior times the same person might have been called a bum, a drifter, a tramp, a vagabond. (Carl Sandburg was once, by his own account, a hobo.) Perhaps these terms became disreputable on their own terms, and so all that was left was a negative identity. We don't know what to call them, but we know what they are not, what crucial thing they do not have: a home. No fixed address.

If you have no address, where do get your mail? Will your letter to the editor be published? (The one time I had a letter published in the Washington Post, they called me at home to verify that I was for real.) If you live out of a van, where can you send your child to school? Where can you register to vote? (If you are interested.) Without firm grounding, what position of authority can you claim?

Having your own household is the beginning of autonomy--this was Aristotle's belief, and it became worked out in English common law. The private sphere, the enjoyment of the privacy of your own home, was a positive asset: the home as refuge from the regulated public sphere, from the authority of the sovereign. It is one half of Shakespeare's "local habitation and a name."

Home is a powerful metaphor. Bring your point home. You're home free. And of course, your home page.

The Homeless Guy has a home page. I understand he makes good use of the Nashville Public Library. Is he unusual? He is unusually articulate, but he may not be that unusual. He's a man without a home, for particular reasons, and he would be happer if he had one (an apartment would do).

In the same way that no one knows you're a dog, on the internet no one has to know you are homeless. You can look for work. You can offer to do work. There is much potential here it seems.

So I asked in the Chapel Hill Public Library about their policy on offering internet services to persons with no fixed address. The woman at the reference desk was not exactly sure. She found out that in order to register to use the internet--and you do have to give information about yourself--you do not have to give an address, not even the address of the homeless shelter. But if you want to check out a book, ah, that is a different question.

Theory versus practice

When we were vacationing in Paris a few years ago, we saw a great headline: "Fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?" Ah, those tricky French! So self-aware they even joke about their passion for abstraction.

But it's not only the French. It's academics across the board. "How does it work in theory?" seems to be the operative question behind the critics of Ruby Payne, an education specialist featured in yesterday's New York Times Magazine. A teacher, a middle-class woman whose defining reality was her marriage to a man raised in poverty, she has made a career out of teaching other teachers how to recognize certain behavioral patterns of poor children and to work with them, not to change them but to help them better understand and negotiate the complex social worlds in which we all move.

At the heart of Payne’s philosophy is a one-page chart, titled “Hidden Rules Among Classes,” which appears in most of her books. There are three columns, for poverty, middle class and wealth, and 15 rows, covering everything from time to love to money to language. In a few words, Payne explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class? About situations. In wealth? About social faux pas. In poverty, the present is most important. In the middle class, it’s the future. In wealth, it’s the past. The key question about food in poverty: Did you have enough? In the middle class: Did you like it? In wealth: Was it presented well?

Her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty has sold thousands and thousands of copies. She has worked her way into personal wealth. Among teachers she's in great demand. But academics look at her with skepticism. She's buying into stereotypes, reinforcing the structures of racism and classism, say her critics. Even worse,

Payne's critics seem less aggrieved by what she includes in her analysis than by what they say she has left out: an acknowledgment that the American economy and American schools systematically discriminate against poor people.

I'm familiar with this line of criticism. Why tinker around the edges when the whole system is unjust?

Take Walter Benn Michaels for example, chair of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His latest, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, looks to be a fine catalogue of persistent economic injustices. I'm not far into it yet, but I see that one of the goals of the book is "to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American life." He finds it "hard to accept" that "we Americans just aren't all that committed to equal opportunity after all." I have no doubt that the observations in this book are earnest and well-conceived and meant to change the world.

What got my attention--what got me to pick up the book off the shelf of new books at the law library--was the afterword, which for some reason he writes in the third person. Here we learn that Walter Benn Michaels

makes $175,000 a year. But he wants more; one of his motives for writing this book was the cash advance offered him by his publishers. Some readers will be tempted to see a discrepancy between these facts and the arguments against economic inequality made in the preceding chapters. But they should remember that those arguments are true (if they are true) even if Michaels's motives are bad, and they would be false (if they were false) even if his motives were good. Not to put too fine a point on it, the validity of the argument does not depend on the virtue of the person making them. Furthermore, the point of the book is not that people, including its author, should be virtuous. During the summer in which most of this book was written, a homeless man lived in the railroad underpass Michaels can see out his study window. A more virtuous person might have been tempted to go down and bring him some breakfast or maybe even invite him in for a shower and a meal. It never occurred to Michaels to do either of these things. Mainly he wished the man would go away. And his desire for the man to just not be there does not contradict the argument of this book; it's more like the motive for the argument of this book. The point is not that we should be nicer to the homeless; it's that no one should be homeless.

This passage, in all of its tedious and cynical self-consciousness, leaves me speechless.

Ms. Payne's work reminded me of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, the formerly homeless educator I blogged about in April. Looking back over my notes, I see that she actually had been in one of Ruby Payne's seminars, where she found a number of truths revealed.

If I want to get out of generational poverty there are hidden rules. For instance when my kids were small if you came to my house to eat, I’m going to make sure you get enough. I'm going to feed you! But if you came when my kids were teenagers I’d say let me fix you something else, because what was important then was that they like it, now how much. Now that I’m hanging around with other people sometimes, I’ve noticed that in affluent situations, they don’t care about whether you like it or if it’s enough, it’s all about how beautiful it is, the presentation and how lovely it is. If I don’t know those hidden rules, if I come into that situation and try to mingle, I’m already ostracized.

For Nussbaum-Beach, it would have been useful as a schoolgirl to be offered the tools to understand class differences. For teachers, it could ease the frustration of working with poor kids. Said a science teacher quoted in the Times article, "I realized, these kids aren't dumb. . . . They just haven't had the enriching experiences that I had growing up."

I'd like to change the world too. I'd like for nobody to be homeless or poor. In the long meanwhile, I wish Ruby Payne many more standing ovations.

Introducing Carson Dean

Tonight at the monthly meeting of the executive team for the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County, we welcomed Carson Dean into the staff position of coordinator for the plan. He comes to us from Raleigh, where he has been executive director of the South Wilmington Street shelter, Wake County's largest emergency and transitional shelter for homeless men. He has a wealth of experience relevant to the work of our ten-year plan. He helped to create an draft Wake County's ten-year plan. He was planning committee co-chair of Wake County's 2007 Project Homeless Connect.

During his time at South Wilmington Street he implemented a housing first program. Additionally, he secured a grant from Triangle United Way to start a program to find employment for chronically homeless men.

Earlier, Dean was a program director at Haven House Services, a nonprofit in Wake County that serves young people: runaways, homeless and trouble youth. There he implemented an innovative street outreach program.

We are very fortunate to have him in the position of coordinating our efforts! I look forward to working with him.

HOPE Gardens

Yesterday it was my pleasure to speak at the dedication of the HOPE Gardens, a community garden on town-owned land sponsored by the Homeless Outreach Poverty Education arm of the UNC Campus Y. The bountiful garden serves as a transitional employment center for homeless people. At the dedication event were workshops on sustainable agriculture, a garden art project, tours and lunch with salad fresh from the garden. Here are my remarks.

Greetings on behalf of the Chapel Hill Town Council, and thanks to everyone involved, including Butch Kisiah and his Parks and Recreation staff, as well as our partners at Active Living By Design, who worked closely with the HOPE group to make this happen. Congratulations to David Baron and the whole HOPE team.

I also bring thanks and greetings from the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, for which I serve on the executive team. HOPE is one of our most important and active partners. We are grateful for all the work they do, including their publication of Talking Sidewalks, which puts a face on homelessness in our community, and the Community Empowerment Fund, which makes the crucial connection between the economic realities of the homeless and the importance of community support.

And then this fabulous community garden. As a council member and a community member I could not be more pleased.

The state of being homeless is such an unsettling, unnerving state that we don't even have a consistent word for it. “Homelessness,” the word we now use, describes a lack—it’s a description for something you don’t have. Generations ago, it was called other things: vagabond, gypsy, tramp, hobo. Sometimes it was just said that you had been put “outdoors.” A character in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove, does that to his whole family: he throws them out of the house, puts them “outdoors.” On this unhappy state Morrison reflects,

Outdoors . . . was the real terror of life. . . . If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. . . .

Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. [The difference between being put out and being put outdoors was] like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Death doesn’t change, and outdoors is here to stay.

So for me at least the very thought of even this beautiful outdoor garden space is tinged by the knowledge that for a few of those among us, the outdoors is all that is, all that is theirs.

But thankfully there are other ways to think about gardens and the outdoors and bodies in need. Wendell Berry has perhaps said it best:

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

In an essay called “The Body and the Earth,” he observes that “no matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it. . . . While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of those other living creatures.”

What Berry beautifully describes is the connectedness of body and earth: The word “health” itself, he notes, is related to the words heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, and holy. “And so it is possible to give a definition to health that is positive and far more elaborate than that given to it by most medical doctors.”

And he links health and community: “Persons cannot be whole alone. . . . Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing.” Connection, too, is healing: “Connection is health.”

“In gardening, “ Berry continues, “one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.”

And so this cycle of work and exercise, community and conviviality, wholeness and health and happy eating—the nourishment of the body and the earth—this is what HOPE Gardens is all about. Please join with me in thanking everyone involved in this great project and wishing them lasting success, season after season.

Employing the chronically homeless

At the first session of the National Alliance to End Homelessness' conference, I had one of my assumptions about the chronically homeless completely turned around. By definition, at least by the operative federal definition, the chronically homeless are people with severe disabilities of some kind--mental health or substance abuse problems or both, often. My assumption was that these people need housing and support services, but that it would be very unlikely that they could hold a job.

We heard about two cities, Indianapolis and Los Angeles, that are putting the chronically homeless to work. They're finding that employment actually helps people with mental illness or substance abuse problems to find their way back: like the rest of us, they find satisfaction in productive work. Not necessarily 40 hours a week. At their own pace they are offered the chance to work as a way to put some structure to their days, to afford them a sense of self-worth.

Grant money for these two programs plus similar ones in Portland, Boston, and San Francisco comes from the Department of Labor.

In Los Angeles, these workers are paid a living wage (currently around $10.80/hr.).

Imagine that.

Hillsborough's homeless

When the temperatures dip and the weather threatens, it's time to think about the homeless. The county's annual "point in time" count was taken last week. (Results will be published on February 13.) Under HUD's guidelines, January is the time the count must be taken, because that's when the homeless are most likely to be visible. Even those who prefer the anonymity of the woods will come in out of the cold if they can. Shelters fill up.

This story is first of a series in The New of Orange County on homelessness in Hillsborough. It highlights the work of Vanessa Neustrom of the Orange-Person-Chatham Area Program mental health agency, for her good work on the count; Vanessa is also a member of the work group for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessnes.

Does it seem odd to think that there could be many homeless people in Hillsborough? Neighbor House, Inc.'s "Food for All" program serves 300-350 meals a week.

Chapel Hill endorses homelessness plan

Late on the agenda of last night's Council meeting, long after the public hearing on the proposed moratorium for the northwest area, after the manager had presented his recommended budget, we endorsed Orange County's Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. You can read the whole thing online.

The roots of this project go back to a roundtable discussion on homelessness held in Chapel Hill in November 2004, attended by around 300 people. We heard about Raleigh's 10-year planning process, and work began to consider whether we ought to embark on one. By September 2005, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, and the county had agreed to work on a joint plan. A steering committee was formed. With the help of a consultant, J-Quad, in February 2006 eighteen focus group sessions were held throughout the county. Over the school year 2005-06 a team of graduate students from the UNC School of Public Health performed an "Action-oriented community diagnosis" (.pdf) involving intensive interviews and a public forum.

In June 2006, the steering committee made a policy decision that the plan would emphasize solutions to chronic homelessness, but not at the expense of ongoing important efforts to combat transitional homelessness or to support the many people at risk of becoming homeless. The focus on chronic homelessness recognizes that these people are truly the least among us: they are broken down with no place to go. And they have the greatest impact on the community in terms of their consumption of public resources.

Over summer 2006, a series of subcommittees of the steering committee worked with the information that had been collected to that point to come up with the recommendations that, with the steering committee's final input, resulted in the final plan.

The key strategy for addressing chronic homelessness is . . . homes. The "housing first" model, as other cities have begun to demonstrate, is an approach that works. It works in terms of getting people housed and keeping them engaged with the services they need, and it works in terms of saving public money. This model reflects changed thinking in the social services community: it's a shift from the "housing ready" model, in which a person was supposed to show that he or she "deserved" housing. The trouble with that model is that the things you need to "deserve" housing, like sobriety and a job, can be hard to land if you don't have a stable housing situation in the first place.

It's an ambitious program. It calls for 40 units of permanent supportive housing to be built, rehabbed, or rented during the first 3-5 years of the program. And that's with intensive support services, which is crucial. You don't just give someone a key and say here's your house.

In addition to concentrating on the chronically homeless, the plan has four other major goals:

• Increase employment
• Expand efforts to prevent homelessness
• Increase access to services (e.g., support the IFC's efforts to go to 24/7 availability)
• Increase public participation in working on these issues

The first step will be the hiring of a full-time coordinator for the plan. So much of the plan involves coordination of resources, putting heads together to address common interests. For example, the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership's downtown outreach task force is working on a street outreach program that fits well within the homelessness plan. Another important responsibility of the coordinator will be working to secure funding from the numerous public and private sources that are available.

Working on this plan has shown me that across the county there's a great collective will to take on these issues--though some frustration at not knowing how. Homeless people too are interested in working on solutions for themselves and others. Homelessness is a complex problem reflective of many others, including a crisis in mental health services, the problems of returning veterans, substance abuse issues, consequences of domestic violence, and on and on. There is no easy solution. Representing the collaborative work of many, many county residents, Orange County's Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness has great potential bring all of us together to do what we can for each other.

UPDATE 5/9: Terry Allebaugh, director of Housing for New Hope in Durham, goes to Washington.