Empty promises?
The mayor's 10-year plan sounds great,
but will it help the homeless – or the politicians who
wrote it?
By Rachel Brahinsky
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
July 14-20, 2004
Mayor Gavin Newsom's 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, a draft of which was unveiled June 30 in City Hall, is ambitious. Attorney and former supervisor Angela Alioto led the team that developed the plan, which focuses on hardcore down-and-outs and seeks to close the shelters in favor of permanent housing.
The plan sets the laudable goal of providing supportive housing services for all those who need it. But just like the effort by President George W. Bush's homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, to promote the 10-year plan concept nationally (and therefore to push the idea that Bush is good on domestic issues), Newsom's effort so far looks mostly like a slick P.R. campaign.
Here's why:
The plan is inconsistent with Newsom's current policy, touting a program that helps chronically homeless people get federal cash assistance and Medicare. That same program is being gutted in the mayor's proposed 2004-05 budget.
The city will need as much as $450 million over the next six years to implement the plan, but it doesn't identify a source for such a monstrous sum. In fact, Newsom is supporting Mangano's pet measure, which would only offer $70 million for the entire country, rather than a more ambitious competing bill.
What's more, Newsom's proposed city budget eliminates a major local funding option, balancing the books with $20 million in sales and transfers of surplus city property – even though city law says such property is supposed to be used to house the homeless.
The feds want to cut $1.6 billion from the Section 8 housing subsidy program, which helps many on the brink of homelessness. And that's just this year's cut. Under the rubric of "reform," Bush seeks to slash another $4.6 billion by 2009 – which could slice a total of 850,000 tenants out of the program, undermining efforts to end homelessness.
The plan's creation was funded in part by the Hotel Council, which paid for a series of nasty billboards last year accusing homeless people of spreading disease and scaring away tourists.
Newsom has promised to preserve homeless services, and his budget mostly reflects that – with the exception of the Disability Evaluation and Assistance Program. DEAP is run out of the Tom Waddell Health Center, is mentioned in the 10-year plan as a model, and connected 125 chronically homeless people with federal aid last year. But Newsom's plan is to lay off the staffers who do this work.
His doublespeak on DEAP mirrors that of the Bush administration when homelessness is on the table. Mangano's favored Samaritan Initiative would provide for only a tiny fraction of the need, and with the cuts that are proposed by his bosses at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it could become meaningless. Already this year HUD has tried to take back some $200 million from housing authorities around the nation – leaving many families scrambling. As a result, 225 extremely low-income tenants in Alameda County are facing eviction over the next few months.
Mangano took the Bay Guardian to task for reporting that he supports the Section 8 cuts (see "Homeless Coalition Facing Homelessness," 7/30/04), which he has refused to speak against. "I support the Section 8 program," he told us. "As does everyone that I know in the administration. [But] there are people who feel that it's spiraling out of control. HUD tells me it's taking up half of its budget, and that certainly gets my attention." Mangano says that he favors "reforming" the program and that making deep cuts could help preserve the political will of legislators to keep it alive.
There's another bill going through Congress that could actually help fund the 10-year plan. It's called the Bringing America Home Act, and it lays out a comprehensive strategy to end homelessness, including money for housing, and a mandate for universal living wages. Among other things, H.R. 2897 would establish housing as a human right, pay for 1.5 million new Section 8 vouchers, and establish a national housing trust fund. Neither Mangano nor Newsom responded to our questions on this bill, but as far as we can tell, neither is supporting it.
Work on the 10-year plan, which will be released in final form July 15, was funded by Newsom's political contributors. Downtown business and development interests have given about $100,000, which is half of the budget used to write the plan, Alioto told us. The Hotel Council gave $25,000. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the Gap each gave $10,000. Others, including the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, gave $5,000 donations each. The city put in $100,000 for in-kind office expenses. Of that money, $40,000 has gone to pay Reginald Smith for four months as program administrator, $20,000 has gone to assistant Tim Guzzetta, and $3,000 has gone to neighborhood activist Barbara Meskunas to help write the plan, Smith said. The rest paid for travel and other expenses, he said. Alioto said she'd provide a detailed accounting but couldn't do so by press time.)
Perhaps there's nothing wrong with getting downtown interests to help pay for this effort. After all, this is a tough budget year, and if they won't agree to pay higher business taxes, the least they can do is pay for projects that might help the poor. Yet cynics might question why they've funded a plan that focuses on the high-profile homeless who scare away tourists – while families made homeless by Section 8 cuts are less visible. Some fear those families could get lost amid the focus on the chronically homeless.
The real test will come as Alioto and Newsom implement the plan. They won't be the first to try: for years San Francisco has had a plan on the books to end homelessness, known as the Continuum of Care. That plan has been underfunded and largely ignored, and the homeless population has, unfortunately, continued to grow.
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