Editorial: Seeking shelter/Reaching out to the homeless
05/17/2005
Star Tribune Editorial
May 17, 2005
Minnesota’s invisible homeless have been with us for decades now—in greater numbers every year—but rarely do we bother to wonder why. Lately, however, more Minnesotans seem to be realizing that homelessness is not a choice as much as it is a sad fate. We are coming to see that, just as society is duty-bound to care for people unable to rise from their beds, so must it reach out to those who have no bed at all.
Why this epiphany is descending now is impossible to say, but it’s plain that the public mind is changing. This is a revolution whose agitators range from President Bush to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to the volunteers in the church-basement shelters. Pawlenty’s plan to end homelessness seizes upon the real solution: the speedy creation of “supportive housing” to welcome and sustain society’s outcasts within the human circle.
It’s a shame legislators couldn’t see their way clear to granting the governor’s request for $20 million for the supportive-housing movement. But as crucial as it is, supportive housing alone can’t possibly end homelessness. Other strategies are needed, too, and lawmakers still have a chance to advance them.
What can they do? For starters, they must scrap the many petty and paternalistic parts of the state vagrancy law. That archaic statute makes it a crime to be unemployed, without means of support and not seeking work, to loiter and to derive support from begging—in short, to be homeless. It lies at the heart of much of the mistreatment borne by people who can’t find their way to a home. In Minneapolis, for instance, police often cart citizens with no address off for a few nights in jail—typically booking them for minor crimes that don’t make it to court. The chief purpose of this expensive enterprise seems to be “nuisance control.”
There’s a shrewder way to keep tabs on the homeless than locking them up—which brings us to reform No. 2: It’s called “outreach,” and it’s by no means new or unproven. Because most homeless people don’t come looking for help, the outreach model insists on dispatching carefully trained seekers to find them. Once the lost are found, the thinking goes, the delicate chat about coming in from the cold can begin.
Sometimes the chat takes years—as the field workers of the Metropolitan Homeless Outreach Project know well. An offshoot of the nonprofit People Incorporated, the project’s social workers have been discovering and visiting homeless enclaves for years—and have managed in that time to reclaim many lives that might otherwise have been lost. But the Homeless Outreach Project has only enough funds to underwrite four field workers—two each in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties. That’s far fewer than needed. And with few exceptions, most communities in greater Minnesota have yet to launch any sort of outreach at all.
These are troubles the Legislature can start to solve—if only a particular conference committee will cooperate. The panel now sorting through the House and Senate versions of the Omnibus Public Safety Bill can strike the deal quite easily. Both versions call for repealing the provocative language in the current vagrancy law and for funding a pilot project to boost the number of outreach workers.
Yet of the two plans, there’s no question which is preferable. Sen. Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis, has conjured a $400,000 outreach effort that would double the number of field workers in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties and enable outreach startup in a greater Minnesota county that shows need and interest. The plan requires the metro counties to come up with a 50-percent match for the dollars they receive and asks a 25-percent match of the third county. The House prescription is similar, but sparser: It requires no local match and envisions spending just $300,000. Conferees should opt for the heftier Senate plan, which holds the best hope for showing the wisdom of seeking the invisible.