Word: cared
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...setting an example. When last year's earthquake nearly leveled a few crumbling flophouses, the city resisted building the standard emergency homeless shelters. Instead, officials used almost $12 million in federal relief money to build state-of-the-art multiservice centers where homeless people can live, get health care, see a social worker, treat their addictions, receive job training -- whatever is necessary to meet their needs and return them to independent living. "If you give me the money, we have the chance to end sleeping on the streets," says Mayor Art Agnos. "I'm willing to be the first mayor...
...most vulnerable of the abandoned people were the mentally ill, who moved through the cities like a great muttering army, foraging, frightening, fearful. In a stunning social blunder, patients were released from public institutions and given no place to go -- no halfway houses, no local clinics, no community care. Between 1960 and 1984, the population in mental institutions fell from 544,000 to 134,000. But deinstitutionalization alone did not create the homeless problem. Many released patients survived for a time in single-room-occupancy hotels, where they at least had a fixed address and could receive monthly benefit checks...
When wave after wave of newly homeless people rolled through the cities, emergency shelters seemed the surest and quickest way to get them off the streets. So most of the money allocated by Congress and by states went toward emergency, rather than preventive, care. Only rarely was there money for rental assistance, tenant-landlord mediation or short-term crisis loans to help the near homeless keep the roofs over their heads. Public money paid slumlords $2,000 a month to put up families in "welfare hotels." But this did nothing to ease the families' desperation, fight their addictions or restore...
...sustain the illusion that all a pregnant, crack-addicted teenage prostitute with AIDS needed was a place to call home. From that admission was born the concept of linkage. Rather than merely providing a shelter, homeless advocates are weaving a web. By combining detoxification programs, job training, day care, parenting classes, health care and social services under one roof, they can help the street people who are unwilling or unable to travel all over town to find the services they need -- if those services exist...
...only are such multipurpose centers more humane than warehousing people in welfare hotels, but they can also cost about half as much. Each city, even each neighborhood, can custom-design its programs. Areas with a desperate AIDS problem can focus on providing outpatient care. For single adults, SROs with on-site services may be a permanent answer. For homeless families, transitional housing can cushion their re-entry into the private market...