Word: socializing
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...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 in America...
Perhaps the 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...
...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...
...Have services, will travel. Even if social services are available, many homeless people cannot or will not use them. So more and more cities are mobilizing their resources. Food vans carry soup and sandwiches to the bridges and parks. Boston's Health Care for the Homeless program sends nurses out knocking on doors in family shelters, offering parents and children preventive health care...
...their first experience of safety -- and for many, of responsibility as well. "This place saved my life," says Lynn Morozko, who sells her plasma and works at a women's shelter while earning a degree in design engineering. "A lot of people think homelessness is a type of social Darwinism," she says. "But it isn't stupid people who are homeless. It's that we hit walls that we can't get over by ourselves." Fortunately, Transitional Housing is perfecting the art of building ladders...