History > 2006 > USA > Poverty (II)

Victims of the fire included buildings

that were once a rope and bagging factory, a jute mill,

and more recently, a location for film projects.

James Estrin/The New York Times        June 8, 2006

2 Homeless Men Blamed for Fire on Waterfront        NYT        8.6.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/nyregion/08fire.html

Census Figures

Show Scant Improvement

in City Poverty Rate

August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

Despite New York City’s economic rebound from 9/11 and the national recession, the proportion of city residents who live below the federal poverty level — about one in five — has not budged in the last five years, according to census figures released yesterday.

The stagnant poverty rate, coming at a time of relative prosperity, suggests that wealth has not trickled down to the city’s poorest, and has raised concerns among experts and policy makers, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has singled out reducing poverty as a goal of his second term. By one measure, poverty dipped slightly from 2004 to 2005, but Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged that the decline was “statistically not significant.”

The new data on income and employment were collected separately, in the Current Population Survey and the new American Community Survey, and the Census Bureau cautioned against extended comparisons and analyses with surveys from earlier years. That left even more latitude than usual for interpretation and ambiguity.

The census statistics also show that New York is the only state in which both the median household income and the poverty rate surpassed the national average last year, an anomaly that suggested growing inequality in some categories and reflected vast disparities within the metropolitan area itself.

Once again, Manhattan recorded the biggest income gap of any county in the country, although the chasm narrowed slightly since 2000. The top fifth of earners reported making $330,244 — about 41 times more than the $8,019 of the bottom fifth.

Among the nation’s largest counties, Somerset in New Jersey ranked fourth in median household income ($88,532), and Morris, Nassau, Rockland and Suffolk were all among the top 10. The Bronx was third-lowest ($29,228) and remained the poorest urban county in the country. More than half of Bronx households headed by a woman and including young children live below the poverty level.

No city in metropolitan New York made the nation’s top 10 in median income, but several were among its poorest. Newark, at $30,711, ranked seventh from the bottom, just below New Orleans, among the biggest cities. Buffalo was third from the bottom. Among America’s smaller cities, Camden, N.J., at $18,007, had the lowest median income in the nation and the highest proportion of poor people — 44 percent.

At the same time, New Jersey’s median income was again the highest of any state’s. Maryland edged Connecticut for second place. New York ranked 15th.

Since 2000, median income has declined in all three states. Only two counties in the metropolitan area — Cape May in New Jersey and Sullivan in New York — recorded significant gains. Across the country, only two states recorded significant gains.

In 2005, according to the American Community Survey, the poverty rate was 13.8 percent in New York State, 8.3 percent in Connecticut and 8.7 percent in New Jersey. In the city, the overall poverty rate remained at just over 19 percent, but compared with a year earlier, it appeared to have increased among the elderly and decreased among children younger than 18. In Queens, poverty rates declined.

Statewide, New York ranked 17th in the share of children who are poor (more than 19 percent), and was tied with Texas for 8th in the share of elderly who are poor (nearly 13 percent).

In New York City, median household income — the middle number on the scale — remained about the same since 2004, at $43,434. But the mean, or average, income rose, suggesting greater gains among the well-to-do. Manhattanites recorded the biggest income gains. About 5 percent of households in the city reported incomes of $200,000 or more; 13 percent reported making less than $10,000.

“With median income in New York City you have to be careful,” said Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. “We’ve been seeing big income gains in a few very wealthy industries, and a few studies have suggested that the gains are not coursing through the entire city economy.”

Given the steady influx of poor immigrants, he expressed surprise that the poverty rate was unchanged.

“The city has been a fairly good place for the foreign-born to come and improve their fortunes,” Mr. Malanga said. Mark Levitan, senior policy analyst for the Community Service Society, a liberal research and advocacy group, said the new figures were “telling us that we have growing inequality — income is rising in the middle of the distribution, but it’s not trickling down. We’ve gone from a jobless recovery to a recovery where wage increases can’t match the rate of inflation.”

Mining the Current Population Survey, Dr. Levitan said he found that the poverty rate among households with children headed by a woman, which had declined from 56 percent a decade ago to 39 percent in 2001, had risen again to 49 percent — an increase not evident from the American Community Survey figures.

What he could conclude with absolute certainty, he said, was that the poverty rate is “stagnant overall.”

Trudi Renwick, senior economist with the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal watchdog group, agreed. “It’s flat, or down only very slightly in the city, despite tremendous economic growth,” she said.

“We have a picture — and you can place all kinds of value judgments on it — of stability with a lot of these numbers,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the Department of City Planning’s population division. “That can be seen as encouraging, and discouraging.”

Yesterday’s release of the American Community Survey, an annual version of the census long-form questionnaire, also plumbed employment patterns.

It found that in New York, women earned 79.4 percent of what men did, above the national average and slightly higher than in New Jersey and Connecticut.

New York is tied with Colorado for first in the highest proportion of people working in the information industry (3.5 percent). Connecticut ranks first in the proportion of people in management, business and finance (16.3 percent).

Sewell Chan contributed reporting for this article.

Census Figures Show Scant Improvement in City Poverty Rate, NYT, 30.8.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/nyregion/30income.html

U.S. Poverty Rate Unchanged Last Year

August 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's poverty rate was essentially unchanged last year, the first year it hasn't increased since before President Bush took office.

The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 37 million Americans were living under the poverty line last year -- about 12.6 percent of the population. That's down from 12.7 percent in 2004, but census officials said the change was statistically insignificant.

The median household income -- the point at which half make more and half make less -- was $46,300, a slight increase from 2004.

However, the number of people without health insurance increased to 46.6 million in 2005. About 45.3 million people were without insurance the year before.

The last decline in the poverty rate was in 2000, during the Clinton administration, when it dropped to 11.3 percent.

With the poverty rate steady but median household income rising, ''that could represent an increase in inequality'' between the wealthy and the poor, said David Johnson, chief of the Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division of the Census Bureau.

The official poverty level is used to decide eligibility for federal health, housing, nutrition and child care benefits. The poverty rate -- the percentage of people living below poverty -- helps shape the debate on the health of the nation's economy.

The poverty report comes four years into an uneven economic recovery -- and a little more than two months before congressional midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate.

High gas prices and a slowing economy could help make pocketbook issues important in some races, especially in the Midwest, where job growth has been slow or nonexistent.

The U.S. added about 2 million nonfarm jobs in 2005, and has added nearly a million since, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But job growth has been uneven across the country.

For example, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois had fewer jobs in July than they did when Bush took office in January 2001. The nation has added 2.8 million jobs in that time, despite suffering job losses in 2001 and 2002.

''The economy should be an issue,'' said Evelyn Brodkin, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. ''But so much of that depends on who people blame for their economic situation and who they think can help them. We will learn a lot from the midterms.''

The poverty report also comes 10 years after the 1996 welfare overhaul, which required millions of poor single mothers to work and which set limits on how long recipients could get monthly checks.

Poverty rates didn't skyrocket as some had feared. But they didn't drop much, either, suggesting that many of those who left welfare didn't climb out of poverty. The poverty rate was 13.7 percent in 1996, when about 4.4 million families received welfare payments. About 1.9 million families receive payments today.

''Most of the people who leave welfare for work are leaving for jobs that pay $7 or $8 an hour,'' said Joan Entmacher, vice president of the National Women's Law Center, an advocacy group based in Washington. ''Under the best of circumstances, they are just getting by.''

    U.S. Poverty Rate Unchanged Last Year, NYT, 29.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Poverty-Rate.html

'No feeding homeless' law

gets Las Vegas sued

Posted 8/3/2006 3:35 AM ET
AP
USA Today

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Activists sued Wednesday to strike down a new city law that makes it illegal to feed homeless people in parks.
The law violates free speech, free assembly and other rights, says the federal suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.

The suit was filed on behalf of five activists and the local chapter of Food Not Bombs, a national organization that describes its objective as "sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty."

The group and its members regularly served meals to homeless people in a Las Vegas park, angering neighbors and sparking the debate that led to the ordinance, passed July 19.

It prohibits "providing food or meals to the indigent for free or for a nominal fee" in a city park and defines indigent as a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to county public assistance.

Violators face a fine up to $1,000 and as many as six months in jail. Seven people have been issued summonses, and three have been arrested.

Lee Rowland, public advocate for the ACLU of Nevada, called the ordinance "immoral" and "embarrassing for the city." Its language violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by "requiring people to make a snap judgment about others based on how they look," she said.

City attorney Brad Jerbic said he had not seen the suit but planned to defend the law and the City Council, which is named in the complaint along with Mayor Oscar Goodman, the city manager, city marshals and police.

The law was aimed at the advocates' activities in Huntridge Circle park near downtown, Jerbic said. Their mobile meals program drew homeless people away from shelters and health providers.

"The shelters provide food, beds, counseling services and doctors," he said. "What this is doing is, it's pulling them away from services and abandoning them in these parks."

    'No feeding homeless' law gets Las Vegas sued, UT, 3.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-03-no-feeding-homeless_x.htm

Las Vegas Makes It Illegal to Feed

Homeless in Parks

July 28, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LAS VEGAS, July 21 — Gail Sacco pulled green grapes, bread, lunch meat and, of course in this blazing heat, bottles of water from a cardboard box. A dozen homeless people rose from shady spots in the surrounding city park and snatched the handouts from her.

Ms. Sacco, an advocate for the homeless, scoffed at a city ordinance that goes into effect Friday making it illegal to offer so much as a biscuit to a poor person in a city park.

Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people in and around the city, joins several other cities across the country that have adopted or considered ordinances limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks. Most have restricted the time and place of such handouts, hoping to discourage homeless people from congregating and, in the view of officials, ruining efforts to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods.

But the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed “the indigent.”

The ordinance does not apply to the famous Las Vegas Strip, which lies mostly in unincorporated Clark County, but it demonstrates both the growing pains the city has endured as tourism has boomed, and the steps Las Vegas is taking to regulate where entrenched populations of homeless people can gather. And eat.

“The government here doesn’t care about anybody,” said one homeless woman, Linda Norman, 55, taking a bottle of water and already perspiring in morning heat approaching 100 degrees at Huntridge Circle Park, a manicured, well-watered three-acre patch of green in a residential area near downtown. “We just want to eat.”

Las Vegas officials said the ordinance was not aimed at casual handouts from good Samaritans. Instead, they said it would be enforced against people like Ms. Sacco, whose regular offerings, they said, have lured the homeless to parks and have led to complaints by residents about crime, public drunkenness and litter.

“Families are scared to go to the park,” said Gary Reese, the mayor pro tem and a City Council member who represents the area around Huntridge Circle Park. The city, Mr. Reese added, had just spent $1.7 million in landscaping and other improvements there.

“I don’t think anybody in America wants people to starve to death,” Mr. Reese said. “But if you want to help somebody, people can go to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and give them a meal.”

He said that the police would ignore “isolated cases” of violating the ordinance, and predicted that the law would ultimately help the homeless because they would be forced to seek meals at soup kitchens run by social service organizations that could provide other assistance as well.

But Maria Foscarinis, director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington, said the prohibition would do more harm than good. “Nobody wants the poor and homeless living in public spaces,’’ Ms. Foscarinis said, “but this kind of response is terribly misguided.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, which opposed the ordinance, said it was preparing a legal challenge. The group’s general counsel, Allen Lichtenstein, called the measure absurd and said it was an unconstitutional infringement on free assembly and other rights.

Mr. Lichtenstein accused Mayor Oscar B. Goodman, who supports the new restriction, of waging a campaign against homeless people, whom the mayor has openly criticized. At a June meeting of the City Council, Mr. Goodman suggested that panhandlers with signs asking for food be sued for “false advertising” because soup kitchens provide free meals. “Some people say I’m the mean mayor,’’ Mr. Goodman acknowledged, but he defended the ordinance as part of the effort to steer the homeless to social service groups, and said the city was taking part in a regional initiative to end homelessness in 10 years.

The ordinance, an amendment to an existing parks statute approved by the Council on July 19, bans the “the providing of food or meals to the indigent for free or for a nominal fee.” It goes on to say that “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

Violating the ordinance is a misdemeanor, and can be punished by a fine of up to $1,000 or a jail term of up to six months, or both. Diana Paul, a spokeswoman for the city, said the police would begin enforcing it after briefings from city lawyers.

Mr. Lichtenstein said the ordinance allows a picnicker to offer food to a middle-income friend but not to a poor one. “If you have a picnic, are you supposed to have everybody give you a financial statement? This is a clumsy and absurd attempt to make war on poor people.”

The ordinance says nothing about offering money to the homeless, and allows offering food to poor people on adjacent sidewalks, something Ms. Sacco said she was considering.

Las Vegas already prohibits 25 or more people from gathering in parks without a permit, and allows the police and city marshals to bar people on the spot for certain periods. The A.C.L.U. has filed a federal lawsuit attacking those restrictions, and Mr. Lichtenstein said he would seek to add this new ordinance to the suit.

Bradford Jerbic, the city attorney, did not reply to a message left at his office. Mr. Reese, the mayor pro tem, said Mr. Jerbic had assured officials that the ordinance was legal and would hold up in court if applied “sensibly.”

And Mr. Goodman, a lawyer, said he did not fear a court fight either.

“For 35 years, I represented reputed mobsters and was never afraid to go to court,’’ he said, “and I am not afraid to go to court against the A.C.L.U.’’

Some cities, like Fort Myers, Fla., and Santa Monica, Calif., have scaled back restrictions in the face of community objections or lawsuits. The Santa Monica ordinance, which governs public gatherings in parks, faced a federal lawsuit in 2003 by Food Not Bombs, a group that has drawn controversy in several cities for serving regularly scheduled hot meals to the homeless in city parks.

The city eventually eliminated a provision requiring a permit to distribute food on public property, but with the backing of a federal appeals court last month, it requires a permit for giving out hot food to groups of 150 or more. Carol Sobel, a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, said they still feed the homeless in parks but make sure the groups have fewer than 150 people.

In New York, Angela Allen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services, said: “The city has not created any policies around feeding in the park, but we believe there are better ways of serving the homeless and all of their needs for both food and shelter. No one should ever go hungry."

On Monday, Orlando, Fla., adopted a prohibition on feeding groups of 25 or more people in downtown city parks and other public facilities without a permit.

Social service providers said they had mixed views of the Las Vegas ordinance. Las Vegas has a severe shortage of shelter space for the homeless, but operators of soup kitchens said they could feed many more people than they do.

“We don’t want to discourage people to give out food, but it has to be done intelligently and with the right format and in the right area,” said Charles Desiderio, a spokesman for the Clark County chapter of the Salvation Army.

Homeless people and Ms. Sacco, a retired restaurant owner who has been serving pots of soup and beans for several years in Huntridge Circle Park, said that it could be difficult to travel to soup kitchens and that the police often forced the homeless from areas where shelters were located.

Huntridge Circle Park is about three miles from most of the soup kitchens downtown, a difficult walk when the weather is hot.

Another reason the homeless do not flock to shelters here, Ms. Sacco acknowledged, is that the chronically mentally ill who make up a sizable part of the homeless population typically resist treatment and services.

“I don’t have no money for a bus,” Nalinh Khamsoukthavong, who said he was “about 50,” and gave a rambling explanation of his plight that involved promised help from several people, a visit to his native Laos and a series of deceitful bosses. “I have to walk, and I don’t have food.”

Las Vegas Makes It Illegal to Feed Homeless in Parks, NYT, 28.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/us/28homeless.html

Study Documents ‘Ghetto Tax’

Being Paid by the Urban Poor

July 19, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

WASHINGTON, July 18 — Drivers from low-income neighborhoods of New York, Hartford and Baltimore, insuring identical cars and with the same driving records as those from middle-class neighborhoods, paid $400 more on average for a year’s insurance.

The poor are also the main customers for appliances and furniture at “rent to own” stores, where payments are stretched out at very high interest rates; in Wisconsin, a $200 television can end up costing $700.

Those were just two examples among several cited in a report Tuesday showing that poor urban residents frequently pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in extra costs for everyday necessities. The study said some of the disparities were due to real differences in the cost of doing business in poor areas, some to predatory financial practices and some to consumer ignorance.

The study, from the Brookings Institution, said finding ways to eliminate these added costs, often called a “ghetto tax,” could be an important new front in the fight against poverty.

At a meeting connected with the report’s release, officials from three states — New York, Pennsylvania and Washington — said they were already doing just that through a variety of programs to draw banks to poor neighborhoods, help finance the construction of supermarkets and encourage innovative insurance schemes.

“There’s a large and for the most part overlooked opportunity here to help low-income families get ahead,” Matt Fellowes, the Brookings researcher who wrote the report, said in an interview. “That is to reduce their costs.”

Measures that reduced the price of essential goods and services for low-income Americans by just 1 percent would put an additional $6.5 billion a year in their hands, said the report, titled “From Poverty, Opportunity.”

Sheldon H. Danziger, a poverty expert at the University of Michigan, noted that $6.5 billion was roughly one-third the benefit the same families have gained through the earned-income tax credit. “Certainly these measures could be an important source of income,” Professor Danziger said of the report’s findings. “But I don’t see them as competing with things like raising the minimum wage, raising child subsidies and providing health insurance.”

Citing other examples of the ghetto tax, the report found that nationally, 4.5 million low-income customers, defined as families making less than $30,000 a year, paid an average of two percentage points more for car loans than did middle-class buyers. And the common use of storefront check-cashing services by poor people, it said, comes at a steep price that varies with local regulations; in 12 cities studied, the fee for cashing a $500 check ranged from $5 to $50.

Part of the problem, the study found, is a discrepancy between the poor and the middle class in consumer skills and mobility: people who comparison-shop, especially on the Internet, tend to pay hundreds less for the identical car than those who walk onto a city lot and buy.

But the disparities can be reduced, the report said, not only by consumer education but also by some combination of incentives to lure banks and stores into poor neighborhoods and tighter regulation on things like the fees of storefront lenders.

The New York State Banking Department has drawn major banks into underserved neighborhoods by placing deposits of government money, sometimes at below-market interest, in the new branches. These may enable more residents to open accounts and reduce reliance on costly check-cashers and lenders, said the state’s superintendent of banks, Diana L. Taylor.

In Pennsylvania, a program led by a Democratic state legislator, Dwight Evans, used state and private financing for construction of supermarkets in areas where residents had previously had to rely on costly small stores or drive long distances for groceries.

Washington State’s insurance commissioner, Mike Kreidler, described efforts to restrict the use of personal credit scores by sellers of home and car insurance.

In a practice that has recently come into wide use in the industry, insurers study credit history to help judge the likelihood that a customer will file insurance claims; those with worse credit records are charged higher premiums, because, insurers say, the industry has found a correlation between poor ratings and the filing of claims.

But Mr. Kreidler and some consumer groups say that the insurers’ approach is not transparent and consistent and that their method is likely to increase prices unfairly for poor people and minorities.

The insurance industry, on the other hand, argues that the new approach benefits many low-income consumers. “We think the use of credit scoring has allowed us to better serve urban areas,” David F. Snyder, vice president of the American Insurance Association, said in an interview. Mr. Snyder said that with this more individualized tool, companies were less likely to raise rates for entire neighborhoods or categories.

    Study Documents ‘Ghetto Tax’ Being Paid by the Urban Poor, NYT, 19.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/us/19poor.html

N.Y. Homeless Face New Effort

to Clear Streets

July 18, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL

WASHINGTON, July 17 — Beginning an aggressive push to reduce the number of people living on New York City’s streets, the city will start pressuring homeless men and women to leave makeshift dwellings under highways and near train trestles and will raise barriers to make those encampments inaccessible, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday.

The city has found 73 of those sites inhabited by groups of chronically homeless people, the mayor said. “Humanely, respectfully and firmly, we’ll work to get these men and women to enter supportive housing, enroll in treatment programs or go into shelters,” Mr. Bloomberg said to a gathering of government officials and social service providers from around the country.

The changes amplify the mayor’s longstanding effort to steer the city away from its emphasis on emergency shelter for the homeless, and toward providing permanent housing and using social services to prevent homelessness.

The measures discussed by the mayor on Monday represented a significant shift in the culture of the Department of Homeless Services.

“While everyone has a right to emergency shelter, that doesn’t always make emergency shelter right for everyone,” Mr. Bloomberg said, adding that his administration was working to replace “the dead-end model of managing homelessness with the new goal of ending it.”

He cited his administration’s program to create 12,000 units of supportive housing, which offers social services like mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment. And he announced plans to expand another program, which helps people on the verge of homelessness hold onto their homes.

But the new element is potentially controversial. The Department of Homeless Services, under its new commissioner, Robert Hess, has identified 73 makeshift encampments, including 30 in Manhattan, to which roughly 350 homeless men and women — of a total homeless population of about 3,800, according to the city’s last count — return nightly.

Most of the encampments are little more than collections of cardboard boxes, or tarpaulins hung over a beam, officials said.

Now, working with community and faith-based organizations, the city plans to work more aggressively to persuade people to leave those areas and enter housing, treatment programs or shelters.

The vigorous focus on the street population is an unusual approach that Mr. Hess brings from his time supervising services to adults in Philadelphia, where he built a reputation for reducing the number of people living on the streets.

The strategy, which officials say has been tried in only a few cities, reflects a growing consensus that a small number of long-term, chronically homeless people account for a large share of the medical care and other services required by the homeless population over all.

Officials stopped short of saying that they would force people off the streets, but they do plan to clear the makeshift dwellings and make them inaccessible for others to return.

“We’re going to let them know that their days on the streets must come to an end,” Mr. Bloomberg said in an address to the annual conference of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “And we’ll secure and clean up the places where they’ve been bedding down, to make sure that they won’t be occupied again.”

Over the past four years, officials said, the administration has worked to shift its focus from improving and expanding shelters toward more permanent solutions. That effort has included the use of supportive housing — or housing that affords a range of on-site social services — and a program called HomeBase, which offers flexible subsidies or other support for people at risk of homelessness.

Mr. Hess would not give the precise locations of the sleeping areas — most of them out of sight of the public — that the city plans to target, out of respect for the people who stay in them, he said.

But officials said that some of the sites are already familiar to the department’s teams of outreach workers and that they will coordinate with the Police and Sanitation Departments and with transit officials to identify other sites, both outdoors and in vacant buildings.

One site, near Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan, is known to homeless workers as the Bat Cave. Lately, it has been home to at least four people, including Gladys Anderson, 44, who sleeps on a discarded bed propped on milk crates. Monday afternoon, sitting on a red velveteen bedspread, she said she would gladly accept the mayor’s offer of more permanent housing.

She said it was “time to be out” of the cave.

“I will drop it like it’s hot,” she said. “This is not no life adventure for me. We’re just passing through.”

City outreach workers stopped by a few days earlier, she said, and had the people in the encampment fill out paperwork needed to get apartments.

Her boyfriend, who would give his name only as Country, was more skeptical of the offer.

“This is America,” he said as he loaded 12 garbage bags full of cans and bottles onto a large rolling cart. “This is living off the land. That’s how we built this thing.”

The largest group of street homeless identified by city workers, 195, is in Manhattan, officials said, spread over 30 locations. In the Bronx there are 54 people living at 12 sites; in Brooklyn, workers identified 45 people in 10 areas; in Queens they found 40 people at 10 sites; and in Staten Island, they identified 24 people gathering at 11 spots.

The city estimates that it will take six months to a year to clear the often-squalid locations, which will then be secured with fencing or other methods, said Mr. Hess, who appeared with the mayor at a news conference after Mr. Bloomberg’s speech. Both men emphasized that they would not forcibly remove people, pointing out that there are legal barriers to doing so.

“The objective is not in any way to force people from one area to another,” Mr. Hess said. “It is to take a social service intervention strategy approach to help people make a decision to move from these very unhealthy encampments.”

Two years ago, Mr. Bloomberg pledged to create the 12,000 units of supportive housing, in addition to 21,000 built over the previous two decades. On Monday, he said the money had been secured to keep his promise.

He also said that the city would funnel an extra $10 million into HomeBase, which helps people to stay where they live by interceding with landlords to head off eviction, making temporary loans for rent or helping obtain needed job referrals, health care or other services.

Mr. Bloomberg faced a receptive audience, which interrupted his speech with applause more than a dozen times. As if to anticipate criticism of his efforts, he used the address to take several jabs at some advocates for the homeless, who have been a frequent thorn in the side of his and previous administrations, suing the city to force it to change its policies.

“To rid our society of homelessness we must first liberate ourselves from the chains of conventional wisdom, from the fetters of political correctness, from the tyranny of the advocates and their unwillingness to admit that we’re ever making progress,” the mayor said.

Leslie Kaufman and Matthew Sweeney contributed reporting for this article from New York.

    N.Y. Homeless Face New Effort to Clear Streets, NYT, 18.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/nyregion/18homeless.html

Homeless Alcoholics

Receive a Permanent Place to Live,

and Drink

July 5, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSICA KOWAL

SEATTLE, June 30 — Rodney Littlebear was a homeless drunk who for 15 years ran up the public tab with trips to jail, homeless shelters and emergency rooms.

He now has a brand-new, government-financed apartment where he can drink as much as he wants. It is part of a first-in-the-nation experiment to ease the torment of drug and alcohol addiction while saving taxpayers' money.

Last year, King County created a list of 200 "chronic public inebriates" in the Seattle region who had cost the most to round up and care for. Seventy-five were offered permanent homes in a new apartment building known by its address, 1811 Eastlake.

Each had been a street drunk for several years and had failed at least six efforts at sobriety. In a controversial acknowledgment of their addiction, the residents — 70 men and 5 women — can drink in their rooms. They do not have to promise to drink less, attend Alcoholics Anonymous or go to church.

"They woke me up in detox and told me they were going to move me in," said Mr. Littlebear, 37, who has had a series of strokes and uses a walker. "When I got here, I said, 'Oh boy, this don't look like no treatment center.' "

These are the "unsympathetic homeless" who beg, drink, urinate and vomit in public — and they are probably the most difficult to get off the streets, said Bill Hobson, executive director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, the nonprofit group that owns 1811 Eastlake.

In 2003, the public spent $50,000, on average, for each of 40 homeless alcoholics found most often at the jail, the sobering center and the public Harborview Medical Center, said Amnon Shoenfeld, director of King County's division of mental health and chemical abuse.

Mr. Hobson's group expected the annual cost for each new resident of 1811 Eastlake to be $13,000, or a total of $950,000. It cost $11.2 million to build and is paid for entirely by the City of Seattle and county, state and federal governments.

The actual price tag will probably rise because residents have more serious health problems than expected, said Margaret King, a social worker who manages the building. Many have heart ailments, cirrhosis, diabetes, head injuries from falling on sidewalks and severe circulation problems. Four residents have already died, including one who moved in with late-stage liver cancer.

The building's critics are particularly incensed that residents do not have to stay sober. The Seattle Times, in 2004, editorialized that government should insist that the residents quit drinking in order to live there.

"Bunks for drunks — it's a living monument to failed social policy," said John Carlson, a conservative radio talk show host here. This approach, he said, is "aiding and abetting someone's self-destruction."

Drink they do. When residents are shuttled to supermarkets for groceries, Ms. King said, they often buy wine or beer, which is sold in this state alongside the milk, eggs and orange juice.

Like Mr. Littlebear, Howard Hunt, 41, moved in the first day. Homeless since 1999, Mr. Hunt said he drank a daily bottle of whiskey before he came to 1811 Eastlake. He has epilepsy and walks with crutches because he fractured his hip.

He shrugged when asked about the policy allowing him to drink in his new home. "We're going to drink somewhere," Mr. Hunt said.

Influential Bush administration officials have come to support this project, including the on-site drinking. John Meyers, director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's regional office here, said he blanched when he learned that his agency had pledged $2 million for it. He now calls 1811 Eastlake "a glorious experiment."

"It's a lot cheaper having them spend the night at 1811 than at the E.R. or at the drunk tank," Mr. Meyers said.

Philip F. Mangano, executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, said there should be a similar building in every city in the country.

These apartments fit into the "housing first" philosophy, newly adopted by many cities, intended to give permanent housing and intensive services to long-term homeless people. Local officials have already approved other buildings for the mentally ill and people with chronic medical conditions, said Adrienne Quinn, director of Seattle's Housing Office.

Though it would be unthinkable for a market-rate apartment building in this booming city, 1811 Eastlake's front door is across the street from busy Interstate 5, on the edge of downtown. The Starbucks around the corner donates pastries, but Robb Anderson, 43, an owner of the trophy shop next door to the apartments, complained bitterly about paramedics' 120 visits in just six months.

The building's atmosphere during a recent daytime visit was more convalescent home than rowdy dorm. A few men in the television room stared silently at a World Cup match, while others wearing backpacks trudged through the front door and into the communal kitchen for apple fritters and coffee.

A third of the residents, including Mr. Littlebear, are American Indian; an estimated 20 percent are military veterans. The average age is 45. Most receive state or federal disability payments, and all residents pay 30 percent of their income as rent under HUD's guideline for low-income housing.

By choice or if they need frequent medical attention, 26 residents live on the first floor in office-sized cubicles with a bed, desk, dresser and small refrigerator. These communal living areas have a strong scent of body odor.

Upstairs, 49 people have private studio apartments with a single bed, bath and kitchen. For many, this normal existence is a huge adjustment. One man continues to sleep on the floor next to his bed, and another refused sheets in favor of his sleeping bag, Ms. King said.

Their quality of life, drinking and use of public services are being studied by researchers at the University of Washington. Ms. King said the alcohol intake of the residents was shockingly high at first, but many residents say they now drink less, at least by their standards.

"I cut down," Mr. Littlebear said. "I've got to save my liver."

    Homeless Alcoholics Receive a Permanent Place to Live, and Drink, NYT, 5.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05homeless.html

New Rules Force States

to Curb Welfare Rolls

June 28, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, June 27 — The Bush administration plans to issue sweeping new rules on Wednesday that will require states to move much larger numbers of poor people from welfare to work.

The rules, drafted in response to a budget signed into law by President Bush in February, represent the biggest changes in welfare policy since 1996, when Congress abolished the federal guarantee of cash assistance for the nation's poorest children.

Since then, the number of welfare recipients has plunged more than 60 percent, to 4.4 million people, from 12.2 million. Most of the decline occurred in the first years, before the 2001 recession. Federal and state officials say they expect the new rules to speed the decline in welfare rolls, which has slowed in recent years.

The rules are far more than a bureaucratic application of the new law, passed after four years of partisan deadlock. For the first time, they set a uniform definition for permissible work activities and require states to verify and document the number of hours worked by welfare recipients.

Nationally, in 2004, the last year for which official figures are available, about 32 percent of adults on welfare were working. Under the new rules, 50 percent of adult welfare recipients must be engaged in work or training in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, or states will face financial penalties. The penalties can reduce a state's federal welfare grant by 5 percent in the first year and by two additional percentage points for each subsequent year of noncompliance, up to a maximum penalty of 21 percent.

Some state officials and antipoverty groups, including many who opposed the 1996 law, say the new work requirements are unrealistic. But Bush administration officials point to Georgia as evidence that the goals are achievable.

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia, a Republican, said 69 percent of his state's adult welfare recipients were either working or in work-training programs, up from 8 percent four years ago. Moreover, Mr. Perdue said, the number of adult welfare cases has declined to 8,100, from 30,590 in 2002. In 32 of Georgia's 159 counties, he said, all the adults on welfare are employed or in training programs.

Members of Congress thought they were setting stringent work requirements when they created the current welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, in 1996. But state officials quickly discovered that the requirements were much less onerous than they had thought.

Under the old law, the work requirements were reduced whenever states reduced the number of families on welfare, compared with the 1995 level. In theory, 50 percent of adult welfare recipients were supposed to be working. But if a state's caseload dropped 45 percent, the work requirement was slashed by 45 percentage points, so that only 5 percent of the state's welfare recipients had to be working.

Wade F. Horn, an assistant secretary of health and human services, said this provision of the 1996 law, known as a "caseload reduction credit," had wiped out any meaningful work requirements. Under the new rules, states will receive credit only for future reductions in their welfare rolls. The base year, for the purpose of comparison, will be 2005.

The new requirements may come as a shock to many states. In 2004, all states but Indiana and Mississippi met their work participation requirements, as calculated by the federal government. In 19 states, the required work participation rate — after taking account of steep declines in the welfare rolls — was zero.

The administration has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday to announce the rules, which, under the new law, must be issued by the end of this month.

Crystal A. Robinson, a 26-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis, said she believed that stricter work requirements could be helpful if states provided generous subsidies for child care.

Ms. Robinson received cash assistance from 2000 to 2002 and now receives help with her child care costs.

"I found a job I liked," said Ms. Robinson, who works 40 hours a week at a local hospital. "I'm a very hard worker. But the child care would be unaffordable without assistance from Hennepin County."

Another welfare recipient, Laura L. Kegerreis, 33, receives $497 a month for herself and her three children while she takes job-preparation courses at Harrisburg Area Community College in Pennsylvania. Mr. Kegerreis said the new work requirements could force her to take fewer classes, prolonging her stay on welfare and delaying her ability to get a professional credential.

The new law reauthorizes welfare programs through September 2010. The basic federal block grant remains $16.5 billion a year and is not adjusted for inflation or changes in the number of people on the rolls.

"Welfare" used to mean a monthly check that could be immediately converted to cash. But more than half of the money now goes into child care, education, training and other services — a huge shift since 1996.

Under the new rules, the federal government will spend $150 million a year on programs to help couples form "healthy marriages." Up to $50 million of this amount can be spent on activities promoting "responsible fatherhood." These activities could include seminars on the causes of domestic violence and child abuse.

After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 welfare law, he gave states a large amount of discretion, saying he trusted them to help families become self-sufficient. The new rules limit the flexibility that states were granted in 1996. They define 12 acceptable types of work activity, including subsidized and unsubsidized employment, community service, on-the-job training, job search (usually limited to six weeks a year) and vocational education training (up to 12 months in a lifetime).

Federal officials said they were adopting uniform standards because the definition of work now varied from state to state, and even from year to year within the same state. As a result, they said, it is difficult to compare states' performance.

Today, as in 1996, many Democrats say the welfare law creates a perverse incentive. A state can comply by putting some people to work and by simply removing others from the rolls, regardless of whether they find jobs.

In an executive order on Friday, Gov. John Lynch of New Hampshire, a Democrat, made clear that he wanted to meet the federal requirements not just by closing cases, but by moving people to "lasting employment and self-sufficiency." Mr. Lynch said he intended to increase child care, transportation, education and other services to help people stay off welfare.

States could avoid many restrictions of the 1996 law by providing assistance entirely with state money, through separate state programs.

    New Rules Force States to Curb Welfare Rolls, NYT, 28.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/washington/28welfare.html?hp&ex=1151553600&en=1816ba1e7be426c6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

2 Homeless Men Blamed for Fire on Waterfront

June 8, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

Two homeless men burning the insulation off copper wires they intended to sell as scrap sparked the spectacular fire that ripped through a warehouse complex on the Brooklyn waterfront last month, the authorities said yesterday. Four hundred firefighters fought the May 2 blaze, which consumed at least 10 historic buildings.

One of the homeless men, Leszek Kuczera, 59, was arrested and charged with arson, burglary, reckless endangerment and petty larceny, the police said. The second man, whose identity was withheld, was still being sought last night.

Fire investigators said that Mr. Kuczera had at first portrayed himself last week as a witness to the fire at the Greenpoint Terminal Market, but when questioned further confessed his actions had caused it. He was scheduled to be arraigned last night in Brooklyn Criminal Court.

The fire was immediately called suspicious by fire marshals.

The authorities said the two men who started the fire were among a group of homeless people who found shelter in abandoned buildings by the East River. The huge fire, which even required the use of fireboats, was started so that the men could get an extra 55 cents per pound for the copper wire — $1.25 compared with 70 cents per pound for insulated wire. Investigators said that the homeless men had placed roughly 120 feet of copper cable onto a platform that was designed to burn intensely — made of rubber tires, wooden palettes and doused with gasoline siphoned from vehicles near the warehouses. Then they set it alight.

"The fire was a very large one that they created trying to burn off a lot of insulation at the same time," Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said. "It spread, it got out of control and they fled," he said.

The fire had focused attention on the lucrative waterfront real estate market and, in particular, on the owner of the warehouse complex, Joshua Guttman, who had been involved in an unsuccessful deal to sell the valuable property.

A lawyer for Mr. Guttman, Israel Goldberg, said that his client called him yesterday after he heard news of the arrest. "He's relieved," Mr. Goldberg said. "We're just happy they found somebody and he can go on with his life."

Officials said that with the exception of the World Trade Center disaster, the Greenpoint Terminal Market fire was the city's biggest since a 1995 blaze at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn.

The huge plume of black smoke at the Greenpoint fire, visible for miles, reminded many New Yorkers of Sept. 11. It took nearly 36 hours to put out the warehouse fire, and the ruins of the unoccupied buildings smoked for days.

The fire reduced to rubble buildings that were once a rope and bagging factory, a jute mill, and more recently, a location for film projects that required a look of rusted industry.

Officials formed a joint task force to investigate the fire that included members of the Police and Fire Departments, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and marshals from the state's Office of Fire Prevention and Control.

While the investigators looked for clues left in charred remains of the warehouse complex and spoke with Mr. Guttman, they also focused on the neighborhood's homeless population, knowing that fires for cooking or for warmth had been started in the warehouses on occasion.

After interviews with more than 25 homeless people, fire officials said, investigators found Mr. Kuczera last week. He told them that he had been out fishing at a dock near the warehouse on the night of the fire, and that he had seen a tall man emerge from one of the warehouses.

Then, on Tuesday night, when investigators took Mr. Kuczera on a tour of the neighborhood to try to find the man he saw, he confessed that he and another man had started the fire, the officials said, adding that his account of how the fire started and its location matched information that had been gleaned by investigators.

Lt. Dennis Briordy, the commanding officer of the Police Department's Arson and Explosion unit, said that Mr. Kuczera told investigators that he did not intend for the blaze to spread.

Authorities said stolen copper wiring is sold to places like junkyards or scrap metal yards. "This has been done for a long time; since I've been on the Fire Department we've had fires from people burning copper," Chief Fire Marshal Louis Garcia said. "Usually it's done in a vacant lot."

Chuck Carr, a spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, based in Washington, said the price of copper had more than doubled in the last year, adding that there was anecdotal evidence that copper thefts had risen nationwide as a result.

He said that the while the problem of unscrupulous dealers accepting stolen scrap metal was widespread, his organization's members, which number more than a dozen in the New York City area, were encouraged to ask for identification from sellers.

Mr. Kuczera's arrest came on the same day that the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, announced charges against the owners of the warehouse for failing to fix dilapidated piers and bulkheads at the site. A statement from Mr. Hynes's office listed the owners of the property as Joshua Guttman; his son, Jack Guttman; and four of the real estate corporations run by the father and son.

They are charged with 434 counts of "failure to maintain privately owned waterfront property," one count for each day the owners failed to make the repairs after being ordered to by the city Department of Small Business Services Dockmasters, the statement said.

The owners were first cited for the damaged and unsafe piers and bulkheads on Jan. 21, 2005, Mr. Hynes's office said.

The charges, considered misdemeanors, are each punishable by a fine of up to $5,000, the district attorney's office said.

As Mr. Kuczera was being led from the Ninth Precinct station house in Lower Manhattan, he appeared confused and answered the shouted questions from reporters by simply saying "O.K." repeatedly.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Al Baker, Michael Wilson, Colin Moynihan, Kate Hammer, Maria Newman and Michael Amon.

    2 Homeless Men Blamed for Fire on Waterfront, NYT, 8.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/nyregion/08fire.html?hp&ex=1149825600&en=9e11f161077947d1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Need for Vodka Money Fueled Fire, One Theory Goes

June 8, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON and ANN FARMER

Years of alcoholism dragged Leszek Kuczera, a 59-year-old Polish immigrant, from steady work to a life of homelessness, begging and selling stolen copper as scrap metal for vodka money, his brother and friends said yesterday.

It was that quest for copper that led him to set the fire on May 2 that grew to a 10-alarm blaze at the Greenpoint Terminal Market, destroying historic warehouses along the Brooklyn waterfront, the police said. Hundreds of firefighters fought the fire.

Mr. Kuczera had been trying to melt the insulation off a long length of copper wire inside the vacant warehouses, using a pile of eight flaming truck tires to do the job quicker, the police said. Detectives are looking for another suspect.

Descriptions of Mr. Kuczera suggest that he had been a man roaming his small universe in Greenpoint desperate for a payday. He had not worked since a stint of five months or so he spent helping with the cleanup at ground zero, said his brother, Yurik Kuczera, 49, a construction worker currently at a job in Las Vegas.

"Leszek every day drink, drink," he said in a phone interview. "No work, no job, no work." He said the drinking worsened after the ground zero work. "This is an alcoholic, not working. This is a sick man," he said.

Mr. Kuczera moved to New York from the city of Lublin in Poland 14 or 15 years ago, leaving behind a wife, Hanna, and a son and two daughters, his brother said. For several years, he was able to hold down a full-time job removing asbestos, his brother said. He shared an apartment for a while with another Polish man, Waldemar Makowski, an elevator repairman, but was thrown out, and returned often to borrow money, said the building's superintendent, Ludvik Knatkowska.

"Every day drink, drink and don't work," Mr. Knatkowska said. "He comes here once in a while to get a dollar or two or food, but I kicked him out because he was a thief. He'll say it's for food, but he'll use it for alcohol."

Mr. Kuczera's brother tried in vain to urge him to return to Poland.

Yurik Kuczera's roommate in Brooklyn, Wiesiek Mastowski, said: "Yurik gives him money. Like $20, like $100. Like a brother."

Mr. Kuczera was a regular at Irene's Bar in Greenpoint. "Every day, drunk," said a customer there who did not give his name, but appeared familiar with the lifestyle. "Go look in the bathroom in the park. Drunk bum, and that's it."

Mr. Kuczera had been convicted of several misdemeanor crimes in Brooklyn, including trespassing, petty larceny and possession of stolen property and burglary tools. The criminal complaints filed in court suggest that he was a bungling thief.

On June 22, 2004, a woman saw him trying to break into her car at the corner of Fulton Street and Alabama Avenue, and he was arrested.

On Sept. 6, 2005, Asin Shahzad, the owner of a convenience store on Manhattan Avenue, caught Mr. Kuczera trying to steal a case of Coca-Cola, he said yesterday.

On June 28, 2004, in Long Island City, Queens, a worker noticed that a truck had been moved from its spot in the parking lot where it had been left and had rammed into a parked car. The police came and found Mr. Kuczera slumped behind the wheel, according to the complaint. He pleaded guilty to unauthorized use of a vehicle.

In a case that may have foreshadowed the fire, Mr. Kuczera was caught stealing a long copper pipe from a metal shop on Provost Street on Nov. 4, 2004, according to a police complaint, and he was arrested. A manager, Stephen Hyun, said the shop no longer bought scrap metal from Mr. Kuczera.

Others did. If Mr. Kuczera walked past any empty can, he stooped to pick it up for money from recycling, his friends said. He was a member of the ragtag community of men who roam the waterfront, sit in parks and sleep in empty buildings, his own preferred spot an alcove in an alley off Milton Avenue, near the East River, said a man who identified himself as Ra, 36, a squatter who lives in a building at the Greenpoint Terminal Market that was not consumed by the fire. But Mr. Kuczera angered the others when he began lighting fires, Ra said.

"He used to burn the copper wires by the river," he said. "He is not playing with a full deck."

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

    Need for Vodka Money Fueled Fire, One Theory Goes, NYT, 8.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/nyregion/08suspect.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

New Campaign Shows Progress for Homeless

June 7, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

DENVER — Arthur Sena spent years living in a hole that he had dug near the railroad tracks. He would probably still be there, defying offers of help from social workers and using cardboard to ward off the chill, if Denver had not adopted a radical strategy of putting homeless people into apartments of their own, no strings attached.

The "housing first" policy that this city adopted last year is part of an accelerating national movement that has reduced the numbers of the chronically homeless — the single, troubled men and women who spend years in the streets and shelters — in more than 20 cities.

In this campaign, promoted by a little-known office of the Bush administration, 219 cities, at last count, have started ambitious 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.

The cities include New York, which is stepping up efforts to house the estimated nearly 4,000 people huddling on sidewalks or sleeping in parks, and Henderson, N.C., population 17,000, which recently counted 91 homeless people, 14 of them chronic cases.

Many of the early starters are reporting turnarounds. In Philadelphia, street dwellers have declined 60 percent over five years. In San Francisco, the number of the chronic homeless is down 28 percent in two years, in Dallas 26 percent and in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., 15 percent.

If it is not always clear who will pay for the plans, the burst of effort has buoyed a field long accustomed to futility.

"I've sensed a new energy in city halls and state houses around the issue of ending homelessness," said Robert V. Hess, who just took over as homeless services commissioner in New York City after years of similar work in Philadelphia. "This is unprecedented in my lifetime."

Part of the credit, Mr. Hess and others said, goes to Philip F. Mangano, a Bush appointee who has spent five years visiting every mayor and governor he can, brandishing successful examples, cost-benefit studies and his own messianic fervor along with modest amounts of federal money.

"We're conspiring to undo what we'd been told for so many years, that this was an intractable issue," Mr. Mangano told 150 mayors, state and city officials and private leaders here in May. They were gathered for the first "national leadership summit," sponsored by the once-dormant office that Mr. Mangano leads, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Wherever he goes, Mr. Mangano, 58, who was director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, emphasizes that it is cheaper to put the chronically homeless right into apartments, and provide medical and addiction treatments there, than to watch them cycle endlessly through shelters, soup kitchens, emergency rooms, detoxification centers and jails.

"Cost-benefit analysis may be the new expression of compassion in our communities," he said at the Denver meeting.

Typically, people in such programs are put into sparsely furnished apartments free. Soon after, as they are helped into jobs or sign up for disability or other government benefits, they are required to pay modest rents.

Outreach workers had spent months persuading Mr. Sena, 69, to move to an efficiency apartment downtown. He finally did in 2005, after injuring an arm. His room still has bare walls, and Mr. Sena, who remarkably retains a head of dark hair, has not lost his crustiness.

"I never had any alcohol addiction," he told a visitor. "I just copped a little shot now and then. As a matter of fact, I was just heading out right now to get a half pint. It's the only thing that helps the pain in my arm."

Mr. Sena refused to disclose more about his history or use of public services. But in a study here, officials found that 25 men were taken into emergency detoxification centers for an average of 80 nights each in one year, at a total cost of $772,000. Officials have found that they can provide housing and most medical and other services for about $15,000 a year per person.

The growing focus on housing the chronically homeless was driven, many officials said, by a study in 1998 by Prof. Dennis P. Culhane, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Culhane showed that a vast majority of people staying in shelters did so briefly and got on with their lives and that 10 percent were in and out repeatedly for years, accounting for half of total bed use.

National estimates of the chronic homeless run about 200,000, among an estimated total of 750,000 homeless people on any given night that includes families and other people in temporary trouble, said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a group in Washington.

Some advocates and state officials have questioned the intense focus on chronic cases, fearing that it detracts from programs for families. Mr. Mangano responds that homeless families continue to receive the bulk of public money and are the subject of promising experiments, too.

More important, he said in an interview, visible progress against the most visible face of homelessness will inspire more financing. Already, Mr. Mangano added, documented gains have persuaded the White House and Congress to increase spending. Federal money to work on homelessness has climbed over the last five years to more than $4 billion, from $3 billion.

Mr. Mangano "is great at spin," said Bob Erlenbusch, chairman of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group based in Washington. But Mr. Mangano is glossing over the broader trend, Mr. Erlenbusch said, because federal programs for low-income housing, which can prevent homelessness, have languished in the Bush years or been cut.

To start their new plans, cities have combined federal and local public money with foundation and corporate grants. But many officials say a lack of money will hamper the development of needed housing and support teams.

The "housing first" approach was pioneered in the 1990's by a group in New York, Pathways to Housing.

In a first step, confirmed street dwellers are coaxed into rooms of their own, a more attractive proposition to many than the drug treatment programs or transitional group homes they had been offered in the past. Some skittish people take along their shopping carts.

Once drawn into so-called supportive housing, the participants are monitored by social workers and offered psychiatric and other services that might stabilize their lives. But breaking addictions or seeking other needed treatment is not a prerequisite for entry.

New York City, a leader in supportive housing, recently counted 3,843 people living in the streets, a 13 percent decline from the previous year. The state and city governments are also joining to build 9,000 supportive housing units in New York over 10 years.

Some "tough-love" groups have opposed housing first, saying that without more discipline, addicts will never succeed. But in experiments around the country, 80 percent or more of those housed participants remained in their quarters after a year.

Workers at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, which runs Mr. Sena's building, said they knew that some tenants were using drugs or alcohol.

"It's better that they pass out here than in the streets," said John Parvensky, director of the coalition.

In many cities, the approach has also drawn fire from agencies that run shelters and drug treatment programs. Those agencies bristle at the suggestion that their emergency aid just perpetuates problems.

"It was very tough to buck the status quo and tell service providers that we're not going to do it your way anymore," said Angela Alioto, a lawyer and Democratic politician who oversees the 10-year plan in San Francisco on behalf of Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Among some groups, Ms. Alito said, "there was hysteria" when the city said it would stop financing groups that did not send participants to housing. But by the end of 2006, she predicted, 2,200 of the estimated 3,000 chronically homeless will be in apartments.

As much as they talk excitedly about ending homelessness, experts know that change will come in fits and starts, for cities as well as for individuals.

By early 2005, Philadelphia had pushed down the number of homeless in the streets to 250, compared to 824 five years earlier, Mr. Hess said.

After a Live Aid concert there last July, however, the number spiked, for reasons that are not clear to the experts, to more than 400, and the city has been whittling it back down.

In Denver, Deborah Johnson, 52, is more openly grateful than Mr. Sena for her new apartment, saying that after 11 years in shelters and recovery programs "it feels great because I'm an independent person."

But her craving for alcohol is a recurring threat, Ms. Johnson conceded. Two times in the last two years she entered housing but was ejected because of "behavior problems" involving her or her guests, a coalition official said.

After another stay in an addiction center, Ms. Johnson moved to her latest apartment in April. She uses an overturned supermarket basket for a table and keeps a Bible near her mattress. She meets her case manager three times a week, Ms. Johnson said, and hopes some day to resume work as a cook.

    New Campaign Shows Progress for Homeless, NYT, 7.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/us/07homeless.html?hp&ex=1149739200&en=293d57ee2b6d21ee&ei=5094&partner=homepage