Homeless advocate says war at home needs funding

Wednesday, April 9, 2003 | 9:31 a.m.

The people in charge of helping the homeless in Las Vegas said Tuesday that President Bush needs to put more money where his mouth is.

Bush has said he wants the United States to end chronic homelessness within 10 years, and the federal government is allocating $10 million toward that goal, Ken Porter, the Housing and Urban Development member on the board of the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition, told fellow coalition members at a meeting in North Las Vegas.

"That is a minuscule amount of money for a national effort," coalition Chairman Gus Ramos said after the meeting. "I support the president in the war in Iraq, but the effort over there is getting a lot more support than the war on homelessness back here. We cannot afford to lose this battle at home."

Porter drew groans from some of the more than two dozen members on the panel -- a number of whom are service organization representatives -- when they were informed there would be no additional money for "support," such as teaching the chronic homeless how to live in mainstream society.

One member suggested -- and others nodded in agreement -- that without such training, chronically homeless people, which include the mentally ill and those who shun the restrictive rules of shelters, might damage apartments.

Should that happen, a number of apartment owners could stop dealing with the referring agencies and that could hurt those groups' efforts to secure apartments for other homeless people, including responsible people who live from paycheck to paycheck but lose their jobs and wind up getting evicted.

In turn, many of the chronic homeless who mistreat dwellings would wind up back on the streets, defeating the purpose of the federal plan and wasting funds.

Porter, however, said some additional efforts have to be made on the part of community-based services if the government is to provide funding to get the chronic homeless off the nation's streets and back into mainstream society.

"HUD's core mission is to provide housing," Porter said after the meeting, noting that the social work part of the puzzle must be provided by the social service agencies that will get the federal grants.

Homeless advocates estimate about 8,000 to 10,000 homeless people live in the Las Vegas Valley. About 10 percent of the homeless population are chronically homeless, according to federal estimates.

With so little money to go around, neither Ramos nor Porter would hazard a guess as to how much of the $10 million Las Vegas organizations will receive. Ramos said that will depend on how aggressive local agencies are in writing grants.

Federal officials say they are focusing on the chronic homeless because that group needs more help getting permanent shelter than the situational homeless, who often can more easily find jobs and thus more quickly return to private housing.