Officials question homeless program

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004 | 11:17 a.m.

Wanted: homeless families who need a roof over their heads and have a flatbed truck.

Come to the pinon pine and cedar forest in Great Basin National Park, 300 miles north of Las Vegas, and the federal government will give you three trailers for you to live in.

The trailers are nearly 30 years old, have 3,000-pound wooden gable roofs on top, and lack wheels and platforms underneath. Oh, and you can't just move into the trailers, the law says you have to move them out of the park.

But they're yours for the taking, courtesy of a nationwide program called Title V federal surplus property, under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.

After a recent notice on those trailers was published in the Federal Register, a closer look at the program revealed a 15-year history of a good idea that appears to have achieved little of its original promise.

The program's implementation has been a "dream ... not realized," said Michael Stoops, community organizing director for the National Coalition for the Homeless, a Washington-based group, and an author of the bill that eventually became the McKinney-Vento act in 1987.

Linda Tribby -- who as quarters program manager for the Department of Interior compiles lists of properties under the law -- said the program is a "waste of taxpayer money."

And Brian Sullivan, spokesman for the Housing and Urban Development Department, which manages the lists of all land and buildings that could be used by the homeless, said 98 percent of the 12,000 properties in the program's inventory are "unsuitable" for use.

Sullivan also said it was difficult to estimate how much money is spent on maintaining the lists, both in his agency and in those that report to HUD, since no line items in agency budgets are used for that particular program.

The statute and regulations under the law state that HUD must compile a list quarterly, but agencies can and do report more frequently, Sullivan said.

"How much incremental effort there is to send the list onto HUD is hard to say," he said.

However, when Tribby was told of the trailers in Northern Nevada, she said, "We're spending a lot of resources -- a lot of money goes into reporting to HUD, and none of the program is used."

"If I could capture some of this money and get it into the hands of homeless providers, it would be more helpful," she said.

The program had its 15 minutes of fame locally in 2001 when the Rev. Joe Carroll, director of a now-closed shelter known as MASH Village, publicly sought to use a federal post office downtown for the homeless, citing Title V.

Apparently, Carroll lost his bid for the property when he never filled out an application to the appropriate federal agency as required by Title V, according to Las Vegas and federal officials.

The post office may be vacated early next year and will be used to house a museum, said Betsy Fretwell, deputy city manager.

Terry Lindemann, director of the Interfaith Hospitality Network, the only group in the Las Vegas Valley that offers short-term housing to intact homeless families, said she was "not too impressed" with the federal program.

"I'm sorry, but this isn't going to help," she said.

Recently, Lindemann picked up a single mother and her four children in the rain after they were evicted from a $1,000-a-month Las Vegas apartment, Lindemann said. The woman could not keep up with the rent on her $9-an-hour telemarketing job selling time shares, Lindemann said.

Lindemann said the valley -- which has an estimated 7,800 homeless people, according to a census done earlier this year -- needs "transitional housing that families can afford on a minimum wage."

"This program is not useful to us," she said.

The program has been featured in recent weeks in an e-mail newsletter issued by the Interagency Council on Homelessness -- an agency created by the same federal law that set up the surplus property program -- under the heading, "Federal surplus property: resources to help communities end homelessness."

Darryl Martin, director of Clark County Social Service, gets the newsletter and saw the items about the program.

"I thought it would be useful," he said.

"But if 98 percent of it is useless, then it's not really a program ... Why continue it?"

"Resources could be diverted elsewhere instead of setting up a dummy giveaway program. This is bureaucracy at its best," Martin said.

The law says that any "excess (buildings or land) not required by any Federal landholding agency for its needs or responsibilities" must be reported to HUD on a quarterly basis, but many send the list along more often, Sullivan said.

After receiving listings from the different agencies, HUD determines if the properties are suitable for assisting the homeless and publishes the final list indicating its decisions each Friday in the Federal Register.

Stoops, one of the authors of the bill that became law under President Reagan, said the original motivation behind converting property not being used by the federal government into housing or shelters for the homeless was to save lives.

"Homeless people were literally dying on the streets in the mid-'80s," Stoops said.

"Our hope was we could save lives by turning over federal surplus properties to nonprofit agencies serving the homeless," he said.

In Nevada, the largest federal landowner is the Bureau of Land Management.

Jo Simpson, spokeswoman for the BLM, said the agency owns 60,000 acres in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. However, none of that land is considered under the program, she said.

"Because of the laws we are directed to operate under, the land we manage could never be considered surplus," she said.

Under the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, however, the BLM can auction off Clark County land. Those auctions have generated nearly $1.4 billion to date.

Sullivan, the HUD spokesman, said that most of the buildings and land considered under Title V comes from the military.

"Sometimes they're storage sheds, sometimes they're lighthouses," he said.

Apart from being in bad condition, another obstacle to getting many properties from the list into the hands of private or public agencies that help the homeless is their location, as in the case of Great Basin's three trailers.

"If they (the agencies) want to incur the costs of moving ... and they are often cost-prohibitive, the property might be suitable," he said.

Michelle Sonetti, who works at Easy Living Homes, a Las Vegas mobile home resale broker, said the trailers at Great Basin -- a 1979 Redman Kirkwood and two 1975 Guerdon Embassies, with estimated values of $4,900 and $5,600 -- "would cost more to move than the homes are worth."

Sullivan also said there is no money provided through the law to manage the program, or to help renovate or transport property that is considered surplus.

Tribby, the Department of Interior official, said another detail making it difficult for any agencies to take advantage of the program is that "an intention to apply" for a property must be filed within 60 days of the Federal Register listing.

"The listing is for a short amount of time," Tribby said.

That's right -- it's a limited time offer.

The Great Basin trailers were listed Oct. 8.

Tribby said she has seen about 300 properties cross her desk in the four years she has handled the list for her agency.

"I've never seen anyone express any interest" in those properties, Tribby said.

"The nation understands we have a serious problem with homelessness and there's excess in federal government -- that's quite obvious to taxpayers," she said.

"This (surplus property) should be made available to those who need it."

Stoops, the bill author, said there has only been "a scattered group of agencies around the country who have taken advantage of the program."

"When you think of the amount of surplus federal land and property across this country, there ought to be success stories in every community," he said.

"The fact that there aren't means this law ought to be re-examined."