Mayor’s remarks rile homeless advocates

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, June 16, 2004 | 11:05 a.m.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and homeless advocates are at odds again.

Tuesday, at the first statewide conference on ending chronic homelessness, Goodman kicked off the daylong event by saying, once again, that he "has no tolerance" for those homeless "who are able-bodied ... and don't want to work and are urinating and defecating on downtown streets ... (and he will) try to get rid of them in a humane manner."

The conference was devoted to the Bush administration's push for getting the most hard-core homeless people -- those who have been without a home for more than a year or four times in three years -- off the streets and into housing during the next decade.

Philip Mangano, the Bush administration's top man on homelessness and the conference's keynote speaker, followed Goodman by quipping, "Your mayor and I have a saying -- what happens in the past, stays in the past."

But it was not to be.

Homeless advocate Linda Lera-Randle El, director of Straight from the Streets, a nonprofit group that works with the homeless, said the mayor "still doesn't get it as far as what it takes to help the chronically homeless."

The mayor's attitude, said Ina Dorman, social worker with Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, "is an obstacle" to solving the problem.

But the mayor later said that what we have here is a failure to communicate.

"What am I, stupid? Am I speaking English? I made my living all my life convincing juries and now nobody understands me when it comes to this," the former criminal defense attorney said.

"I'm not saying I don't want to help the chronically homeless -- I'm talking about the guy at the corner of Rancho and 95 who panhandles and uses the money for beer and then urinates in people's front lawns.

"These people want to be homeless," Goodman said.

Randle-El, who brought a former chronically homeless man, 60-year-old Gerald Schmidt, to address the conference, said the people like the panhandler that Goodman cited are likely to be "part of the chronically homeless population.

"A lot of these people are distasteful and problematic because of the nature of their issues," she said.

Mangano responded to Goodman's remarks by explaining, "mayors all over the country not only have compassion fatigue, they have solution fatigue."

Goodman, he said, "isn't all the way there yet" when it comes to dealing with the issue.

"But I think he's starting to understand that it doesn't have to be a punitive approach," Mangano said.

Mangano, in an hour-plus talk that at times resembled a sermon -- including calls for "amen" -- listed programs around the country getting housing for those homeless men and women who experts say drain the most resources from the system.

The programs were "not illegal, immoral, or punitive," he said. One project, in St. Louis, reached people who were considered beyond all help. But before those lives were turned around, "everybody said, 'They want to be out there ... they want to be homeless,' " Mangano said.

Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness since 2002, was once a volunteer at a Boston soup kitchen; he is passionate about the idea of ending chronic homelessness and refers to those who are skeptical about that goal as "agnostics."

Punitive approaches to the problem include police sweeps, and Schmidt was swept along by police several times when he was still on the streets of Las Vegas in 2001 and 2002, Randle-El said.

She referred to Schmidt as "one of those people who did not want help" in introducing the formerly homeless man to the conference.

"I ended up in the streets through severe depression ... I didn't even want to feed myself," said Schmidt, now neatly shaved, in jeans and a cowboy hat.

He stayed downtown in alleys and under bridges for seven years, until Randle-El gradually got him to apply for social security disability benefits, the cornerstone of his economic self-sufficiency today.

Schmidt objected to Goodman's remarks.

"What are you going to do -- put us in prison because we feel so bad we don't want help? Run us out of town? That's not the answer."

But Goodman insisted his words are misunderstood, and that he would advocate for helping people like Schmidt, because "he can't help himself."

"It's the people who are trying to take advantage of the system that I have no use for -- they're nogoodniks," he said.

Paula Haynes-Green, who was hired by Clark County Social Service earlier this year as regional coordinator on homelessness, dismissed the mayor's remarks.

"He makes those statements; he's made them before; that doesn't affect us implementing a strategy," she said.

Haynes-Green said the region should have its own 10-year plan for ending homelessness in general by the end of the year.

"Once you start implementing things, attitudes can change," she said, speaking of the plan's future.

Mangano said the plan, and its implementation, will require backing, including that of the mayor.

"You need political will ... and we're trying to move the political will of the mayor," he said.

Later Mangano said he had met separately with Goodman and Clark County Manager Thom Reilly to discuss the possibility of establishing a regional 10-year plan for the county. Mangano said he received assurances from Goodman that the mayor would discuss the prospect of a long-range plan with the Las Vegas City Council next month.

"Las Vegas can't get it done alone," Mangano said. "Clark County can't get it done alone. What I think will happen in Clark County is that it will be a regional plan.

"What I think will be good here is a broad set of stakeholders."

Those stakeholders, he said, include law enforcement agencies, social service workers, hospitals and the gaming industry.

Schmidt, the formerly homeless man at the conference, said, "Change is slow."