Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

White House official touts 10-year plan to aid homeless

In a meeting Tuesday with the Las Vegas Sun editorial board, Philip Mangano, the White House point man on homelessness, said the Bush administration has the right strategy to eliminate chronic homelessness.

Mangano said the reason chronic homelessness hasn't been eliminated is that money was being thrown at programs without long-term results.

Prior to the Bush administration's push for 10-year plans to move the chronically homeless into housing in the nation's cities, there hadn't "been a management strategy for homelessness," he said. "It has been ad hoc spending over and over."

At the same time, Mangano conceded that governors and mayors, who already face tight state and municipal budgets, have been reluctant to spend more money on social services.

Instead, Mangano said communities such as San Francisco and Maricopa County, Ariz., have found creative ways to shift finances. One thing they have done on a pilot program level is place chronically homeless individuals in existing apartment units and provide them with targeted mental health and drug treatment services. Mangano said Maricopa County found that it is now spending as little as $25,000 a year in taxpayer dollars on chronically homeless individuals who previously cost as much as $120,000 annually, much of it related to emergency health care costs.

"The idea of expending additional resources doesn't have a lot of currency with governors and mayors right now," Mangano said. "There is a lot of money out there right now but we have to spend it more efficiently. Some of it is looking at cost benefit analysis. What resonates with governors and mayors is cost savings."

Mangano said 46 states, including Nevada, have formed state-level interagency councils to tackle homelessness issues. And 117 mayors and county executives nationwide have committed to 10-year plans, he said.

On a national level, Mangano said 20 federal agencies have been pulled together in an effort to spend federal money more efficiently to serve the chronically homeless and do a better job working with the states. One problem, he said, is that only a fraction of the homeless population eligible for Social Security disability is actually receiving benefits.

He said federal agencies "don't understand how the decisions they make can impact the issue of homelessness."

Although Bush has been criticized for proposing sharp cutbacks in funding for Section 8 housing vouchers for low-income families, Mangano said targeted federal spending on homelessness has actually increased from $2.4 billion to $3.3 billion since Bush has been president. The Bush administration has proposed additional spending to target homeless populations, such as individuals recently released from prison and teenagers who have "aged out" of foster care, Mangano said.

"More than half of the people coming into the front door of homelessness are coming out of the back door of other systems, such as prisons and foster care," Mangano said. "It's easier to prevent homelessness than to end it."

He said most of the proposed Section 8 voucher cutbacks would impact families who earn at least 30 percent of median income, and he said there is still plenty of affordable housing for that population. The problem, he said, is that the chronically homeless mostly involve individuals well below 30 percent of median income.

archive