THE CURRENT SITUATION

President Bush has decided that the construction of only 200,000 housing units will be sufficient to end all homelessness within ten years. Unfortunately, the funds intended for the construction of these units have been diverted to other programs. (200,000 out of an estimated 6,000,000 homeless = 3.3%! What happens to the remaining 96.7% homeless left behind?)

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Last November, California voters passed Prop. 46, a $2.1 billion bond funding, among other projects, shelters and housing for the state's hundreds of thousands homeless citizens.

Unfortunately, most of these funds will never help those who need help the most—the disabled, the elderly, the unskilled.

Instead, most will go to existing social service agencies which currently attempt to cure homelessness from the "top down", placing ten to twenty percent of the homeless population (usually those most likely and able to move into employment and permanent housing) into 'transitional'* shelters with their stringent residence requirements and which often attempt to 'hammer square pegs into round holes' as a condition of participation.

Most 'transitional' shelters house only 100 or less of the thousands of homeless men, women,and children currently sleeping in our streets.

Given the astronomically high costs of real estate and construction plus the NIMBYism (Not In MY Back Yard) of local communities, only a limited number of new 'transitional' shelters will ever be built.

When those few new shelters are filled, at least 80% of the homeless will still be forced to remain in the streets.

* Most so-called 'transitional' shelters are not transitional! Transitional shelters are supposed to move their residents from homelessness into permanent housing—few do since there are simply not enough affordable apartments to house the graduates of these shelters. Once their time is up, most homeless who enter and endure these programs find themselves dumped right back out into the streets again!

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