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Philadelphia experiment yields success

City of Brotherly Love has become a model for sheltering the homeless

Stuart Steers, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 23, 2005 at midnight

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PHILADELPHIA - Lou Barnett goes to work every day and tries to persuade homeless people to come in off the street.

He tells his "consumers" he knows what it's like to be homeless, and that usually gets their attention.

Barnett lived in a cardboard box in a subway station across the street from City Hall for six years. He got drunk every day. Commuters on their way to catch a train would avert their eyes. Every day, he would panhandle to buy another bottle of Thunderbird.

When Barnett turned 40, he had finally had enough.

"I decided to turn my life around," he said.

Barnett's life changed at the same time this city decided to do what no other city in America had done: get the homeless off the street and start to deal with the problems that had taken them there. Barnett soon found himself living in city-sponsored housing and enrolled in a program for recovering alcoholics.

After years of turmoil and political infighting, Philadelphia began a grand experiment by creating a new paradigm for dealing with homelessness that has become the envy of cities across the country.

Those cities include Denver, where officials are looking to the City of Brotherly Love as a model for how to end homelessness.

Philadelphia's success didn't come quickly or easily. Things started to change after what one official calls a "Philadelphia ruckus" in 1997 over a proposal to make it illegal to sleep on the street. A Catholic nun and her allies took on much of the city's political establishment in a series of angry confrontations at City Council meetings.

When the dust settled, a compromise emerged. Downtown business interests that were alarmed over the hundreds of people camped out on sidewalks struck a bargain with advocates for the homeless. In return for a law that allowed police to ticket people hanging out downtown, the city committed millions to build housing and launch treatment programs for mental illness and addiction.

Since the passage of that 1998 law, Philadelphia has added hundreds of beds in small shelters, transitional housing and apartment buildings throughout the city. Not only are the homeless offered a place to stay, they're assigned a case manager who gets them into programs intended to keep them off the street.

Philadelphia was unusual in having an outspoken group of homeless activists that tapped into a long local tradition of concern for the poor. The city also has a well-developed network of nonprofits that were ready to provide services to the homeless. They received a great deal of support from the public and used that to pressure the City Council to divert tax dollars into programs for the homeless.

"This is a very progressive city," said Rob Hess, who has overseen homeless programs for Philadelphia for the past four years after arriving from Baltimore.

"Shortly after I got here, I was asked to do a call-in show with the owners of several prestigious restaurants. When people called in, every caller supported me. I was stunned. They want to have a community where people have a place to live."

The Philadelphia experiment changed Barnett's life. Now 50 and married with five children, you would never guess that at one time he was part of a homeless encampment of nearly 900 people who slept on the streets of downtown Philadelphia.

Barnett spends his days looking for the homeless downtown, an area known as Center City. He's part of an outreach team that drives around Center City in a van, talking to homeless people in parks and along sidewalks.

There are only about 100 homeless people remaining on downtown Philadelphia's streets, and Barnett and his colleagues know who they are, where they hang out and whether they have mental problems or abuse drugs or alcohol.

They're constantly asking them to come in off the streets, offering them a bed in the city's extensive public housing system and talking up the mental health and detox programs that Philadelphia offers to all the homeless.

They reach out to such people as John, a mentally ill man who wears a fake leopard skin hat and lives in a trash-strewn lot underneath a bridge along the Schuylkill River. John spends his days in a makeshift bed underneath dozens of blankets. He keeps his food in bags that hang on the concrete walls to prevent the rats from eating it. He spent the winter here, ignoring pleas from Barnett and Sam Santiago, another outreach worker, to go inside.

"Come on, John, you're 50 years old; you need to come in," Barnett told him. "If you come in, we'll get you the help you need."

Santiago, a former cop who has become legendary for his ability to persuade the most hard-core to leave the streets, tells John he wants to take him to Project HOME, the homeless center co-founded by Sister Mary Scullion.

"I want you to come to Sister Mary's spot," Santiago said.

Even though winter is over and it's a pleasant April day, John surprises everyone by announcing that he'll go with them tomorrow and leave the streets for the first time in years.

You can't go anywhere in Philadelphia's homeless circles without hearing someone mention Sister Mary. She has spent most of her adult life working with the homeless, and she led a series of battles with the city that changed the hearts and minds of Philadelphians.

Sister Mary's greatest battle was the 1997 struggle over the "sidewalk ordinance." She led the coalition of homeless advocates that fought the proposed law.

"We packed City Council," Sister Mary said. "It was criminalizing homelessness, saying it was illegal to sleep on the streets. That's a scary phenomenon."

After months of acrimony, the law that eventually made it through the council gave police authority to crack down on people camped out on sidewalks. But it also set aside $5.6 million to hire more outreach workers, create a homeless hot line and open a half-dozen shelters and treatment centers geared to the chronically homeless. The city also created a special unit of the police department that responds to calls involving the homeless.

The impact was dramatic. In the next several years, the areas around City Hall and the main subway station emptied out. Hundreds of homeless people entered into housing developed by the city or nonprofits. Shelters opened around Center City, even in prestigious neighborhoods such as Rittenhouse Square, where condos can fetch $1 million. At the same time, Center City began a boom that continues today, with more than 100 new restaurants and dozens of loft projects that have brought in thousands of residents.

One of the biggest changes in Philadelphia has been in neighborhood attitudes toward facilities that serve the homeless. Initially, the reaction from neighborhoods was often vitriolic - Sister Mary spent years in court fighting for the right to open a center for the homeless that neighbors bitterly opposed. Today, that neighborhood is being gentrified.

"The neighborhood was run-down, and now houses are selling for $400,000," Sister Mary said.

She said the key to winning acceptance is making sure that the facilities are well-run and that any problems with neighbors are dealt with immediately.

The city makes a point of spreading public housing around Center City and is trying to integrate apartments for the homeless with mainstream housing. Projects tend to be small and to blend in seamlessly with adjacent buildings. Residents are asked to pay one-third of their income in rent.

Philadelphia officials routinely host visits from people dealing with the homeless in major cities - including Denver - all of them asking how people here turned things around.

"Twenty years ago, I don't think we believed we could move people off the streets and put them in apartments and give them services," said Hess, the program overseer.

"It took us a long time to figure this out. We had to learn there is a housing technology for everyone. It just takes political will and money," he said.

The key is to have programs geared to people in different circumstances, Hess said. Philadelphia has a large diversity of housing options, including small shelters designed for the mentally ill and apartments for the long-term homeless who have entered detox programs. Everyone who comes into the system is assigned a case worker who determines the problems that have caused them to become homeless and figures out what program would help the most.

"There is a path out of homelessness, but it's like walking through a forest; you need a guide," said Marcella Maguire, Philadelphia's director of initiatives for the chronically homeless.

"We don't just want someone to come off the street; we want them to recover. People are homeless for variable reasons. If they aren't served for their mental health or drug and alcohol problems, they'll fall back into it," Maguire said.

All this costs money, and Philadelphia has made a substantial financial commitment. The city of 1.5 million spends $17 million per year on homeless services. Philadelphia uses that money to get state and federal grants, creating a pool of $64 million. On any given day, Philadelphia provides some type of emergency shelter to an estimated 6,500 people.

While Philadelphia's system is expensive, officials such as Maguire say they believe they're actually saving the city money. They note that homeless people are frequently in and out of hospital emergency rooms, jail, detox centers and shelters. Maguire estimates there's been a 70 percent reduction in the use of emergency services by the homeless since Philadelphia got them off the streets.

"It costs a lot of money to support homeless people," she said. "We're trying to make the case this is cost-effective."

One sunny afternoon, Barnett visits a man who lived on Philadelphia's streets for 20 years and recently moved into his own place.

Keith Kirkland lives in a small, two-room apartment on a street called Spring Garden. His neighbors are mostly unaware that a man who slept on a grate for decades lives next door.

Outside Kirkland's second-story window, a cherry tree is in bloom. He proudly shows off his place to visitors. Barnett is amazed to see him, because he remembers talking to Kirkland countless times on the street and assumed he would never come inside. Kirkland is a soft- spoken man with a trim moustache, and in his tidy apartment it's easy to forget he is also a paranoid schizophrenic who became addicted to drugs and alcohol.

"I've been clean for nine months now," he said. "It's a miracle. This program helps you feel like a human being again. On the street, we felt like aliens; society didn't understand us. Now, we have social acceptability. We don't smell like we used to."

Kirkland said he is taking his medication and has joined Narcotics Anonymous. He even hopes to find a job soon.

Barnett suddenly stands up and hugs him, still astonished to see someone he had all but given up on.

"I'm so happy for you, man," he said.

Inside the apartment, Barnett struggles to control his emotions. But once he's outside, the tough-guy facade crumbles, and he quietly sobs.

"To see somebody in his place and doing so well who was out on the street for so long, it's just incredible," he said. "That's what keeps you going."