NO PLACE LIKE HOME
May 20, 1992

Homeless is like the government wanting you locked up

And the people in America do not like you.

They look at you and say Beast!

I wish the people would help the homeless

And stop their talking.

—FRANK S. RICE,
the Rio Times

The building is beautiful, white and beige and oak, the colors of yuppies. The rehab of the Rio came in seven-hundred-thousand dollars under budget, two months ahead of schedule. The tenants say they will not mess it up, no, no, no. “When you don’t have a place and you get a good place, the last thing you want to do is lose it,” said one man who slept in shelters for seven years—seven years during which you might have gotten married, or lost a loved one, or struck it rich, but all this guy did was live on the streets.

Mayor David Dinkins has announced that he will study parts of the study he commissioned from a commission on the homeless, the newest in a long line of studies.

One study, done in 1981, was called “Private Lives, Public Spaces.” It was researched by Ellen Baxter, who now runs the nonprofit company that has brought us the Rio and four other buildings that provide permanent housing for the homeless in Washington Heights.

Another study, done in 1987, was called “A Shelter Is Not a Home” and was produced by the Manhattan Borough president, David Dinkins, who now runs the city of New York. At the time, the Koch administration said it would study Mr. Dinkins’s study, which must have taught Mr. Dinkins something.

Robert Hayes, one of the founding fathers of the movement to help the homeless, once told me there were three answers to the problem: housing, housing, housing. It was an overly simplistic answer, and it was essentially correct.

Despite our obsessions with pathology and addiction, Ms. Baxter has renovated one apartment building after another and filled them with people. At the Rio, what was once a burnt-out eyesore is now, with its curving façade and bright lobby, the handsomest building on the block; what were once armory transients with dirt etched in the creases of hands and face are now tenants. The building needed people; the people needed a home. The city provided the rehab money; Columbia University provides social service support.

Some of the tenants need to spend time in drug treatment and some go to Alcoholics Anonymous and some of them lapse into pretty pronounced fugue states from time to time. So what? How would you behave if you’d lived on the streets for seven years? What is better: To leave them out there while we lament the emptying of the mental hospitals and the demise of jobs? Or to provide a roof over their heads and then get them psychiatric care and job training?

What is better: To spend nearly $20,000 each year to have them sleep on cots at night and wander the streets by day? Or to make a onetime investment of $38,000 a unit, as they did in the single rooms with kitchens and baths in the Rio, for permanent homes for people who will pay rent from their future wages or from entitlement benefits?

Years ago I became cynical enough to envision a game plan in which politicians, tussling over government stuff like demonstration projects and agency jurisdiction and commission studies, ignored this problem until it went away.

And, in a sense, it has. We have become so accustomed to people sleeping on sidewalks and in subway stations that recumbent bodies have become small landmarks in our neighborhoods. Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, says she was stunned, talking to students, at their assumption that people always had and always would be living on the streets. My children call by pet names—“the man with the cup,” “the lady with the falling-down pants”—the homeless people around their school.

And when a problem becomes that rooted in our everyday perceptions, it is understood to be without solution. Nonprofit groups like the one that renovated the Rio prove that this is not so. The cots in the armory are poison; drug programs and job training are icing. A place to shut the door, to sleep without one eye open, to be warm, to be safe—that’s the cake. There’s no place like home. You didn’t need a study to figure that out, did you?