HUMBUG ABOUT HOMELESSNESS

Iwouldn't care to predict the practical outcome of tomorrow's march to demand more federal help for the homeless. It's too hard to know who in the Bush administration will be listening and what, given the government's strained budget and the president's anti-tax-increase obstinacy, their response might be.

But it does seem clear that homelessness has reached scandalous proportions, and the pressure on the low-income renters in such housing-tight markets as Washington threatens to make it worse.

"Housing Now!" The coalition of groups sponsoring the march may not have a detailed strategy for the war on homelessness, but who can question insistence that a federal effort to increase the supply of low-cost housing must be a major part of the attack?

Well, John Scanlon can. Scanlon, a policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, acknowledges the good intentions of the marchers but sees their strategy as fatally flawed.

If their demands are met, he says in a paper released this week, "the ironic result will be a tragic defeat for homeless Americans. The reason is that the homeless problem is not due to a lack of housing."

He's as serious as a cold night on a steam grate. Whether his conclusion makes any sense is another matter.

In one sense, of course, there is no lack of housing. Thousands of Americans own two or more homes, and thousands of housing units -- not all of them boarded-up buildings in the inner cities -- are vacant. But the existence of this housing "surplus" does not mean that there is plenty of housing that the homeless can afford. Is Scanlon arguing that we should speak not of a lack of housing but of a lack of affordable housing?

No, he's talking about something else entirely.

"A massive new program of subsidized housing would do nothing to help the majority of the homeless, because it would ignore the disabilities preventing the homeless from taking advantage of existing forms of housing assistance. It also would do little to aid those few among the homeless who do owe their condition to economic factors."

For Scanlon, the homeless are overwhelmingly mental patients prematurely released, alcohol and drug abusers, people who do not avail themselves of available help and victims of rent control.

I find it hard to take him seriously.

There is no doubt that some of America's homeless are the counterparts of the mentally ill who can be found sleeping on cathedral steps, in parks and under bridges the world over. It is also true that the misguided policy of releasing mental patients to seek outpatient care at neighborhood clinics added to the problem.

But it's clear that the ranks of the homeless have been swelled in recent years by people -- including families and working adults -- whose basic flaw is the lack of money to pay for housing.

The Economic Policy Institute has done a masterful job of demolishing the supposed link, dear to the heart of conservatives, between homelessness and rent control. As for the rest of Scanlon's notions, a glance at the survey of Washington homeless undertaken by the University of the District of Columbia's Kathleen H. Dockett should help.

According to that two-year study, 75 percent of the District's homeless had no severe psychiatric distress, and 86 percent reported no history of psychiatric hospitalization.

Drug and alcohol abuse were frequent problems, and the city's homeless had a startlingly low rate of participation in public entitlement programs. But lack of money for housing was the overwhelming factor in their plight.

"Economic problems and interpersonal conflicts were most often cited by respondents as the reasons they became homeless," according to a UDC summary, "and the lack of economic resources helps keep them on the street. ... Lack of money and the lack of access to facilities needed to meet basic needs are the leading causes of stressful living on the streets."

Scanlon, who has studied government reports, says the biggest gainers from the "Housing Now!" demand for more affordable housing would be "construction companies and their employees."

Dockett, who has studied the homeless themselves, reaches another conclusion:

"Long-range solutions to the problems of homelessness involve increasing the supply and accessibility of low-cost permanent housing. Diverting funds into bigger and better shelters, while an essential emergency service, should not be viewed as a substitute for the development of permanent housing."

Scanlon, incredibly, says such help would only make things worse.

Perhaps the most charitable description of Scanlon's paper is the one he applies to the homeless whose plight he claims to care about. I'd call this Heritage Foundation backgrounder a premature release.

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