BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A ROOM?

Social engineers have pushed the poor onto the streets of America's cities.

Ambrose Evans Pritchard reports Washington TONIGHT there are 22 homeless women at the Rainbow Shelter in Rockville, Mary- land. It is rather Crowded because of the cold weather, but not full. There are cubicles along the walls where the regulars have a bed and a chair, a sort of room of their own, while the newcomers sleep in cots in the middle of the hall. The atmos- phere is peaceful, like a hospital ward.

The low murmur of voices is punctuated from time to time by yelkt of excitement from the far corner, near the kitchen, where three black girls are watching bas- ketball on television. One of them has just taken her clothes out of the drying machine and is ironing cheerfully as she watches the game. She needs to look respectable, she explains, because of her full-time job as a cleaner at the Marriot Hotel, for which she gets $5.50 a hour and comprehensive health insurance. She had a flat lined up but it fell through because her room-mate could not come up with the money for the security deposit.

`How about you, Jackie?' she says, turning to a healthy woman, in neat denim jeans, sitting on the sofa. 'You want to share a place?'

`Got no credit,' replies Jackie evasively. She has other plans. With her skills as a secretary, she'll find a job by the end of the week, she says in a matter-of-fact tone, and she'll get herself straightened out. Jackie is not a regular. She only moved into the shelter yesterday after breaking up with her boyfriend. 'He's an older man, a lot older, that's the thing,' she confided. 'I want to go out partying with friends in GeorgetoWn, and he expects me to stay at home all the time doing nothing.' The third woman, Ethel, sits beside me in a Nigerian nightdress, filing her bright red fingernails. She is coquettish, and quite charming. Last September she began a full-time job at a fast food chain, Roy Rogers, on $4.75 an hour, but has con- tinued living at Rainbow, off the charity of the Presbyterian Church and the city gov- ernment, in order to save up enough money to rent a flat with her new man, who meanwhile either stays with friends or sleeps in his car outside the shelter. Ethel says she pines for her two small children. She seems to have abandoned them after a family quarrel, leaving them with her mother and a troop of noisy relatives in overcrowded quarters in Washington. 'It's my fault, I know, I should never have done it,' she mutters.

These three women form a group apart. They laugh when a shaven-headed lunatic rushes over and shrieks: 'Are you the British reporter? You tell Mr Sherlock Holmes that I've got his birth certificate.' She then returns to the dinner table and quietly eats her meal of chilli con came, fruit salad, and blueberry muffins, pre- pared by the volunteers who run the shelter. About a dozen other women are sitting at the table, each with a mug of tea or decaffeinated coffee. A few stare at their plates, hostile and withdrawn. But most sit chatting in groups, a mixture of races and ages, and welcome me when I go over to join them. The shelter is closed during the day. In rain, snow, or frost, everybody has to be out by seven a.m. For those who do not have jobs, usually the majority, there are three main ways of getting through the morning. They can go to the heated foyer of the courthouse, which opens early; they can go to the library; or they can buy a bus pass for $1 and go round and round in circles for hours. 'It's like being incarcer- ated. You lose track of the days, 'cause every day, seven days a week, it's the same,' says Cat, a black woman with a soft sweet voice, who left her husband after he beat her repeatedly. 'The longer you stay, the worse it gets. You lose your dignity; your thinking starts changing; before you know it you get so far into it you can't get out again.'

Some of them try to look for work, but the days are gone when you can simply turn up and get a job. The modern employment agency takes your phone number and calls you back. 'When you say you don't have a number, you're instantly suspect, there's something wrong with you,' says Elliot Liebow, an anthropologist who has spent four years studying the women at Rainbow. 'After all, you may even be homeless.' The Methodist Church recently opened an afternoon shelter near- by where they take telephone messages during office hours, but for months the staff apparently insisted on answering the phone with a chirpy, 'Methodist day shel- ter for homeless women'.

An old lady named Betty, with white hair and bifocal glasses, sits at the head of the table, listening politely to a sermon by a younger woman, who has a Bible in front of her, open at the beginning of St Mark's Gospel. Betty used to be a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in South Dakota before coming to Washington during the war to work for the Navy. Now she is retired and lives off a modest pension. She put her life savings and her credit into the bankrupt business of her son, a depressive and a drug addict. By last autumn she was three months behind with the rent for her bed-sit, so the landlord had her possessions thrown out onto Washington's busy 16th Street. 'They could have been a little more helpful,' she said, sardonically. Being old- fashioned, however, she insists on paying off the arrears first, then looking for a new bed-sit. Meanwhile she spends her days at the library or visiting art galleries. In December she even slipped into a confer- ence on the homeless at the Heritage Foundation, to find out about herself.

A handsome woman of about 40, with nordic features, comes over to join us at the table. Her hair is tied up in a bun and she is dressed neatly in a blue ski jacket.

She is called Emma. By all accounts she has a terrific wardrobe which she keeps in storage bins, along with her furniture and family heirlooms, at the cost of $163 a month. Last time we met she could not meet the next payment and was in a neurotic state, too 'busy' to sit still and talk. 'Storage is such a central part of their lives,' says Mr Liebow. 'You hold on to everything you've got because you know that one day you'll have a home of your own again. When you give up your belong- ings, your pots and pans, it's a point of no return.'

Somehow Emma managed to come up with a $400 refund from a swimming club she used to belong to and this temporary reprieve seems to have restored her peace of mind. Tonight she is friendly, in a tortured sort of way, and even asks me to stay for a chat in the smoking corridor after the lights go out at 10 p.m. in the dormi- tory.

Elizabeth comes over and sits down at the other end of the table. She is a tall strong woman in terylene slacks, who has been working at Zayres department store for the last two weeks as a sorting clerk.

She was sharing a house with two friends but they took off, leaving her with the entire month's rent of $600, so she came to the shelter. She seems a perfect candidate for rehabilitation, practical and lucid, until I discover that she has been in and out of Rainbow for years. The stress gnaws at her, apparently, and she loses control at work.

There are several women like Emma and Elizabeth in the shelter who cannot hold down jobs because they are unreliable, obstreperous, or have compulsive obses- sive disorders. They are not mad in any useful sense of the word, but nor can they be lumped together as victims of economic injustice. `Macro-economic policy is not going to help these people,' says Liebow.

`The economy's booming. Look down the road, they're paying $6.50 an hour at Dart (Drugs) for unskilled workers — and it still doesn't make any difference.' They are casualties of a shiftless culture without community, where people are forever moving on, to new cities, new friends, and new spouses, and where the clan or the family fails to look after its own.

Then there are the insane. The most psychotic tend to avoid the shelters. They live on the streets or in abandoned build- ings. You see them on Capitol Hill, a block from the Congress, going through the rubbish bins looking for food, or curled up in filthy rags talking to invisible voices. `Their piled bags and belongings [are] cairns to departed psychiatric shibboleths,' writes Fuller Torrey in his book, Nowhere To Go, a damning account of America's policy of `deinstitutionalisation' over the last 30 years. In 1955 there were 550,000 patients in mental hospitals. Today there are less than 120,000.

It began after the war as a reaction to a series of exposés of asylums, one writer describing a ward of over 200 naked patients sitting huddled together in their own excrement. At first the policy was restricted to discharging patients well enough to leave, while improving asylums for the rest. Then it fell prey to quackery. The psychiatric profession, still in the long shadow of Freud, pushed the fashionable line that mental illness was not clinical, but rather the result of upbringing or social injustices. In 1961 Thomas Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness in which he claimed that there was no such thing as madness, that it was a notion created by the power structure as a tool of social control. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came out a year later. Opinion turned against asylums altogether and the Ken- nedy administration began the massive undertaking of emptying them. Over the next 25 years hundreds of thousands of mentally ill were taken to an address vaguely linked to them and dumped on the doorstep, free at last to compete as equals in the open market of capitalism.

They did not fare well. Many had dis- eases that could be treated with medication if somebody kept an eye on them to make sure they took their pills, even if it was only the desk clerk at a hostel. But there were too few 'half-way houses' to accommodate the deluge. Only half of the Community Mental Health Centres that were supposed to provide aftercare were ever built. They were redundant anyway, fussing over the neurosis of the worried well instead of attending to the psychosis of the truculent insane. And still convinced that schi- zophrenia was a social illness linked to the stress of ghetto life, they embarked on preventive psychiatry, which meant be- coming activists in the war on povertY- Like the priests of liberation theology these psychiatrists abandoned their charges to go and play politics.

So bedlam moved to the streets, making up about half of America's homeless. The judiciary keeps it there. In the 1972 case of Lessard v. Schmidt, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, a Wisconsin court ruled that the insane can only be confined if it is proven that they are a danger to themselves or other people. Such proof is rare. The Reagan administration, there- fore, could not have reversed the policy until it had secured a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which only hap- pened in 1988. Yet blame for the disaster of `deinstitutionalisation', the cruellest of all the human experiments conducted by America's liberal intelligentsia, has not fallen on its authors but has somehow, by media metamorphosis, fallen on Ronald Reagan in the form of the scandal of the homeless.

But there are not three million home- less, the figure repeated endlessly by Michael Dukakis during the presidential campaign. To my knowledge he was never upbraided by the press for telling this whopper. Indeed it was picked up and peddled by the press itself. The figure was invented by the fevered prophet Mitch Snyder, a former advertising executive who never quite lost the voice of his old trade. A more experienced counter, Pro- fessor Peter Rossi, head of the Social and Demographic Research Institute at Amherst, put together a team of 40 inter- viewers in the winter of 1985-86 and launched a blitzkrieg in Chicago to deter- mine, once and for all, the scale of the problem. He concluded that there were about 2,200 homeless on any one night in Chicago, of whom 55 per cent were in shelters. Mitch Synder called the study, `just sloppy and stupid work. . . almost comical if it wasn't so serious'. He sticks by his uncounted estimate for Chicago of 25,000, 12 times as high. Rossi's study suggests that the much maligned Department of. Housing and Urban Development may in fact have over-estimated with its total of 250,000 to 350,000 homeless for the whole country. Rossi also discovered that the Chicago homeless have a higher rate of graduation from high school than the general public, and that four out of five have been in institutions of one kind or another: pris- ons, asylums, or drug and alcohol clinics. They are troubled individuals, not an economic underclass.

Liberals still cling to the economic theory of vagrancy. First they blamed Unemployment, until it fell to three per cent in several states without making a dent in the homeless numbers. Then they fingered poverty. (that, famous moving target), saying the bottom tier of the Working class was slipping into indigence as Atherica moved to a service economy. But now America is enjoying an industrial boom, so they rely more and more on a mechanical argument about a housing shortage, supposedly caused by the Reagan cuts in public housing. The snag is that the burst of housing authorised by Jimmy Carter took a while to build and only became available to the public be- tween 1981 and 1984, when Reagan was in office.

There is a housing shortage in several cities and it has to do with rent control, which chokes off the supply of private housing, raises rent for newcomers, and discriminates against the young. Cities like Washington, New York, and San Francis- co, with strict rent control and nightmare regulatidns (often used by corrupt officials to extract bribes from landlords), have homeless rates several . times higher than Cleveland or Philadelphia. Needless to say, Washington and New York are also strongholds of the opinion elite.

Washington is a case study in how to create homelessness. In 1984 a 'right to shelter' referendum was passed manditing that the city give shelter to anybody who asks for it. Homeless families are now lodged indefinitely in motels like the Capit- al City Inn, with televisions and air con- ditioning, at the cost of $3,000 a month to the taxpayer. Once there they jump to the head of the queue for subsidised public housing. Since 1984 the number of home- less families in Washington has increased by 600 per cent. City officials suspect that the law is itself causing the increase by giving an outlet to families that are dou- bled up in overcrowded houses. In other words, some of the DC homeless are probably refugees from conditions that are routine for the vast majority of people in the Soviet Union.

The homeless are unclassifiable. All kinds of people stay in shelters, for all kinds of reasons. One woman comes to Rainbow on Saturdays because she works as a live-in housekeeper and her employer throws her out at weekends. Another works late nearby and uses the shelter as a pied-a-terre when she misses. the last bus. A third has an apartment but comes occasionally be- cause she is lonely. For a few, Rainbow is a congenial alternative when things are going badly at home, or it is a way of saving money. For the mentally ill it has become the 'half-way house' that was never built. For the poor it is the old lodging hostel that was knocked down to make way for urban renewal. And for the penniless it is what keeps them from the abyss. They are all mixed up together, scrambling the statis- tics, and defying the social engineers with their incorrigible idiosyncrasies.