Things were going just fine for Tyrone and Sherri Coleman in the summer of 1988. They were settled in their own apartment, their baby boy was healthy, Tyrone was working, and Sheri was pregnant. Homelessness? They knew as much about that as most Americans. "We watched the homeless on TV," Sherri said. She never imagined that her new baby's first home would be a shelter.
The trouble began with a car accident. The injuries left Tyrone unable to work at the print shop for a few months. Soon they couldn't pay the rent. One day an eviction crew kicked them out and set all their belongings on the sidewalk, where passersby quickly hauled away everything the Colemans owned.
Within weeks, the family was split up. Tyrone was sleeping on a friend's couch, and Sherri was living in a shelter with Tyrone Jr. She wasn't working, having quit her job with the federal government in order to raise her growing family.
Sounds desperate, doesn't it? Guess what: Within four months, the Coleman family was back in a home of their own, a six - room, $800 - a - month apartment in Washington, D.C. Tyrone was working at a better job than he had before, and Sherri was preparing to work for the government again.
With more and more homeless people crowding America's cities and towns - sleeping on sidewalks, begging for change, costing taxpayers millions of dollars for shelters - the Colemans stand out. They are part of a program that, unlike traditional efforts to help the homeless, actually gets people out of shelters and into homes of their own.
That program and others like it around the country are demonstrating that we can indeed tackle the homeless crisis, which has grown into one of the tragic legacies of the 1980s. To succeed, however, we must change our attitude and our approach.
For most of the last decade America grappled with an ever-increasing homeless population with wonderful insertions and horrible results. We have more homeless people now than ever, even though the federal and local governments are spending more than ever to help them. The District of Columbia spent about $9 million on homeless services in 1985; in 1989, it spent about $30 million.
This hemorrhage from the public coffers reflects more than a rise in homelessness; it reflects a national shortsightedness about how to deal with the phenomenon. For too long, government, social service organizations, and the media have treated homelessness as a short-term dilemma. We thought it was enough to give people soup and a bed for the night until the economy picked up and got everyone back on their feet.
David Whitman, and editor at U.S. News & World Report, told a Heritage Foundation conference on homelessness in December 1988:
When the homelessness implosion occurred in the early 1980s, many commentators thought that it was a reflection of the 1982 and 1983 recession; that it was temporary thing caused by a downturn in the economy. We now know that this is not true. The number of homeless, in fact, has grown substantially while the nation has undergone a period of economic recovery. But the
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