SF adopts "Care Not Cash" welfare reduction

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Okay, so after a bleeding heart supe judge nearly overturned the will of the voter, and a bunch of lawyers filed suit on behalf of some homeless women to temporarily hault it, San Francisco finally began the program of "Care Not Cash" yesterday. Basically what this means over the course of the rest of the year, more homeless people will be seeing their welfare checks drastically cut and will be offered shelter instead.

 

Too compassionate for it's own good, San Fran has been doling out checks to homeless on welfare that's some of the largest around. Instead of getting the homeless people using the money to get off the street and reduce the amount of them, the number of homeless in the city has exploded, as homeless from other cities have been making the trek to SF, as life under a box or a cart in San Francisco is a lot more financially lucrative than doing so in the surrounding cities.

 

"Care Not Cash" is supposed to be the first step in correcting this problem. Although the city will still be paying money per homeless person, the homeless will mostly be given an oppertunity to come out of the streets, instead of freely being handed hundreds of dollars to spend on whatever they desire. But will it work?

 

Care Not Cash hits streets today

S.F. to start offering homeless people shelter instead of money

 

It's been thrown out in court and revived again, demonized by some and longed for by others. And now today, two years after San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed the Care Not Cash initiative to slash welfare payments to the homeless in exchange for housing, the city's great experiment in transforming how it treats its most desperate citizens will finally take effect.

 

But most homeless people won't notice - at least at first.

 

The program is being phased in so slowly that, for most of the 2,500 homeless people getting welfare checks, there will be no change this week. Or even next month. But the change is genuine, and it marks the start of a new, although confusing, era for the city's homeless.It works like this:

 

Until today, homeless people on welfare have been getting monthly checks as big as $410 -- the highest in the state -- with the option of spending some or all of it on rental rooms for a few weeks a month.

 

Now, that option has been removed.

 

As of today, whenever city welfare officials have a shelter bed or a permanent room available, it will be offered to a homeless person. His or her monthly welfare check will be cut to as low as $59, whether he or she takes the room or not. But if the person takes it, the rent for the entire month will be paid by the city. The offer will be made only to people who have been on a long waiting list for housing, or during the semiannual sessions a homeless person has with the welfare office to determine how much his or her payments should be. As a result, some people will be able to keep the existing higher level of payment until Halloween. This all means the only homeless people being affected today are those signing up for welfare for the first time, those coming off waiting lists or those whose six-month reassessment time has come. That is only expected to amount to a couple of dozen people.

 

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who wrote Care Not Cash and rode its popularity into the mayor's office last winter, understands this all may be confusing.

 

But just to reassure himself of his plan's potential, in the past four months he has quietly visited shelters, logged himself into the homeless fingerprinting system to see how it works and inspected residential hotels getting ready to take in Care Not Cash recipients.

 

Now he says he is more certain than ever that the homeless will be better off.

 

"It's the beginning of change in San Francisco," Newsom said. "We expect it to go smoothly, but if we make mistakes, I will be the first to own up to them. And we will probably make mistakes.

 

"But we will try to do this with wisdom and compassion. And we will be working in a cooperative environment the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time here."

 

Indeed, the consensus of business interests, social service providers and city poverty-aid officials does seem to be stronger than at any time in recent memory, with dozens of erstwhile opponents uniting to help a city committee draft a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness.

 

But that doesn't mean skepticism has disappeared.

 

Allison Lum, a leader of the Coalition on Homelessness, still hates Care Not Cash, and she was hoping a lawsuit that successfully diluted it last year would be upheld by the state appeals court in San Francisco. When that court instead restored Care Not Cash to its full strength on Friday, she viewed it as a triumph of politics over compassion.

 

"This gives homeless people less money to live on and nowhere near enough housing to take them," she said. "It's stealing from them, really. It's an outrage, and the court just made it worse."

 

The coalition plans to protest the program at City Hall today at noon.

 

Slowly and surely, the city expects Care Not Cash to cut the homeless welfare rolls in half by the end of the year, to about 1,200, as recipients move indoors or leave the city. The cash being cut from the checks will be diverted to a special fund to create more housing and counseling services -- and next year, city officials hope that fund will grow to at least $10 million.

 

For Exhibit A on how bright the future might be, officials point to two rehabilitated old residential hotels opening today with a total of 154 rooms to take Care Not Cash recipients.

 

The McAllister Hotel near City Hall and the Graystone Hotel near Union Square are shining models of the latest in thinking among social welfare experts about how best to help the nation's homeless get off the streets: supportive housing. They are designed to be safe havens of clean rooms, with counselors on hand to help people with whatever drug, alcohol or mental problems pitched them into the street.

 

The approach already has met with great success in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago -- and even San Francisco.

 

The trouble is, there aren't enough of these hotels. Yet.

 

San Francisco has an estimated 8,600 to 15,000 homeless people, about 3, 000 of whom are "hard core" -- meaning they have a galaxy of mental, drug or other problems that keep them on the street. And right now, the city has only about 2,500 supportive housing rooms, between the 1,000 administered by the city and another 1,500 offered independently by nonprofits.

 

Trent Rhorer, Newsom's chief homelessness adviser, believes that will vastly improve.

 

He anticipates Care Not Cash will fund 939 new supportive housing units by year's end. Newsom also is proposing a multimillion-dollar bond for the November ballot to pay for supportive housing, and whatever chronic homelessness plan the 10-year committee drafts by summer will probably attract new federal supportive housing grants.

 

"Care Not Cash is only part of the solution," said Rhorer, executive director of the Department of Human Services, which oversees welfare. "We have to approach the problem from as many different angles as we can -- but the approach has to lead to housing first, with services, no matter what."

 

One of the main sticking points of Care Not Cash is that it is so confusing.

 

There are four categories of welfare -- single adults with no special conditions, people looking for work, the elderly and the disabled -- and exactly how they lose their cash is a riddle few outside the welfare offices seem to be able to answer, despite many citywide seminars all winter to explain it.

 

"Nobody really knows how this will shake out," said Swords to Plowshares official Kym Valadez, who chairs the citywide Homeless Service Providers Network. "We can all have hopes, but we'll just have to see what happens."

 

Nobody could be more eager to find out what's ahead than the homeless. And many can't wait to get their hands on a room key.

 

"I'll take one of those rooms in a hot second," Pete Jensen, 43, said at the welfare office last week.

 

Jensen, whose blond goatee was as tidy as his brown T-shirt and slacks, has been sleeping at a church shelter for two months, ever since he got medication for his bipolar and manic depressive mental illnesses. He has been getting the full $410 monthly welfare check given to homeless people looking for work, and even though he has four months to go before being re-evaluated under Care Not Cash, he said he would leap the line if he could.

 

"Man, they have counselors right there in the building, it's a clean place to live -- let me in, right now," he said.

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...MNG386FDDH1.DTL

 

So, is this a better welfare system? My own opinion is it won't get homeless people on their feet by itself, but hopefully it'll keep the tide of out-of-city hobos from rushing in.

[Guest Cerebus]

You can't avoid homeless people when you go to San Fran they're EVERYWHERE. My uncle, who lives in SF, told me he used to hand out job phamplets and applications instead of money and nearly got beat up for it by one guy.

[Highland 0]

No, it's a poorly thought out system. Even if you have free housing, you cannot live off of $59 a month, unless you enjoy a diet consisting only of ramen noodles.

[MrRant 0]

Housing and $59 is generous IMO. They can get a job you know if they want to eat more than Ramen and hot dogs.

[Jobber of the Week 0]

No, it's a poorly thought out system. Even if you have free housing, you cannot live off of $59 a month, unless you enjoy a diet consisting only of ramen noodles.

Keep in mind $59 is the low end.

[Highland 0]

No, it's a poorly thought out system. Even if you have free housing, you cannot live off of $59 a month, unless you enjoy a diet consisting only of ramen noodles.

Keep in mind $59 is the low end.

Ah, I thought it was an average or flat rate. While I tihink $60 per month is ridiculously low, that $400 dollar a month figure just boggles my mind. I could live off of that, and I'm certainly not homeless.

Edited May 5, 2004 by Naibus

[Guest MikeSC]

No, it's a poorly thought out system. Even if you have free housing, you cannot live off of $59 a month, unless you enjoy a diet consisting only of ramen noodles.

Since the goal is to get them OFF welfare, being "not enough" to live on is the best policy.

-=Mike

[Guest Anglesault]

No, it's a poorly thought out system. Even if you have free housing, you cannot live off of $59 a month, unless you enjoy a diet consisting only of ramen noodles.

I live off Ramen and I have plenty of money.

[Ced 0]

If you haven't lived off of eating Top Ramen or a week or four, either you're really well off or you've been spoiled.

 

No, it's a poorly thought out system. Even if you have free housing, you cannot live off of $59 a month, unless you enjoy a diet consisting only of ramen noodles.

Since the goal is to get them OFF welfare, being "not enough" to live on is the best policy.

-=Mike

I agree with TheMikeSC here. The goal should be to help the homeless on their way back to becoming effective members of society and not to allow them, to put it bluntly, freeload. If you give too much welfare, there is no incentive for a homeless person to try to find opportunies to become self-sufficient. You also get San Francisco's dilemma of more homeless people coming to your city to take advantage of your generosity.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

Seeing as though it seems SF's main problem was that homeless people were coming to SF for the big money, that will obviously stop once theres no big money to be had. The plan will work for SF, but the homeless people who would have gone to SF will just find somewhere else to go so really its only solving 1 city's problem which is great if you live in SF.

 

And Im sure that cities like NY are handling the homeless problem better now. Are they still putting the homeless people on the docked cruise ship in NY (if they ever actually did that, I remember there was talk of it but I don't know whether it was actually implemented or not)?

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Heartless bastards.

 

Those shelters better have cable TV or Internet access.

 

And how does one collect welfare while homeless? If that were the case couldn't anyone not shower for a few days and walk up to collect?...

[Jobber of the Week 0]

And how does one collect welfare while homeless? If that were the case couldn't anyone not shower for a few days and walk up to collect?...

I don't know, but I imagine it's probably somehow checked against taxes?

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Or lack thereof, perhaps?

 

I guess the homeless could always put down what bridge/dumpster they live under, or put down the current location of the box they are living out of...

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

I'm glad I'm not the guy who cleans those rooms.

[Guest Crazy Dan]

Being that I have visited SF on numerous occasions (it still is one of the coolest cities on the West Coast) The homeless situation is quite sad. And you get bugged almost none stop when you make your way out of the BART stations. If I have a dollar, I usually will give it to one of the vendors if the "newspapers" they sell, just to leave me alone. But sometimes I just ignore them, becuase I don't have anything on me. As for the homeless themselves, I think their problem is that many are mentally disturbed. They aren't ever going to be able to live any normal life becuase most of them are quite crazy, and are in their own little world. My Dad, who is a very smart man, says that when Reagan closed the asslym's down, guess where the patients ended up. That is right, the streets. As sad as that may be.

 

I don't know what solution one can do for this. Now some homeless could actually get a job, but most if you notice, will be the ones who have conversations with themselves, or with Harvey, or they talk in their own language. And it is always sad when you see the churches of SF have numerous homeless people sleeping on theie steps. I know that many say :"well they should just get a job". And I agree, but when you are completely insane, that is going to be a problem. But, I still love SF, and have no problem going there, most of the homeless will not do anything drastic to you. You just be wise to stay in groups and stick to the busy streets. But I have walked down 16th and Mission (a fairly rough area in SF) before, and not gotten bothered.

 

But I wish I had a solution, but I don't. And being that a Rudy Guilianni-type mayor being elected in SF has about as much chance as a Democrat actually carrying a Southern State (unless the candidate is from that state). So it is just going to be a grim reality. But for all of you who might enjoy something funny, if you happen to visit the Pier 39/Fisherman's Wharf area, there is a homeless man who will sit on the street, hold a big brush, and scare people as they walk by. Pretty funny when someone gets scarred by this man. I guess that is what comes with territory. But I still love SF, and highly recommend anyone who has not seen it before, to. So much to do, and the bars rock. But you do deal with the homeless, which is my main negative I can say, and the fact that you can't make a left turn to save your life.

[Guest Anglesault]

, or put down the current location of the box they are living out of...

What if it blows down the street?

[Some Guy 0]

Being that I have visited SF on numerous occasions (it still is one of the coolest cities on the West Coast) The homeless situation is quite sad. And you get bugged almost none stop when you make your way out of the BART stations. If I have a dollar, I usually will give it to one of the vendors if the "newspapers" they sell, just to leave me alone. But sometimes I just ignore them, becuase I don't have anything on me. As for the homeless themselves, I think their problem is that many are mentally disturbed. They aren't ever going to be able to live any normal life becuase most of them are quite crazy, and are in their own little world. My Dad, who is a very smart man, says that when Reagan closed the asslym's down, guess where the patients ended up. That is right, the streets. As sad as that may be.

 

I don't know what solution one can do for this. Now some homeless could actually get a job, but most if you notice, will be the ones who have conversations with themselves, or with Harvey, or they talk in their own language. And it is always sad when you see the churches of SF have numerous homeless people sleeping on theie steps. I know that many say :"well they should just get a job". And I agree, but when you are completely insane, that is going to be a problem. But, I still love SF, and have no problem going there, most of the homeless will not do anything drastic to you. You just be wise to stay in groups and stick to the busy streets. But I have walked down 16th and Mission (a fairly rough area in SF) before, and not gotten bothered.

 

But I wish I had a solution, but I don't. And being that a Rudy Guilianni-type mayor being elected in SF has about as much chance as a Democrat actually carrying a Southern State (unless the candidate is from that state). So it is just going to be a grim reality. But for all of you who might enjoy something funny, if you happen to visit the Pier 39/Fisherman's Wharf area, there is a homeless man who will sit on the street, hold a big brush, and scare people as they walk by. Pretty funny when someone gets scarred by this man. I guess that is what comes with territory. But I still love SF, and highly recommend anyone who has not seen it before, to. So much to do, and the bars rock. But you do deal with the homeless, which is my main negative I can say, and the fact that you can't make a left turn to save your life.

Wrong Pres, it was Carter who let them out. What they should have done was just fix the places up and keep the lonnies in there, but that wasn't compasionate enough for the libs, so they let them live on the street instead. You are corect in that the vast majority of bums are crazy, achoholics, drug adicts, or any combonation of the three. There are very few of these "invisible homeless" or homeless families (I have never heard of a husband, wife, and child who were homeless) that the left loves to drone on about.

[Guest Crazy Dan]

My bad on the President. I was way too young when this all went down, and so I think it was my Dad who made mention of Reagan (My Dad is conservative politically) who he said cut programs and that is the reason many homeless are insane. By no means was I trying to flame Reagan or anything like that, I was trying to point out that the action was a cause of some of the homeless people. So throw another reason for Carter not being a good president, I guess.

 

But you know, more than likely there were comittees who investigated and then reported to Carter about cutting the institutions, so good chance that both sides of the spectrum had a hand in this decision, which was not a good one in the long run, so to blame only Liberals, well they should take blame, but I am pretty some Conservatives was also favoring the cuts as well. Man, the 70's were a F'd up decade. I am so glad I was too young to know what was going on.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

My bad on the President. I was way too young when this all went down, and so I think it was my Dad who made mention of Reagan (My Dad is conservative politically) who he said cut programs and that is the reason many homeless are insane. By no means was I trying to flame Reagan or anything like that, I was trying to point out that the action was a cause of some of the homeless people. So throw another reason for Carter not being a good president, I guess.

Saying you're sorry and admitting when you're wrong?

 

Son, you're in the wrong folder...