nationally acclaimed 1989 homeless plan, “Beyond Shelter,” written by Robert Prentice (one of the formulators of the consensus proposal), who was hired by Mayor Agnos to serve as the city’s homeless coordinator. President Bill Clinton’s homeless plan, as set forth in 1994 by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) undersecretary and current New York governor Andrew Cuomo, was essentially a redrafting of “Beyond Shelter.”
The Coalition’s proactive approach proved so successful an example of tactical activism that many of the plan’s authors, including me, became its implementers. I met with Agnos’s new social services chief, Julia Lopez, to urge the adoption of a modified payment program that would enable General Assistance recipients to obtain permanent housing at below-market rates. Based on discussions with hotel operators, I believed they would agree to lower rents and allow welfare recipients to become permanent tenants if the risk of eviction for nonpayment of rent could be reduced. The modified payment plan lowered this risk by having tenants voluntarily agree to have their rent deducted from their welfare checks.
Lopez told me such a program sounded great but that it would succeed only if the Tenderloin Housing Clinic ran it. We had never sought to run homeless programs, but I had spent years fighting the city’s practice of transforming single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels into temporary lodging for poor people. We wanted to restore SROs to their historic status as homes for elderly, disabled, and low-income people and, not wanting to lose the opportunity to achieve this goal, we became a city-funded housing provider. As anticipated, landlords lowered rents so they could attract the formerly homeless tenants we could supply. The program was so successful that SRO rents fell significantly lower than they had been a decade earlier.
Agnos understood that homelessness was fundamentally a housing problem. But the city’s business and real estate community never liked Agnos, and storm clouds were brewing. On May 29, 1989, the San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page story in which business leaders denounced Mayor Agnos for allowing camping in the park outside City Hall. In what many believed was the greatest political error of his term, Agnos had decided to allow camping in this park until his programs creating alternative sources of housing were in place. As public anger over “Camp Agnos” grew, the mayor decided in July 1990 to cut his losses and sweep the park of campers. The purge became a national media story, as reporters found interest in a self-described “progressive” mayor’s cracking down on the homeless.
Because many of the campers had sought the now-independent Coalition on Homelessness’s assistance to prevent the sweep, Coalition staff workers entered the national debate in opposition to Agnos’s action, arguing that the mayor had caved in to political pressure and swept the park before his programs had become operational. The Coalition was correct about Agnos but failed to appreciate that his tolerance of camping had caused him serious political harm. The public never understood the rationale for allowing camping, and continuing the policy had become politically untenable. In their anger over Agnos’s betrayal, the activists rushed to defend the campers without appreciating the risk that their fight for more low-cost housing and mental health services would be reduced to a dispute over the right to camp in a public park.
The Coalition’s full-fledged attack on Agnos’s action was an entirely defensive response on behalf of people whom the public saw as voluntarily homeless. The residents of Camp Agnos typically wore backpacks and had chosen to sleep outdoors rather than pay rent in residential hotels. The Clinic’s outreach staff surveyed most of the campers and found that the majority received enough public assistance to pay rent if they so chose. In the public mind, people should be homeless only if they could not afford housing. Now the city’s leading homeless advocacy group was arguing that people who could afford housing had the right to forgo this option and instead live under the stars outside City Hall until temporary shelter or permanent housing was available to everyone. The public and media rejected, even ridiculed, this notion; accustomed to viewing homeless people as victims of hard luck, they could not accept the idea that anyone should reject shelter.
Most believed that Agnos could fulfill his responsibility to the campers by ensuring that each received a shelter bed or hotel room. The Coalition countered by urging sympathizers to “storm the park” so there would be more park dwellers than Agnos could immediately shelter. This strategy, a sudden, defensive response, understandably backfired. The media, though long sympathetic to homeless activists, interpreted this move as a blatant attempt to inflate the number of homeless denizens of Camp Agnos. The activists were even seen as interfering with the government’s effort to put a roof over people’s heads.
Agnos’s park sweep brought national attention unprecedented for a city homeless policy. From the New York Times to the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, national observers were fascinated by this action, taken by a mayor viewed as one of the nation’s most progressive. The publicity transformed San Francisco’s public debate about homelessness and led to the emergence of an entirely new model in cities across the United States. The model, honed by ambitious politicians and their corporate and media allies, creates symmetry between repressive political agendas and homeless advocacy groups: a mayor calls for a crackdown on “aggressive panhandling” and public camping; homeless advocates object on civil-liberties grounds.
When Agnos sought reelection in 1991, he faced a runoff against a former police chief, Frank Jordan. Jordan attacked Agnos’s “social worker” approach to homelessness and highlighted his own ability to get tough on individual homeless people by suggesting they be sent to work camps outside the city. Agnos got little political credit for providing thousands of housing units to the formerly homeless, and was instead condemned for allegedly allowing the homeless problem to get out of control. His defeat sent a powerful message to future San Francisco mayors: it’s fine to house homeless people, but voters define success by stopping public camping and related “problem street behavior.” Agnos laid the groundwork for the “housing first” approach to homelessness, which remains a national model, but some in San Francisco still believe he was a disaster in dealing with homelessness.
A Lost Opportunity
The 1990s proved an enormous lost opportunity for addressing homelessness. Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 brought a Democrat to the White House for the first time since the homeless crisis had begun. The nation soon had a booming economy that could have built all the low-income housing needed, yet the public debate about homelessness had already shifted. Emotional battles were fought, not over the nation’s affordable-housing shortage, but over the right to camp in parks and panhandle on city sidewalks. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani won praise for reducing visible homelessness in his city, even though this “reduction” was achieved not by housing homeless people but by physically removing them from the areas of Manhattan frequented by tourists. San Francisco residents and politicians returned from Giuliani’s city marveling at the reduction in homeless people and wondering why they could not do the same. People compared San Francisco’s “failed” strategy with that of New York City’s “successful” one, as the criterion was not housing homeless people but getting them out of sight. Although Giuliani acknowledged upon leaving office in 2001 that New York City’s homeless numbers had risen during his eight-year tenure—despite great economic growth—his punitive methods became a “model” for other urban politicians.
By the 1990s, media sympathy for homeless persons had greatly declined. Media coverage of the homeless went from stories on recently unemployed middle-aged men to sound bites of long-haired, able-bodied young people confessing that they lie about being veterans so they can make more money panhandling. Panhandlers are no longer people trying to compensate for cuts in welfare checks; they are now drug addicts and alcoholics who use public charity to feed their habits. While positive stories are still reported about new housing and programs for homeless persons, stories connecting homelessness to the inability of millions of Americans to afford rent are eclipsed by those that separate the homeless problem from housing needs.
In “The Year That Housing Died,” the cover story of an October 1996 issue of the New York Times Magazine, author Jason DeParle claimed that “the Federal
