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Out of sight, out of mind

Monday, the city council barely defeated a measure that would discontinue food service to the homeless at the Toole Service Center in the downtown business area. Instead of offering food, the city council proposed changing it into a job training center. The bill was suspended by a vote of 4 to 3, after the council agreed to conduct a 60 day study on that center's population. Food services at Toole are continuing, but not out of concern for the homeless. Instead, council members are concerned with the image of Tucson neighborhoods. Again, our community's priority is not quality of life, but quality of image.

Each year, hundreds of homeless people head to Tucson from the north and east to avoid cold climates. Most of these people are single males who have been homeless for an extended period of time. Once here, many of them live off the street, begging or borrowing to survive. Most do not have jobs, and the migrant homeless who find employment make very little money doing things like hocking newspapers. Needless to say, these populations are dependent on the community services provided to them by agencies like the Salvation Army.

With this population in mind, the Toole Service Center was opened. The city contracted with four private institutions to provide this migrant homeless population with the goods and services that would sustain them and have the least possible impact on the city. Things were going pretty well, until, in 1998, the city council decided it was tired of giving hand outs. In the council's infinite wisdom, it decided to require that the homeless who receive city-funded services also register and receive job training. After that there was a decline in the number of homeless being served by the center.

The council members' decision to require job training and registration shows how woefully ignorant they are about the homeless in Tucson. If simply offering job training was the answer to ending homelessness, then the homeless population in the nation would have been eradicated a long time ago.

What the council has failed to grasp about the perpetually homeless are the social and environmental factors that foster the condition. It is estimated by the National Coalition for the Homeless that 20 to 25 percent of the homeless are mentally ill. These illnesses prevent their sufferers from engaging in the normal daily activities of life, such as holding down a job and attending to hygiene.

Many of the homeless are also addicted to drugs or alcohol, and have not been rehabilitated to the point where holding down a job would be preferable to supporting their habits. Forty percent of homeless men are also veterans of the Vietnam War. Others are homeless because a combination of factors, the most notable of which is age. In studies, the aged homeless have been shown to be incredibly distrustful, and they are often suffering from mental disorders. According to federal studies, 31 percent of the homeless are over the age of 45 according to federal studies on the subject.

These populations are not the kind that are going to benefit from job training and become magically cured of homelessness. These men, when they are no longer fed at the Toole Center, will seek food and other services elsewhere, most likely from private institutions and churches.

This is what has city council members and the mayor in a tizzy. It is not the idea of letting the homeless go hungry or the thought of overburdening the private agencies with an influx of homeless clients that bothers them. It is that the residence of Tucson might actually see the homeless out of "their place."

Granted, it is not pleasant to view homeless people in one's own neighborhood, but they are part of the community. We cannot always whisk them away and pretend they do not exist. Foremost, they are people and have as much right to be in Tucson as you or I.

If the city was really interested of freeing its neighborhoods of "the problem," it would not sink its money into job training. Experts on homelessness agree that the homeless are the people that fall through our society's cracks. The fact that the city council even considered discontinuing food service to the homeless signals a scary trend in our community's views about the homeless. Instead of citing concerns about the homeless being undernourished, the council emphasized the negative impact that "the problem," as they like to call the homeless, would have on neighborhoods.