The Big Freeze

Longtime Cambridge resident Maria Joubert used to weather the coldest nights of the winter at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter on Winthrop Street.

But two years ago, Joubert and her husband Rick responded to an item in a local weekly newspaper advertising

a five-month-old half-Chihuahua, half-terrier, whom they named Becky. Joubert refuses to leave Becky alone in the couple’s gray Volvo station wagon, and the shelter—run by Harvard students and housed at the University Lutheran (UniLu) Church—maintains a strict no-dogs-allowed policy.

For Joubert, who speaks disdainfully of the “crackheads and druggies” that she says populate UniLu, the move to living full-time in the station wagon was a small sacrifice to make for her canine companion.

Joubert and Rick (who declined to provide his last name) say they subsist day-to-day on a diet of free dinners from local churches and charities. They say they earn enough from their federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check to afford coffee and tea—and an occasional danish—in the mornings. For lunch, Rick sometimes cashes in cans and bottles to buy a whole chicken from the DeMoulas Market Basket in Somerville for $4.59.

Their hand-to-mouth existence is not uncommon in Cambridge, despite the last Census estimate that the city’s median family income is nearly $60,000 a year.

When the Class of 2005 emerges from Johnston Gate today, the graduates will inevitably encounter the now-familiar sight of panhandlers lining Mass. Ave.

But if city officials meet their declared goals, the Class of 2015 will march in cap and gown to a Square where homelessness is a thing of the past.

Last month, a committee chaired by Mayor Michael A. Sullivan released its “Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness in Cambridge,” which comes on the heels of a Bush administration pledge to eliminate “chronic homelessness” nationwide by 2013.

But Joubert and her friends, gathered for a recent dinner at the Christ Church on Garden Street, scoffed at those quixotic aims.

“That’s never going to happen,” says John Kaye, a sporadically-employed painter from Brighton, echoing the sentiments of Harvard experts and even some Cambridge officials.

Several seemingly insurmountable obstacles lie in the city’s path. Local real estate prices are skyrocketing, while federal housing aid to Cambridge decreased last year. The federal government’s limited definition of “chronically homeless” prevents some Cantabrigians from accessing the help they need. And poor individuals continually flock here from across the Greater Boston area, attracted by the perception that students, tourists, and affluent Harvard Square residents drop generous donations in panhandlers’ cups.

TAKING AIM

One night last January, just 48 hours after a blizzard, Cambridge officials counted 501 homeless people living in the city. Forty-one were living on the street—like Joubert and Rick, who were bundled up beneath blankets in their station wagon.

Four months later, the city released a plan designed to ensure that low-income Cantabrigians aren’t left out in the cold.

According to Cambridge officials, the Bush administration required cities to create such a plan in order to continue receiving federal funding for homelessness services.

In an indication of the challenges facing the city, the plan devotes four pages towards outlining “Obstacles and Caveats”—and only a page and a half to new municipal initiatives.

Among its few new recommendations, the plan calls for a “public education campaign to help residents understand the human side of homelessness.” And it proposes the construction of new housing units for low-income individuals, although it offers few further details.

HUNT FOR A HOME

But the city faces a Sisyphean struggle in its bid to provide affordable housing for its residents.

Of all U.S. cities, Cambridge experienced the fastest growth in real estate prices from 1980 to 2000, according to Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser. The median price of a home in Cambridge—adjusted for inflation—increased 183 percent during that period. And the problem of skyrocketing housing costs exists throughout the Greater Boston area.

Kaye, the Brighton painter, says he devotes 70 to 80 percent of his income to rent and utilities, paying close to $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. To cover food costs, Kaye, who does not own a car, says he treks to churches and community centers for free dinners—sometimes walking nearly two hours in each direction.

His hunt for a free meal parallels the increasingly arduous quest that low-income Hub residents face in finding affordable housing.

Under the three-decade-old Section 8 program, the federal government provides housing vouchers that cap rent payments at 30 percent of recipients’ incomes. But the waiting list for the popular program has grown so long that local authorities will no longer accept new applications.

Joubert, who says she has been homeless since 1993, has entirely given up any hope of obtaining a voucher.

Shelters find themselves crunched for space as they struggle to house those who can’t find homes of their own. Yi-Chen “Lilly” Zhang ’07, a supervisor at UniLu, says that overcrowding and a lack of resources have even caused fights to erupt among those who sleep at the shelter.

“There are some instances where people get really rowdy because they just can’t take it anymore,” Zhang says.

And the squeeze could worsen if Cambridge officials cut the number of voucher recipients—which they say may be necessary after the federal government reduced Section 8 funding to the city by $1.2 million last year.

“If we continue to have a federal administration this hostile to funding programs that support low-income folks and housing-related services, we’re likely to be nowhere in 10 years. We’ll have increased rather than decreased homelessness,” says Ellen M. Semonoff, assistant city manager for human services, who served on the city committee that produced the plan.

Reflecting Semonoff’s frustration, the plan devotes substantial ink to blasting Bush administration budget cuts.

“We very cognizantly decided to take our shots at the federal government,” Sullivan says. “We knew it would behoove us to put down how we felt about it.”

BAD SAMARITAN?

Cambridge officials say that new federal regulations also make it harder to provide services for some who need it most.

“It’s against the law to help me,” insists a homeless man at the Christ Church dinner as he picks M&Ms from a chocolate cookie.

One of the lucky individuals to make it off the Section 8 waiting list, this man says he voluntarily left two federally-subsidized apartments in recent years. The first was too small, the second too noisy.

He can barely hear a reporter’s questions—perhaps on account of the bright-orange ear plugs he wears—and he refuses to divulge his first name.

The Bush administration’s next budget allocates $200 million to the much-heralded Samaritan Initiative, which specifically targets the needs of individuals who—like this man—are “resistant to services,” according to Philip F. Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.

The federal government mandates that permanent supported housing programs devote at least 70 percent of funding to the “chronically homeless.” And for new programs funded under the Samaritan Initiative, the Bush administration requires that all clients be “chronically homeless.”

But Cambridge social service providers say the definition of this phrase is too limited.

To qualify as “chronically homeless,” an individual must have been in shelters or on the street for a full year—or must have experienced four episodes of homelessness in the last three years.

So if an individual who has been homeless for decades accepts transitional housing—even for a short period—“poof, you lose your eligibility,” says Fred Berman, a planner for the Cambridge Department of Human Service Programs.

The definition also excludes married couples and families. And to qualify as “chronically homeless,” one must have a diagnosed disability—a requirement that makes it more difficult to provide certain services to those with unacknowledged physical and mental illnesses, according to Semonoff.

For instance, it’s neither realistic nor fair to expect HIV-positive individuals to reveal their condition to provider agencies in order to obtain basic services, says Katya E. Fels ’93, executive director of the Cambridge-based organization On The Rise, which assists women who are homeless or who face crises such as trauma and abuse.

By requiring aid recipients to report that they have a disability, the definition of “chronically homeless” can seem “pretty stigmatizing,” Fels says.

But Mangano says that lists of individuals who have died on the streets “are composed almost exclusively of those experiencing chronic homelessness,” and he says that segment of the population should be prioritized.

Mangano—who served as director of homeless services in Cambridge long before joining the Bush administration—says that in recent decades, service providers have turned their attention away from disabled individuals and towards homeless families.

Meanwhile, “the most vulnerable population, those people who had been de-institutionalized, who had mental illnesses and other co-occurring disorders, were essentially left behind,” he says.

It was in response to this phenomenon that the Bush administration insisted that more funding be devoted to the “chronically homeless,” according to Mangano.

AN UNHOLY MECCA

Even if Cambridge officials increase the availability of affordable housing and reach hard-to-serve populations, experts say the city will not eradicate homelessness within its borders, since it would only attract poor individuals from neighboring communities.

“To some degree the more successful [cities] are, they are victims of their own success in that other homeless people will come into the community and fill up the beds that they are able to empty,” says Eric Belsky, executive director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Sitting outside the Tannery on Brattle Street with his dog, a German pointer named Penny, and his tuxedo cat Charlie, Ken O’Brien, a 51 year-old homeless Cambridge resident, agrees with Belsky’s assessment.

“You can’t end homelessness in one city because all you do is create a vacuum,” O’Brien says as he garners a steady stream of spare change from passers-by.

Known for its liberal politics and its liberal spenders, Harvard Square has emerged as a mecca for panhandlers.

“If you’re homeless in Boston...you have to be kind of daffy not to schlep to Cambridge to see if you can get some undergrads to give you money,” says Christopher S. Jencks ’58, Wiener professor of social policy at the Kennedy School of Government and author of the 1994 book “The Homeless.”

O’Brien says that close to Christmas, his daily take can reach nearly $100, although he adds that a panhandling income is highly variable—and some homeless individuals reel in just a few dollars a day.

Jencks, who is also a Crimson editor, says that by some estimates, as many as half of panhandlers are not actually homeless.

“If we housed every person who was an alcoholic or had a drug problem or wasn’t employable,” Jencks speculates, “what would they do during the day?”

HITTING THE SHOWERS

When asked if Cambridge can end homelessness within a decade, Belsky—a member of the city committee that produced the report—replies, “I think the answer is no.”

“Cambridge is exceptionally well-intentioned and well-staffed, but frankly they just lack the resources to do it,” he says.

Semonoff, a 1975 Harvard Law School graduate, agrees that it is “almost futile” for one city to expect to end homelessness, but she stresses that the plan can be used to call attention to the extensive programs that already exist in Cambridge.

With a shrinking supply of affordable housing, inflexible federal regulations, and a steady flow of low-income individuals into the city from neighboring communities, Cambridge can’t go at it alone.

But Mangano says there is “an unprecedented level of political will in this country around ending chronic homelessness.”

“It’s not a wistful notion,” he says. “If Mayor Daley is saying he can do it in Chicago, if Mayor Bloomberg is saying he can do it in New York, if Mayor Newsom is saying he can do it in San Francisco, I would trust that my good friends in Cambridge believe they can do it too.”

Still, many members of the homeless community view such rhetoric with disdain.

With a broad brush-stroke, Joubert paints politicians from the local to the federal level as “crocks of shit.”

She says they have failed to respond to the homeless population’s most immediate needs.

“They don’t have no places around where anyone can take a shower,” she says.

—Staff writer Anna M. Friedman can be reached at amfriedm@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.