Guess Who is Effectively Fighting Homelessness?

It's not John Kerry, Al Gore, or Hillary Clinton and her political spouse. It's the much hated George W. Bush. Don't take my word for it (after all, I am quite suspect: I am a Republican who thinks that George W. Bush will go down in history as a great president). Go to the N.Y. Times and look up this article "New Campaign Shows Progress For Homeless" dated Wednesday, June 7, 2006, at this link. What the article shows is that the Bush administration dared to think outside the box constructed by the "social justice and poverty" professionals in the area of homelessness. That box (or prison of sorts if you happen to be one of the congenitally homeless) consisted of cycling the chronically homeless through all the stops manned and visited by the poverty professionals: shelters, soup kitchens, emergency rooms, detox centers, and jails. The problem was that there was no solution: many remained stubbornly homeless.

And so a little known Bush administration official took a different tack:

Wherever he goes, Mr. [Philip F.] Mangano [who leads the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness] emphasizes that it is cheaper to put the chronically homeless right into apartments, and provide medical and addiction treatments there, than watch them cycle endlessly through shelters, soup kitchens, emergency rooms, detoxification centers, and jails.

N.Y. Times, "New Campaign Shows Progress for Homeless," June 7, 2006, at this link.

It's another disquieting and disorienting experience for the self-anointed peace-and-social-justice-crowd, Catholic and non-Catholic: compassionate, innovative conservatism is better for the poor than the old social welfare models so dear to their hearts. Liberals don't have a monopoly on compassion. In fact, their monopoly in the area of social services has for too long more effectively served the pocketbooks of middle class poverty professionals than the quality of life of the poor themselves.