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Corbett's budget proposal would send addicts flooding onto Philly streets
For thousands of recovering addicts, the only option for getting clean in Philadelphia is checking into one of more than 300 informal recovery houses. Gov. Corbett's proposal to eliminate General Assistance, the meager payout that is the houses' core funding source, could decimate the fragile network and make thousands homeless.
Corbett’s budget proposal would send addicts flooding onto Philly streets
For an estimated 1,000 to 4,500 recovering addicts in the city on any given day, the only option for getting clean in Philadelphia is checking into one of more than 300 informal recovery houses scattered across Kensington, Frankford and North Philly. It’s a fragile network, administered mostly by former addicts and funded largely through residents’ welfare dollars, in particular the nine-month, one-time General Assistance (GA) payments offered by the Commonwealth.
In Gov. Tom Corbett’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, GA is eliminated altogether. Advocates say that the impact could be devastating, affecting 34,843 Philadelphians (including people with disabilities and survivors of domestic violence) who receive GA money and pushing thousands of addicts out onto the street.
“If you cut all this, the bottom line is that the streets are going to overflow with people,” says Anthony Grasso, co-owner of the Next Step recovery house in Frankford. “Do you know how many people are going to commit more crimes to get what they need?”
Recovering addicts are typically awarded medical insurance and food stamps; the rest of their benefits come in the form of GA. It’s not much money: $205 monthly, unchanged and unadjusted for inflation since 1990.
“When looking at this year’s budget, the state is facing significant challenges,” says Corbett spokeswoman Kelli Roberts, who argued that the governor made “tough decisions” to “preserve core services.” In this case, Roberts says that eliminating GA — cash assistance she says only 19 states provide — allowed the commonwealth to preserve the Medical Assistance available to the same groups.
But Corbett’s budget also cuts $170.3 million from that program.
Media attention has focused on Corbett’s proposed 20 percent cut to Philly’s social services, disguised by a new “block grant” that rolls seven line items — funding programs to the homeless and those with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities — into one. But the estimated GA dollars that Philadelphians will lose out on — $87.5 million — are even greater than the $41 million that will be cut from the block grant.
GA also provides cash assistance to people who do not qualify for federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, including victims of domestic violence, those caring for a non-relative’s child, and people with disabilities — including those with applications for Social Security Disability Insurance pending. The severely backlogged Social Security Administration can take months to approve applications, and, if the initial application is rejected, the appeals process can take years. General Assistance covers applicants in the interim; if they are approved, the state is reimbursed. For many of these populations, losing GA would be a severe hardship; for recovery houses, it could be fatal.
Almost 10 years ago, Grasso walked in the door of the same recovery house he owns today, high on speedballs, oxycontin, heroin — whatever he could get his hands on.
“I had never heard about no recovery house,” says Grasso. “I know today it was God who sent me here.”
The wall of his office is lined with treatment certificates. Some of the men have recovered, others are now dead.
General Assistance provides between 60 percent and 75 percent of the revenue at Next Step. If recovery houses like this one close, the city cannot fill the gap.
“A good portion of the population comes through the uninsured door,” says Roland Lamb, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Addiction Services. “That means you will have a lot of people who will not be able to be sustained in our system.”
The city has 24 recovery houses under contract to provide services, he says, which must meet Department of Licenses & Inspections requirements and have staff complete training programs. The city cannot, however, afford to fund most recovery houses — and so they are, by and large, unregulated.
That can result in a broad range of issues. Some, says Lamb, are “more flophouses than they are recovery programs.” Others have been accused of exploiting addicts for cash, or requiring them to perform questionable “volunteer” labor — including at election time. Neighbors complain that most are concentrated in just a handful of zip codes, taking advantage of the abundant cheap and sometimes vacant row homes in certain neighborhoods. Even good houses, he says, are underfunded and thus pose “some definite problems insofar as safety issues are concerned.”
“It’s all of the above, really,” says Paul Yabor, who lives in a recovery house in Frankford. But, he adds, “The places I associate with are first and foremost dedicated to recovery.”
Most recovery houses follow the 12-step model; others, like the Adonai House on Frankford Avenue, follow different faith-based approaches. Adonai’s Bob Beck, like many people who run houses, is a recovering addict you would not have liked to meet when he was using.
“I rode on the wrong side of the tracks,” the tattooed, muscular former bike-gang member tells City Paper. Now Beck goes down to Kensington and Somerset avenues most days to pray with addicts. Other times, men come to his door straight from prison: Admission to a recovery house is frequently a condition of an addict’s parole or probation.
Everyone — service providers, the city — says recovery houses are indispensable.
“I have no idea how the system would continue if they eliminate General Assistance,” says Mimi McNichol, director of social services at the AIDS service organization Philadelphia FIGHT. “These places fill a huge gap not just in terms of recovery, but also homelessness.”
Recovery houses also help addicts deal with other medical issues like HIV, which Yabor, an activist with ACT UP, has survived since 1990.
Philly’s recovery-house movement began in the 1980s during the crack-cocaine epidemic. A recovering drug addict named Rev. Henry Wells — everyone just calls him “the Rev” — opened one of the first, inviting people to recover at his home. One Day At a Time — or ODAAT, as people call it — is now a sprawling recovery empire with its main facilities at the corner of 25th Street and Lehigh Avenue in North Philly. Over the years, Wells graduates took over ODAAT houses or simply opened their own. And so it grew.
“This is the grandfather of all recovery houses,” says Mel Wells, the Rev’s son and ODAAT president. Though worried about the cuts, Wells won’t speak ill of Corbett.
“We’ve been trying not to get caught up in the politics,” he says, and instead “focus on the effect on the people.”
Nonetheless, he pledges that ODAAT, which as of last Thursday housed 103 people, will “raise some hell” to defend GA. On April 3, they’re taking buses of recovering addicts to Harrisburg and mobilizing local political support.
Sharif Street, son of former Mayor John Street, sits on ODAAT’s board. The recovery house was in John Street’s city council district, and the councilman defended them when the Department of Licenses & Inspections came poking around. (In 1999, hundreds of ODAAT volunteers returned the favor, campaigning for Street.) It is unclear whether local connections will provide sufficient leverage in notoriously Philly-hostile Harrisburg.
Plus, says Street, “this is a population that, for a lot of folks, is easy to dismiss.”
Philadelphia is home to one of the most thriving markets for cocaine and heroin in the nation. People from the suburbs come here to buy drugs, and then move on to places like ODAAT to recover. Indeed, recovery houses are full of people from elsewhere —including from Baltimore, New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. Recovery houses, like the Kensington and Frankford neighborhoods where the open-air drug trade flourishes, are extraordinarily diverse.
“We don’t advertise ourselves as a regional hub,” health commissioner and Deputy Mayor for Health and Opportunity Donald Schwartz testified at a City Council hearing last week. “But there are people who come to Philadelphia because they don’t really have a choice, and there is such a concentration of people and services.”
“If Philadelphia is unable to care for people,” he warns, “it very well may ripple back to surrounding counties.”
That would be difficult for Philly’s suburbs — and disastrous for the city itself.
“It’s places like this that save me from going to prison,” says Anthony, a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, and Next Step’s house manager. General Assistance, he says, “pays for most of it.”
Anthony, like many recovering addicts, suffers from mental illness. Outside of a structured environment, he tends not to take his medicine for schizophrenia — and promptly winds up in jail.
Others in recovery echo Anthony’s message: You don’t want us on the street.
“I guess I’d be out there committing more crimes,” says Sean, a 27-year-old recovering heroin addict at Next Step who grew up near Kensington’s McPherson Square, also known as Needle Park. “I know it’s hard on the budget. But I know they’re building more state correctional institutions than schools and rehabilitation centers. … It takes more money to take care of us in jail than to pay us 200 bucks.”
A lot more, in fact: Pennsylvania spends an average of $42,339 per year on an inmate, versus $1,845 on General Assistance (plus a maximum $1,800 over that nine months in food stamps, and undefined costs related to medical insurance). Addicts also impose hard-to-tally costs of crime, violence and broken families.
“Just as people in addiction pose a risk to the community,” says Lamb, “people in recovery are a protective factor for the community.”
Margaret, formerly a self-described “menace to society” in Fishtown, was allowed to stay in a recovery house rather than being sent to prison, after facing charges including reckless driving and driving while intoxicated. A resident at The Joy of Living Recovery Program in Frankford, she’s now paying off $11,000 in tickets with an installment plan. “I just want to deal with the wreckage I’ve caused,” she says, “and get on with life.”
The conservative mantra is that government has to do more with less, and some will find it particularly galling that out-of-state addicts take advantage of Pennsylvania’s relative generosity. But General Assistance supports a private network that has, with very little money, patched the gaps in this state’s safety net — and, yes, that of other states, too — created by decades of government cutbacks.
“The city and the state are getting an absolute bargain with that General Assistance $205 a month,” says Robert Fairbanks, a University of Chicago sociologist who has studied Philadelphia recovery houses. “For Corbett to go after it is irrational and hamfisted.”
Stephanie, a recovering addict who runs Joy of Living and founded the Frankford Recovery House Coalition, agrees.
“I get $50 a week [from residents]. This is the only place they can live on $50 a week. They have no other place to go.”
(daniel.denvir@citypaper.net)
For more information about this cut, please check out pacaresforall.org, a coalition of over 100 organizations statewide working to save General Assistance and GA Medical Assistance.— michaelrfroehlich- I'm sure he's not going to do it, but if he's going to take away money for addicts, he should spend money on getting rid of the drug markets that make them addicts in the first place. Not that Republicans could give a shit about cities or anyone but themselves.— thegreengrass
- ..."Most recovery houses follow the 12-step model; others, like the Adonai House on Frankford Avenue, are faith-based." Er, you Do realize that 12-step programs are faith-based, right? You're required to believe in God, admit to God that you have a problem, and put yourself in the care of God. I'd certainly call that faith-based.— RosenOtter
- RosenOtter - It isn't a REQUIREMENT to believe in God. It is suggested.
7 years, 8 months, 24 days clean— Atomic Fury
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