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We have a plan to end homelessness?
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We have a plan to end homelessness?
This week saw the Nutter administration defend the mayor's ban on outdoor meals in city parks in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of religious groups who claim that the ban violates their constitutional freedoms of speech and religious practice.
But hearings before Judge William Yohn focused, so far, less on the constitutionality of the rule than on its practical justification and application thus far, with Judge Yohn asking questions not about constitutional law but about how and whether the mayor's rule stands up to its own purported logic.
Nutter, for example, claimed that the rule sought to provide more "dignity" for those receiving meals; but Judge Yohn on Thursday questioned whether there was more "dignity" in waiting in line for food on City Hall's concrete apron than on the verdant parkway. The administration has claimed that moving people off the Parkway will allow it to better provide services for the homeless; but Yohn noted questioning by plaintiff's attorney Paul Messing that revealed that the city hadn't developed any plan to provide those services before the ban or in the months since.
But most interesting, maybe, was Mayor Nutter's defense of his ban as part of his plan to "end homelessness."
Come again?
Nutter certainly isn't the first Philadelphia mayor to talk about ending homelessness. In 2005, Mayor John Street announced his own "10-year Plan to End Homelessness" — though the number of homeless, by the end of his administration only appeared to have grown.
Nutter had "endorsed and embellished" that plan, said homeless services director Dainette Mintz in 2008, when the city announced 30 additional beds in shelters and a handful of new housing programs.
According to the current plan, homelessness is supposed to end, therefore, in 2015. Maybe that's why the mayor has only mentioned the "plan" a tiny handful of times since.
Yet there it was on Tuesday, serving as an apparent explanation — or justification — for banning outdoor feeding.
Not, as Judge Yohn himself pointed out, that the mayor has so far actually allocated any extra resources to replace the free service he attempted to ban outside the Barnes. In deciding to uphold an injunction against the ban, Yohn cited the city's lack of movement on purported plans to move meals indoors and questioned why, if the city's intention is to deliver more services, it hasn't done so on the Parkway itself.
The simplest answer is that the city doesn't intend to deliver more services — as evinced by the cutting of homeless services over the last few years (though, to be fair, Mayor Nutter has cut those services in proportion with other departments, and in some years less so; the Office of Supportive Housing was also one of few departments to get extra money, to the tune of $1 million, in this year's budget, though it expects to deal with the fallout of millions more slashed in state funds).
None of that isn't to say the city doesn't try hard to provide what services it can — but whether that constitutes a "plan to end homelessness" is maybe another question.
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