Bussed Out How America moves it's homeless
Bussed out
How America moves its homeless
(Graphics and pictures at link.)
Each year, US cities give thousands of homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town. An 18-month nationwide investigation by the Guardian reveals, for the first time, what really happens at journey’s end
By the Outside in America team
20 December 2017
Quinn Raber arrived at a San Francisco bus station lugging a canvas bag containing all of his belongings: jeans, socks, underwear, pajamas. It was 1pm on a typically overcast day in August.
An unassuming 27-year-old, Raber seemed worn down: his skin was sun-reddened, he was unshaven, and a hat was pulled over his ruffled blond hair. After showing the driver a one-way ticket purchased for him by the city of San Francisco, he climbed the steps of the Greyhound bus.
He traveled 2,275 miles over three days to reach his destination: Indianapolis.
Cities have been offering homeless people free bus tickets to relocate elsewhere for at least three decades. In recent years, homeless relocation programs have become more common, sprouting up in new cities across the country and costing the public millions of dollars.
But until now there has never been a systematic, nationwide assessment of the consequences. Where are these people being moved to? What impact are these programs having on the cities that send and the cities that receive them? And what happens to these homeless people after they reach their destination?
In an 18-month investigation, the Guardian has conducted the first detailed analysis of America’s homeless relocation programs, compiling a database of around 34,240 journeys and analyzing their effect on cities and people.
A count earlier this year found half a million homeless people on one night in America. The problem is most severe in the west, where rates of homelessness are skyrocketing in a number of major cities, and where states like California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have some of the highest rates of per capita homelessness.
These are also the states where homeless relocation programs are concentrated. Using public record laws, the Guardian obtained data from 16 cities and counties that give homeless people free bus tickets to live elsewhere.
The data from these cities has been compiled to build the first comprehensive picture of America’s homeless relocation programs. Over the past six years, the period for which our data is most complete, we are able to track where more than 20,000 homeless people have been sent to and from within the mainland US.
Raber had been feeling sick, tired and depressed in San Francisco, and after three years living on the streets he decided to take his chances in Indianapolis, where he grew up. An old friend had offered him a living room to sleep in and told him there was a possibility of a job as a dishwasher at a nearby fine-dining fish restaurant.
“I’m just going to go back and work,” Raber said, and “save money, and just live”.
The Guardian has determined the outcomes of several dozen journeys based on interviews with homeless people who were relocated and friends and relatives who received them at their destination, and the shelter managers, police officers and outreach workers who supplied them with their one-way tickets.
Some of these journeys provide a route out of homelessness, and many recipients of free tickets said they are grateful for the opportunity for a fresh start.
Returning to places they previously lived, many rediscover old support networks, finding a safe place to sleep, caring friends or family, and the stepping stones that lead, eventually, to their own home.
Nan Roman, head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said bus programs can be a “positive”, although not a panacea, in part because most people are homeless in places they are from.
That is far from the whole story, however.
Once they get you out of their city, they really don’t care what happens to you
- Jeff Weinberger, Florida Homelessness Action Coalition
While the stated goal of San Francisco’s Homeward Bound and similar programs is helping people, the schemes also serve the interests of cities, which view free bus tickets as a cheap and effective way of cutting their homeless populations.
People are routinely sent thousands of miles away after only a cursory check by authorities to establish they have a suitable place to stay once they get there.
Some said they feel pressured into taking tickets, and others described ending up on the streets within weeks of their arrival.
Jeff Weinberger, co-founder of the Florida
Homelessness Action Coalition, a not-for-profit that operates in a state with four bus programs, said the schemes are a “smoke-and-mirrors ruse tantamount to shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic rather than reducing homelessness”.
“Once they get you out of their city, they really don’t care what happens to you.”
A one-way ticket off the island
Willie Romines, Key West
Willie Romines was attracted to Key West for the same reasons as the tourists and billionaires whose yachts fill the marina. “It’s beautiful, it’s paradise,” he said. “You meet a lot of people from different countries.” For homeless people like Romines, there was also the added benefit of a mattress at the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter (Kots).
But the 62-year-old former painter said his life on the island took a turn for the worse about five years ago, after he fell off his bicycle and broke his ankle in four places. He decided to spend a couple of months recuperating at a friend’s house in Ocala, and the shelter offered him a free bus ticket for the 460-mile trip.
He insists he was never told that by agreeing to take that Greyhound bus ticket off of the island, he was also promising never to come back.
I would never have taken the ticket if I had known this would happen
- Willie Romines
Romines said when he took his ticket, he was told he could return to the shelter after six months. But when he came back to Key West, still limping from his badly injured leg, he said he was informed by shelter employees that the ban was for life. He would have to sleep on the streets.
“I would never have taken the ticket if I had known this would happen,” he said. “They stabbed me in the back is what they did.”
Willie Romines, 62, took the bus from Key West to Ocala, Florida.
The Southernmost Homeless Assistance League (Shal), a not-for-profit that runs the shelter, requires recipients of bus tickets to sign a contract confirming their relocation will be “permanent” and acknowledging they will “no longer be eligible” for homeless services upon their return.
Of the 16 cities that shared their data with the Guardian, Key West was the only program with a policy expressly banning homeless people returning. It is also the only program that does not have a record of where it has sent 350 or so people who have been given one-way tickets off the island since 2014.
In many respects, however, Key West’s bus program is similar to the others in the database.
Homeless people hear about bus schemes through
word of mouth or are offered a free ticket by a caseworker. To qualify, they must provide a contact for a friend or relative who will receive them at their chosen destination. The shelter then calls that person to check the homeless traveler will have somewhere suitable to stay.
No one is supposed to be put on a bus so they can be homeless elsewhere, and there is broad agreement that no tickets should be given to those with outstanding warrants.
John Miller, the executive director of Shal, said his organisation also tries to find homeless people work on the island and, where possible, a transition to housing.
But he insists the bus relocation program is a valuable service, and said he often receives letters of gratitude.
Most of the people who stay at the shelter are locals, he said, but there are others who come to Key West and discover it is not the tropical paradise they expected.
“Between the heat and the bugs, and the lack of services, and the low wages and the high rents, it is just not a good place to be homeless. It might be one of the worst places in the country to be homeless. The only thing you can say is you’re not going to freeze to death.”
Nonetheless, Miller said around one in 10 homeless people who take a free ticket off the island boomerang back, only to discover that they have no access to the few services that were previously available to them.
That was the easiest sell … give us money and we’ll ship our problem to somebody else
- John Miller, Southernmost Homeless Assistance League
“They’re like: well I didn’t think you were serious,” he said. “We’re like: yeah, we’re serious. Some of those gather up their change and leave again. And then we have some that are sleeping on Higgs beach or whatever.”
Miller said that Romines, who was issued his ticket under a previous scheme, is not on the official list of people banned from the shelter. Romines, however, insists he was told he was not permitted to sleep there, and police records show he has been arrested three times for sleeping outside, including on Higgs beach, a strip of sand on the south of the island.
Mike Tolbert, former shelter official, defends the policy of banning people from returning.
Miller conceded that members of his board had been “conflicted” over the morality of turning homeless people away because they previously took a free bus ticket.
But he maintained the policy was justified to discourage abuse – a point echoed by his former deputy, Mike Tolbert, who said it was the only way to prevent the shelter from being used as a “travel agency”.
There is another benefit to the shelter in banning ticket recipients from coming back: it is a policy that can appeal to locals on the island. Miller asks residents to contribute to a fund that will buy homeless people one-way tickets to relocate elsewhere. He makes clear that they will not be allowed to come back.
“That, I figured, was the easiest ‘sell’,” Miller said. “Give us money and we’ll ship our homeless problem to somebody else.”
The hundreds who fly overseas
Two children tumbled out of a cab at New York City’s John F Kennedy airport on a humid evening in July. They enthusiastically helped pull suitcases onto the crowded curb. Their parents looked more subdued; they felt they were being strong-armed by city officials to board a flight to Puerto Rico.
“I really don’t want to go back,” Jose Ortiz, 28, had said hours earlier, standing outside the austere brick building in the Bronx where his family had been given temporary shelter as the city assessed their case, a standard procedure. “They said we could only stay in this apartment for 10 days, after that we might be on the street.”
New York appears to have been the first major city to begin a relocation program for homeless people, back in 1987.
After the current iteration of the program was relaunched during the tenure of mayor Michael Bloomberg, it ballooned, and its relocation scheme is now far larger than any other in the nation. The city homelessness department budgets $500,000 for it annually.
Almost half the approximately 34,000 journeys analyzed by the Guardian originate from New York. In contrast with other relocation initiatives, New York is notable for moving large numbers of families, like the Ortizes.
New York does not only move homeless people on buses. About 20% of travelers were given sometimes-costly airline tickets.
Homeless relocations from New York City
Around 650 people were flown to foreign countries.
Ortiz and his family did not last long on the mainland.
They first moved to Delaware in early 2017 to live with his mother. When that did not work out they packed up and moved to New York, where Ortiz pleaded with the city’s homelessness department for help until he could find a job.
We feel like animals, like they put us in a garbage bag and put us to the side
- Jose Ortiz
He was told the family was ineligible for services because they had housing options elsewhere, notably in Puerto Rico with his partner’s mother. To officials in New York, steering the family into accommodation instead of the city homeless system was the most sensible option. Ortiz’s decision to take the airline ticket was voluntary, but he did not feel he had much choice given the alternative likely meant sleeping in the park or on a street corner.
“We feel like animals, like they put us in a garbage bag and put us to the side on the street,” he said.
They, like others relocated to Puerto Rico, were being moved from a city with a median household income of $60,741 to an island with one of $19,606, and an unemployment rate twice the national average.
It is a stark example of a pattern that is replicated through most of the journeys, which, analysis shows, have the overall effect of moving homeless people from rich places to poorer places.
Most ticket recipients are relocated to places with a lower median income
Number of people
lower medianincomesame medianincomehigher medianincome
12%traveled to cities where the average income is higher
88% traveled to cities where the average income is lower
New York to SanJuan Chico to Seattle
There are some obvious reasons why impoverished homeless people might choose to relocate to less-wealthy cities, such as the availability of cheaper housing and a lower cost of living. To some extent the apparent transfer of homeless people from richer to poorer locations is a product of the data: relocation programs are often based in cities with high median incomes such as San Francisco, Santa Monica and West Palm Beach.
However, the repercussions of this trend in the extreme cases bear considering. “The folks who so often fall into homelessness come from communities that have been experiencing a Great Recession for decades, living in neighborhoods with broken or absent support systems, enervated public schools, and little or no economic prospects to lift themselves up beyond their current circumstances,” said Arnold Cohen, president and CEO of The Partnership for the Homeless in New York. “Moving them out to other struggling neighborhoods is just another way of neglecting the root issues that continue to drive the problem.”
Just over a week after arriving in Puerto Rico, Ortiz sent a Facebook message to say that his prospects were looking up: he had an interview for a job as a security guard. In late September, Puerto Rico was struck by Hurricane Maria, devastating the island’s infrastructure and sending its economy into freefall.
The Guardian has reached out to the family but not heard from them since.
A lifeline, or a broken system?
Fran Luciano, Fort Lauderdale
For as long as cities have been offering homeless people free tickets to go elsewhere, the programs have attracted controversy. In the run-up to the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, the city was accused of getting rid of homeless people by distributing free tickets for them to leave.
In 2013, the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas, a state-run facility, was alleged to have discharged around 1,500 patients, often with little more than their medication and a bus voucher to leave the city. One of the patients killed themselves after their bus journey and another committed a homicide, according to a lawsuit brought by former patients.
While high-profile abuses such as these have attracted headlines, there has been far less attention on whether relocating homeless people makes sense in the first place. Among the cities that provided data to the Guardian, there was an almost total lack of long-term follow-up with the recipients of bus tickets to check whether their relocation had been a success.
San Francisco provided records showing that in the period from 2010 to 2015, only three travelers were contacted once they had left. “Our record-keeping, as you discovered, has not always been that great,” said Randy Quezada, a spokesperson for the city’s homelessness department. Records from 2016 onwards, when different officials ran the program, showed that a majority of people were “contacted” once they reached their destination, but the city declined to share whether they were actually housed, citing privacy concerns.
Smaller schemes had mixed results: Portland found that around 70% of 416 travelers were still housed three months after traveling, and of those leaving Santa Monica, 60% remained housed six months later.
“I think it begs for more research,” said Michelle Flynn, a program director at the shelter that gives out tickets in Salt Lake City. Following up with homeless people who are given tickets in the weeks, months and years after they have left is not a trivial undertaking, especially for shelters that are short-staffed and funded with slim budgets, and when homeless people are by definition hard to trace. “That would probably cost even more than what we’re saving on the actual trips,” said Tom Stagg, an administrator in Santa Cruz.
If I hadn’t gotten that ticket I would have drunk myself to death
- Tiffany Schiessl
The interviews the Guardian has conducted with recipients of bus tickets indicate the outcome of their journeys can vary hugely.
Tiffany Schiessl credits her bus journey with saving her life. She was living in a tent beside some railroad tracks in Fort Lauderdale when her alcoholism took her to the brink of death. She recalls waking up in the mornings and having to drink cans of beer to stop herself from shaking and vomiting.
She was diagnosed with early-stage cirrhosis and chronic pancreatitis in 2015, the year she suffered a pulmonary embolism from a blood clot. She was 22 years old.
It was her doctor who recommended she use Fort Lauderdale’s bus program to move in with her mother, Marleen, who had previously been unable to house Tiffany when she experienced difficulties after suffering heart attacks and a stroke. Marleen lived in Lehigh Acres, on the other side of the state. When Tiffany got off the bus, Marleen was horrified: Tiffany’s weight had dropped to 94lbs, her face was sunken and her vertebrae were poking out through the skin of her back.
https://interactive.guim.co.uk/atoms...es/Tiffany.jpg
Marleen Schiessl and her daughter Tiffany Schiessl outside Marleen’s home in Lehigh Acres, Florida.
Now Tiffany Schiessl is on the road to recovery, contemplating moving into her own home and looking to find work as a counselor. She credits the turnaround in part to her mother, who gave her the care “of someone who wants to see you succeed”. She adds: “If I hadn’t gotten that ticket I would have drunk myself to death.”
Those who agreed to take in bus-ticket recipients spoke candidly about the challenges, both financial and emotional, of taking responsibility for formerly homeless family members. Rick Williams, a Boeing technician in Everett, Washington, said he would give his son everything he needed to get on his feet – food, money, shelter – for six months after he came home from Florida in mid-2017. “I want to see him succeed,” Williams said. “All I can do is help him as best I can.”
Kathy Mathews, who agreed to host her brother, Alan, in Whitehall, Pennsylvania, after he traveled from Sarasota, said the situation was “absolutely a little bit of a strain”. But she added: “I know that had he been left where he was it wasn’t going to get any better.”
But not everyone receiving homeless people at their destinations is so accommodating.
The underlying assumption of the relocation programs, which have names such as “Homeward Bound” and “Family Reunification”, is that returning to a hometown or relative will lead to a process of rehabilitation. But for some, homelessness is driven by domestic conflicts and broken relationships, issues that may be rooted in the places they are returning to.
Last year Fort Lauderdale sent Fran Luciano, 49, back to her native New York to stay with her ex-husband, according to program records. A home health aide who cared for patients with cancer before she ended up homeless, Luciano had been sleeping in bus shelters and at the airport in the Florida city and desperately wanted to leave.
They should’ve said, ‘are you going have a place to stay?’
- Fran Luciano
When Fort Lauderdale offered her a bus ticket back to New York, she said her instant reaction was: “Yeah, of course I want to go home.” The city asked for a contact there, and Luciano could only think to provide her ex-husband’s details, although she said she stressed she could not stay with him given their divorce was acrimonious.
When she arrived at the Greyhound station in New York, Luciano sat on her luggage and wondered where to go. For around six months she shuttled between shelters, eventually ending up in the small town of Nanuet, where she spent nights in McDonald’s and was assaulted. She is now back in Fort Lauderdale.
“They should’ve said, ‘you’ve got to make sure’,” she said of the outreach workers who gave her a ticket.
“Are you going to be out on the streets there? Are you going to have a place to stay?’”
Even relatives of homeless people who assure outreach workers they can look after their loved one may struggle to live up to that ambition.
Rose Thompson, 58, said she decided to leave Key West last year after her problems with drugs and alcohol resulted in her collapsing at a soup kitchen.
She opted to relocate to Morgantown, West Virginia, to stay with her daughter, who agreed to host her. But when she arrived, she discovered she would have to share a trailer with seven other people.
Rose Thompson, 58, went back to Key West only three weeks after leaving.
Thompson slept on the sofa for two weeks before her daughter took her to a Morgantown homeless shelter. “It was just better to come back here where I know people,” she said of her decision to return to Key West.
There is limited information in the data held by relocation programs about precisely who is hosting homeless people at their destinations. But three Florida cities – Fort Lauderdale, Sarasota and West Palm Beach – did keep a record.
The aggregate data shows a wide variation in the types of people that homeless people are going to live with, from brothers and sisters to friends and employers.
The people and institutions who receive homeless travelers
Parents and children Siblings and grandparents Other relatives Friends and acquaintances Institutions & others
Bail bondsman
Ex-husband
Shelter
Church
An official with the Sarasota program said he did not know why two homeless people were sent to meet with bail bondsmen in South Carolina and Indiana earlier this year, but did not consider this problematic.
A third was put on a bus to Traverse City, Michigan, where he lived in a tent. A fourth person, meanwhile, said Key West sent her to a homeless shelter in Sarasota.
While some programs consider it essential to check for active arrest warrants before dispatching people, others do not perform such extensive research.
In a random sampling of around 100 ticket recipients from Salt Lake City, the Guardian found that at least five had outstanding warrants at the time they were dispatched. A number were for minor public nuisance and drug crimes that routinely and – in the opinion of many advocates – unfairly dog homeless people.
Others were more serious, including one recipient with two warrants for domestic violence who received a bus ticket to Texas last year, and another man with an assault warrant who traveled to Montana.
Asked why the shelter had given tickets to men wanted by the police, Flynn said that so far this had not proved problematic. “We are quite open to exploring this as a part of the travel program,” she added.
The end of the road
Quinn Raber, San Francisco
Raber wanted his relocation to Indianapolis to be an escape. Within a week of arriving it was clear it might not last as one for very long. “Starting over is really tough,” he said by phone in August. He found work at a burger restaurant, but the friend he was living with decided to enter an addiction-recovery program, leaving Raber with nowhere to stay. He was overtaken by a sense of claustrophobia. “I feel like being outside I can breathe better,” he said. “It kind of makes me feel like coming back to California.”
San Francisco has one of the largest homeless populations in America, and it is an expensive problem to have. Once the cost of policing and medical services is taken into account, each chronically homeless person is estimated to cost the city $80,000 annually.
Bus tickets cost a few hundred dollars.
The city does not deny there is a financial incentive behind its program, which was launched in 2005 when officials considered the example of nearby Sacramento, which was reducing its homeless population by giving people tickets to leave.
Commander David Lazar, who at the time was a lieutenant representing the San Francisco police department on homeless issues, said there were humanitarian reasons he and others wanted to introduce the program in the city. But he added that giving free bus tickets was considered a “win-win” because each homeless person that left was “one less call for services”.
“How many more people would have been in San Francisco had we not had this program?” asks Lazar.
The dataset, which reveals the number of homeless people given tickets in and out of the city, can help answer that question.
Bus journeys into city City homeless population 1406 Bus journeys out of city2500
How San Francisco’s bus program impacts its homeless population
2005
Over the last 12 years, San Francisco’s homeless population has grown from around 6,200 to just over 7,600, according to the city's counts. During that period, a small number of people in other cities have been given free tickets to relocate to San Francisco. A far larger number – more than 10,500 homeless people – have been moved out of San Francisco on buses.
What might the San Francisco homeless population have looked like if homeless people had never been bussed into and out of the city?
This data is partial; it does not include, for example, housed San Franciscans who become homeless while living in the city, the many homeless people who travel to and from San Francisco independently of relocation programs, or those homeless people who might have by now found a home. But it does give a rough illustration in response to Lazar’s question.
If these relocation programs did not exist, and the people San Francisco has bussed out of the city had stayed put, there could be as many as 18,000 homeless people currently in the city, more than twice the current population.
The US government mandates cities and other municipalities count their homeless street populations every two years; mayors are always keen for the tallies to show numbers are not on the rise. In 2009, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg lauded his own city’s bussing scheme because it “saves the taxpayers of New York City an enormous amount of money”.
Officials currently involved in running programs in Denver, Jacksonville, and Salt Lake City all told the Guardian they saw them as cost-effective programs that delivered their cities value for money by reducing the numbers living on their streets.
Yet it appears bussing schemes are also being used to give a misleading impression about the extent to which cities are actually solving homelessness.
Almost half the people San Francisco claims to have helped lift out of homelessness were simply given one-way tickets
When San Francisco, for example, reports on the number of people “exiting” homelessness, it includes the tally of people who are put on a bus and relocated elsewhere in the country. It turns out that almost half of the 7,000 homeless people San Francisco claims to have helped lift out of homelessness in the period of 2013-16 were simply given one-way tickets out of the city.
Such sleights of hand are not unique to San Francisco; a travel program operated by a homelessness not-for-profit in Oahu, Hawaii, claimed in documents shared with the Guardian that several hundred people who were offered subsidized plane tickets to the mainland were moved “out of homelessness”.
But the money spent on bus tickets does not necessarily address the root causes of homelessness.
“There may be cases where you have good intentions of trying to return that person back to that family”, but the family is “why they were homeless in the first place”, said Bob Erlenbusch, a longtime advocate based in Sacramento, California. As examples he cited domestic violence victims, transgender youth facing rejection by their parents, and families unable to deal with a relative’s mental health or substance-abuse problems.
The records kept by San Francisco will presumably state that Raber ceased being homeless when he was relocated to Indianapolis in August: one more person they can call a success story. That’s despite the fact he has been back in San Francisco for three months.
Raber appeared relaxed as he sat on a Greyhound bus crossing the Bay Bridge to bring him back into the city.
The sojourn in Indianapolis had been worth it because he “was not in a good state” when he left San Francisco, he said. “It helped me get my mind back on track and my body back on track.”
But when it became clear that his friend’s substance-abuse issues would leave him homeless, he decided to return to San Francisco – paying for the ticket with his own money.
Quinn Raber, now 28, said he never saw his departure from San Francisco as permanent.
Today his circumstances are almost exactly the same as they were before he left. He spends part of the month crashing in a friend’s room in a rundown residential hotel, and the rest bedding down on the sidewalk with a blanket and pillow in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, where many other homeless people congregate. He drags his belongings around in a suitcase with broken wheels, and hopes to move into a discarded tent that he found recently.
He is adamant that he did not mislead San Francisco’s bus program officials about his intentions. As he tells it, his return to the city he loves, despite the hardships he faces there, was almost ordained.
“I told them up front that I might not stay where they’re sending me,” he said. “San Francisco is a place that people always end up going back to at some point.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-country-study