substance abuse

Two weeks ago I noted how Colorado Springs city officials a decade ago handed a $3 million federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant to Springs Rescue Mission (SRM) leaders. Later, City Hall gave $3 million more. That was because SRM, an explicitly Christian organization, was ready to help homeless wanderers in Colorado Springs, and no one else was ready. Strict church-state separationists didn’t like it, but city housing executive Steve Posey noted that the HUD Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) contract detailed public benefits: “SRM would build a commercial kitchen; they would build an overnight shelter for several hundred people; they would build a day center with showers and laundry facilities. Nowhere in those contracts, or any ongoing contracts Read More ›

The advent of Thanksgiving brings more stories about homelessness and more debate about its causes. Some advocates emphasize housing costs, as New York’s Charles Brace did during the Civil War era (see my May 3, 2024 column.) Others emphasize substance abuse and mental illness. That also is nothing new: New York City suffered not only through draft and racist riots in 1863 but homelessness in the 1870s, often among Civil War veterans suffering from what today we call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. The debate, even then, was not new. Starting early in the century, the street-level analysis was that some poor people became paupers — not just poor, but distraught and defeated — by getting drunk and staying drunk. What Read More ›