The Ann Arbor Inn: Another Lost Opportunity

Over the past ten years, people in Ann Arbor have become interested in helping the poor and homeless in the community. The traditional way that people have "helped" the poor has been through supporting the work of social service agencies, shelters, and churches. In turn, these organizations have typically provided free meals, emergency shelter, counseling, and administered state and federal welfare and housing programs. This approach to dealing with homelessness exacerbates instead of solves the problem of homelessness.

This standard approach lo homelessness was developed in the early 1900's by social planners to aid people who are unable to find housing in our current for-profit housing system. Almost all housing today is financed by private, profit-oriented mortgage lenders. Monthly mortgage payments (interest & principal) are the biggest part of housing costs, usually 30-50% of the cost of occupying a house. The cost of this money, interest rales, has been one of the main factors creating a lack of low-income housing. High interest rates mean that it's not profitable to build affordable housing. They also result in higher mortgage payments paid by developers, which cause higher rents for already existing housing. The standard approach is to accept the poverty caused by this system and to create an institutionalized bureaucracy to aid poor people. Not only does this approach not challenge the current system, it perpetuates it by hiding the system's failure to provide affordable housing.

The standard approach is founded on the myth that poor people are unable to function. Thus, if a person is homeless, it is because of their individual shortcomings. And if they are given a home, they will not be able to sustain it without proper intervention. It is assumed in this model that what poor people need before they're ready for "independent living" is transitional shelter and support services.

One alternative solution put forward by housing activists is to get government and private grants and thus bypass high-interest borrowing. This would allow for the development of a public and/or cooperatively owned housing system. Locally, for instance, the Ann Arbor Inn at 100 S. Fourth was a target of a recent effort to do just that.

The Inn has been vacant since January. In May, several groups formed an ad hoc committee to convert the Inn to low-income housing. Over the course of three months, biweekly meetings were held at the First Baptist Church. They were attended by various business people, service providers, city officials, local activists and concerned citizens. The group looked at blueprints of the Inn and discussed potential combinations of use of its space. However, the group was unable to come to a consensus about whether the Inn should be converted into housing or a shelter and whether the Inn should be converted to permanent or temporary housing. Currently, the Inn is set to go to auction on September 15. What these meetings illustrated was that the standard approach to homelessness is impractical and condescending.

There was a major debate about what is suitable density for low-income housing. It is accepted as conventional wisdom that high concentrations of poor people, especially in urban high-rises, leads to rampant social dysfunction, ie., crime, vandalism, and drug use. While significant proportions of the homeless population do have a variety of emotional and physical problems, these are frequently generalized as a condition of poverty. "It's a myth that poor people don't know how to live," said Tracy Cipoletti, a formerly homeless mother of three children. "They need to stop talking about the problems and start helping us to deal with them. Permanent housing is the most important first step."

However, one of the main arguments made at the meetings against converting the Inn into housing was the idea that high-rises are unsuitable for poor families with children. Clearly the problems which have occurred in high-rises and public housing are more complex than the density of people and are potentially avoidable. For example in Chicago, which has a high percentage of low-income housing high-rises, tenants have successfully managed some buildings and have revealed the real factors behind housing failures. According to J.S. Fuerst and Roy Petty, who work with public housing projects in Chicago, "Poor original locations, poor tenancy controls, enormous concentrations of the very poor, socially troubled families, some design flaws, poor maintenance, few supporting social services and inept management have a lot more to do with public housing problems than how many floors [density] each building has," (In These Times, June 20, 1990).

There was also dissent at the meetings over prioritization of short-term shelter over permanent housing. In Washtenaw County over half of the welfare recipients don't receive a high enough housing grant to pay for rent. In addition, a recent survey of Domestic Violence Shelters in Michigan found that because of a lack of safe, decent, and affordablc housing, "...nearly 60% of women who returned to their violent partners... did so because of housing problems." No matter how many short-term shelters there are, the majority of people still have nowhere to go after leaving these programs. Knowing this, several service providers still proposed using the Inn for short-term shelter and office space.

Finally, it is clear that the social service system is unwilling or unable to fully advocate for the interests of low-income people. Shelters and social service agencies have daily contact with low-income people and are aware of the inadequacies of their programs but rarely mention this in political debates about housing. Alternatively, when real housing opportunities arise, like the Ann Arbor Inn, a myriad of excuses are offered as to why they won't work, with the alternative being more shelters. While this may appear to be a humane response, we will continually be plagued by lost opportunities and self-defeating misdirected actions until we challenge this approach.