What the Dog Saw [78]
Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening to old Malcolm X speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the civil-rights movement and the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. “I am an abolitionist,” he says. “My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”
3.
The old YMCA in downtown Denver is on Sixteenth Street, just east of the central business district. The main building is a handsome six-story stone structure that was erected in 1906, and next door is an annex that was added in the 1950s. On the ground floor are a gym and exercise rooms. On the upper floors there are several hundred apartments — brightly painted one bedrooms, efficiencies, and SRO-style rooms with microwaves and refrigerators and central air-conditioning — and for the past several years those apartments have been owned and managed by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.
Even by big-city standards, Denver has a serious homelessness problem. The winters are relatively mild, and the summers aren’t nearly as hot as those of neighboring New Mexico or Utah, which has made the city a magnet for the indigent. By the city’s estimates, it has roughly a thousand chronically homeless people, of whom three hundred spend their time downtown, along the central Sixteenth Street shopping corridor or in nearby Civic Center Park. Many of the merchants downtown worry that the presence of the homeless is scaring away customers. A few blocks north, near the hospital, a modest, low-slung detox center handles twenty-eight thousand admissions a year, many of them homeless people who have passed out on the streets, either from liquor or — as is increasingly the case — from mouthwash. “Dr. —, Dr. Tich, they call it — is the brand of mouthwash they use,” says Roxane White, the manager of the city’s social services. “You can imagine what that does to your gut.”
Eighteen months ago the city signed up with Mangano. With a mixture of federal and local funds, the CCH inaugurated a new program that has so far enrolled 106 people. It is aimed at the Murray Barrs of Denver, the people costing the system the most. CCH went after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a criminal record, who had a problem with substance abuse or mental illness. “We have one individual in her early sixties, but looking at her you’d think she’s eighty,” Rachel Post, the director of substance treatment at the CCH, said. (Post changed some details about her clients in order to protect their identity.) “She’s a chronic alcoholic. A typical day for her is, she gets up and tries to find whatever she’s going to drink that day. She falls down a lot. There’s another person who came in during the first week. He was on methadone maintenance. He’d had psychiatric treatment. He was incarcerated for eleven years, and lived on the streets for three years after that, and, if that’s not enough, he had a hole in his heart.”
The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had laid out in St. Louis: Would you like a free apartment? The enrollees got either an efficiency at the YMCA or an apartment rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided they agreed to work within the rules of the program. In the basement of the Y, where the racquetball courts used to be, the coalition built a command center, staffed with ten caseworkers. Five days a week, between eight-thirty and ten in the morning, the caseworkers meet and painstakingly review the status of everyone in the program. On the wall around the conference table are several large whiteboards, with lists of doctor’s appointments and court dates and medication