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Alum's goal in federal post is ending homelessness in 10 years

By Brian Fitzgerald

Philip Mangano has a lofty goal: eliminating chronic homelessness nationwide in 10 years. For those who think it's impossible, he says, think again: "More difficult tasks have been accomplished."

Philip Mangano

For example, Mangano (SED'69) can recall a 1962 speech by John F. Kennedy declaring that the United States would put a man on the moon within the decade, an idea many thought was pure science fiction. But soon after Mangano graduated from BU, political and scientific will finally turned it into a reality with Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind.

But many people feel that ending homelessness -- if possible at all -- will be a much bigger hurdle. However, Mangano, who in January was appointed by the Bush administration to serve as the executive director of the Interagency Homeless Council, also remembers a time when the national urban landscape didn't include people sleeping in boxes and on heating grates.

"Many of us grew up in an era when homelessness wasn't a major social issue, when there weren't any emergency shelters," he says. Could we return to those days? Mangano likes to use the example of slavery in the United States as a seemingly intractable social evil that was abolished. "There were 6,000 years of history and broad social support behind it, but slavery ended," he says. "And if someone said just 15 years ago that Soviet Communism would fall within 10 years, you would have thought that he was crazy. Now the Berlin Wall is a museum. Our goal should be that our children need to go to a museum to see what homelessness once was."

Homelessness became a large problem in the 1970s, Mangano says, when media coverage brought to light the inadequacies of mental health care in state hospitals, resulting in the mass discharge of mentally ill people from institutions. "The irony of that, of course, was that it was intended to be a good thing," he says. "The research indicated that these people weren't well treated in the back wards of these hospitals, so at first the whole idea of desinstitutionalization was a positive one."

Homelessness was the unintended consequences of this policy, says Mangano, even though many people left these institutions with the promise of housing and support services. "In many places, neither were delivered," he says. "In some places, such as Massachusetts, the residential aspect of the promise was pretty much kept. But there were no support services to ensure that these people, for example, kept taking their medication. There was no liaison with the property owners to make sure that rents remained affordable. There was no liaison to help these people get jobs. And as a result of that, many of them were placed in residences such as YMCAs and YWCAs throughout the commonwealth. After a few months, they left, and there was no state hospital to go to anymore. With no families to take them in, these people went to the street."

In the 1980s, the "economic homeless" became part of the national consciousness. "The number of homeless families increased in the mid-'80s. At the same time," Mangano says, "as substance abuse became more prevalent in society, we not only had people suffering from alcoholism in the streets, we also had people suffering from other kinds of addictions. So there was an explosion in homelessness during that decade. To put it in perspective, in 1981 there were two state-funded emergency shelters in the state -- one in Boston and one in Cambridge. By the end of the 1980s, there were 155."

Mangano, a former seminary student, wound up in Los Angeles in the 1970s as a music manager. But he left the West Coast and the Hollywood glitz and came back to Massachusetts to be a professional advocate for the homeless. From 1986 to 1990, the Belmont, Mass., native was director of homeless services for the city of Cambridge, where he worked with the St. Paul AME Church and other African-American congregations to create meal, shelter, and permanent housing programs. In 1990, he became the founding executive director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance (MHSA).

In his new post, his strategy will be much like it was at the MHSA: beefing up the resources needed for prevention at the front door of homeless programs, and the production of housing at the back door. "What is needed at the front door are more residential options and permanent housing," he says. "At the back door there must be appropriate discharge from institutions, and aftercare planning from care systems."

Mangano says that a federal study in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia shows that 80 percent of all people who go into emergency homeless shelters are "transitionally" homeless. "Only 20 percent are chronically homeless," he says. "We can help both populations."

Mangano says his mission is to coordinate the government's overall approach to homelessness with the help of several departments, including Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Veterans Administration. But it is logical to expect that chronic homelessness can be eradicated in a country with 650,000 people on the street on any given night? Mangano points out that the government recently provided nonprofit organizations across the country with more than $1 billion in grants to provide housing and supportive services to the homeless -- the largest amount of homeless assistance in history. "We can abolish chronic homelessness in 10 years," he says. "To tell you the truth, I never would have left Boston if I thought this wasn't possible."

According to U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Mangano is the right man for the job. "Philip Mangano has been a passionate voice on behalf of the homeless in Massachusetts for over 20 years," he says. "I am confident that he will bring the same energy, compassion, and effectiveness that has marked his service in Massachusetts to his new role as executive director of the Interagency Homeless Council. The commonwealth's loss is the nation's gain."

5 April 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations