Homeless Czar Visits Nashville

The White House’s top official on homelessness made the rounds in Nashville Friday, meeting with Mayor Karl Dean, the Homelessness Commission and the Chamber of Commerce.

Phil Mangano, who is better known as the homeless czar, encouraged city leaders to stick with an ongoing pilot program that uses a method called ‘housing-first.’ Mangano is a strong believer that it is cheaper for a community to house a homeless person than to pay when he or she is put in jail or goes to the emergency room. He says it’s even more important than the nation’s foreclosure crisis.

“We are beginning with the folk who are the most vulnerable, the most disabled. These are the people literally experiencing chronic homelessness. These are the people that literally die on the street. The last time I was in Nashville, I was astonished to hear that 55 people had died on the streets of Nashville. Well, we have a moral, a spiritual obligation to them. But we now know we have an economic obligation to the taxpayer.”

Mangano says some 60 studies throughout the country show the cost of a homeless person ranging anywhere from $35 to more than $100,000 thousand dollars per year.

A study that attempts to pinpoint the true cost of homelessness in Nashville is due out from a Vanderbilt research team later this year.

Members of the Metro Homelessness Commission are looking for input on how to continue attacking homelessness. The commission is one of few Metro entities looking at a budget increase in the mayor’s proposal – up 18% over last year.