Smart-spending skid row program saves lives

If you pay taxes, Eddie Givens was costing you a fortune.

For the better part of 30 years, his life was a disaster. He was arrested dozens of times and cycled in and out of jails and hospitals, all of it on the public dime.

In his own words, Givens was a "blackout drunk" who passed out on the streets of downtown Los Angeles night after night. Each morning, he'd reach for the "vodka, scotch, whatever," and start all over again.

"That was my breakfast," says the 56-year-old New York native and former auto body repairman who occasionally cleaned up and moved indoors, only to quickly relapse.

Then one day late in 2007, Givens, who was known on skid row as "Wild Wild West," got a surprise.

"A man and woman came up and said they had a program called Project 50. . . . They said, 'We've got a place for you to stay.' "

Project 50, initiated by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, had a bold objective: Select the 50 most hard-core, sick, chronically homeless people on skid row, give them a place to live with a raft of support services, and see what happens.

Would their lives be transformed? If so, how much would it cost taxpayers?

Nice idea. But then came the hard part. For starters, Project 50 required the collaboration of 24 city, county and nonprofit agencies, and history tells us the city and county don't often work well together. Next came the problem of which homeless people should be included. But by the end of 2007, 350 pavement dwellers had been surveyed, and the 50 most vulnerable identified.

They were, in a manner of speaking, the walking dead. Among the 50, there was cancer, liver and kidney disease and HIV/AIDS. Roughly 90% had some form of mental illness. More than half had a history of substance abuse.

When it came time to move them into housing in early 2008, 14 of the 50 had disappeared, and six were in prison. The outreach team searched for replacements, and between January and May of last year, 49 people were moved from skid row and housed, most of them in downtown apartments run by Skid Row Housing Trust.

And today?

Four of the 49 are in jail or prison.

Two dropped out.

And the rest -- 88% -- are still indoors, including two people who were reunited with their families. A 50th person was recently housed but did not figure into the evaluation released last week, at the halfway point of the two-year program.