Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

At the Ready, Willing and Able shelter on 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, a former homeless crack addict I'll call Tom walked me through immaculate, pleasantly furnished dormitories where books and telephones were kept by the beds.

He took me to the computer room where men were quietly studying for the G.E.D. He showed me the room where members of the program have their urine tested twice a week. There was no violence, no drugs and none of the filth and chaos that everyone remembers from the thousand-bed armory shelters in the 1980s.

Those were the days when the Coalition for the Homeless monitored conditions in the mega-shelters, steadfastly ensuring that there was three feet between each bed and at least one shower for every 15 people -- even if no one felt safe enough to use it. Lately the advocacy group has joined with talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell and other Celebrity Friends of Hillary Rodham Clinton to excoriate Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his policies on the homeless.

The barrage of criticism has eclipsed revolutionary improvements in the way New York deals with the homeless. Whatever you may think of the mayor's dubious record on police brutality, media and free speech, it is Rudy Giuliani who has brought that revolution about by implementing the suggestions of a 1990 report authored for then-Mayor David Dinkins by Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who was working for the alternative housing nonprofit H.E.L.P.

Sure, people are aware that there are fewer vagrants, panhandlers and muttering schizophrenics in Gotham these days. And though most have no clue how or why that came to be, they're generally so pleased by the change that Clinton and Co. have probably picked a losing political strategy. It's telling that only 1,000 people turned up at a demonstration against Giuliani's homeless policy in Union Square in early December.

And even with the mayor's strange genius for attracting negative publicity, the more New Yorkers learn about his genuinely humane and effective homeless policy, the more damaging it will be for Clinton if she makes it an issue in her New York Senate campaign.

With the help of the nonprofit organizations that now run 90 percent of New York's shelters, many homeless are getting their lives together and joining the mainstream. And when New Yorkers discover that the homeless haven't been chased out of town by the New York Police Department or packed into penitentiaries (though far too many mentally ill people do end up at Rikers Island, rather than in the asylums and halfway houses where they belong) but are instead rejoining the community of those who live according to the social compact, it will only help Giuliani's political prospects.

Yet it's the very programs that have most helped the homeless -- drug testing, work requirements and other programs that help acculturate them into the mainstream -- that make the Coalition for the Homeless and its allies wax hysterical. If you believe their most recent sallies, you'd think that requiring work from able-bodied, mentally healthy people in the city's shelters was the ultimate unspeakable act of a monstrously uncaring city government.

You also might be bamboozled into thinking the city's homeless policy is the product of financial stinginess. Yet New York now spends $800 million a year on the homeless -- with $438 million budgeted for the Department of Homeless Services and another $360 million that gets filtered through other agencies. And under Giuliani, even as the number of people on the streets has shrunk, the city's budget for helping the homeless has grown beyond what was spent under the supposedly more compassionate Mayor David Dinkins.

The most recent salvo in the battle between the mayor and the alliance of Clinton supporters and advocacy groups came from federal Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who since endorsing Clinton has apparently disavowed his own report, which was the foundation for Giuliani's policies.

In late December, Cuomo took control of the $60 million the federal government provides New York for its homeless programs. The housing secretary said his decision to resume control was a response to a recent federal court ruling that the city "improperly" blocked funds to the activist group Housing Works. But despite the mayor's often deserved reputation for punishing groups that criticize him, Housing Works actually lost its funds because it may have misappropriated a half-million dollars in 1998 grant money. (The organization denies any theft but cannot account for the missing $500,000.)

When the Doe Fund introduced its Ready, Willing and Able program in Harlem in 1996, the organization was picketed by the Coalition for the Homeless. Activists slammed The Doe Fund as "racist" and compared its program to "slavery." (It was, of course, the Coalition that had supervised the shelter in the halcyon days before The Doe Fund took it over, when crack was openly dealt in the parking lot and hallways.)

The homeless themselves tend to take a less theoretical approach to their situation. When I asked trainee Frank Simmonds, who lived on the streets for two years and used to hustle tourists at Kennedy airport for crack money, if he thinks the program is like slavery, he told me that the question is insulting, in fact crazy. "Work gives you your dignity back," he said.

It's one of the two phrases you hear from everyone at RWA, especially from the majority of staff members who themselves are graduates of the program. The other is, "I was tired," meaning tired of life on the street.

When I arrived at the shelter, work crews wearing the program's blue-and-white uniforms were heading out into vans, having had their breakfast and attended the morning's Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

Since the program was first established in Brooklyn in 1990, Ready, Willing and Able workers have cleaned hundreds of blocks in Manhattan, and much of the program's noncity funding comes from businesses and individuals who heard about the program from the men sweeping the sidewalks on their streets.

The Doe Fund pays trainees a salary that starts at $5.50 an hour. Out of that salary they must pay $50 a week in rent and another $15 for meals; $30 is withheld for savings that are returned when a trainee graduates from the program. Many trainees are able to save additional money during their year to 18 months in the program, and if they manage to put aside $1,000 or more by graduation, Doe offers matching funds -- provided over a period of several months, with mandatory drug testing prior to disbursements.

The shelter stresses getting trainees ready to join the work force, by teaching basic life skills such as punctuality, workplace behavior and writing a r?sum?. Combined with drug tes