Leave it to Michael Medved to See the Glass as Half Empty

The recently unveiled Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness (pdf) aims to end chronic and veteran homelessness in five years and family, youth and child homelessness within ten years. "We believe it is important to set goals, even if aspirational, for true progress to be made," goes a line in the plan's executive summary. Conservative pundit and professional agitator Micheal Medved must have missed that line.

"Could any sane observer above the age of 14 honestly believe that a new federal program would succeed in achieving that noble goal?" Medved wrote over at AOL News on Wednesday. "Or, even more outlandishly, that the latest bureaucratic prescription would finally succeed in its broader purpose: to 'end' homelessness of every sort within 10 years?"

Certainly, if we are to look only at the scope of the problem before us and ignore any successes thus far — those occuring locally, made possible by people who Medved hints know better than those in Washington — we will not get far. That's why we set for ourselves aspirational goals we can work towards. But there are misunderstandings more fundamental to the plan Medved expresses.

"In fact, the new federal effort mostly duplicates costly efforts already under way in every corner of the country," he writes. "Cities and towns have previously launched 234 local plans to 'end homelessness,' and 84 percent of them include 10-year deadlines — just like the Obama undertaking." But reading even the opening of Opening Doors, it is more than obvious that the plan is not to duplicate these efforts but to build on them. The plan is to acknowledge the work that has been going on through the various regional 10-year plans and to realign the federal end of things with progress on the ground.

From Opening Doors:

• "This Plan is a roadmap for joint action ... with local and state partners in the public and private sectors."
• "The Plan also proposes the realignment of existing programs based on what we have learned and the best practices that are occuring at the local level, so that resources focus on what works."
• "The Plan recognizes that the federal government needs to be smarter and more targeted in its response and role, which also includes supporting the work that is being done on the ground."

These quotes are all pulled from the first five pages of Opening Doors, which is basically nothing more than a list of ten objectives and various strategies for completing them. I can't assume that Medved, like the reflexive liberals he refers to, is reacting to the announcement of a federal 10-year plan to end homelessness, rather than to the plan itself, or that he hasn't read the plan, but both prove hard insticts to ignore.

Despite all the self-contradiction and grating hyperbole ("armies of social workers," "messianic visions of the Obama administration," "preposterous promises," "the homeless hordes"), Medved does make one good point. Government at all levels finds itself, like the homeless, extremely strapped for cash right now; its ability to help alleviate social ills is as precarious now as it's ever been — both financially with deficits and politically with Medveds and Tea Partiers seemingly on the rise. Now more than ever it is time to demand that individuals and the private sector do something.

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