[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[December 22, 1993]
[Pages 2200-2201]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks Announcing Grants for Programs for the Homeless
December 22, 1993

    Thank you, Reverend Steinbruck. He was so good I kind of hate to 
spoil the occasion. [Laughter] I want to thank all of you for being 
here, those of you who work in the field of homelessness. I want to 
thank Senator Riegle and Congressman Vento and Congressman Frank and 
Congressman Kildee for their support in the Congress. I want to say how 
good it is to see my friend Mayor Schmoke here who's done so much in the 
housing area. And I want to thank, too, Secretary Cisneros and Assistant 
Secretary Cuomo for the leadership they have shown.
    I want to try to explain why, 3 days before Christmas, this is an 
important event not just because of the money involved but because this 
represents a different approach to what has become our most painful and, 
as a country, I think one of our most embarrassing social problems.
    We have tried to look beyond the issue of temporary shelters to the 
question of permanent relief from the condition of homelessness. And I 
congratulate Assistant Secretary Cuomo and all the people at HUD, who 
worked with a lot of you who labor in housing and have for years for the 
homeless, a lot of you who've worked with the mentally ill, with people 
who have other problems, in coming up with an approach that at least 
gives us a chance to try to go beyond the symptoms to the cause, to try 
to deal with this problem on a long-term basis.
    For years, our Nation's attention has been properly focused on the 
emergency needs of the homeless and the efforts just to find people a 
place to stay on a cold night. That's an important thing. Nearly every 
day when I go out running I run by a group of homeless men who sleep on 
the grates within two blocks of my back door. And we've developed a kind 
of a friendly relationship. They say hello to me. I say hello to them. I 
wish to goodness on the days that are cold and windy, when I find it 
difficult to find the courage to run, they at least didn't have to spend 
the night there. But I also know that there are other factors at work 
inside the minds and hearts of those people which make some of them 
reluctant to come in and which make it impossible for them to stay in.
    So we have tried to ask some other questions with this proposal: 
What kind of skills and assistance do homeless people need to really 
move from the streets to places of their own? How do we help maintain 
their housing in more permanent and stable ways when lives themselves 
have often never been permanent or stable in any traditional sense?
    For some of the homeless we may never find the answers. For whatever 
sad reason, some people do drift beyond the outer realm of society and 
never come back. But a lot of others, especially the parents and their 
children, can be lifted out of their helplessness and hopelessness if we 
relate to them in the right way.

[[Page 2201]]

    You heard the Secretary say that yesterday the United States 
Conference of Mayors said that as much as 43 percent of the homeless 
population may now be parents and children. The mayors' press conference 
yesterday was the first one ever attended by an administration official 
since the mayors formed their task force on homelessness 10 years ago. 
And I want to thank again the leadership at HUD, starting with the 
Secretary, for bringing new energy and attention to this.
    I didn't have much to do with it except to ask that simple question 
when my longtime friend Henry Cisneros and I talked about this. I just 
said, ``Will we ever be able to show the American people that there 
aren't so many people on the streets?''
    On Sunday there was a wonderful piece in the New York Times Sunday 
Magazine about a woman who has transformed an old stereotype of single-
room occupancy hotels and replaced it with a new model to help meet the 
long-term needs we're discussing. She's reinvented this single-room 
occupancy housing to create well-kept places and integrate services for 
people with special needs and disabilities. And in so doing, she's 
helping people regain control over their lives.
    None of the initiatives of this administration--strengthening work 
and family and community--can be done without forming a partnership with 
people on the front-lines, like that lady and like so many of you in 
this room, the people who give of themselves not just on Christmas Day 
but every day. But as Christmas approaches, I hope the American people 
will, in all their Christmas prayers, save room for a simple one, that 
all of us somehow might realize the humility to know how blessed we are 
to be in this country, and still to remember those who are not blessed, 
though they are among our midst.
    This Christmas all many of them wish for is a place to spend the 
night. But what we know is, if they're going to have a place to spend 
the night, they have to have a place where they can live and grow and 
deal with the demons that bedevil so many of us in this country.
    I have a list--I won't read it to you but I was--that Henry gave me 
that kind of is representative of the kinds of people who are getting 
these grants. Sometimes I think we make them more inaccessible to 
ordinary Americans by talking about things like support services and 
transition services and this, that, the other thing. But in plain 
English, what we're trying to do is take people who are battered and 
bruised and broken, but who still have a lot of God's grace left in 
them, and find a way to bring all that back to the surface and put their 
own lives back more in their control.
    I hope this new approach works. If it does, it will be because of a 
lot of you out there on the front-lines who are making it work, like 
this fine and funny man of the cloth. If it does, we will have given the 
American people a good Christmas present.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:55 p.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the 
White House. In his remarks, he referred to Rev. John Steinbruck, 
pastor, Luther Place Memorial Church.