Word on the street

'I'm not going to give anyone a sandwich, a blanket or money to stay on the streets. If you saw someone bleeding on the street, you'd call an ambulance, even if they didn't want to go. You'd say maybe they're not in the best state of mind to make that judgement." Tough words from Muzzy Rosenblatt, the man behind the campaign that has swept the streets of New York of homeless people over the last six years. Closely allied in the public imagination to the city's right wing mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his zero tolerance policy, Rosenblatt oversaw a tough and controversial programme aimed at cutting the number of rough sleepers through 'aggressive' social work, police outreach teams and attempts to make access to homeless hostels conditional on signing up to drug and alcohol rehabilitation or training programmes. This week he is in Britain, to tell a conference of homelessness agencies why they should be copying the New York example. What is surprising is that he is unlikely to get a hostile reception: his audience will agree with much of what he has to say. Attitudes have changed hugely since last year when Housing Today reported outrage at an invitation to Giuliani to speak at the Chartered Institute of Housing's annual conference.

According to Crisis research and development manager Kate Tomlinson, everyone in the field has had to rethink their stance, in the light of the Social Exclusion Unit's report on rough sleeping. It held a double-edged and apparently contradictory aim: to reduce rough sleeping by two-thirds by 2002 and to "deliver clear streets".

A recent visit to New York has left Tomlinson impressed with the city's positive, proactive approach to outreach, which involves motivating rough sleepers to come in, rather than leaving them on the streets. She explains: "Here street clearing has become a bit of a bogeyman. But we're not talking about every homeless person being hounded off the streets into the back of a van. Our target is a two-thirds reduction, not complete invisible homelessness. We can achieve a good proportion by tapping into people's motivation, by asking what will make people want to come inside."

So perhaps the appearance of 33-year-old Rosenblatt is timely. In 1993, under the city's first black mayor David Dinkins, he set up a task force of government departments and not-for-profit agencies to form a new department with a $400m annual budget to tackle the crisis levels of homelessness in the city, a set-up not dissimilar to Louise Casey's London rough sleepers unit.

The city's 44 homeless shelters were "privatised" - transferred to not-for-profit agencies to run, providing specialist, "customer oriented" services like drug and alcohol rehabilitation and mental health services.

Access to these hostels was made conditional, more or less, on going through a programme.

Just four remained in city control, offering no more than a bed for a night. These, Rosenblatt admits, remain unruly and violent, and full of what he describes as a "service resistant" population.

His attempts to "attach strings" to entry to these were legally challenged by agencies who said this would be contravening the city's duty to offer everyone shelter. It was partly this that caused the outrage at Giuilani's proposed visit last year.

At the same time a police homeless outreach "social work coercive" team was formed, focusing on "the social services needs of street people, over petty criminal behaviour". Criminalising homelessness does not work for homeless people, he says, and the police don't want it either: but "social coercion" does.

Around 10 mobile outreach teams tour the streets offering places in hostels, detox, drug treatment, in direct competition with groups handing out food to the homeless.

If the food programmes were stopped, and no one gave money to beggars, many more homeless people would come off the streets, Rosenblatt believes. "We try and get there before the food does. Once they've got food from the do-gooders, it makes our job much harder. I think they're helping people to die. I think they're unintentionally hurting people they're trying to help. You don't get better living on the street."

The bottom line, he believes, is that people "do not have a right to harm themselves".

But are we ready for this radical approach? Last month London's newly appointed streets czar Louise Casey told Housing Today she was morally concerned for people who chose to stay on the streets and wanted to make it harder for them to stay there. Her line is close to Rosenblatt's. "We do have to give people on the streets every opportunity to come in off the streets," says Casey. "The quid pro quo is we expect they will."

So how do you tackle those that genuinely don't want to leave the street? Both Casey and Rosenblatt believe educating homeless people about their options, and educating the public about their responsibilities, hold part of the answer. From Rosenblatt's experience, adequate resources and control over budgets are essential, in working with voluntary agencies, rather than against them is another key.

And one final thought: "Reasonable people can discuss and never agree whether there's a right to sleep on the street," he says. "I don't care. If we have a debate about rights, we're distracting ourselves from solutions. If you put new solutions out, maybe we'll not have to have that discussion.