USA Today, in its customary role as codifier of conventional wisdoms, offers a glowing appraisal of the new just-be-yourself homeless shelters that have become a national trend, entitled Cities Go Further To Help the Homeless. And who could possibly be against that?

The problem is that the programs she lists read like a catalog of the mistakes of the last 60 years. The article, which includes not a single quote critical programs that ask nothing opens in New York, where reporter Charisse Jones finds her single sympathetic subject—

It took a new kind of shelter to bring Thomas Malinowski in off the streets where he has slept and lived for 13 years.

At the 2-month-old Safe Haven, the first shelter of its kind in the city, there is no curfew and no requirement that residents give up alcohol or drugs in order to have a bed.

…

Safe Haven is one of several steps the city is taking to achieve Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ambitious goal of reducing the homeless population here by two-thirds by 2009.

Jones doesn't mention that this is only slightly more likely that Jimmy Carter coming through on his vow to eliminate homelessness in Atlanta. In New York, the Department of Homeless Services' annual survey, itself a measure to be viewed skeptically, shows the city's homeless population increasing from 2,694 in the 2004 survey (the first year for which comparable numbers are available) to 3,843 in the 2006 survey.

Instead, Jones runs through same mistaken reasoning that gave rise to the massive projects that still besot our cities by assuming that if you give poor people the same living conditions as rich people, they'll behave the same way. This is especially senseless when the poor people being helped are mostly addicts, mentally ill, or both.

She even points to San Francisco as a success story for ending homelessness, and uses a quote to frowns on those who don't want them as neighbors (these people, incidentally, never speak for themselves: "San Francisco has rented entire apartment buildings and built units to fill the void. Alioto says some residents resist having the formerly homeless as neighbors. 'You don't want them on the streets, but you don't want them in your neighborhoods,' [program head Angela] Alioto says of some residents' feelings. 'And that doesn't work.'"

Finally, she ends with a miraculous, if self-reported, success story:

Peter Diaz, 51, an alcoholic, lived on Manhattan's streets for six years. The cleanliness of Safe Haven, located in the Bowery neighborhood, and the persistence of outreach workers finally persuaded him to move there in early December.

Though he is not in an alcoholism treatment program, he says, "I haven't drunk since I've been here. That's amazing. Really."

He sees a future where he is never again homeless.

"I would like to either get me an apartment or a room," says the onetime construction worker. "I'd like to stay sober, which I will as long as I have a place. … I have something to look forward to."

If building people homes and paying their rents would solve the problem, you'd think we'd have it under control by now. Then again, Jones tells us that "at least 285 communities are creating or implementing plans to end homelessness in a decade."

I'm all for it in principle—is there anyone against ending homelessness?—but somehow expect that I'll be reading more or less this same dispatch 10 years hence.