Mandell is just as dedicated to eradicating homelessness, but speaks in skillfully crafted sound bites meant to generate warm fuzzies, which is why city officials and advocates for the homeless name Mandell as their go-to man. Mandell will actually say things such as the coalition intends to "chart a course for the future of our city and our country."
Such words will never fall from Hatcher's lips. He's more apt to refer to homelessness as "a complex frickin' problem," and then suggest mandatory institutionalization for the homeless who are mentally ill and who cannot care for themselves.
"After 20 years or so of seeing it not work, I'd like to see more people forced into treatment," he says.
Besides the problem of the mentally ill, Hatcher boils the complex frickin' problem down to two factors: the abundance of crack and the void of affordable housing.
Houston does not have enough substance abuse programs to combat crack, the most nefarious narcotic in the homeless milieu, Hatcher says.
"There is a hell of a crack distribution system, and it's unlike that we've ever encountered as a drug," he says. "It's acceptable to be a social drinker. Old hippies think it's acceptable to smoke pot socially. Heroin addicts, if they have enough money, can be junkies. But" -- here, Hatcher slows his cadence to prove a point -- "you can't smoke crack If a person is not a drinker and they start drinking, it's going to take a year or so of concerted effort to become a debilitated alcoholic. You can make yourself fucked up totally in 30 days by smoking crack every day."
And Houston has a lack of affordable housing. Years ago, there was an abundance of boarding houses offering cheap, clean alternatives to the street. But in the mid-1980s -- the same time the federal government closed mental hospitals, putting more people on the street -- the rooms dried up. (About one million SRO units were demolished between 1970 and the mid-1980s, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.)
The alternatives were shelters or the street. Some found the latter more palatable than the proselytizing and condescending nature of "life skills classes" in the shelters. They stayed in their camps, and an apathetic nation accepted it.
"Somehow, during the '80s, across the country, we started accepting as a fact, or as reality, that there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people camped out around this country and it's okay. It's sad, but it's okay," he says.
Hatcher blames that status quo attitude for perpetuating the problem. He has compassion for the people on the streets, which is precisely why he wants to make homelessness illegal. Enforce the hell out of the civility ordinance, he says. Penalize property owners who allow squatters. Sic the health department on the troubled nomads whose sense of dignity has deteriorated to the point where they're covered in their own shit. Just don't allow them to be on the street anymore. Don't sigh and say "too bad" and drive on.
"I'm a left-wing liberal socialist, and that sounds very right-wing Nazi," Hatcher says. "But I can't come up with something else that works."
Dotti Wilson will probably never learn of Hatcher's message unless it somehow winds up in her tattered copy of a Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary for Young People. Back at Root Square, she's splayed out on a friend's blanket, thumbing through the words that begin with C. Her other prized possessions include postcards and envelopes decorated with neatly handwritten columns of numbers from zero to 45. She's written the numbers but can't explain their meaning.
Wilson, 45, is overweight and has long, stringy brown hair. She insists she's not homeless, she just came to the park today to relax. She says she lives in South Houston with a truck driver who she says hits her and kicks her out of his apartment for months at a time.
She also tells of designing album covers, writing the country song "Indian Outlaw," supplying money to banks and making baseball cards out of gold. She's descended from kings and queens of England and Pennsylvania, and her famous uncle Bill invented the outdoor billboard. Hence the name.
Wilson says she has two grown children in Bellaire, but she hasn't seen them in a long time because "they're the government."
It turns out she really lives with a truck driver, Robert. He says he met Wilson a few years ago on the street, thought she was "retarded" and offered her a place to stay.
Wilson's children are also authentic. They live with her ex-husband in Bellaire, in a tiny white house where Wilson will sometimes show up. Her ex, who declined to give his name or to be interviewed, would say only that Wilson is schizophrenic and beyond help.