St Mary's

• Kathleen Noonan From: The Courier-Mail September 17, 2011 12:01AM

Source: News Limited

She is checking emails at the office of West End community organisation Micah Projects when we meet but jumps up – “Do you want tea/coffee/water?” – and she’s in the kitchen.

Haggerty is royalty in the homeless sector. One US newspaper called her the Mother Teresa of affordable housing, which all sounds over the top until you stop and think about what she’s achieved.

She tackled homelessness in New York when the city was broke. Some areas were crime-ridden no-go zones and most people thought it utterly hopeless. She put together an elegant solution which, on the street, worked.

Better still, it has been successfully replicated through the US and here in Australia. Queensland is building its first Common Ground right now, at Hope St, South Brisbane, with 146 studio and one-bedroom units for the city’s most vulnerable.

Back in 2001, Haggerty received the MacArthur Foundation’s $500,000 no-strings genius grant for her work renovating defunct old hotels into low-cost, publicly subsidised housing for the homeless.

Haggerty is often described as influential, dogged, charming and focused. She says she was simply in the right place at the right time.

After graduation, she volunteered at a homeless teens’ charity on 43rd St, Times Square. There was a massive notorious hotel next door that she couldn’t get out of her mind.

“The Times Square Hotel was so big and derelict, no one knew what to do with it. The bankruptcy judge was asking ‘Who is going to do something with this?’ so I put my hand up.”

The business community of Times Square backed her. “That gave government the cover they needed,” she says. “If it bombed they could pretend it had nothing to do with them.”

It didn’t bomb. It succeeded spectacularly and now offers 652 units of supported housing, complete with on-site social services.

So where does Haggerty’s social conscience-meets-determination come from? She grew up outside Hartford in a big Catholic family with strong social beliefs at its core. At 17 she helped her mother care for seven younger siblings after her father died.

“I remember those days at home when we were small and lots of interesting people from boarding housing were at our house, like an extended part of the family,” she says.

“At Thanksgiving there would be people like Frank at the table. Lovely people with nowhere else to go. When I got my driving licence, my mum would send me to pick them up. This gave me a full education into where poor single people made their lives.

“Parents are smart, aren’t they?”

Haggerty, it seems, never stays still for long. She is now president of Community Solutions, a new US organisation aimed at strengthening communities to end homelessness.

She says something that came out of 9/11 was a change in the way New York deals with vulnerable people.

“The city was in a state of crisis and quickly set up large family assistance centres,” she says.

“You had people from all income brackets in crisis. They had to go to 12 different agencies and fill out so many forms to get help.

“Well, there was a mutiny. Middle-class, educated people cracked up.

“The city had to come up with a way to fix this by breaking down the silo attitude. It’s something the homeless – vulnerable, with limited education and a mental illness – have had to face for decades.”

So how does Haggerty top up her ideas bucket? “I bowerbird ideas from around the world when I travel and think, can I make this work back home. And I read.”

On the plane over to Australia, she devoured Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck. “I’m always looking for different ways at looking at problems. I don’t have all the ideas.”

And then she’s off, down to the Hope St site, then on to South Bank for the next function to meet and greet and mingle and spread the genius of Common Ground.

AND ANOTHER THING

It’s hard to drive over the Story Bridge these days and not think of the fragility of this life. I am heading home the other night, when the big bone-pale moon looms into view, bouncing light off the oncoming cars. Straight up, Pearl Jam’s enigmatic Eddie Vedder singing Wishlist comes to mind: I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good/I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood.

Fine songs are like that, our internal soundtracks. After this month’s tragic headlines here in Brisbane and in the US, if only all the news was good.

Listening to the late-night coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, when the names of the dead were read, there were eight with the same surname. Incomprehensible.