Test Case — Austin
Austin, Texas, is seen as one of the finest cities in the country, one of America’s urban gems. For a long time, its reputation has been that of a liberal, progressive, enlightened city in the midst of a state that is not so much any of those things. Thanks to the “City of Austin Tax Increment Financing Reinvestment Zone No. 17,” aka the “Waller Creek Tunnel Project Final Project Plan,” which helpfully gathered the list, we see that Austin has bragging rights to a long and growing list of “bests” (link is PDF), including but not limited to:
1st place — “Best Large City for Relocating Families” in 2004
1st place — “Top 10 Cities for Hispanics to Live in” in 2005
2nd place — Top Creative Class Cities in 2002
2nd place — “Ten Greenest Cities” list in 2005
3rd place — “Best Places” for business and careers in 2005
6th place — Nation’s top tech hubs in 2005
11th place — “The 25 Best Running Cities in America”in 2005
One of the top 10 cities to be a dog in 2005.
Relevant to the last item, in 2011 it was announced:
Austin achieves 90 percent live animal outcome; reaches no-kill status… by achieving a 90 percent live-animal outcome for all animals that enter the Town Lake Animal Center.
Now, that’s admirable, and no animal should ever suffer, but here’s the thing. Hopefully, it won’t get to where the kill rate for stray creatures is more favorable than the kill rate for homeless people. Austin may be a great place for a dog, but it’s not so wonderful for a lot of folks. This could change. Hopefully, now more than ever, Austin is capable of looking through reasonable eyes at people experiencing homelessness and seeing more than just a nuisance to be gotten rid of.
Sure, some down-and-outers are never gonna make it. But — and this is a very important but — like any other metropolis, Austin has not just a social and fiscal liability on its hands, but, at least partially, a talent pool of potentially useful and contributing citizens.
Last week, we talked a little about the article recently published by Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless. Titled “How to end homelessness in Austin: A plan,” it is part of CultureMap’s Imagine Austin’s Future series. Richard believes that the Universal Living Wage will end homelessness for about half of Austin’s homeless population. Nationwide, the number is projected as 1,000,000. That would add up to a lot less stress for government agencies and helping organizations.
House the Homeless has devoted a lot of time and energy to assessing the health status of Austin’s homeless population, and arrived at some troubling conclusions. One is that a lot of homeless people are just plain incapable of holding down a job, because of disabilities and other health issues. Of the homeless who are capable of working, most would love to be employed.
And, big surprise, a lot of people experiencing homelessness are employed now, possibly even at more than one job. And still can’t make ends meet. They are what Richard calls the economic homeless. He writes:
… [A]s it stands now, a person can work a full time job and still not be able to afford basic rental housing either in Austin or any city in the U.S…. [F]or those who can work, we need to fix the Federal Minimum Wage (FMW, currently $7.25 per hour)… By simply indexing the FMW to the local cost of housing using HUD Fair Market Rents, we ensure that anyone working 40 hours in a week will be able to afford basic rental housing.
For people who can’t work, the solution, he believes, is to increase Supplemental Security Income, which presently only adds up to half of what a minimum-wage earner makes. If even some jobholders are unable to find housing, imagine how much more difficult it is for people who only make half that much.
Yes, it might cost the taxpayers more. On the other hand, it might not, if the taxpayers would ever take more of an interest in how much money is wasted by government (or disappears into places it’s not supposed to be). Maybe there are places where the money could be found without having a tax impact. Surely, somebody can figure out this stuff. Molly Ivins, where are you now, when we need you so much?
Just to put things into perspective, here is Richard’s capsule description of another lengthy, uphill local effort:
About 12 years ago, advocates organized to create and pass housing bonds. After about ten years, the bonds were passed and money for 350 units of housing was set aside for people experiencing homelessness. Only about a third of this housing has been created. Do the math. How many decades to house 4,000 people at that rate?
He closes with:
In overview, we can see that with clear vision, new perspective and collectively involving the city, the citizens of Austin, federal and state governments and the business community in a fair, equitable, balanced and profitable fashion, we can end homelessness as it exists today.
Austin has a splendid opportunity to set an example of how to do the most beneficial thing for the biggest number of people. Austin is a test case whose success could revolutionize the homeless scene and influence policy, for the better, in other cities. It’s the chance of a lifetime to make a whole lot more “best” lists.
Reactions?
Source: “Tax Increment Financing Reinvestment Zone No. 17 (Waller Creek Tunnel Project)” (PDF), ci.austin.tx.us March 2008
Source: “City and County Notes—March 2011,” ImpactNews.com, 03/25/11
Source: “How to end homelessness in Austin: A plan,” CultureMap.com, 02/08/12
Image by William Beutler, used under its Creative Commons license.
Even the Best Band-Aid Is No Cure
Last week, Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless accepted the invitation from Austin’s CultureMap to contribute to a special editorial series called “Imagine Austin’s Future.” The best thing to do is just read “How to end homelessness in Austin: A plan” in Richard’s own words. His theme is:
My vision for Austin is a community without homelessness.
There are about 4,000 people experiencing homelessness in Austin now, and that includes plenty of women and kids. Also, there are just over 600 emergency shelter beds. As a wise man once said, “You do the math.”
At a rough estimate, it sounds like there’s a place for only one out of six: 1/6th, more or less, give or take. Yes, the emergency shelter beds that exist are very excellent, but here’s the bottom line. Society has to come up with either (a) a way to create more beds or (b), shocking as the idea may seem, a way to bring the homelessness statistics way, way down — by creating conditions where there are not so many people experiencing homelessness. Maybe not even any.
Until then, House the Homeless continues to set aside a month every Autumn to raise money for thermal underwear, which is better than no shelter at all. Austin’s Thermal Underwear Drive happens in November, right after the annual memorial service for those who have died on the streets, both recently and in all the preceding years.
Of course, Austin isn’t the only city ever to hold a collection drive for winter gear. But it may be the most dedicated. This year, $20,000 in donations bought 3,500 items of clothing to keep people warm. Well, warm-ish. Warmer than they would have been without these welcome additions to their wardrobes.
Now, think about this. Suppose you’re a person experiencing homelessness, and you receive a set of thermal long-johns. You need to strip down to your skivvies in order to put on the new stuff. And it would be extra nice to have a wash in the process. Where can a homeless person do that? In surprisingly few places.
Okay, suppose you’re lucky enough to have a shelter bed for the night, and even the opportunity to catch a shower. So you sleep in your thermal underwear and get up the next day and go outside, and guess what? It’s a little bit too hot to be wearing a layer of insulation all day, outdoors. But, say, the shelter is closed during the day. Where can you go to take off your clothes, remove the thermal underwear, stow it in your pack, and get dressed again? Probably nowhere. Even in a seemingly remote place, there’s always the danger of an observer or a camera, and then you get arrested for indecent exposure.
When the afternoon turns really hot, suppose you can find a place to remove the underlayer. A few hours later, you have to find somewhere to strip down again and get into the warm clothes. This means taking off your shoes and removing the outer layers; preferably in a secluded and not-too-cold place. You have to set down the pack and other belongings, and, of course, a state of undress always puts a person at a disadvantage. In other words, just to prepare for the cold night, you would have to put yourself in an extremely vulnerable situation.
But cheer up, there is an alternative. You can resign yourself to just wearing the thermal underwear all the time, even throughout a warm winter day. It’s extremely uncomfortable to roast in too many clothes, especially if your day includes a long walk to some office to fill out some papers. Of course, you will perspire, and suffer the consequences of offending the noses of the housed citizens who have access to toilets and showers any time they wish.
The message here is, YES, it is a great and important thing to help by providing winter underwear! We will all keep on doing it! But it helps to bear this in mind: Thermal underwear is not a solution. It’s a band-aid for a gaping wound in the body of society. There’s still a bunch of people out there in the cold! Nobody who is reading this needs to be reminded — it’s not enough to give to the Thermal Underwear Drive, and then forget about the homeless until next November.
Remember the part about creating a city and a world where few or no people would experience homelessness? If you haven’t done so already, please see Richard’s solution. His article is titled “How to end homelessness in Austin” for a reason.
Reactions?
Source: “How to end homelessness in Austin: A plan,” CultureMap.com, 02/08/12
Image by Daquella manera (Daniel Lobo), used under its Creative Commons license.
From Head to Toe
Here are a few excerpts from Doing It Homeless, the website created by Kendoll, an actor/Web designer who lives in his car in Los Angeles. His advice to other homeless men is, invest in electric clippers which, although a big-budget item to a pauper, save lots of money in the long run. Learning to cut your own hair, even the back, is not so hard, he says. He also discusses body hair (we won’t) and beards.
This is Kendoll:
Ok, this one’s tricky, if you’re finna rock facial hair, just keep it trimmed and LINED UP! Don’t do the scraggly thing, it’s not crackin’… if you want to keep growing, just line it up under your jawline and below your cheekbones… Shaving cream is expensive… use Dove soap, it’s cheap, it’s thick (work to lather) and it protects from nicks and cuts. With no money, like me, your whole shaving kit shouldn’t exceed 10 dolla to make ya holla. Keep it clean!
Kendoll quotes football star Deion Sanders, who said:
If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, you get paid good.
Of course, a guy probably needs a few practice runs before accomplishing a home-grown haircut fit for a job interview. Thanks to various wonderful volunteers, there are places around America where people experiencing homelessness can get enough of a makeover to make a good appearance at an important appointment.
In Kansas City, MO, there’s Madalyn Wetzel, formerly an Army nurse and now a hair stylist. Long ago, she, her husband, and their baby boy were homeless. Times were bad, and she even pawned her wedding ring. A great deal of generous help was extended to the little family, and they eventually got on their feet, and Wetzel feels a need to give back.
Her good deeds are organized by a nonprofit group called Neighbor2Neighbor, which is housed in a church basement where meals and other services are provided. They arranged for Wetzel to use a corner of a thrift store as a barber shop, and she takes care of the guys with job interviews first. Reporter James Hart tells us that on her very first day, Wetzel gave 17 haircuts. By the time Hart approached her for an interview, she had been serving the homeless in this way for about a year.
In Annapolis, MD, the homeless women’s shelter called Willow House is one of the sites covered by Rob’s Barbershop Community Foundation (RBCF), another nonprofit. Interestingly, its goal is phrased in terms of a service rendered to the people who give, not the ones who receive. Psychologically, this is probably very useful when the organization seeks funding. The organization’s webpage says:
Our mission is to provide comprehensive management to donors whose desire is to support projects that improve the grooming, hygiene and well-being of individuals who cannot afford regular personal care products and services… These products and services are directed to projects at residential, transitional, emergency housing facilities and Title One Public Schools. These projects ensure that those who are homeless, in treatment or wards of the State attend job interviews, work and/or school with a neat and clean appearance.
RBCF also operates a full-service barber shop at a site in Baltimore where 410 males are temporarily housed while taking part in drug treatment. There is also the new Lighthouse Shelter in Anne Arundel County, and participation in the annual Homeless Resource Day, where several hundred of the local people experiencing homelessness are given grooming services at no charge.
Another source says of founder Rob Cradle:
He started the foundation about 10 years ago and grew it to include six sites, but that number has been cut in half due to the poor economy and difficulty to raise money. The three salons cost roughly $130,000 a year to operate. Last year, the foundation provided over 6,000 free grooming services to homeless people.
Cradle says he spends about 4/5ths of each day raising money. He was named a People magazine hero a few years back, and been named as a “Give Back Day Hero” as well as receiving other well-deserved honors.
And now for something completely different — feet! Allan Appel wrote about an unusual and much-needed event for the New Haven Independent. Many Christian denominations practice foot-washing, especially on the Thursday before Easter, and a Connecticut church has taken an ancient ritual to the next level.
This new tradition was started two years ago by Trinity Episcopal Church and its homeless outreach program, “Chapel on the Green,” and even the bishop shows up to help. It’s not just a symbolic gesture, but a podiatry clinic. The parishioners not only wash the feet of 40 homeless visitors, but inspect for and treat medical problems. This includes a brief interview about the person’s general health, a wash, a foot massage, and a coat of lotion. Then, the person gets a new pair of socks and a $40 shoe store voucher:
According to Rev. Alex Dyer of St. Paul and St. James in Wooster Square, the average homeless person walks 8.5 miles a day. John Nelson… said 8.5 is nothing. ‘My feet is my money,’ he said, adding that he often covers 18 to 20 miles a day collecting cans and doing odd jobs. He sleeps in the city’s overflow shelter…
A nurse from the local health center’s homeless outreach program decides who has problems that need attention, like toes in danger of being lost to diabetes, and arranges to follow up with further care.
Thanks to selfless volunteers in communities across the nation, people experiencing homelessness get needed help and, even more important, the knowledge that society has not forgotten them.
Reactions?
Source: “Essential Male Grooming…for the income impaired,” Doing It Homeless, 12/09/10
Source: “Missouri woman offers free haircuts to the homeless,” KMOV.com, 10/07/11
Source: “Rob’s Barbershop Community Foundation,” RBCF.info
Source: “Grooming Services Help Homeless Move Toward Better Future,” Historic Annapolis, MD Patch, 02/13/11
Source: “Homeless Feet Washed,” New Haven Independent, 04/23/11
Image by Kevin Lawver, used under its Creative Commons license.
How to Become Homeless: Have a Criminal Record
Who has time to read every newsletter? But when one shows up, headlined, “Why does the United States lock up so many people?,” attention must be paid. The answers are to be found in The New Yorker piece, by Adam Gopnik, called “The Caging of America.”
Here are some of Gopnik’s words:
Although academic scholars have been analyzing the social costs of our 30-year punishment binge for some time, the American public has been oddly disinterested in our de-evolution into a full-blown prison nation… Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.
The person who pointed out this piece in her newsletter is forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, who can always be counted on for awareness of the most interesting and potentially significant developments in the criminal justice system.
Nowadays, one out of every 99 American adults is behind bars. That’s actually a pretty big segment of a population to be locked up, and it costs a hellacious amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere. More to the point, a lot these imprisoned people will, like so many before them, be released into the condition of people experiencing homelessness.
It’s all too easy to have a knee-jerk reaction like, “If a bunch of former inmates are homeless, so what?” Fortunately, a few moments’ reflection can reveal the reasons why it is a good idea to care about this particular societal problem. Statistically, if you know 400 people, four of them are incarcerated. These days, almost everybody has a family member or a friend in the system. Often, we know this is a basically okay person who messed up in a way that probably won’t happen again. Which is exactly the case with a lot of the anonymous homeless.
Gopnik goes into a great deal of detail about the present state of affairs in the incarceration business, and believes that nonviolent crime should not be dealt with by prison sentences. He gives the example:
… [N]o social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two.
Dana Goodyear wrote about the wrong way to do things, as demonstrated in Los Angeles in 2006:
Garden-variety addicts were caught up in the drug sweep, and those arrested with, say, a five-dollar rock of crack cocaine were charged with possession for sale, which is a felony, rather than the lesser charge of simple possession… [T]here was a new policy in the DA’s office — not to plea-bargain on Skid Row drug cases… Those convicted of drug sales will, upon release, no longer be eligible for food stamps, and some federal housing programs.
And good luck getting any kind of housing. Why should a landlord rent to someone with a record, if other tenants apply with clean slates? The answer is, because not renting to someone with a record can help perpetuate the vicious cycle that the ever-larger numbers of people find themselves caught up in. A record leads to homelessness, and homelessness leads to a record, especially when a person can run afoul of the law by such a simple act as sitting on a sidewalk.
The stigma goes so deep, homelessness even becomes part of the definition of criminality. In The Evil that Men Do, authors Roy Hazelwood and Stephen G. Michaud enumerate the traits of the antisocial personality:
… [L]ying, substance abuse, promiscuity, disdain for social norms, cruelty, use of aliases, lack of a fixed address…
The Center for Economic and Policy Research issued a report that one of its authors, senior economist John Schmitt, summed up by saying:
We incarcerate an astonishing share of non-violent offenders, particularly for drug-related offenses. We have far better ways to handle these kinds of offenses, but so far common sense has not prevailed. …[W]e have created a situation over the last 30 years where about one in eight men is an ex-offender…
The press release announcing the report says:
Three decades of harsh criminal justice policies have created a large population of ex-offenders that struggle in the labor market long after they have paid their debts to society.
For someone emerging from prison and trying to rebuild a life, it’s incredibly hard to get a job without a place to live, and almost as difficult to find a place to live without a job.
Marin County, CA, has a reputation dating back to the 1960s (and earlier) as a wacky place. Maybe that’s why it comes up with fresh ideas. Doug Sovern reported that the county, with around 5,000 people either homeless or “precariously housed,” only had 70 shelter beds and was desperate for new answers.
Cris Jones of St. Vincent de Paul told the TV journalist:
Our clients have tickets for sleeping outside even though there’s not a shelter. Open containers, small infractions and the tickets end up getting bigger and bigger.
The solution was to establish a community court that refers offenders to mental health and substance abuse services. The hope is that by avoiding handing out punishments for minor crimes, and keeping people’s records clean, they will be better equipped to turn their lives around and escape homelessness. It was meant to be a six-month pilot program, but no report on the outcome seems to have been published yet.
People wind up without a roof over their heads for all kinds of reasons. One of the most useless ways to spend time is arguing about who is worthy of how much help, and what they may or may not have done to deserve being demoted to the pariah status in our society. Everybody has made mistakes, and a lot of people have paid for their mistakes. The point is, right now, a large number of pretty much blameless people are out in the cold, along with the small percentage of folks who have been in trouble.
It’s up to America to quit wasting energy on side issues and get busy on actions that can help lift our whole society out of the cycle it seems to be stuck in. Let’s do something that will help everybody, like adopt the Universal Living Wage (ULW), a change that can make an enormous difference. It is predicted that the ULW will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers. Please learn about the Universal Living Wage and how it works.
Reactions?
Source: “The Caging of America,” The New Yorker, 01/30/12
Source: “Why does the United States lock up so many people?,” forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com, 01/29/12
Source: “Letter from Los Angeles,” The New Yorker, 05/05/08
Source: “Growth of Ex-Offender Population in United States Is a Dramatic Drag on Economy,” CEPR.net, 11/15/10
Source: “Community Court Gives Fresh Start To Marin County Homeless,” CBS San Francisco, 06/13/11
Image by zappowbang (Justin Henry), used under its Creative Commons license.
Richer Rich, Poorer Poor, and PSC
House the Homeless looked at the Associated Press journalist Hope Yen’s report on the recent Pew survey about attitudes concerning class in the United States. It turned out to be so interesting, there’s more to say about it.
Increasing poverty and “stubbornly high unemployment” are mentioned, societal conditions that are no longer fresh news to anyone. We have seen months of Occupy movement activities, including in many places the welcoming into the ranks of people experiencing homelessness.
The media have been full of photos of peaceful demonstrators being struck, stunned, sprayed, and otherwise brutalized. The impression such pictures give is that the members of America’s police forces are desperate to keep their jobs. The police seem to be so panicked by the thought of unemployment, they are willing to drop the charade of protecting the people, to become the tools of an elite class that does not even have their best interests in mind. Afraid of losing their security, of becoming broke and powerless, they are overtaken by a primal urge to attack the thing they fear becoming.
Oddly, what really struck a public nerve was not an instance of out-of-control violence, but the iconic photo of protesters sitting peacefully on the ground, being pepper-sprayed by a UC Davis cop. His perfectly casual attitude of “business as usual” is far more insulting and frightening than a display of temper. Going about his job with all the composure of a gardener watering flowers, Pepper Spray Cop (PSC) became an Internet meme.
Hundreds of adaptations were generated by creative people with graphics software, and Tumblr has a great collection. The PSC on this page has been separated from its original context and touched up, for the convenience of anyone inspired to do some PSC art.
Hope Yen quoted one of the survey analysts from the Pew Research Center, Richard Morin, who sees “a growing public awareness of underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society.” In 2005, the top 10% of the population held 49% of the wealth. By 2009, the top 10% held 56% of the wealth. Meanwhile, almost half the people in America are in a condition of poverty, and no matter how generous and caring they might be, a great many Americans are simply not in a position to help those who are in the worst condition of all, the actually homeless and out on the streets or packed in shelters.
Yet, incredibly, Reason magazine’s Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, seems to think everything is okay because “income mobility is actually alive and well in the United States of America.” She interviewed a University of Chicago economist named Steven Kaplan, whose main point seems to be that, whoever the top 1% were in 1990, they were not the same individuals as the top 1% in 2000, and so on. Things get churned around, and there is plenty of “income mobility.”
In other words, some people get rich but don’t stay that way, and some people who were not wealthy become wealthy. It’s as if, because different people take turns in the poverty sector, that somehow makes everything okay.
Yen quotes Scott Winship, from the Brookings Institute, who talks about other measures of economic distribution. He says:
These accounts generally conflate disappointing growth in men’s earnings with growth in household income, which has been impressive. Growth in women’s earnings has also been impressive…
We’ve got scholars claiming that the average household has a higher income than at some point back in history. Big whoop! Even if the average family income is higher, it’s achieved at the cost of both parents working. Two adults have to work, if they can find work, to maintain a household economic standard that, in the past, could have been attained with only one adult working. This is not progress.
Yen asks the rhetorical question: “So why are people still sleeping outside in protest?” A better question is, why are so many people still sleeping outside because they don’t have anyplace else to sleep? If things are so economically rosy, why are thousands of Americans still homeless? Maybe because we don’t yet have the Universal Living Wage, which promises to end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.
But what about economic charts and graphs? Glad you asked. Here are some magnificent ones, gathered by various sources and presented by Business Insider. The charts have such titles as:
The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn’t been this bad since the Roaring Twenties.
Half of America has 2.5% of the wealth.
The last two decades were great… if you were a CEO or owner. Not if you were anyone else.
Despite the myth of social mobility, poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class
In introducing the charts, Gus Lubin says,
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age… The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.
Reactions?
Source: “Conflict between rich, poor strongest in 24 years,” Statesman.com, 01/11/12
Source: “For Richer and for Poorer,” Reason.com, 02/12
Source: “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America,” Business Insider, 04/09/10
Image by DonkeyHotey, used under its Creative Commons license.
Perceptions and Poverty
Associated Press reporter Hope Yen recently wrote about a telephone survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in December of 2011. More than 2,000 adults were questioned about class tensions, which researchers conclude are at their most intense in 25 years.
The article says:
About 3 in 10 Americans polled said there are ‘very strong’ conflicts between the rich and poor…. That is double the share who believed so in July 2009 and the largest proportion reporting that view in the 24 years the question has been asked in surveys.
The thing is, this survey is about perceptions, otherwise known as opinions, concerning the economic divide. It used to be mainly Democrats, African-Americans, and youth who were conscious of an upsetting disparity between the rich and the poor. But now, this survey reveals, even white folks are seeing the huge chasm between the richest and the poorest, and not liking what they see. Why? Because a lot of formerly middle-class Americans see themselves sliding closer and closer to the abyss.
It’s the kind of issue that people get emotional about, and form opinions about, but can we really understand what they think, when the framework of questions is so rigid? Thanks to this study of attitudes, we now know that:
… about 46 percent of Americans hold a disapproving view that rich people are wealthy because they were fortunate enough to be born into money or have the right connections. But almost as many people — 43 percent — say wealthy people are rich ‘mainly because of their own hard work, ambition or education.’
Why are the pollsters asking respondents to choose one or the other? In the real world, both are true. The correct answer is, some people have money because it was given to them, or they were granted unfair opportunities to acquire wealth. And, even worse, some are rolling in dough because they threw their souls overboard to make room for greed. As Balzac and many others have said, “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.”
The rest of the correct answer is, a lot of people have become wealthy because of their ambition, drive, work ethic, integrity, talent, ingenuity, and a whole lot of other desirable qualities. There is a quite a number of different ways for a person to reach the high-income brackets.
But the more disturbing question is, why is there so much concern about asking Americans their opinion about things, whether it’s the motherhood fitness quotient of Britney Spears, or the qualifications of their fellow citizens to have big bank accounts? What people think doesn’t really count for much. If the majority of people think that the Earth is balanced on the back of a giant turtle, that doesn’t make it so, and no progress is made toward solving the planet’s problems.
There is another difficulty. This kind of either/or thinking encourages Americans to polarize: x% believe that the homeless deserve all the help a society is capable of giving, and y% believe that people experiencing homelessness are lazy specimens who deserve their bad fortune and that they have brought it on themselves.
Well, guess what? In the real world, both are true, and many other things, too. Many of the people experiencing homelessness are disabled, either mentally or physically. There just isn’t any kind of work they can do — especially when unemployment is so high, with hordes of massively overqualified workers available for even the most menial jobs.
And many, of course, are children. Surely, nobody expects them to go out and get jobs. Their lives are difficult enough, just trying to keep up in school. That’s their job. Keep the kids in mind when learning about the Universal Living Wage, which has the potential to end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers. Including the ones with kids.
Reactions?
Source: “Conflict between rich, poor strongest in 24 years,” Statesman.com, 01/11/12
Image by eflon (Alex), used under its Creative Commons license.
Looking Back at 2011
Amongst the year’s news research, one of the more interesting comments from the public to be discovered came from “pdquick,” who worked in the streets for years as a paramedic, and later as a doctor in a program for people experiencing homelessness. This person was reacting to a video clip about San Francisco‘s sit-lie ordinance, and to unkind remarks by other commentators:
If people could overcome addictions with a snap of the fingers, they wouldn’t be addictions, they would just be bad habits… You have no idea the barriers to housing — internal and external — that people face. We have a whole set of policies in place, from draconian drug laws, to public housing policies that essentially make evictees permanently homeless, that stand in the way. Then we put people into buildings where drug dealers knock on the doors all night trying to get you to buy drugs. These are collections of people whose mental illnesses often don’t mesh with each other at all. Then when they ‘fail’ in housing, we send them back to the streets with less stability and less chance at housing than they had before.
The organization Faith Advocates for Jobs, in the winter issue of its newsletter, named Looking Up at the Bottom Line as a “Books of Note” recommendation. This is, of course, the book we see over on the right-hand side of the page, written by Richard R. Troxell, and it is the place to find out how the Universal Living Wage can help you, me, and everybody.
For The Libertarian Alliance (a think tank headquartered in Britain), Kevin Carson wrote a lengthy and well-considered piece on Looking Up at the Bottom Line.
In July, when Austin’s city government announced the sale of a dozen subsidized homes, KUT News reporter Nathan Bernier interviewed Richard. The good news is, the construction of these houses was part of an ongoing program which had already put 30 families into houses. The bad news is, despite the city’s administering nearly 2,000 low-income units, and managing the Section 8 voucher program which affects 5,000 units, both programs have waiting lists numbering in the hundreds of applicants. Richard says,
Most of our ‘affordable housing’ programs have nothing to do with homelessness… We’re talking about people who don’t have anything, and don’t qualify for anything.
Instead, he thinks better results could be obtained by creating a living-wage jobs program that would help homeless people work their way off the street. While roughly half of the people experiencing homelessness in Austin (and the nation) are so disabled they cannot work, the other half are capable of working and indeed want to work. Meanwhile, House the Homeless has been kept extremely busy dealing with the citywide restructuring of funding for all social services that caused the Salvation Army, the Children’s Shelter, and Legal Aid to lose city funding.
John Joel Roberts, of PovertyInsights.org, cited Richard’s book in The Huffington Post article, relating its message to his own locale of Los Angeles:
… [T]he average rent for a one-bedroom apartment, as of May 2011, is $1,315 per month. Many housing experts believe that in order for a person to be able to pay for housed-living (such as food, utilities, transportation and clothing), a person should not pay more than one-third of his monthly income toward rent. That means in Los Angeles, the homeless man standing near the freeway needs to earn $22.76 per hour to afford the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment… Minimum wage in Los Angeles, however, is only $8 per hour. A person earning this rate could barely pay his rent, and would have nothing for food, utilities or anything else. In other words, he would be sitting in an empty apartment, darkened because of no electricity, and hungry because of not enough income to buy food.
If it makes sense to you that a person working 40 hours a week should be able to afford a roof over his or her head other than a bridge, then the Universal Living Wage makes sense too. Every member of Congress and every state Governor have been sent a copy of Looking Up at the Bottom Line. So has the President. Why not write or email them? Tell them that Troxell’s idea will stabilize small businesses, stimulate the housing industry and the economy generally, end economic homelessness for over one million minimum-wage workers, and prevent it for all 10.1 minimum-wage workers, including our returning veterans.
Reactions?
Source: “Homeless React to Sit/Lie,” MissionLocal.org, 11/11/10
Source: “Richard R. Troxell. Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle for the Living Wage,” The Libertarian Alliance: Blog, 04/27/11
Source: “City Selling 12 Subsidized Homes For $110,000 Each,” KUT News, 07/05/11
Source: “Unlivable Wages Mean Unlivable Conditions,” The Huffington Post, 06/09/11
Image by jdn (Jack Newton), used under its Creative Commons license.
Homeless in the Capitol of America
Eric Sheptock, the media-savvy “Homeless Homeless Advocate,” has posted a 14-minute video detailing the events of 2011 in Washington, D.C. He gives a little of the back-story of homeless activism in the nation’s capitol, especially the years-long battle for the Franklin School Shelter which was finally closed. (Recently, an attempt was made to re-occupy it, which is a whole separate story.)
Yes, Washington has initiated a permanent housing program, but when the last count was made (January 2011), the capitol city of the greatest country in the world still contained at least 6,546 people experiencing homelessness.
Sheptock makes a conclusion and offers a solution:
In spite of the programs that are being created, we can’t seem to house people more quickly than they become homeless… We need to figure out how people are becoming homeless, and we need to capture them before they enter shelters
The analogy he makes is a leaky water supply in a house. Sure, you mop the floor — but first, you shut off the water. “You stop the flow into homelessness and then you clean up what you already have,” says Sheptock. Hopes were raised when Washington acquired a mayor who came to the position via the Department of Human Services. Unfortunately, the effect of that coincidence was negligible, because in April the mayor’s budget proposal indicated a $20.5 million shortfall for homeless services because of a reduction in federal funding.
Somehow, D.C. shelters had been managing to operate year-round. But the budget cuts would mean that they would scale back to only being open during the five coldest months of the year, which is the bare minimum required by the city’s law. It looked for a while as if all the shelters in Washington were fated to close in April of 2012, not to reopen again until November.
After the mayor’s announcement, 250 activists showed up at City Hall urging the government to find the money somewhere. A sub-group from Coalition of Housing and Homeless Organizations started meeting even more often at the Community for Creative Non-Violence, where Sheptock lives. The upshot, as described in one of his website reports, was:
After we put enough public pressure on them, they found $17 million for shelter (while taking $18.4 million from the fund that creates affordable housing — an asinine move, to say the least). We thought that the shelters were saved (and lamented the loss of funding for affordable housing).
This same blog entry also critiques a couple of other federal institutions, starting with the president, who visited what is probably the country’s largest shelter without saying anything about what he planned to do about ending homelessness:
It only took him 2 years and 8 months of being in office to ride the 1 mile or so from the White House to the shelter which sits right on the edge of Capitol Hill… Still, that’s more than I can say for the U.S. Department of Labor. Their building is right across the road from this ginormous shelter and they’ve yet to walk over and see what they can do to employ its residents.
Of course, there are more problems. Federal funding for Section 8 housing vouchers in Washington was threatened with a 50% cut, and then the cut was changed to a smaller proportion. That’s the kind of thing that passes for good news these days.
As we know, it takes time for the gathering and collation of statistics to catch up with reality. Sheptock gives the figures from the Washington metro area between January 2008 and January 2009, during which time the number of homeless families grew by 25%. He goes on to say:
All over the country, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is families… You see, when individuals become homeless, folks tend to blame that individual for their own missteps, whether it was drug addiction, or alcoholism, or not paying the rent, or some other personal vice. But when families become homeless, people tend to blame the economy. They’re more sympathetic to families that become homeless. But that sympathy doesn’t house people.
But hey — at least we’re not in Hungary! Last month, BBC News reported that Hungary has outlawed homelessness. Not only that, but its capitol city beats Washington, because Budapest has about 10,000 people experiencing homelessness. And the government has decided to solve that by making their very existence illegal, punishable by either a fine (money they obviously don’t have) or jail (which just costs the taxpayers even more money). Way to go, Hungary! The fact that America hasn’t quite reached such a point yet is, again, what passes for good news these days.
Reactions?
Source: “2011 State of Homelessness Address inour Nations Capital,” YouTube.com, 12/24/11
Source: “Obama Fails To Address Homeless Crisis While at Kitchen,” streatstv.blogspot.com/, 09/15/11
Source: “Hungary outlaws homeless in move condemned by charities,” bbc.co.uk, 12/01/11
Image by Daquella Manera (Daniel Lobo), used under its Creative Commons license.
Occupy Occupied — by People Experiencing Homelessness
The homeless community and the Occupy movement agree on many points:
– The yawning chasm of wealth disparity is not to be tolerated.
– People need jobs.
– Corporate greed is at fault. (Maybe not all corporations. Greedy ones, definitely.)
– Also guilty is the whole mess with the banks and the foreclosures.
– There needs to be a separation of money from politics, and vice versa.
Still, some cosmically absurd things have been going on. A bunch of protesters take over a private or public space, to bring attention to their oppressed status. They are supported by some and vilified by others, who are even willing to use force to make them leave. The protesters’ cause is just, and all right-thinking people ought to agree with them.
Then… a bunch of people experiencing homelessness comes into that occupied space, and their claim is a legitimate one, of even more oppressed status. They are supported by some, but others would prefer that they stay out. The homeless people’s cause is just, and, to their way of thinking, all good people ought to support it. What a situation!
What happens when Occupy gets occupied? Sometimes, the homeless are treated as intruders and hazardous nuisances. They are said to jeopardize the legitimacy of the Occupy movement. From that standpoint, it’s a public relations nightmare. But the news is not all bad.
From Boston, MA, John Zaremba reports that the city will not act to prevent Occupiers from spending the winter on Dewey Square, as long as rules for public safety are observed, including a ban on open fires and kerosene heaters. The reporter interviewed a logistics and supplies person from the Occupy Boston camp, Kristopher Eric Martin, who said of the homeless members:
These guys are experts at staying warm and staying dry. All these guys are used to living on the streets and sleeping with one eye open.
Among the helpful hints offered by the people experiencing homelessness: Extra protection from the cold can be obtained by stuffing hay or straw between layers of clothing. First off, where do urban street people get hay and straw? Good grief, what story will we see on TV on Christmas Eve? News of a homeless person arrested for taking the straw out of a church’s nativity scene to insulate their clothing?
Remember Otzi the Ice Man, the 5,300-year-old frozen corpse found in the Alps? He wore a cloak of woven grass, and his shoes were stuffed with grass and moss for warmth.
So, here we are in America in 2011, with some citizens teaching other citizens the survival skills of a Neolithic hunter. Now, that’s progress.
From Seattle, WA, Paula Wissel wrote about the ongoing struggle concerning Westlake Park, where protesters continued to stay despite being officially forbidden. The mayor has been ambivalent. He sympathizes with the protesters, but there are local residents and businesses to consider. Apparently, the movement has sparked some hope among the city’s urban indigent people. The reporter sought an opinion from a citizen named Delmar Bryant:
He says he’s lived on streets all over the Northwest. He believes Occupy Seattle is the start of something special.
The situation in Atlanta, GA, seems to be kind of strange. Early last month, Gwynedd Stuart titled a post, “Occupy Atlanta uniquely OK with homeless ‘interlopers.’”
Well first of all, Atlanta is not so unique in being okay, as we have seen. But here’s the unusual slant. Stuart speaks of:
… Occupy Atlanta’s acceptance of the homeless — which is probably best demonstrated by the decision to actually move into a homeless shelter…
Apparently, when demonstrators were ejected from Woodruff Park, about 100 of them moved into the top floors of the Peachtree-Pine homeless shelter, where around 600 homeless people already lived. In other words, Occupy Atlanta occupied the homeless shelter.
The controversial shelter’s future was already precarious. Later in the month, Bob Cramer, who was chairman of Atlanta’s Task Force for the Homeless for 14 years, wrote:
With the loss of so much public housing, low-income Atlantans have few choices and little hope. With the possible loss of the Peachtree-Pine shelter, homeless people may once again need to use Woodruff Park as a refuge, perhaps standing shoulder to shoulder with Occupy Atlanta, perhaps to die once more on our streets.
Eugene, OR, is on the cusp of major change, with an upcoming vote on whether to allow continuing life to a large encampment of people experiencing homelessness. Edward Russo reports:
The council is to vote on whether to let Occupy Eugene continue its camp of mainly homeless people in Washington-Jefferson Park… The protest group wants to remain in the park and work with city officials to find a place to build a permanent camp for the homeless.
The settlement is said to consist of between 150 and 200 people, some protesters and the rest representing a very small fraction of the city’s estimated 4,000 homeless people. The occupiers want to help collect donated materials and build kitchens, showers, and necessities. But opinions differ of the advisability of this. City Councilor Chris Pryor, who works for United Way, told the reporter:
I am part of the human services world that doesn’t think living in a tent is a step to solving homelessness. The long-term solution is to get people into jobs and housing.
On the other hand, St. Vincent de Paul Director Terry McDonald told Russo:
Occupy Eugene has engaged homeless youth. The group’s gatherings and workshops in the campsite are giving the youths something to do other than simply try to survive on the streets… bringing them from a more feral society to one that is more civil…
House the Homeless has communicated with dozens of Occupy groups throughout the nation, encouraging them to get behind the Universal Living Wage. Richard R. Troxell says:
According to the last several U.S. Conference of Mayors reports, no one working at a full-time minimum wage job can afford to get into and keep a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, this will result in 3.5 million homeless minimum-wage workers this year alone.
The situation is summed up by a comment from “Kiddo”:
Homeless Americans most directly represent the impact of our exploited brokedown financial system. Their very living situation IS part of the protest. That they lack regular shelter and means, and are (unfortunately) available to protest via occupation is to all our benefit…. We all have a place in this movement.
Reactions?
Source: “Occupiers turn to homeless for tips,” Boston Herald, 10/19/11
Source: “Homeless find home at Occupy Seattle, so is it still a protest?,” KPLU.com, 10/10/11
Source: “Occupy Atlanta uniquely OK with homeless ‘interlopers,’” clatl.com, 11/01/11
Source: “25 years of poverty vs. power,” ajc.com, 11/25/11
Source: “Homeless find ally in Occupy,” RegisterGuard.com, 12/11/11
Image by Kalinago English (Karenne Sylvester), used under its Creative Commons license.
Occupy Homelessness
Barbara Ehrenreich published a very significant book called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. More recently, she pointed out the similarities between the Occupy political protesters and people experiencing homelessness, who both engage in urban camping:
Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarps, and relieve themselves without committing a crime.
Whoever defined the three basic needs of humans as food, clothing, and shelter, could have been more accurate. For starters, clothing and shelter are both subsets of the same class, coverings to protect the body from the elements. Clothing and shelter have more similarities than differences. There are places where people get along pretty much without clothing, and even places where they can survive without shelter. There are situations where either clothing or shelter will do. So, neither of them can be called an absolute necessity at all times and places.
But nobody survives without going to the bathroom (or the vacant lot or alleyway, if necessary.) It would be much more in alignment with reality to define the three basic needs as food, body covering, and elimination.
Ehrenreich goes on to say:
As the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, many ordinary and biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets — not just urinating but sitting, lying down and sleeping.
This is what Richard R. Troxell says when inviting members of the various Occupy groups nationwide to consider the Homeless Protected Class Resolution and the Universal Living Wage as issues to coalesce around. Excerpts follow:
We certainly know the pain of homelessness here in Austin. As hard as we are working to end homelessness by getting people mental health care and safe, decent, affordable housing, there are still thousands of folks right here in the Austin area that are sleeping in their cars and living on our streets and in our woods.
While they are experiencing the trauma of losing their homes and being separated from their loved ones, they are getting ticketed, abused, their cars and belongings stolen and arrested… We fixed the No Sit No Lie ordinance… We can fix this as well.
Ehrenreich, in fact, specifically mentions Austin as exemplary, before summing up:
In Portland, Austin and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we all could be headed — the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-laden college grad, out-of-work schoolteacher and impoverished senior — unless this revolution succeeds.
There is, in some quarters, debate over whether the homeless qualify as bona fide Occupy protesters. The answer seems obvious: they are certainly not members of the elite, all-possessing 1%. An anonymous commentator asks readers to think deeply about the difference between the homeless and the Occupy protesters, reasoning that what’s good for one is good for the other:
I have entrepreneurial spirit and I’ve decided to start a homeless camp along the river in Harrisburg… I’m going to buy some $99 tents, then charge the homeless, say, ten bucks a night… When the police show up to displace the homeless, I as their spokesperson, will insist that this is merely a protest. And we have the right to occupy as long as we want, just like our bothers and sisters down the street… I do not understand how any city can roust homeless folks when the occupy crew get to do whatever they want. And heaven forbid we should trample on their rights.
This person meant to be sarcastic, but you know what? Heaven forbid we, as a society, should trample on the rights of either the protesters or the people experiencing homelessness.
Reactions?
Source: “Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Homeless in America,” TomDispatch.com, 10/23/11
Source: “Treating the Homeless the Same As Protesters,” whptv.com, 1/18/11
Image of Invisible Homeless used under Fair Use: Reporting.
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