Because Berkeley, California, is such a quintessentially American city, things that happen there gain resonance. For background, see “A Berkeley Tale” which talks about last year, and “Activism in Berkeley,” which covers the more recent past.

Today’s post mentions several events briefly, so for hard information, please see the linked news sources. Their usefulness here is to highlight typical instances of things that go on wherever people experience homelessness, but particularly in a city that is known for dissent and social ferment.

Last year there was a lot of discussion about things that made housed people anxious, such as the growing number of tents in the camp, and what looked like a bicycle chop shop (where stolen bikes are dismantled for parts). This attitude assumes that anything done by a homeless person must be a criminal enterprise, because homelessness itself is fast becoming a crime.

It is entirely possible that someone with an aptitude for bike repair could have a totally legitimate talent for fixing bikes, and do it in a totally legitimate way. Housed people will throw away a punctured inner tube, but a thrifty and enterprising homeless person will recover it and patch it.

Enough bikes are abandoned or trashed that a supply of parts is available without any need to steal them. Bike repair is a skill that can be traded for money or other commodities, like food. If somebody is doing useful work, voluntarily, why disparage that? (Shown on this page is the legendary Bike Bus of RomTom, aka Thomas Holme, which used to roam the Pacific Northwest, California, and other parts of the country.)

Thanks in part to such stereotypical thinking, it was decided last summer that a big settlement on Gilman Street in West Berkeley would be cleared. It wouldn’t be the first “sweep,” nor the last. The number-one tactic for dealing with people experiencing homelessness is to cause them to move from one location to another.

In this particular case, the target area was an underpass, where Caltrans “needed to access an underground vault in the area to help set up a camera that will be used for its East Bay corridor freeway messaging system,” wrote Emilie Raguso for Berkeleyside.com. And another camera, no doubt, to give early warning if the area starts to become recolonized.

So, city crews and volunteers do a massive cleanup and have their pictures taken wearing biohazard suits and sifting through piles of detritus. Headlines announce the dollar cost of removing the trash. As always, there are snide remarks about “squalid conditions” and the amount of human waste that was found. The whole area is cleaned up, sanitized, and, if possible, defoliated, and the carnival moves on.

What if, instead, a recycling station were set up, with receptacles for cardboard, glass, etc.? What if somebody who lived there took care of that, and got to keep any profit from selling the stuff? What if there were dumpsters, and regular trash removal? What if there were industrial-strength portable toilets and, at the very least, a water source for hand-washing? What if the people just stayed in one place and cleaned up as they went along? But back to reality.

The authorities come in numbers and they bring muscle. According to Raguso:

Jim Hynes, with the Berkeley city manager’s office, said homeless outreach, city maintenance crews, mental health workers and environmental health staff were all on the scene to help out… The city always sends out workers to try to help connect homeless individuals to services that could improve their circumstances…

Oakland-area California Highway Patrol spokesman Officer Sean Wilkenfeld confirmed that officers were on the scene Thursday morning to help monitor the clean-up operation. Berkeley Police officers were also part of the effort.

Raguso also wrote:

Before Caltrans took over the area […] workers from Pacific Steel Casting used to park below the freeway. Hynes said a return to that historic use could help keep the area clear of camps in the future.

In other words, the priority here is to have a place for cars to park, and never mind the people who need a place to live. Hynes also told the reporter “the city plans to look deeper at ways it might keep the area safe and clean in the future.” That statement presupposes that homeless people do not deserve to be in a safe and clean place, because they are the threat and the dirt.

Reactions?

Source: “Authorities clear out Gilman homeless camp in Berkeley,” Berkeleyside.com, 06/16/16
Image by RomTom

Berkeley, California, is one of the most progressive, ornery, and distinctive cities in the USA. This time last year, City Councilwoman Linda Maio faced some conflict over Ohlone Park, a three-block-long urban oasis that she helped create 42 years before.

In recent times, however, Ohlone had become a temporary haven for people experiencing homelessness. Maio followed the lead of her constituency and promoted the introduction of new, stricter city ordinances against camping in parks, and against placing personal property on public sidewalks.

Also included was the old favorite, “urinating and defecating in the parks.” When will municipal officials figure it out? Their refusal to provide restrooms does not discourage homelessness, but only punishes individuals. What that refusal does, however, is threaten public health in very real and scary ways.

To Maio’s credit, she did encourage the city to deploy mobile showers, and devote some storage facilities to people’s stuff. Still, she found herself accused by a fellow council member (and a portion of the public) of criminalizing poverty and homelessness.

Rachel Swan wrote this for SFGate.com:

“We want people to get a little more connected with social mores,” Maio said, emphasizing that the laws are small, and so are the city responses for breaking them: an initial warning followed by a citation…

Nonetheless, the new laws prompted strong opposition in Berkeley, where housing activists camped out in front of City Hall the night before the council meeting…

The new laws will take effect Jan. 1 but will not be enforced until after Berkeley installs public storage bins, and there are no plans set for that yet.

Councilman Kriss Worthington objected to prosecuting, fining or jailing people who have no money anyway, for minor offenses. But the new ordinances were approved. Swan wrote of a local sympathy protester:

One woman who camped outside City Hall told the council that she woke up with a stark realization of what it means to be homeless. “There is no restroom,” she said at the meeting.

At the same time in West Berkeley, a lot of people were living in campers and RVs parked along city streets. Again, human waste was a problem. But rather than handle this in a mature, adult way, cities all over America continue their attempts to criminalize natural functions. It always comes back to the essentials.

Meanwhile tension buillt in other areas, because the Super Bowl tourist influx into San Francisco was on the horizon, and the mayor promised the corporate suits that the Embarcadero district would be purged of unsightly beggars. Some of the displaced people could reasonably be expected to relocate across the Bay.

House the Homeless asked longtime Berkeley resident Ace Backwords how the past year has been. Here’s what he said:

The homeless scene is always in a state of flux. It changes day to day, month to month, year to year. But the basic game seems to stay the same. One week the cops will be crunching you for one thing. The next week its OK to do that but they’re crunching you for something else. One week is OK to hang out on one side of the sidewalk. The next week they kick us off that side and say we gotta hang out on the other side. And the next week they reverse it again. Round and round it goes.

Getting back to Ohlone Park, and a last quotation from Swan:

One resident, Lynn Barrow, wrote that her dog had gotten sick after walking through one of the Ohlone Park encampments and had to be taken to the emergency room. “They tested his urine, and it contained marijuana and meth,” Barrow’s letter said.

Ms. Barrow does not appear to have divulged why her dog was running, loose and out of control, through the public park where homeless people were settled. It would be unfair to speculate on the reason, but fair enough to hope that no local person would do something like that for the purpose of intimidation, to alarm and threaten the people in the tents.

Reactions?

Source: “Berkeley’s homeless feel squeezed as neighbors seek clampdown,” SFGate.com, 11/21/15

Back in the 1960s, Berkeley, California, was the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, and of vehement objection to the Vietnam war, as well as a mecca for women’s rights activism. The city’s radicals were always marching against things and occupying places, not to mention educating the public at every turn. Causes like People’s Park kept the atmosphere electric for decades.

Recently, Berkeley is having a resurgence of political ferment. (For interested observers in other parts of the country, local participants report on the ongoing hour-by-hour drama of the Berkeley street scene via a Facebook group called “First they came for the homeless.”)

As in so many other American cities, the cost of housing is simply out of reach for a large segment of the population. Homeless activist Mike Lee is running for mayor, on the platform of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.

Many people experiencing homelessness also want to experience the democratic process, by voting, but they are often unable to. The fact that this is an election year adds greatly to the overall stress, and much energy has been put into voter registration efforts.

For Truthout, David Bacon has written a massive report covering these and other Berkeley issues. He recounts how, in October, a homeless community that had been camping on a grassy medium in the middle of a road were forcibly relocated, and not for the first time. The way the authorities habitually accomplish this is to roll up at 5:00 AM with a contingent of city vehicles, flanked by several police cars. Customarily, they fill their trucks with seized tents, bedrolls and other belongings.

On this particular occasion, some residents had the opportunity to send text messages to allies. The journalist quotes Mike Zint, one of the group’s leaders:

We went into delaying tactics while we got community support mobilized. That doesn’t stop them, but every time this happens we get more support. So they sat there in their trucks for the next six hours — a dozen city workers and a code compliance officer, all on overtime. They took seven cops off patrol. And in the end, after all the arguments, we only moved about 200 feet, across the street. And how much did that cost?

The politically motivated group demonstrates outside Impact HUB, where homeless services are centralized. Their intention is to force public debate and defend rights. One bone of contention is the shabby treatment doled out to the most vulnerable members of the community. From Dan McMullan, of the Disabled People Outside Project, the reporter learned how a wheelchair-bound woman was repeatedly denied help because she “didn’t fit the intake criteria.” How much worse off than homeless in a wheelchair does a person have to be?

This bunch is made up not of random rough sleepers, but of politically savvy people who have formed an intentional community. Bacon quotes Zint’s description of what has come to be known as the Poor Tour:

It’s a mobile occupation that can pop up anywhere. We’re exposing the fact that there is no solution — nothing but exposure for the homeless. And exposure is killing a lot of people.

One such casualty of the War on the Homeless was Roberto Benitas, who in late September was found dead in the doorway where he slept. McMullan, who writes for the newspaper Street Spirit, recruited a city council candidate to help organize a memorial. For additional commentary about that sad event, House the Homeless contacted Dan McMullan, who said:

I was touched the way the community came together to remember this man who went unnoticed amongst us for so long. Even in death it took a while for anyone to notice. A year ago there wouldn’t have been such a cross section of the community. Housing is on everyone’s mind and the wolf is heard in all quarters. Not one but two Native Americans showed up independently to play the flute. The spirit was strong and we all were together… [M]oved together… I went out and put together a protest… My own years of homelessness haunted my every thought and I had to placate the many ghosts that cry out in the bad weather. Do something… [A]nything.

Reactions?

Source: “‘We’re Homeless and We Vote’: Homeless People Want a Voice in This Election,” Truth-out.org, 10/28/16
Photo credit: Mic V. via Visualhunt/CC BY

Every now and then, House the Homeless explores the difficulties encountered by people who help the unhoused. “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” related the story of how David Henderson, editor of Poverty Insights, bought a Greyhound bus ticket for someone else and encountered what he calls the Samaritan Tax, an $18 “gift ticket fee,” which can only be waived under very annoying and inconvenient circumstances.

Last summer we considered some “People Who Feed People” and their struggles with police, neighborhood organizations, zoning laws, and local health departments. Food trucks may be towed and fines may be levied. Municipal administrations have numerous ways to make the lives of givers miserable.

Last week, we looked at some of the pushback against tiny houses and the people who generously build and donate them.

All across America, volunteers give a whole lot of time and energy, and money they could be spending on themselves. Sometimes they work obsessively to keep old vehicles moving, so breakfasts can be delivered. They deprive themselves of sleep or even food, and go out in all kinds of weather.

Over the years, this kind of dedication takes its toll. But we’re not talking about gradual attrition of health. We’re talking about helpers of people experiencing homelessness, who have been deliberately killed.

Shoeless in Georgia, Clueless in New York

In April of 2014 Donnie Reed, the 40-year-old father of three children, was stabbed to death in Rancho Cucamonga parking lot. The California man was with some friends at a sports bar, and when it closed they ran into where some strangers were harassing a homeless man.

After Reed suggested that the antagonists knock it off, one of them stabbed him in the chest and stabbed Reed’s friend in the neck. (The friend survived.) Apparently the murder remains unsolved. Reed’s wife told journalist Melissa MacBride:

He’s not a fighter. He was trying to help somebody, and this is what happened to him for doing something he would have done for anybody.

Last fall in Atlanta, a 24-year-old National Guard sergeant who had served three tours of duty in Afghanistan was was shot to death near a homeless shelter where he had gone on a Sunday morning to donate shoes — something that he had done without incident on other occasions.

Attig Eminue, whose family relocated to the United States from Nigeria 15 years ago, was killed for no apparent reason. Crime Stoppers offered a reward, which was increased in the following month. The police believed that the shooter was a 21-year-old named Harold Dodson, who had already accumulated five felony convictions, but didn’t know where he was. Toward the end of October, Dodson was arrested, charged, and denied bail.

In June of this year, only a block from his home in the Bronx, a high school senior was stabbed in the chest several times. Carl Ducasse, who planned to become an attorney, will not be joining any profession, because someone begrudged the teenager’s donation of $2 to a shelter resident.

As the 17-year-old bled to death, the killer stole his phone and fled the scene. Eventually, another 17-year-old was arrested and held without bail while 500 people attended funeral masses for Ducasse.

Only two months ago, in another part of New York, the driver of a van belonging to an organization that helps homeless women and children was shot to death while a client (en route to fill out a housing application) was also in the vehicle. The tragedy caused the nonprofit Women in Need, Inc. (WIN) to keep its vehicles off the road for a while.

For reasons undisclosed to the public, police characterized the driver’s murder as the denouement of a “personal feud.” But since WIN provides, among other things, shelter for women who are fleeing domestic violence, the killing could certainly have been an act of revenge against a system that dares to steal a man’s chosen victim.

Reactions?

Source: “Good Samaritan dies trying to help homeless man in Rancho Cucamonga,” ABC7.com, 04/13/14
Source: “Police arrest Harold Dodson in murder of Army sergeant who was helping homeless shelter,” GeorgiaNewsday.com, 10/27/15
Source: “Teen Stabbed To Death After Someone Saw ‘Gift’ They Gave Homeless Man,” MadWorldNews.com, 06/20/16
Source: “Borough Park shooting: Driver of homeless service van killed, NYPD says,” amNY.com, 08/30/16
Photo credit: Hakon Siguroarson via Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

There are many versions of the starfish story. Here is one.

A man walking along a shore covered with washed-up, dying starfish notices a boy throwing them back into the ocean, one by one. The man says to the boy that there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish, and that he’ll never make a difference. As the boy throws a starfish back into the ocean, he says, “I just made a difference to that one.”

Almost three years ago several Denver-area news sources related how Joe Manzaneres, on his way to work as a real estate broker, drove past Chris Razec. A certified welder and forklift operator, Razec had fallen on hard times and was experiencing homelessness and displaying the typical cardboard sign.

The real estate broker returned with a different sign and paid Razec $25 a day to show it to the public instead. It read, “No need for your cash! I’m sponsored by Joe Manzaneres!” and gave the businessman’s contact information.

Subsequently, Manzaneres also helped out with clothes, haircut, cell phone, and resume creation. Unfortunately, we don’t know more about either the individual fate of Chris Razec or what happened with Joe Manzaneres’s idea of asking the mayor’s office and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to begin some type of one-on-one sponsorship program.

Also in Denver, Purple Door Coffee is an espresso shop that employs “teens and young adults who have been homeless and want to leave homelessness behind.” The interesting thing about their website is the page containing profiles of and interviews with the employees. It really radiates conviction that people’s lives are indeed changing.

From Dothan, Alabama, journalist Matt Elofson described a plan that might help a few people in a state that many consider, social policy-wise, to be very backward. He wrote:

Ken Tuck, the president of Love in Action International Ministries, said they’re planning to open the former Dakota Coffee Works cafe and make it a self-sustaining business by helping train homeless people to run the business…

Tuck grew up in the restaurant business… He said the coffee shop will serve breakfast and lunch. He also said the coffee shop will have a meeting room, and will include a stage for live entertainment and worship nights.

The goal is to provide job training and actual paying work for people experiencing homelessness. Ken and Martha Tuck plan to also teach such life skills as budget planning and how to handle a job interview. Meanwhile, they are holding yard sales, trying to raise at least $250,000 in startup funding.

If a business like this can find its footing, who knows how many people it might help? But it is never easy. A similar project began in 2014 in Fort Collins, Colorado, when RedTail Coffee joined with the city and a local not-for-profit organization to open a coffee shop inside the South Transit Center, a large and fancy new bus transportation hub.

The intention was to only hire people experiencing homelessness. Toward the end of 2015 one of the proprietors, Cailte Kelley, wrote:

We struggled but eventually we figured it out. The people we needed appeared, the opportunities appeared, and with no money, no experience, we put the pieces together…

We’re a small shop, run by my incredible sister-in-law Kelly, with 3 employees with a fourth about to be hired. Two of our employees have found permanent housing and are well on their way to piecing their lives back together.

The food and drink selections were varied and the prices reasonable, but somehow RedTail Coffee didn’t catch on. The transit hub lies well back from the main road, close to nothing but a recreational bike trail, and populated by folks waiting as long as an hour for their transfer buses. It seems like they would be a captive clientele.

But people who ride city buses often can’t spare even a couple of dollars for snacks. Bike trail users are trying to work off calories, not ingest them. And in that location, the little shop certainly was not a “destination.” Only a few months later, it closed without fanfare.

So these efforts have either helped a handful of people, or tried to, or hope to very soon. Sometimes that’s all a person can do, and there is nothing wrong with a small project. But some critics will try to float the idea that unpopular change should exclusively be made by individuals who care about that particular issue, and that those changes are not the responsibility of the country as a whole to endorse, support, or finance. This last paragraph by a writer named Rich Tafel reminds us that, magnanimous as they are, individual efforts are not enough, and need to be backed up by public programs and laws:

Real world problems usually result from a broken ecosystem, and solutions most often require some kind of change to the rules…

Starfish throwing, like charity, isn’t a bad thing, but it is not a solution. When we confuse charity and justice, we perpetuate injustice. True world change requires more of its leaders. We must have the courage to work within our complex systems to change the rules.

Reactions?

Source: “Denver real estate broker hires homeless to help them and his business,” WTKR.com, 01/03/14
Source: “Purple Door Blog,” PurpleDoorCoffee.com, August 2016
Source: “Homeless employees to operate ministry’s downtown Dothan coffee shop,”
DothanEagle.com, 09/03/16
Source: “The Greatest Thing I’ve Ever Done,” Opportunities-fc.com, 11/12/15
Source: “Social Entrepreneurs Must Stop Throwing Starfish,” Ssir.org, 03/20/12
Photo credit: Matt J Newman via Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Last week, House the Homeless noted that, across America, some 3% of public school students are experiencing homelessness. Sometimes it seems like we mainly hear about happenings in New York and California, because they are the big states representing the East Coast and the West Coast, so they appear important. Today, we look at some news stories, all published within the past year, from states that don’t get as much attention.

This very recent one says it all in the headline: “There are 29,537 homeless kids in Arizona public schools.” Just for reference, the smallest-size football stadiums that Wikipedia bothers to list are 30,000-seaters, so these kids would just about fill one of those. Journalist Michael Hughes characterizes these children as…

[…] young outcasts who, through no fault of their own, have entered a world of motels, doubled-up quarters with relatives, a life on the streets or emergency shelter.

 

Also, before the recession, there were fewer than 20,000. The greedy and irresponsible financial tricksters who caused that meltdown have a lot to answer for, and the consequences of their misdeeds will linger for generations to come. Safe, affordable housing is the very bedrock necessary for an educated and conscious population.

While the Arizona homeless student total only increased by 50% since the recession, another state has seen a 100% increase. “Number enrolled in Arkansas schools doubles in 10 years,” the headline says. That may sound like an impressive rate of increase over a decade, but in the city of Lexington, Kentucky, it took only three years for the homeless student population to double.

A study by the Lexington Fair Housing Council determined, to no one’s surprise, that “elementary schools with the highest percentage of homeless students were ranked much lower in overall academic performance.” The Fayette County Schools Superintendent expressed disappointment that the Council’s report didn’t offer more answers, saying:

Speaking not as a superintendent, but as an individual who experienced housing insecurity and food insecurity as a child, I implore the council to look at the root causes of homelessness in our community and develop bold recommendations to create a safety net for our families and children.

However, the director of the Homeless Prevention and Intervention Office told the press that although he and the others in the homeless provider community had tried to meet with Superintendent Manny Caulk, “that meeting has not yet happened.” No doubt this same scenario of unscheduleable meetings is being played out all over the country in large cities and small towns.

Kentucky as a whole, incidentally, could fill another of those 30,000-seat football arenas with homeless students. But the state of Washington has them beat, with 35,000 enrolled in public schools, and as for how many others are wandering around, unbeknownst to authorities, that is anybody’s guess.

We have all heard of the McKinney-Vento Act and how much it is supposed to help. But…

Public schools in Kent get no money from McKinney-Vento because the available funds are distributed through a competitive grant process… That means the district spends “thousands and thousands” out of pocket for staff and transportation required by the act.

Just 24 of 295 school districts in Washington received McKinney-Vento money for a three-year period starting in 2013.

In Boston, Massachusetts, during this school year nearly 4,000 students are without homes. With the city’s average apartment rent at $2,300, this is not an astonishing outcome. Nor is it likely to change any time soon, unless serious action is taken.

Obviously, there are quite a few more states we didn’t even get to today. An important aspect to remember is, these tallies don’t even include “unaccompanied youth” who should be enrolled in school, but aren’t. They are mostly, as the old expression has it, “in the wind.” They are easily ignored now, but during the decades of adulthood that lie before them, far too many of those kids will give us reason to regret not looking out for them or taking better care of them.

Reactions?

Source: “There are 29537 homeless kids in Arizona public schools,” AZCentral.com, 09/04/16
Source: “Homeless kids fly under radar; number enrolled in Arkansas schools doubles in 10 years,” ArkansasOnline.com, 09/26/16
Source: “Student homelessness in Lexington nearly doubles over three years,” Kentucky.com,08/07/16
Source: “With 35,000 homeless youth in public schools, state lawmakers seek money to help,” SeattleTimes.com, 02/15/16
Source: “Nearly 4,000 students are homeless as start of school approaches,” WCVB.com, 08/15/16
Photo credit: K.W. Barrett via Visualhunt/CC BY

The number of public school students experiencing homelessness has doubled since the recession, over a number that was already too large. Now, an estimated 3% of public school kids are homeless, which is of course an average. Depending on the city and state, it varies wildly.

These words are from Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown:

The impact is profound on public schools, which struggle to try to address the needs of homeless children. Teachers often find themselves working not only to help children learn but also to clothe them, keep them clean and counsel them through problems — including stress and trauma — that interfere with classroom progress.

Transportation is another issue that teachers find themselves dealing with. School districts have different rules about who has to be taken where, and when and how. The parents of homeless children may not have a car, and anyway they are expected to be either working or looking for work. Kids need school supplies. They need a table somewhere to do their homework on. Mostly, they need stability and peace of mind.

The Homeless Children and Youth Act was introduced in January of 2015. Its point was to expand the official Dept. of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of homelessness on behalf of an estimated million kids and their families, whose lives would be affected. The website of California Senator Dianne Feinstein describes the proposed legislation in detail.

Access to federal housing programs is complicated by confusion among governmental entities over what constitutes homelessness. Sen. Feinstein gives two examples of the results, applicable to her own state and another:

In California, 259,656 children experienced homelessness last year, while HUD counted only 25,094 households that included at least one child as homeless. Due to the narrow HUD definition, only one in 10 homeless children in California is eligible for federal housing programs.

In Ohio, 23,748 children experienced homelessness last year, while HUD counted only 4,714 households that includes at least one child as homeless. Due to the narrow HUD definition, only one in five homeless children in Ohio is eligible for federal housing programs.

One in five is a best-case scenario? That’s crazy. And it doesn’t even mean the family will find housing — only that it is eligible to apply. The National Network for Youth website is a trove of information about the Homeless Children and Youth Act, and their page includes simple instructions for writing to the appropriate members of congress.

One interesting bullet point states that the HCYA…

Prohibits HUD from overriding local communities. Local service providers are the best equipped to evaluate which homeless populations have the greatest unmet needs.

Basically, one aim of the bill is to encourage the federal government to trust local agencies and take their word for it that someone is homeless. Briefly, some of the other sections concern data collection, reporting requirements, and transparency; and simplification of documentation needed to prove eligibility for housing programs.

That documentation requirement is frightening. Imagine a woman going back to the violent husband she escaped from at great risk. “Excuse me, would you mind writing a letter stating that we left because you brutalized me and two of our three children?” Good luck with that.

To learn exactly and in detail why the current rules are problematic, this page explains it fully. We learn from the U.S. Congress website that, despite the fact that 400 organizations are on board with support of the bill, the last action taken was its referral to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in January of last year.

In April of 2015 the U.S. Senate Appropriations Transportation, Housing & Urban Development Subcommittee held a hearing on HUD’s Efforts to Prevent & End Youth Homelessness, at which singer Cyndi Lauper related how she was a homeless teen who found a doorway back into society through a youth hostel that helped her earn a high school diploma.

She also said:

We can end youth homelessness in America, but we have to get to the root of the problem. Our country must invest in preventing kids from becoming homeless in the first place, and this is an area of focus that has largely been ignored. That means helping families. It means fixing our broken child welfare system, our flawed juvenile justice system, and our schools. Each one of those places can be a doorway to homelessness or to a better future.

The “Kids 4 Kids Sake” video

House the Homeless urges everyone to watch the video “Kids 4 Kids Sake” and share it with the candidates who are running for president! In fact, please do what you can to bring it to the attention of all candidates for everything, anywhere. Tweet it, share on via social media, contact the candidates directly, and ask your friends to do the same.

Reactions?

Source: “Number of US homeless students has doubled since before the recession,” WashingtonPost.com, 09/14/15
Source: “Homeless Children and Youth Act: A Couch is Not a Home,” NN4yYouth.org, undated
Source: “Bill Introduced to Expand Housing Programs to 1 Million Children, Families,” Senate.gov, 01/27/15
Source: “Current Law and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Regulations Deny Homeless Children and Youth the Help They Need Now,” HelpHomelessKidsNow.org, 02/03/15
Source: “Homeless Children and Youth Act of 2015,” Congress.gov, 01/27/15
Source: “Written Testimony of Cyndi Lauper,” Senate.gov, 04/29/15
Photo credit: Maryland GovPics via Visualhunt/CC BY

House the Homeless announces the release of a very important document, titled “Traumatic Brain Injury — A Protocol to Help Disabled Homeless Veterans within a Secure, Nurturing Community.” This publication is a joint effort born of the collaboration between House the Homeless, Millennium Health Centers, the Warrior Angels Foundation, and Community First! Village.

After a series of e-mails and lengthy conference calls, initiated by House the Homeless, Inc., we have formed a team that shares the philosophy that, quite possibly, a significant percentage of people experiencing homelessness got there due to a Traumatic Brain Injury. Up until now, these individuals may never have previously been asked to connect a past head injury (or a series of them) to the symptoms of anger, alcoholism, Parkinson’s Disease, Bi-Polar disorder, bad decision making, and other manifestations of TBI.

“Traumatic Brain Injury – a Protocol” descriptive pages about all four organizations, along with the 2016 Traumatic Brain Injury Survey conducted by House the Homeless, and a short history of how the Homeless Veterans in Action project came together to…

[…] create a first of a kind,ongoing program for ten homeless veterans to specifically treat their Traumatic Brain Injury thus combining the two populations of both veterans and people experiencing homelessness.

 

Here is a short excerpt from Dr. Mark Gordon’s segment of the paper:

Common to all degrees of head trauma (and body trauma) is the unforeseen development of hormone deficiencies…

Studies have shown that the use of conventional medications (antidepressants, anti-anxiety, anti-seizure, and antipsychotic) do not improve upon the underlying cause creating the symptoms associated with Traumatic Brain Injury (Post-Concussion Syndrome) because they do nothing to increase the missing hormones. Psychotherapy does nothing to increase deficient hormones; it only encourages you to accept a poor quality of life and to move on.

Another useful publication is the article “Survey Links Brain Injury to Medical Causes of Homelessness To be Addressed with Hormone Therapy — Follow Up.”

To get up to speed on this problem and need for this planned intervention, we also recommend:

• How to Become Homeless — Have TBI
• Prevent Vet Homelessness with Correct Diagnosis
• Brain Injury, Neglect, and Self-Destruction
• Raw Deals for Homeless Vets
• Heroes of Health Care
• Traumatic Brain Injury — Promising Developments

Kids

For NationalReview.com, Julie Gunlock described that changes that have been taking place in public schools, which she sees as an intensification of the “already pronounced trend of shifting child-care responsibilities from family, friends, and, most of all, parents to schools and government-sponsored programs.” She regrets that some children spend 10 to 12 hours a day at school, because schools have by necessity become child-welfare centers, with programs both before and after classes, and free or reduced-price meals.

Based on an instinctive and often justifiable distrust of the government, Gunlock wonders why parents are okay with this. But more than likely, they are not. It’s just that everybody is working all the time, trying to make enough to either keep a roof over themselves or get a roof. Friends and family members are tapped out. A lot of people just can’t take on any more responsibility.

Here is a significant quotation from New America’s Annie Lieberman:

High-quality early childhood education programs can cushion the negative effects of homelessness, providing children with stability, a safe environment, and helping them develop the skills needed to succeed in school and in life.

House the Homeless urges everyone to watch the video “Kids 4 Kids Sake” and share it with the candidates who are running for president! In fact, please do what you can to bring it to the attention of all candidates for everything, anywhere. Tweet it, share on via social media, contact the candidates directly, and ask your friends to do the same.

Reactions?

Source: “Schools: The New Social-Welfare Centers,” NationalReview.com, 10/09/14
Source: “Reaching the Most Vulnerable Children: A Look at Child Homelessness,” NewAmerica.org, 10/10/14
Image by U.S. Department of Agriculture US — Marine Corps

At the end of 2013, it was estimated that around eight million children had been adversely affected by the mortgage foreclosure epidemic that was such a prominent feature of the 2008-09 depression. By now, three years later, we trust that at least some of them are settled in housed circumstances that, if not permanent, are at least temporarily stable.

But it is the nature of an economic catastrophe to have far-reaching consequences. Sometimes the dominoes fall slowly, and it is totally possible that a percentage of families who were hard-hit by the recession managed to hold on for a few years, and then lost their grip, step by painful step. It is in fact quite likely that the disaster is just now catching up.

According to Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, an increase in admissions due to suspected or actual abuse was linked to the increase in delinquent mortgages. That is an example of one of the more extreme effects of the stress caused by societal upheaval. Each family has its own unique history and set of priorities, and no doubt many separations and divorces happened that otherwise would not have.

When a home is lost through inability to pay either mortgage or rent, devastation comes in a thousand different forms. Couples who were already at risk of breaking up figure, why not take advantage of this to go ahead and divorce?

Sometimes separations are involuntary. The wife’s parents might be willing to give house room to their daughter and a grandchild or two, but certainly don’t want to put up with that son-in-law they never liked anyway. Or the father might leave, trying to find work in another state, or at least hoping that the mother and kids will be more eligible for social services if he’s not around.

Greg Kaufmann wrote this for BillMoyers.com:

A single mother must apply for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which in Wisconsin is $653 per month no matter the size of the family. She then must meet a work requirement, arrange for child care, buy furniture and pay for utilities, among other challenges. If her child is sick and she stays home from work, she is sanctioned by the TANF program. She might lose her $653 assistance, consequently fall behind on rent and begin her slide towards homelessness again.

In any case, being a homeless parent is hard, and the kids don’t have it easy either. By mid-2014, school districts tallied up twice as many students experiencing homelessness, as compared with pre-recession America. For The Huffington Post, Ann Brenoff identified several of the difficulties they face.

Health and hygiene are major problems. There is little opportunity to soak in a bubble bath and play with rubber duckies. In some places, people are lucky enough to have access to free clinics, along with the likelihood of catching some new contagion in the waiting room.

Nutrition is iffy even for housed kids whose parents bring home paychecks. Parents don’t have time to carefully shop for organic ingredients and cook meals from scratch, and kids resist such conscientious attempts anyway, preferring to scrounge junk food any way they can.

On the subject of eating, Brenoff mentions an awkward fact that housed people probably never think about. When the annual food donation drive comes around, they generously donate canned goods without wondering what pot the family living in a car will empty that can into and what stove they will cook it over.

When a family is homeless, kids may subsist on public-school free lunches and little else. The writer hopes they will at least be issued a lunch card that looks the same as their classmates, and goes on to say:

If their family doesn’t have a post office box, it’s hard to mail home their report card. They don’t want everyone to know if the PTA paid for them to go on the class field trip. School projects that involve a trip to the crafts store for supplies pose a special burden on their families who can’t afford it. Participating in sports sounds great, but soccer cleats and baseball uniforms aren’t exactly in the budget. A lost textbook is a problem for a regular kid; a lost textbook is a catastrophe for a homeless kid.

Mail, incidentally, can be problematic. The US Post Office still has General Delivery, but it may be limited to only one facility in an area. A person needs a picture ID to apply, and to pick up mail, and needs to re-apply every month. There are no free PO boxes for individuals. To rent a PO box or a box at a commercial mail receiving agency requires two forms of ID, one with a picture and another with a physical address, so it may be doable if a person is prepared to lie and can do so successfully, and if a box is even available. Rent is paid 3 or 6 months in advance. Some people receive mail at a shelter or drop-in center, but there is no guarantee that any agency will offer this service.

On the academic side, homeless kids have a notoriously hard time keeping up. On the social side, forming friendships can be difficult or even impossible. But those challenges are subjects for another day.

House the Homeless urges everyone to watch the video “Kids 4 Kids Sake” and share it with the candidates who are running for president! In fact, please do what you can to bring it to the attention of all candidates for everything, anywhere. Share via social media, contact the candidates directly, and ask your friends to do the same.

Reactions?

Source: “America’s Homeless Kids Crisis,” TheAtlanticCities.com, 11/01/13
Source: “America is Ignoring Homeless Families,” BillMoyers.com, 04/21/13
Source: “7 Things About Homeless Kids You Probably Didn’t Know,” Huffingtonpost.com, 05/25/14
Source: “508 Recipient Services,” USPS.com, 07/11/16
Photo credit: www.audio-luci-store.it via Visualhunt/CC BY