First-Person Homeless: Kirsten Anderberg
As we recall from English class, if someone tells or writes a narrative using “I,” that story is being told in the first person. There is a quite a growing body of “first-person homeless” literature, and Kirsten Anderberg is one of its shining lights. Her first university degree was in political science. Last year, she became a Master of Arts in history and archiving.
This is from her bio:
She has published more articles in first person by a woman street performer than ever published prior in history. Her historical work regarding street performance and busking is filling a gap too long neglected.
These achievements are splendid, but consider the irony. If ever there was a writer with no need of diplomas to certify her mastery, Anderberg is that writer — brilliant, with street cred up the wazoo (a perfectly valid expression, meaning “in great abundance or plentiful supply,” and, in this case, it also means “equivalent to a Ph.D.”)
Most of her published work has stemmed from first-hand experience in the areas of natural health, political activism, civil rights, poverty, feminism, performing arts, homelessness, and institutional history. Her “Philanthropy in Child Protection Institutions,” subtitled “Community Volunteers Be Aware: Gifts Can Make Kids Targets in Institutions,” is outstandingly powerful and revelatory. We admire those who speak truth to power, but Anderberg does something even more rare and courageous: she speaks truth to the well-intentioned but clueless.
With a target in her sights, Anderberg is merciless and unrelenting. Her piece on the Section 8 voucher program for low-income housing assistance is absolutely scathing. It drips with scorn, and not in any fuzzy, generalized way. It is packed with specific examples of egregious failure spelled out in chapter and verse. She relates several nightmare scenarios — not imaginary ones — but horrible situations that have actually happened to people she knew and has worked with.
Apparently, in any given area, 90% of the rental units cost more than the Housing Authority has decided a Section 8 tenant can pay. Excesses and follies, Anderberg tells it like it is, explains it all for you, and ties it up in a ribbon with a bow. How many people do you know who would actually call 300 different Los Angeles apartment ads to determine that only three landlords would take Section 8 vouchers?
And then she explains the big Catch-22. Really, it’s amazing that anyone ever finds a place to rent. The waiting time to get into the program can be unbelievable, long enough so a single mother’s kids grow up and leave home before she can qualify, and then because there are no kids, she still can’t qualify.
Anderberg says,
It seems at every turn the government is trying to make sure only a small percentage of those who qualify for Section 8 can get it, and then those who finally do get it, cannot use it!… Many people give up every month in exhaustion, not using their Section 8, forfeiting it after waiting years for it, as they could not find any way to actually use it for rent anywhere.
Even the minor irritations are inimical to the quality of life. Like having the marked Housing Authority vehicle pull up to your door to make an inspection, letting all the neighbors know your loved ones are Section 8 riff-raff.
Furthermore,
The Section 8 ‘inspections’ seem more to check on the participants’ behaviors and lifestyles than to actually inspect for housing code and standards violations.
Then there is the ridiculous rule against shared housing:
If two welfare moms with Section 8 wanted to team up and try to find an affordable house together, costing the state less in funds for rent, Section 8 will not pay for that: the two women must rent separate rental units, probably apartments instead, at higher prices, which actually pleases the landlords.
A comment to Anderberg’s (republished elsewhere) article noted that things were somewhat better on the East coast, and added,
Section 8 housing is actually to the advantage of the owner because that means he has to keep places open as section 8 housing and gets a check regardless of if someone is living in it… Any landlord who doesn’t have section 8 housing is an idiot. Most will instantly take it because if there is an empty house in your unit you can pimp the system… A lot of the funds for repairs on the units come from the section 8 money. They are instant money in the bank.
Getting back to Anderberg: She has more to say about landlords, too. And the government:
In all reality, the only reason the Section 8 program is funded and allowed to continue is that it is designed to benefit land owners, much more than the renters. Section 8 does not help renters become home owners. Section 8 will not allow Section 8 renters to pay their rent towards home ownership, as in a mortgage, they may only use Section 8 for temporary rentals, turning it in essence, into a benefits program for land owners…
There is a serious housing crisis and the chasm between the have and have-nots has never been more obvious. This band-aid program of Section 8 vouchers barely functions in reality… Section 8 vouchers are often not worth the paper they are written on… In essence, the government has made the Section 8 voucher program nearly impossible to use, while feigning the illusion of concern and remedy.
“Minimum wage is not equal to minimum rents,” Anderberg says, and, of course, that is what the Universal Living Wage is all about. All Americans who work 40 hours a week should be able to afford basic housing wherever they live. We can end economic homelessness for over a million people and prevent economic homelessness for all of 10.1 million minimum-wage workers. Learn more about the Universal Living Wage.
Reactions?
Source: “Kirsten Anderberg,” Amazon.com
Source: ““Section 8″: The Myths of Low Income Housing in the U.S.,” Mostly Water, 09/19/08
Image by Sir_Iwan (Pawel), used under its Creative Commons license.
How Change Happens
August 17, 2010: Richard R. Troxell and House the Homeless at the Austin City Council meeting.
When the words “City Council meeting” are mentioned, many people, for one reason or another, tend to zone out. But stick around, and you will hear an amazing thing. Last August, the philosophical position of House the Homeless was made clear by Richard R. Troxell and published by Mobile Loaves & Fishes, which also supplied a description of the circumstances, as follows:
Today as this blog posts the Health and Human Services Committee of the City of Austin is debating whether to amend the no sit/no lying down ordinance to exclude people with verifiable known disabilities… there is a lot of opposition…
The purpose of the session was for Richard to state the case, and for the Council to discuss it and mull it over. So, here is the amazing thing. Look at the signs. They say “Thank You.” The House the Homeless folks arrived with signs saying “Thank You,” as if the City Council had already decided to do the right thing. That is So. Extremely. Cool. Any young person interested in changing the world would be well advised to become an apprentice or intern for this organization. There couldn’t be a better education.
House the Homeless takes part in such meetings frequently, and Richard often speaks. Take a look at his health survey testimony from July 2010. Or his testimony earlier this year on the No Sit/No Lie Ordinance (which is also paradoxically known as the Sit/Lie Ordinance). House the Homeless went so far as to obtain a Memorandum of Law from TRLA (Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc.), which emphasized the difficulties faced by the targets of the ordinance, and opined that, if reasonable accommodation were not provided for the disabled homeless, the city would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities act. That is another interesting group, by the way. Its homepage, http://www.trla.org/, proudly quotes a frustrated bureaucrat:
I think that [TRLA] is the problem because they’re supplying these people with the information and they’re telling them all about the federal laws and everything.
Just when it seemed that progress might be made, someone changed the wording in Austin’s proposed Sit/Lie Ordinance, applying it only to physical disabilities. The Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit group that fights for economic and racial justice for the poor, weighed in with a letter which Richard has also contributed to. Addressed to the Mayor and the Council, it emphasized that an ordinance which only protected people with physical disabilities would be discriminating against those with mental disabilities. It said,
We are of the opinion that all persons with disabilities should be exempt from fines and penalties under the ‘No Sit/No Lie’ ordinance, including those who are temporarily sitting down because of the effects of their disability.
James C. Harrington ended the letter with a reminder that the Texas Civil Rights Project would be happy to litigate the issue, but hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Meanwhile, HtH suggested amending the ordinance with clearly stated exceptions, and the training of police officers to recognize those exceptions, and offered to provide officers with plastic cards listing the acceptable disabilities.
Eventually, after three “stakeholder” meetings and many televised City Council committee meetings, Richard decided,
I will take 50 guys and ask City council to Not give Austin a Black Eye. We will all have one black eye.
You would be astonished at the total number of hours and the amount of sheer tenacity required to win even a partial victory on this one issue alone. To learn how it came out, please see “Austin’s Revised Sit/Lie Ordinance,” in which we mentioned an article by the Austin journalist Andrea Ball, titled “New rules allow homeless people with disabilities to sit on sidewalks.” Imagine what Lenny Bruce would have done with material like that.
When “New rules allow homeless people with disabilities to sit on sidewalks” is a piece of good news, something has gone desperately awry. To get even this far, the city had to be reminded of human priorities and, perhaps more relevantly, of the possibility of a lawsuit. Imagine how many months and meetings it could take to convince the city to put more benches out there.
As Richard says,
The City also has the resources to mitigate the situation by merely providing benches for all citizens. The City Council chooses not to provide this alternative because the downtown business operators are afraid that people will use them. They probably wouldn’t mind… but it might not be ‘their’ people. So we end up with both selective enforcement and the withholding of resources (tax payer dollars) because we can’t selectively ensure that the recipients will be the ‘deserving folks.’
Meanwhile, nationally, why not just cut to the chase, and do something to end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers? That would be the Universal Living Wage, and more information about it is available on this page.
Reactions?
Source: “Austin,” Mobile Loaves & Fishes, 08/17/10
Image by House the Homeless.
The Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative
Prevention is always better than the cure, and homelessness is no exception to that rule. The Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative (NSI) takes a multi-pronged approach to homelessness prevention. It’s all about eliminating barriers that keep people from fully participating in our society, whether politically, economically, or in any other way.
The people behind this initiative see a lot of racial bias underneath the subprime mortgage crisis, and aim to do something about it. They want to see more sustainable credit options for low-income borrowers, especially ethnic minorities. The NSI’s website says,
[…O]pportunities for homeownership are closely linked to wealth creation and financial security, particularly for African American and Latino households. The current subprime and foreclosure crisis threatens to reverse the substantial gains in minority homeownership that the country has witnessed in recent decades.
Rather than just dealing with the tattered victims of the system, the NSI intends to reform the system. Right now, change is needed in order to create sustainable home ownership. Change is needed to prevent repetition of the circumstances that have brought America to such a sorry condition. Plenty of damage control needs to be done now, and a whole lot has to be accomplished in a short time to keep even more damage from needing to be controlled later.
Another page on the NSI website explains one of the big difficulties with the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis: in most jurisdictions, nobody has the resources to handle such a huge and complex catastrophe. Cases are flooding the courts, neighborhoods are abandoned to blight, and people who are just trying to get along and keep their homes often don’t have a clue what to do.
They need legal services programs and foreclosure diversion and mediation programs, plus improvement of the entire foreclosure and bankruptcy processes. And it’s not only homeowners who suffer. Renters are in even worse shape. The most conscientious, on-time-paying tenant in the world doesn’t have a chance when the landlord’s mortgage is foreclosed.
Tenants need protection from having their already precarious existences upset by stuff that isn’t even their fault. They need eviction defense and help in relocating. Tenants are seen as lowly pawns on their chessboard, by landlords and bureaucrats alike, but to a renter family, moving screws up everything. It’s costly and time-consuming; it affects the kids’ education and friendships, the parents’ ability to travel to their jobs, the ties of mutual help among neighbors. Being forced to move is bad enough when a new place is easy to find and is affordable. But many families are denied even that much. Their new place is a shelter or the streets.
And it’s not even a good deal for the lenders. They wind up with “distressed” properties in urban ghost towns that are headed straight down the tubes. What is the point? If property is going to be lost by one party, at the very least let’s find a way to utilize it rather than let it rot. The NSI wants to see foreclosed properties put to use as housing. Either get new owners into them, or let nonprofit organizations take them over and get some affordable rental housing onto the market for people who need it, meanwhile employing people who need work to do the rehabilitation and management of these properties. The organization has even more ambitious goals:
The Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative supports innovative efforts to overcome the servicer bottleneck in loan modifications, including research into the legal and economic structure of the servicing industry, advocacy to encourage greater transparency and accountability in the mortgage industry, and the implementation of timely and effective loss mitigation policies.
The NSI is headed by Solomon Greene, a product of Stanford, Berkeley, and Yale, who holds the title of Senior Program Officer, and is also a professor in the field of urban planning. Before that, he was a New York University Law Fellow. Just a few more highlights from Greene’s CV:
He has published on such diverse topics as comparative welfare reform, the history of juvenile courts, and forced evictions in squatter communities… he served as Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal… and a human rights fellow at the World Bank Institute, where he developed a set a best practices for legal titling of informal housing in developing countries… Greene held leadership positions within several community development and affordable housing organizations…
The Neighborhood Stabilization initiative is part of the Open Society Institute (OSI), financed by the Institute’s Equality and Opportunity Fund, which in turn is supported by George Soros. The U.S. is only one of more than 60 countries where his foundations work to better the lives of marginalized people such as the Roma (gypsies) of Europe. The OSI makes grants for the study of such efforts as identifying “effective models for helping low-income, low-skilled people become economically self-sufficient.”
In the United States, certain cities have come in for heavy attention from the NSI. In Baltimore, the organization is concerned with drug addiction, criminal and juvenile justice, youth, education, and community development. It was at work in New Orleans even before Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing disasters.
Another offshoot, the Urban Institute, is very active in Chicago, Illinois and Portland, Oregon. There is a Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation, which is interested in, among other things, reforming the system of criminal background checks in employment and recognizing that just because a person made a mistake and paid a debt to society that doesn’t mean he or she should never be allowed to work again. This alone should go a long way toward alleviating homelessness.
Reactions?
Source: “Neighborhood Stabilization,” Soros.org
Source: “About,” Soros.org
Source: “Solomon Greene,” wagner.nyu.edu
Image by Aldon (Aldon Hynes), used under its Creative Commons license.
Lose – Lose – Lose – Lose: Tanya McDowell’s Homeless Plight
How important is it to end homelessness in America? Please see the information from House the Homeless on how the Universal Living Wage can save millions of Americans like Tanya McDowell and her young son.
John Nickerson reports on the situation in Norwalk, Connecticut, where McDowell faces a huge bill for reparations, and a 20-year jail term. The charges are grand larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny. The thing that was stolen, allegedly, was education for McDowell’s son, who was enrolled in the “wrong” elementary school for less than six months. They actually say that the attendance of A.J. Paches for that period of time amounted to more than $15,000 worth of educational services, which is astonishing. There are still colleges you can get into for less. The reporter tells us,
McDowell said she divides her time between an apartment on Priscilla Circle in Bridgeport, where she is not allowed to stay when the lease holder is away, the Norwalk Emergency Shelter and her minivan.
The address McDowell used to enroll her boy in Norwalk belonged to a friend in a public housing complex, who was subsequently evicted as punishment for her part in the alleged deception. (See our helpful article, “How to Become Homeless,” for more tips.) Emotions run high and hot on both sides of this controversy, and citizens have added many comments to the online coverage. If only people would become as excited about ending homelessness, as they are about a little boy going to school.
Part of the tragedy is that A.J. really loved going to school, and any parent knows how rare and precious that is. The Connecticut Parents Union has started a bottle-and-can drive to raise money to help McDowell pay the fine. The reporter talked to the group’s founder, Gwen Samuel, who said:
You would figure that a school district such as Norwalk would put the child first. Saying we had the child this long with no fixed address and you would think they would do anything to ensure that this baby is safe and stable. Instead they arrest the baby’s mother, knowing she has no fixed address. The system has failed this child because of what they did to his mother.
An even stronger reaction comes from Dr. Boyce Watkins, a Syracuse University professor who founded the Your Black World Coalition, and who sees not only homeless-bashing but racism in the Connecticut story. Dr. Watkins is still angry over a similar case in Ohio. Dr. Watkins characterizes McDowell’s crisis as sad and sickening, and says,
Simple logic implies that whatever resources were saved from him not being enrolled in his home district (whatever that might be) could be applied to the secondary district. So putting parents in jail for sending their kids to schools outside their district is simply a legalized way of fencing out those that the community deems to be undesirable… Beating up on a homeless woman who is doing all she can to get her child into school is a shameful microcosm of the kind of greed and selfishness our country has chosen to embrace. There was once a time when slaves were arrested for trying to learn how to read, and now poor mothers are being arrested for trying to send their children to the school of their choice.
Apparently, this is the first case of this kind in Connecticut that has actually been turned over to the police. (And let’s hope it’s the last.) The strange coincidence that McDowell and her son happen to be homeless, inspires some people to say “selective enforcement.” A homeless woman and child are easy victims.
But for the state to win is a Pyrrhic victory. It’s doubtful whether a woman with no address or job will pony up that $15,000. Say the going price for soda cans is 30 cents per pound. That seems to be about 37,000 pounds of redeemed metal. Or 300,000 cans at 5 cents each. Plus, how much will it cost the state to keep Ms. McDowell in jail for 20 years? Plus, a family is broken up. Plus, a kid who loved school will probably form a different opinion about that subject. Sounds like lose-lose-lose-lose, all the way around.
Reactions?
Source: “Homeless woman’s arrest for sending son to Norwalk school stirs debate,” Stamford Advocate, 04/21/11
Source: “Another Mom Jailed for Sending Child to Wrong School District,” DrBoyceWatkins.com, 04/19/11
Image by Nisha A, used under its Creative Commons license.
Brianna Karp — One Woman’s Homeless Story
A lot of people have been writing about homelessness lately, and they fall into categories. In one group are the people who are chronically or temporarily homeless, telling their own stories from first-hand experience. We have talked about Becky Blanton, who spoke at the prestigious TEDGlobal conference in 2009 on the topic, “The year I was homeless.”
Because people experiencing homelessness form friendships and relationships just like anybody else, the writer might also tell stories of street comrades. For instance, Ace Backwords has been for many years the chronicler of the lives of Berkeley’s legendary street characters, like Blue, Talon, and Hate Man, “your typical, dress-wearing, former New York Times-reporting, hatred-spewing, homeless freak,” who is actually one of the nicest people you’d ever want to know.
Then, there are the objective reportorial types, journalists, bloggers, and allies who gather and then disseminate the stories of others. We have mentioned B. N. Duncan, longtime recorder of homeless lives in both words and photographs. Then there are the subjective reporters, who are not actually homeless themselves but who enter that world in order to bring back stories and publicize them, in hopes of raising public awareness. We’ll have more to say about them another time.
Today’s spotlight focuses on Brianna Karp, a native Southern Californian who started working at age ten, apparently because nobody else in her family was able to. All she ever wanted was to grow up to be a solid citizen, employed and home-owning. But it didn’t turn out the way she had planned — at least, not for long..
Karp had what anybody would call a good job, not that it mattered once she had been laid off. Only executives get those multi-million-dollar golden parachutes. The average employed person is just “let go” like a like an enemy spy shoved out of a helicopter over the ocean — bound, blindfolded, and with no parachute of any hue. Karp was luckier than many, and acknowledges it:
The company that I worked for was enormously kind and fair to each and every one of us, and compensated us well with a severance package, so I was OK for a while.
Thanks to that lucky break, and by scrambling for every possible opportunity to make a few bucks, Karp remarkably managed to delay her transition from housed to homeless for an entire half-year. But, inevitably, harsh exigency caught up. Because of another tragedy — the suicide of its owner — a travel trailer came into her possession and she set up a tenuous base from which to try and rebuild her life. Introducing her book, The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness, Karp says,
I am an educated woman with stable employment and residence history. I have never done drugs. I am not mentally ill. I am a career executive assistant –- coherent, opinionated, poised, and capable. If you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t have assumed that I lived in a parking lot. In short, I was just like you — except without the convenience of a permanent address.
Reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and featured by TV shows, The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness was also written about by prominent author Augusten Burroughs in these words,
Brianna Karp is the perfect example of how a person can triumph not in spite of adversity but as a direct result of it. This smart, pragmatic young woman takes us inside the new face of homelessness in America and her dramatic memoir guides us through our assumptions, fears and judgment into a place of understanding, compassion and respect. Truly essential reading.
Once reestablished in the world of the housed and employed, Karp has not forgotten her desperate days, but wishes to help others cope, and to extend hope to people experiencing homelessness.
Here’s an idea that could change the landscape: the Universal Living Wage, which can end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum wage workers. Please learn more about the Universal Living Wage and how to make it a reality.
Reactions?
Source: The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp
Source: “Where It All Began,” GirlsGuidetoHomelessness.com
Source: “Reviews,” GirlsGuidetoHomelessness.com
Image by PJFurlong06 (Patrick Furlong), used under its Creative Commons license.
2011 Tax Day Action: An Appeal from Richard R. Troxell
You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger in one of the communities of your land. You must pay him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets, for he is needy and sets his life on it; else he will cry to God against you and you will incur guilt.
Deuteronomy 24:14-15
Greetings!
Mark your calendars and contact your Board of Directors! Friday, April 15th, is our 11th annual Universal Living Wage Tax Day Event! From 7:30-9:00 am and 4:30-6:00 pm, we will go to our nation’s post offices and call for a Universal Living Wage. Once again, 3.5 million minimum-wage workers are expected to experience homelessness this year. Using existing government guidelines, we have devised a single national formula that ensures that anyone working 40 hours a week will be able to afford basic food, clothing, shelter (utilities included), and have access to health care.
We have found that American businesses have grown to rely on government subsidies to pick up that portion of the basic wage that they have failed to provide. Workers have been forced in ever increasing numbers to depend on food stamps, general assistance, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Congress intended these to be emergency, stop-gap measures. Instead, many businesses use government support to save on basic payroll. A national shift is occurring from the businesses’ responsibility of paying a “fair wage for a fair day’s work” to creating an ever increasing burden on the taxpayer.
We know that if businesses paid their employees a fair living wage, we could dramatically reduce the burden to taxpayers.
We will provide you a 4-foot by 10-foot banner, free, that says:
Reduce Your Taxes!
… with a
www.UniversalLivingWage.org
People will be drawn to the ULW website, which will display your contact information. We encourage you to use this opportunity to tout your own local living wage campaign. We can provide the banner, push cards (clearly explaining the formula), and a flyer explaining the issue.
Save us work, please email us your desire to participate. Some of you do not have email, so, for you, this will be our only opportunity to communicate. Call us at (512) 796-4366 or toll free at (888) 484-8591 if you wish to be a lead organization and receive a banner or just join in at a post office action lead by another organization.
Select the post office in your city where the media shows up every year to report on the last-minute tax return filers. Then call or email us with that address at rrtroxell@aol.com. Be sure to put “Tax Day” in the subject line.
Don’t delay, act now, April 15th is almost here!
Go to www.UniversalLivingWage.org to see photos of our past Tax Day and “Bridge the Economic Gap Day” held on September 6th. We are creating a national ground swell of support which will carry us to the “tipping point” when we will fix the Federal Minimum Wage and create a Universal Living Wage!
In Unity There Is Strength,
Richard R. Troxell
P.S. Hunger Action Network NY won our digital camera for best action. Is it your turn?
Problems with Numbers
Maria Foscarinis is founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (Her complete biography is found at the NLCHP website.) She calls for a commitment to the principle that “in a country as wealthy as ours, everyone should have a place to call home.” Homelessness is simply not a thing that should be tolerated in this country.
Foscarinis discusses two reports that came out recently, on people experiencing homelessness in America. Last December, the U.S. Conference of Mayors found a 9% increase in family homelessness. Then the National Alliance to End Homelessness announced another set of dire numbers. Foscarinis has a problem with its definition:
The Alliance numbers capture only a very narrowly defined slice of homelessness: People in shelters or other emergency housing, or in public places.
Unlike some other organizations or government bureaus, the Alliance does not count as homeless the families that double up with relatives, or singles who are couch-surfing. Sometimes these arrangements are meant to be temporary, and sometimes they end unexpectedly because of personality clashes, inability to contribute to the household finances, or any number of other stress factors inherent in shared living quarters. The people who are staying with relatives or friends this year have an estimated one-in-10 chance of being literally homeless next year, in a shelter or on the street.
A lot of these people are experiencing “economic homelessness.” They are not bums or freeloaders. They may be working full time, but even so, the expense of an apartment is beyond them, even if they are lucky enough to be in an area where there are apartments to rent. This is why House the Homeless endorses the Universal Living Wage. It is believed that implementation of the Universal Living Wage will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers in America.
Getting back to the two reports Foscarinis talks about, both of them point to unemployment and the foreclosure crisis as the major causes of homelessness, which, frankly, seems fairly obvious to anybody who has lost his or her job and/or had gone through the hell of paying mortgage on time while unemployed. And even the government admits that around 40% of the homeless are unsheltered because the resources just are not there. Whether a family or an individual needs housing, legal help, or food, the safely net is in shreds. Foscarinis calls it a human rights crisis and she’s right. She says,
Last year, our country spent hundreds of billions of dollars to save banks that were considered ‘too big to fail.’ Now the conventional wisdom in Washington is that there’s ‘no money’ to help ordinary people who are suffering in poverty and homelessness.
As for the estimated six million American families that have been forced to move in with relatives, this is really only new for some Americans. Even in the decades when middle-class white America spread out into suburbs and single-family homes, minority families have always been squeezed together by economic necessity. New arrivals to our shores and undocumented people have always lived eight or 12 to a room.
For at least some doubled-up families there might be a bit of a silver lining. In a way — and this is by no means meant to sugarcoat or excuse homelessness — there could be an upside. For decades, sociologists have lamented the demise of the extended family. For a lot of different reasons, it is not optimally healthy for each nuclear family to be sequestered in its own little shell. Well, like it or not, many Americans have now been forced to move in with relatives or endure having relatives move in. That adds up to a lot of overcrowding, friction, and discord.
On the other hand, we can hope that at least some families have benefited from the mingling of generations and the increased contact with family members, or even unrelated families. In the 60′s, communal living was an eagerly sought alternative to the traditional nuclear family. Living with a bunch of people doesn’t have to be a nightmare. It would be nice if at least some people were able to find unexpected blessings in adversity.
The enumeration of people experiencing homelessness is a complex undertaking, and it turns out to be a touchy, tricky subject everywhere. Especially important is the definition of exactly who should be considered homeless. Also vital is the methodology. In Australia, the Bureau of Statistics (ABS) wants to change how homelessness is calculated, as Farah Farouque explains. There would be a new counting method, and the old statistics would be revised retroactively. Farouque says,
The ABS will revisit figures based on the 2001 and 2006 censuses using a new formula devised by in-house statisticians in a discussion paper to be released this month.
Among opponents of the proposed change, there is talk of inconsistency, and of goalposts moved in the middle of the game. It really doesn’t even matter if a new counting method is better or worse than the old method, because either way it will skew the results over time.
The thing is, the Australian government promised to cut homelessness in half by the year 2020. Homeless advocates believe that using the proposed method could magically reduce the number of apparent homeless by as much as one-third. But the actual situations of the people experiencing homelessness would not be changed. It would be a clever way of understating the problem, consisting of smoke and mirrors. The next census happens in August, so they need to figure it out pretty soon.
Reactions?
Source: “Too Big to Fail? Homelessness Increases as Help Decreases,” The Huffington Post, 01/13/11
Source: “Fears over re-count of homeless,” The Age, 03/14/11
Image by Quinet (Thomas Quine), used under its Creative Commons license.
A Certain Income Level
Imagine a world where 80% of the people are without such basic needs as water, sanitation, education, healthcare, food security, or the old-age pensions — a planet where four out of five people lack what the United Nations (U.N.) calls “adequate social protection.”
Well, there is no need to imagine it, because that’s the kind of world we already have. Juan Somovia, a U.N. official, recently pointed out something we are reminded of daily by the frightening headlines from everywhere. He calls it the “linkage between social justice and national stability,” a polite way of saying that if a nation’s people do not have food, jobs, housing, fair treatment at the hands of their government, and certain other basic amenities, the leadership will definitely need to watch its back.
Now, imagine a world where everybody makes a living wage and has access to basic services. Somovia is director-general of the ILO (International Labour Organization), which is part of the U.N., and he says it’s possible. The ILO has established the basic entitlements that ought to apply to every person on earth:
– basic income security for children;
– access to some social assistance for people of working age that prevents them from falling into absolute food poverty;
– a basic old-age pension for people over a certain age;
– and essential health services for all.
Susan Jones reported on these ideas and others proposed on February 20, the “World Day of Social Justice.” All of the 183 member nations of the ILO have arranged to send delegates to a convocation in June, where they will discuss long-term plans for a worldwide “social protection floor.” The ILO believes that a worldwide universal living wage could be accomplished by spending only 2% of the Global Domestic Product.
Since they are already so clear about what is wanted and needed, it would seem that the main problem will be to discover how to get the money from wherever it is now to the people who presently live below this “floor” level of a living standard. The U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also emphasized the necessity of social justice for all, saying,
No one should live below a certain income level, and everyone should have access to essential public services such as water and sanitation, health and education.
Specific to the United States, we have mentioned some of the things Richard talked about when he was interviewed by Wayne Hurlbert for Blog Talk Radio. This is Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless, of course, talking about the ideas proposed in his book, Looking Up at the Bottom Line. It was a very wide-ranging discussion, and it’s worth touching on a few of the topics again.
In these hard economic times, we (as a nation) need to be strategic. We are smart enough not to operate on a sick patient with a chain saw as opposed to a scalpel. We should also realize that we are not a nation with just one economy. We are a nation of a thousand economies. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach with the federal minimum wage is not good for anybody. Currently, it’s enough to hurt some, for instance small rural businesses, and yet at the same time not enough to help others, such as workers in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco. In other words, it’s a lose-lose proposition.
Richard sees the Universal Living Wage as a clear, simple way to turn things around, and certainly as a large part of the solution to get economy moving. The idea has already been proven, and only needs to be extended. The military adjusts the pay scale for off-base housing according to the geographical locality. The US Government has also adopted a pay policy that considers geographic considerations when federal employees are transferred from region to region. The concept has been tried and found to be successful and valuable.
Everyone knows it doesn’t cost the same to live in Harlington, Texas, as it does to live in Boston, Massachusetts. This results in “economic homelessness,” where even an employed person can’t afford basic housing. We need a Federal Minimum Wage that is indexed to the local cost of housing (the number-one most expensive item in every American’s budget). By indexing it to the local cost of housing, we ensure that anyone working 40 hours a week will be able to afford basic food, clothing, and shelter (including utilities). Richard estimates that the Universal Living Wage could end economic homelessness for over a million people and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.
By showing how easily a “social protection floor” could be established in the United States, we could once again lead the world by setting a good example.
Reactions?
Source: “‘No One Should Live Below A Certain Income Level,’ U.N. Secretary-General Says,”CNSNews.com, 02/21/11
Source: “Richard Troxell Looking Up at the Bottom Line,” BlogTalkRadio, 12/08/10
Image by AZRainman (Mark Rain), used under its Creative Commons license.
Helping the Homeless: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Poverty Insights is a website that offers a very exceptional “Opinions” section, packed with thought-provoking editorials. One of the major contributors is Joel John Roberts, who used to live in Venice, California, and still writes about it.
As well as being the editor of Poverty Insights, David Henderson founded Idealistics Inc, “a social enterprise that builds web-based technologies that help social sector organizations help people better.” That sounds pretty good! Under his byline, we find such intriguing titles as “Bad Data, Bad Decisions — How Well Intentioned Organizations can Hurt the Poor” and “Poverty Goes on When the Holidays are Gone.”
Henderson wrote the post we’re looking at today, “Grey Hound Bus Wins War on Generosity.” He wanted to help somebody move to another town where the future might have better possibilities, so he went online to buy the person a bus ticket. That’s when he learned about the Gift Ticket Fee, which is only one ugly manifestation of a “corporate culture that kicks the crap out of poor people.”
Henderson reports,
When I went to purchase the ticket, I was astonished to read the following upon checkout, ‘An $18 US Gift Ticket Fee applies when the primary card holder is not traveling.’ The ticket I was purchasing was $36, meaning this $18 generosity fee was 50% of the value of the ticket!
He tweeted Greyhound about it, and received a reply indicating that the system is in place to protect the corporation from fraud. In Henderson’s eyes, the blatant fraud is being committed by Greyhound, given that…
… every other company in the country seems to have figured out how to handle credit card transactions without an $18 dollar fine.
Poverty Insights extended to the bus company an invitation to present its case as a guest blog on the Poverty Insights website, an opportunity which Greyhound has so far declined. But Dr. Mary McLaughlin shared her experience. She tried to buy a ticket for someone in another city and was told that it just plain could not be done over the phone with a credit card, because of the terrorism threat. After wasting a large part of the doctor’s day messing around on the phone, the company finally relented and electronically took her money, plus the Gift Ticket Fee, of course. But that wasn’t the end of it! McLaughlin says,
The disabled veteran was required to stand in line at the ticket counter over and over again as numerous questions arose that the ticket agent insisted must be answered only by me. The disabled veteran had to get out of line repeatedly, call me again and again, and then stand in line again and again. This process took all day, starting about 8:00 AM and ended only when the last bus of the day was just about to leave the station.
Getting back to David Henderson: Greyhound’s return tweet helpfully informed him that a ticket buyer can avoid incurring the Gift Ticket Fee by paying at the terminal. Only problem was, the person who needed the ticket was hundreds of miles away. Henderson was not about to show up at the ticket window. His and McLaughlin’s stories are so disgusting, I was inspired to send my own two cents’ worth to the Poverty Insights comment box:
Even being in the same city doesn’t help much. I called Greyhound to buy tickets on my credit card, so my visitors could go home. Greyhound gave me this advice: Avoid the extra charge by paying at the terminal. Problem is, the terminal is only open weekdays between 9 and 4. One option would be to make an extra trip ahead of time, downtown and back, via city bus. I’d already arranged with a neighbor for a ride in the middle of the night, so the passengers could catch their 2 AM bus, and didn’t want to ask for this too. Nor, with my guests here for only a couple of days, did we want to spend our limited time together shuttling around on city buses to procure the damn tickets. So I sucked it up and paid the extortionate Gift Ticket Fee.
The Greyhound bus is the last-resort mode of transport for people experiencing homelessness and other economically oppressed and underprivileged Americans. How else would anyone in the carless indigent class get around? But we don’t single out Greyhound as a company that is particularly harsh to the poor. On the contrary! The bus line is joined by money-transfer companies, credit card companies, telephone companies, and many others, in making it expensive to be poor. Helping a relative or friend in a crisis is a costly proposition, in which every contribution is penalized by a hefty Samaritan Tax. Corporate policy dictates that “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Reactions?
Source: “Grey Hound Bus Wins War on Generosity,” Poverty Insights, 02/22/11
Image by Mike McCaffrey, used under its Creative Commons license.
Predictions on Homelessness and More
Of course, all kinds of predictions became available around the new year. “New Year’s Prediction (II): The US Economy in 2011″ is one of them, and its author’s capsule bio is presented here:
Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His ‘Marketplace’ commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.
Like many other observers of the economy, Reich has noticed the phenomenon described by the first line of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Reich feels that the coming year will be maybe not the best of times, but pretty good for the stock market and anybody connected with Wall Street. Giant corporations will make giant profits. What he calls the Big Money economy will do just fine.
The rest of us, not so much. What Reich calls the Average Working Family economy is doomed to more of the same. American workers will continue to be lucky to be working at all, but no matter how fervently grateful they are to be employed, their pay isn’t going to go up. The working poor will stay poor, though not necessarily working. The number of people who wish they had jobs will keep growing. Americans will sink deeper into debt, if they can even get loans or credit at all.
Small businesses will flounder and fail. The housing situation won’t get any better for either owners or renters. Reich does not specifically mention the population of Americans experiencing homelessness, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate from the foregoing, and understand that “dismal” is not too strong a word. Here’s part of the problem as Reich diagnoses it:
America’s big businesses are depending less and less on U.S. sales and U.S. workers. Their big profits are coming from two sources: (1) growing sales in China, India, and other fast-growing countries, and (2) slimmed-down US payrolls….
In short, profits aren’t coming from American consumers — and profits won’t be coming from American consumers in 2011.
Reich mentions that General Motors makes more cars in China than in the United States. Gee, I hope they do a better job with cars than with audiocassette players. I just threw away an American-brand, made-in-China, personal cassette player because batteries could not be inserted into its body. To make a compartment that holds a couple of AA batteries — how complicated an engineering feat is that?
And the other General, General Electric, plans to invest $2 billion in China very soon. Wal-Mart’s customers are mainly outside America and its workers will soon be too, if not already. Reich says,
Most Republicans and too many Democrats are dependent on corporate America and Wall Street. Their version of tax reform is to cut taxes on the wealthy and on big corporations, and either raise them on everyone else (sale and property taxes are already on the rise) or cut spending on programs working families depend on.
He sees a new progressive movement forming up, composed of (not surprisingly) progressives, Independents, minorities, organized labor, and the young. He also includes the “enlightened Tea Partiers,” which is an important distinction to make. There is too much stereotyping and labeling going on, and not enough serious consideration of views.
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What else can help to change the dire outcomes predicted by many prognosticators? How about the Universal Living Wage? We really urge every American to get familiar with the idea, as described in Looking Up at the Bottom Line. Here is the essence:
The benefit of the ULW is that it will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum wage workers.
Reactions?
Source: “Robert Reich,” RobertReich.org
Source: “New Year’s Prediction (II): The US Economy in 2011,” Truth-Out.org, 12/29/10
Image by freeparking, used under its Creative Commons license.
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