Meanest Streets, Part 1
A 2005 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless listed what were, at the time, the 20 meanest cities, the ones with the worst records in terms of anti-homeless laws, selectivity of enforcement, severity of penalties, and their general political climate including whatever anti-homeless legislation was currently being pushed.
Let’s look at what were then deemed the five worst cities and catch up on subsequent events.
#5 Las Vegas, NV. [THEN]
Even as the city shelters are overcrowded and the city’s Crisis Intervention Center recently closed due to lack of funding, the city continues to target homeless persons living outside. The police conduct habitual sweeps of encampments which lead to extended jail time for repeat misdemeanor offenders.
The more recent situation in Las Vegas is outlined by Rodger Jacobs in a three-part series published late last year. The introductory editor’s note mentions a downtown tent city, which the author and his girlfriend fortunately were able to avoid. Jacobs gives 13,000 as the number of homeless residents in the county, and relates details of his problems in obtaining the documents required to apply for services.
Like any endangered renter with good sense, Jacobs was aware of the landlord-tenant law. As he and his girlfriend struggled to pack, he reflected on what would happen if they couldn’t get their belongings out of there by the deadline. The building owner could put their stuff in any rental storage unit, charging any fee. Thanks to the publicity from the news article, a donor paid the moving and storage costs. The next place where the couple landed inspired Jacobs to write that…
… life in a residential hotel is far from ideal, and it has offered me a ground’s-eye view of the full effect of the Great Recession, from entire families crammed into small rooms and a school bus that drops off dozens of children in front of the hotel on weekday afternoons.
In the second installment, Jacobs names and thanks people who came forward with help, but that humanitarian glow is spoiled by the Las Vegas newspaper readers who responded to Part 1 with hostility. Jacobs says,
The day the Sun published my essay… I spent many of my waking hours defending myself against allegations of sloth… hypochondria, arrogance… weak moral and ethical judgment, prevarication, alcoholism, drug abuse, liberalism, solipsism, atheism… ripping off ‘the system,’ a defeatist attitude, poor money management…
In the third installment of his story, Jacobs was still shocked by the outpouring of malice. He writes,
More than the tale of my plight itself, the vicious online response to the New Homeless series… became the story for the press beyond Nevada’s borders… Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak summed it up best when he said, ‘Societies are judged by how they respond to those in need.’ Indeed, the citizens of Las Vegas have been judged by the shrill voices of a very vocal minority… my story has also gained a lot of traction in foreign media.
Well, thanks, unfeeling people of Las Vegas, for once again making America look bad in the eyes of the world. On the other hand, the city apparently is tolerant of the hundreds of tunnel dwellers and does not go out of its way to disturb them.
#4 Atlanta, GA. [THEN]
In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Atlanta stood firm in its resolve to criminalize panhandlers… In addition, during the first week in December, the Atlanta Zoning Review Board approved a ban on supportive housing inside the city limits.
As we have mentioned, the reputation of Atlanta, Georgia, was dismal due to the massive displacement of the urban homeless in preparation for the 1988 Democratic Convention, and then again for the 1996 Olympic games. The city has some good things going for it more recently, including the Georgia Law Center for the Homeless.
In late 2007, House the Homeless did a survey to find out how many of the people experiencing homelessness in Austin, Texas, were actually working; were, in other words, the “working poor” who can’t even scrape together a living wage. Richard says,
Upon releasing the survey results… we were notified that in Atlanta, Georgia, 45% of their homeless population were working at some point during the week… Apparently, the work ethic is there but the wage is not.
The House the Homeless website features a report on Bridge Action Day 2010 in Atlanta, more formally known as “Bridge the Economic Gap” Day. Its purpose is to focus attention on the gap between an average worker’s paycheck and the possibility of actually living on that amount.
More recently, Lori Chapman reported for CNN about an unusual art studio opened by Anita Beaty, who is executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. Chapman says,
The art studio sits in the group’s headquarters, a 1920s-era building on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. Beaty says the homeless can find a secure place to paint and a creative community environment there… To get their own free studio space, those interested must show some artistic ability and follow certain rules, including staying drug-free.
There is a coffee bar in the storefront space, to entice passers-by and potential art patrons. Anything the artists sell, the Task Force gets a very reasonable 20% commission. Whether homeless or housed, painters tend to sink their profits back into buying more art supplies. This news story profiles a couple of artists who, between part-time service industry jobs and their art sales, managed to earn enough to rent an apartment. Also important is the chance to mingle with other artists who are not experiencing homelessness, who are also welcome at location.
Reactions?
Source: “A Dream Denied,” National Coalition for the Homeless
Source: “I am frightened,” Las Vegas Sun, 08/29/10
Source: “Hostile toward homelessness,” Las Vegas Sun, 09/26/10
Source: “Homelessness and the indignity of hurtful speech,” Las Vegas Sun, 12/05/10
Source: “Vancouver Olympics Aftermath Studied,” House The Homeless blog, 02/17/11
Source: “What’s New at the Universal Living Wage Campaign,” Universal Living Wage
Source: “At this shelter, art studio helps the homeless paint a brighter future,” CNN.com, 04/01/11
Image of Bridge Action Day 2010 Atlanta by House the Homeless.
The Crime of Breathing While Homeless
In the United States over the past three decades, we have seen the invention of many new crimes (Driving While Hispanic, Voting While Black, Flying While Muslim, etc.) that are not officially on the books. But they are all too real for the people caught up in them. One of the new crimes is, apparently, Breathing While Homeless.
Check out this Executive Summary from the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH). Its full title is “A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities.” The numbers it utilized are a few years old, but if anyone imagines that things have improved since then, we have a nice bridge to sell them. (The bridge comes ready-equipped with a used tarpaulin, several sheets of prime cardboard, and… well, that’s all, actually.)
Depending on location, the statistics on people experiencing homelessness, and on available shelter space, may fluctuate. But the tendency to make homelessness a law enforcement problem continues to change for the worse. The authors of this report studied laws and practices in 224 cities and concluded,
This trend includes measures that target homeless persons by making it illegal to perform life-sustaining activities in public.
It mentions activities we have discussed on this blog, such as sitting, sleeping, camping, cooking, eating, or begging in public places. Of course, most cities figure out quickly that a two-pronged approach works best. Go after the people experiencing homelessness, AND go after the people who try to help, such as organizations that provide food. Here are some of the measures that have been taken by municipalities in the Orwellian name of “Quality of Life,” according to the NCH report:
* Legislation that makes it illegal to sleep, sit, or store personal belongings in public spaces in cities where people are forced to live in public spaces;
* Selective enforcement of more neutral laws, such as loitering or open container laws, against homeless persons;
* Sweeps of city areas where homeless persons are living to drive them out of the area, frequently resulting in the destruction of those persons’ personal property, including important personal documents and medication; and
* Laws that punish people for begging or panhandling to move poor or homeless persons out of a city or downtown area.
There are of course numerous civil rights issues. Laws against vagrancy and loitering have always been constitutionally shaky, especially when the exact same behavior is accepted if the miscreant has a home where the police can tell them to go. (At Venice Beach, California, there used to be a street guy with a great line. If some tourist or local resident offended him, he would yell like a scolding parent, “Go to your room!”)
When a homeless person’s belongings are searched, or seized and arbitrarily destroyed, that’s Fourth Amendment territory. Begging for spare change just might be protected under the First Amendment. Then you’ve got the Eight Amendment, the one concerning cruel and unusual punishment, which applies when a person is accused of the heinous crime of sleeping.
So, what is accomplished by anti-homeless laws? They move people away from the centers, usually located in the inner city, where services such as food and job counseling are available. They make getting to these places even more difficult for people who must depend on buses (if they are lucky) or their own power of walking, to get around. Restrictive ordinances award thousands of homeless people with criminal records, as if they needed any more strikes against them in their efforts to emerge from the bottom layer of society. And the price of incarceration — don’t get us started. Jail is two or three times as expensive as supportive housing.
And then, there’s the little matter of international law. Our nation has signed on to global human rights agreements, prescribing humane treatment of people experiencing homelessness, which is fine for other countries but which we ourselves apparently don’t feel compelled to honor.
The report also offers some rays of light in a section called “Constructive Alternatives to Criminalization,” which is full of good ideas that have been either tried or contemplated by various localities. It offers helpful recommendations for the benefit of city governments, business groups, and the legal system, in dealing with these issues. Answers are proposed for both the chronic homeless, and the working poor or “economic homeless,” those who are unable to afford basic housing even though they have jobs.
However, House the Homeless has one big idea that would pretty much cover everything, and take away the need for each city to figure it out for themselves. It’s called the Universal Living Wage, and it will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum wage workers. You can also find out all about it in Richard R. Troxell’s book, Looking Up at the Bottom Line.
Reactions?
Source: “A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities,” NationalHomeless.org
Image by quinn.anya (Quinn Dombrowski), 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.
Homes Needed to End Homelessness
Following the success of our guide on “How to Become Homeless,” here are a few more suggestions. We spoke of earthquake, fire, foreclosure, and domestic disharmony as popular methods of achieving homelessness. Another strong force has been the change in entire societal institutions. In Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle For the Living Wage, Richard R. Troxell describes some of the ways in which large demographic segments have been rendered homeless, especially young men and single older men. He writes,
Adding to the complexity of homelessness was the loss of several million SROs (single room occupancy units) when motels and cheap apartments were torn down and replaced with condominiums or made into parking lots. Another dynamic affecting our nation’s poor was the decision by the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, to leave the SRO field of housing.
Back in the day, and we mean way back, even a family of lower economic status could conceivably be living in a large, rambling house. Almost any house could be made into a boarding house. Rooms could be rented to traveling salesmen, or teachers (who were not allowed to be married), or even actors.
More recently, the trend in houses became smaller, yet more open. It’s much more difficult to carve out a space for an extra person or family. Now, cities and neighborhoods and housing developments all have rules about how many unrelated people can cohabit, how many cars per household, how many toilets, and so on. Nobody’s home is their castle, not if they want to rent out a room. This is bad both for homeowners who need some extra cash, and for people who need cheap temporary digs.
If rental housing is available, the prospective renter is faced with numerous hoops through which to jump. High move-in costs, don’t get us started. First, they charge you to even look at the place. Yes, there is a fee to even apply. And if the manager is crooked, you may expect more special fees to be extracted, down the line. To move in requires a lump sum of first and last month’s rent plus security deposit, with of course more deposits for special circumstances like pets.
Not to say this is necessarily wrong. It costs a lot to refurbish a trashed apartment, and people can be pigs. The self-justification is, “So what? It’s the landlord’s money.” Maybe so, but he’s gonna get it back from all the other tenants. For that kind of vindictiveness, everybody pays. It may be necessary, out of fairness to landlords, to pay the equivalent of three months’ rent up front. But it’s not easy. Here’s the situation, as described in Looking Up at the Bottom Line:
More than the minimum wage is required in every state to be able to afford a one bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent, as set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
This is why America is seeing a lot of economic homelessness, which is what happens when even those who are working full-time can’t afford a place to live. You are invited to learn more about the Universal Living Wage, which is expected to end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.
We have talked about Jimmy McMillan, who got a lot of attention in last year’s New York State gubernatorial race. His platform, “The Rent Is Too Damn High,” inspired AnnaMaria Andriotis to explore the question in The Wall Street Journal.
She relates how, in the midst of a phone conversation with another reporter, McMillan stopped a passerby on the street to ask if his rent was too high. And one of the examples she gives of impossible rent comes from Austin, Texas, coincidentally the city where Richard R. Troxell lives and works with House the Homeless. Andriotis writes,
In Austin, Texas, a new two-bedroom two-bath condo runs around $1,800, but cost $1,200 before the downturn, says Jack McCabe, CEO of McCabe Research & Consulting, which tracks the housing industry. In Austin, income fell 4.9% to $35,522, making that 35% of income threshold a meager $1,036 rent payment.
Andriotis also mentions the mysterious formula that addresses the question, “How much rent should a renter pay, if a renter could pay rent?” She writes,
Many personal finance experts say you should spend no more than 35% of your take-home gross income on rent (not including renter’s insurance) whether you live in a high- or low-cost area.
Wait a minute! Just a little while ago, the experts were telling us not to spend more than 30% of our income on rent. Now it’s more. As responsible citizens today, we are supposed to feel as wise and mature about paying 35% as we felt a few years ago when the experts advised us to put a lid on at 30%. And it’s not as if we have a choice about it. Even 30% and 35% are not the worst. Apparently, some people spend more than 40% of their income on rent. That is one of the criteria for eligibility when Habitat for Humanity helps a family build a house.
You know what? It used to be 25%. That’s what the financial advisors used to say. Within living memory, it was taught in home economics class. You were a prudent money manager and a good citizen if you followed the rule of not paying out more than a quarter of your income for rent. It’s insidious percentage creep, meant to fool us into thinking we are doing the grown-up thing by handing over such a large proportion of our income for rent. They keep raising the bar, and pretending that nothing is amiss. They’re messing with our heads, and it’s positively Orwellian.
Reactions?
Source: Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle For the Living Wage by Richard R. Troxell
Source: “Is Your Rent Too Damn High?,” The Wall Street Journal, 10/19/10
Image by Rex Dingler/dingler1109, used under its Creative Commons license.
Rulers and Vassals and Pay Differentials
If you only have time to look at one post today, please go straight to Richard R. Troxell’s piece on the 2011 Universal Living Wage Tax Day Event, because that’s coming up, and you might want to plan. Richard begins by quoting Deuteronomy 24:14-15, which instructs people not to abuse a needy and destitute laborer, because that person’s life depends on being paid. It’s a pretty sure bet that every spiritual tradition calls for similar behavior.
Once you start thinking about the whole subject of work and pay, whether in a religious context or in any number of purely materialistic ways; whether in the framework of homelessness or from the perspective of the millions of families hanging on by their fingernails, many questions come to mind. For instance, how much is a boss’s time worth, stacked up against the time of a low-level worker? This is the question answered by Douglas McIntyre for Daily Finance in a piece published several months ago, so please feel free to assume that the situation has not improved much. McIntyre says,
Even though the gap between executive and entry-level worker pay has shrunk ever so slightly in the past couple of years, it’s still not unusual for the CEO of a large public company to earn more per day than some of his employees earn over the course of an entire year.
Excuse me? What can a human being possibly do that makes one day of his labor worth more than someone else’s entire year? Sure, once in a while an astonishing genius comes along. A case could be made that the work of Thomas Edison was worth many, many times the work of certain other humans. But is the CEO of McDonald’s a reincarnation of Thomas Edison? No offense to whomever she or he may be, but probably not.
McIntyre looked at more than a dozen megacorporations and, working with the total compensation reports from proxy statements, came up with some mind-blowing numbers. The big boss at CVS Caremark Corporation makes the same amount of money as 1,461 entry-level workers. Doesn’t that just make steam come out of your ears? This is the outfit behind Long’s Drugs, #18 in the most recent Fortune 500.
What does it say about Americans that this retailer of pharmaceuticals is gigantically rich? When are we going to stop doing the things we do to make ourselves sick, and stop putting money in the pockets of rapacious health “care” providers? And here’s a heartbreaker. The Walt Disney Company is not all sweetness and light, nor is it all song, dance, and fun. The head honcho pulls down as much as 1,115 lowly employees.
Don’t forget to do business with a couple of companies whose pay scales are a bit closer to fair. At FedEx Corporation, for example, the biggest boss is worth the monetary equivalent of 251 entry-level employees, and at Costco Wholesale Corporation, the CEO’s pay envelope only holds an amount comparable to what 115 serfs are paid.
Mark Karlin wrote for Buzzflash about the amazing resurgence of monstrous bonuses for CEOs. The Wall Street Journal article that attracted Karlin’s attention is certainly provocative. Apparently, the newspaper commissioned a consultant to scrutinize pay disclosures made by corporate heads. Here is an example of the findings:
CEO bonuses at 50 major corporations jumped a median of 30.5%, the biggest gain in at least three years…
No doubt about it, something is wrong with this picture.
Reactions?
Source: “A Tale of Two Americas: One America Lives on Greed; The Other America Barely Survives to Live,” Buzzflash, 03/18/11
Source: “Executive Bonuses Bounce Back,” The Wall Street Journal, 03/18/11
Image by Beau B, used under its Creative Commons license.
The Minimum Wage and the Big Ideas
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out the unsurprising fact that the minimum wage is worth much less than it previously was worth. Its graph illustrated the value of the minimum wage since 1960, adjusted for inflation and translated into 2009 dollars:
When adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was worth $8.54 per hour in 1968, compared to the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Based on a typical, 2,000-hour work year, the 1968 inflation-adjusted minimum wage would equate to an annual salary of $17,080 per year, versus $14,500 for today’s minimum wage.
In other words, the minimum wage decreasingly resembles a living wage. Historically, the peak of minimum wage value was in the 1960s, a long-gone era many people who are working today don’t even remember, because a lot of them weren’t born yet. The EPI also points out that raising the minimum wage stimulates the economy by giving workers more spending power. You’d think this would be obvious, but apparently many politicians overlook this basic fact.
We previously mentioned the very comprehensive interview that Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless did not long ago. It’s worth mentioning again, because when Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Talk Radio conducts an interview, he skillfully leads his subject to lay out the most important principles, as well as explain things in detail.
Painting first with a broad brush, let’s review some of the big ideas. Changing people from tax-takers to taxpayers is one of them. If the working poor were making a fair, adequate living wage, it would reduce the tax burden, because there would be less need for food stamps and other sorts of government assistance. Even if it can’t happen right this minute, people need to know that there is hope, they need to see that pathway stretching out before them. They need to know opportunity exists, and to be inspired to take advantage of opportunity, rather than subside into hopelessness.
Another basic principle of Richard’s is, solutions that come from the grassroots are faster and more effective than those involving the government. Of course, for something big like the Universal Living Wage, the government has to be behind it. But if homeless veterans in your community need socks, an appeal to the local goodhearted people will get them a lot quicker than a request to an official bureaucracy. And we have to show the way, because the old saying is true — “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.”
The biggest idea of all is that homelessness does not have to exist. This situation we have today does not have to be the situation we have tomorrow. We’re in a mess, but it can be undone and fixed. Richard’s proposal for fixing it is implementing the Universal Living Wage. In the interview, Hurlbert asks how the ULW is different from the minimum wage already in effect, and the answer is, it’s not really that different. What we have now needs to be tweaked and perfected, and if it is done over a 10-year period, the shock for anyone need not be too unbearable.
As a background, Richard talks about when the federal minimum wage was instituted in 1938, to make sure every working American could afford basic shelter, food, and clothing. It was a humane, fair, and much needed measure, but it was based on an assumption that it costs pretty much the same to live anyplace in America, so it was not indexed to anything. Still, it worked acceptably until the mid-1980s, when extreme booms and busts in the economy had really messed things up.
Another thing happened too, that would impact the nation very adversely by increasing not only the number of people experiencing homelessness, but the number of such people who were truly incapable of taking care of themselves. By the ’80s, the whole structure of mental health institutions had become so abusive, it seemed better to integrate the mentally ill into society.
The first part of the plan worked fine, dumping thousands of seriously ill and disoriented people on the streets. The second phase didn’t work so well, and rather than getting “mainstreamed,” the people ended up drowning instead, denizens of the streets, free but so impaired that freedom became “just another word for nothing left to lose,” as Kris Kristofferson phrased it.
In the interview, Richard talks about how the minimum wage always falls behind the poverty line, and how it didn’t increase for a whole decade between 1997 and 2007. We ended up with a situation where one of the largest labor organizations, Service Employees International Union, was training people in how to apply for food stamps. At one point, the University of Texas had 200 staff members on food stamps. And because of the unrealistic minimum wage, the federal government had become a creator of homelessness.
Reactions?
Source: “State of Working America preview: The declining value of minimum wage,” EPI.org, 11/17/10
Source: “Richard Troxell: Looking Up at the Bottom Line,” Blog Talk Radio, 12/08/10
Image by EPI, used under its Creative Commons license.
Some Heroes Who Help the Homeless
Bobby and Amanda Herring, along with a number of volunteers, used to feed some of the people experiencing homelessness in downtown Houston, Texas. For about a year, they dispensed between 60 and 120 meals a day, made from food donated by individuals and businesses. Then, reporter Bradley Olson tells us,
On Nov. 8, they were approached by Houston police officers and asked to provide food at another location under an overpass at Commerce and Travis streets adjacent to Buffalo Bayou, he recalled. They were happy to move to the new location and continued to provide food there until Dec. 30, when a park ranger and two police officers told them they would have to stop until they could obtain a permit.
Actually, they would need two permits, one from the parks department and one from the health department. The place they were moved to is on city park land, and it’s not clear why they can’t move back to the old location, except now this health permit thing has also come up.
Here’s a piece of official reasoning worthy of George Orwell. You know, the slogans from his dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” Now, we got “Starvation is Health.” The following statement was made by Kathy Barton of the Health and Human Services Department. The regulations are all the more essential in the case of the homeless, Barton said, because “poor people are the most vulnerable to foodborne illness and also are the least likely to have access to health care.”
Connie Boyd of the Coalition for the Homeless offered hope that by connecting with another group, perhaps a local church that already has a certified kitchen and certified food manager, the Herrings could continue their mission.
Ryan S. Riddell is pastor of the Shelter Community Church of the Nazarene in Dayton, Ohio, where there are about 4,000 people experiencing homelessness that he wants to help. Riddell is also in the real estate business and the roofing business. He has been making a video diary of his 30 days of voluntary homelessness. Not wanting to take up a shelter bed that an actual homeless person could use, he sleeps in a van. Meredith Moss of the Dayton Daily News says,
The clergyman is hoping to bring awareness to the issue of homelessness this month by sleeping and living in his van on the streets of Dayton instead of in his comfortable Miamisburg home.
It’s not a total simulation of homelessness. Riddell has been visiting home twice a week to see his wife and kids, and he has a credit card ready for when someone needs help. His website offers video documentation of such events as a visit to a homeless man who lives in a hut in the woods, and reports such surreal experiences as running into a woman he had sold a house to, who didn’t recognize him.
The goal of Riddell’s month-long excursion into homelessness is to raise awareness, and it’s working. Along with the website, he has a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and the larger media have obliged by covering the story in newspapers and on television.
From Denver, Electa Draper describes the St. Francis Center, a co-ed daytime shelter open from 6:30 in the morning till 6 in the evening on weekdays and weekends. This mission of the Episcopal church has been in existence for nearly 30 years. On an average day, over 600 people experiencing homelessness will drop in to take a shower, pick up mail, make phone calls, or do laundry. No alchohol or other substances are allowed, nor is anyone admitted in an intoxicated condition. Best of all, a staff of 37 helps with job counseling and housing placement. The outreach program finds lost people on the street and brings them in. Draper says,
For the newly and first-time homeless — which the center is seeing more and more all the time — St. Francis is a great orientation in how to navigate a complex system of human services scattered throughout the Denver area.
Don’t forget to learn from Looking Up at the Bottom Line, how the Universal Living Wage could help millions of Americans be self-sufficient, taking a great many burdens from the shoulders of volunteers and taxpayers, and, of course, from the very overburdened shoulders of the working poor.
Reactions?
Source: “City puts a stop to homeless outreach,” Houston Chronicle, 01/13/11
Source: “Ohio pastor living in van aims to aid the homeless,” Dayton Daily News, 01/22/11
Source: “St. Francis Center works tirelessly to find homes, jobs for the homeless,” Denver Post, 01/12/11
Image by kelsey_lovefusionphoto, used under its Creative Commons license.
I Am My Brothers’ Keeper… but for Everyone?
Again this year, 3.5 million people will experience homelessness in America. In the land of milk and honey, this is unconscionable.
Let’s examine the word homelessness for a moment. Who are the homeless? Well, clearly they come from all walks of life: homeless veterans, single women, women with children, people with mental health disorders, people with substance abuse problems, and the list goes on.
In January 2009, House the Homeless conducted a Health Survey of 501 people experiencing homelessness in Austin, Texas. Our survey showed that 48% of the people experiencing homelessness were so disabled that they could not work at a full-time job.
And in December 2007, another House the Homeless survey of 526 people experiencing homelessness showed that 37% of those surveyed were working at some point during the week, with 97% expressing a desire to work. In fact, we have come to understand that homelessness, for all its components, can be viewed in two major categories: those who can work and those who cannot work.
Reports from the last several U.S. Conferences of Mayors show that a person working full time, in a forty-hour-a-week, minimum-wage job, is unable to afford a basic, one-bedroom apartment, and remains homeless.
Who Are the Working Homeless?
They are the someone in our schools serving green beans and corn to our children in the cafeteria lines. They are the people in local dry cleaner operations pressing our suits and dresses. They are our janitorial staff cleaning our office buildings and urinals after we’ve gone to bed. They are the motel/hotel workers who change the sheets and clean up the trashed out rooms that we have left. They are the cashiers who cheerfully ask how they can help us.
They are our restaurant workers who work at below minimum wage ($2.13) and rely on us to (hopefully) boost their base pay with tips. They are poultry processors who work in our nation’s processing plants nationwide. They are farm workers who, even today, stoop behind the field machinery and continue to pick thorny cotton by hand.
They take our tickets in movie theaters, so we can see the next exciting 3-D movie. They are the healthcare aides in nursing homes who constantly turn over our loved ones to prevent bed sores. They do all the “dirty jobs” that you see on TV, and they flip our burgers at all the fast-food restaurants, and fold and refold the linen at every Wal-Mart.
And yet, the federal government continues to tell businesses nationwide that they only need to pay a minimum wage — not a living wage. A living wage would afford them basic food, clothing, and shelter. But as it is, nowhere in this country can receptionists, daycare aides, garage attendants, car washers, manicurists, grocery baggers, landscape workers, data entry workers, and elderly care aides afford the basics without a second job or relying on some outside support. That’s just wrong.
Who Should Pay?
Who should pay a wage sufficient to afford life’s most minimal necessities? Who profits from their labor if not business? Clearly it is businesses who benefit from their labor. So why are taxpayers footing the bill for food stamps when someone is working? Why do able-bodied individuals qualify for general assistance or the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is just another tax-sponsored program that would be unnecessary if businesses acted as responsible/ethical community partners?
If half these people who are homeless can work, why should you or I as taxpayers have to support them? I don’t want to. In fact, as a society, I’m not at all convinced that we could afford to support these millions of people indefinitely anyway. If a person is not disabled, then their homeless situation is really just an unmet economic need. This should be dealt with at the source: “A fair wage for a fair day’s work.”
When I was growing up, the saying was, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” I still believe in that postulate; however, that begs the question, if you work 40 hours in a week, shouldn’t you be able to afford the basics? If you work a full 40 hour week, shouldn’t you be able to afford a roof over your head (other than a bridge)?
I work in a homeless shelter. Every day I arrive to see hundreds and hundreds of people, half of whom are able-bodied. What they lack is opportunity.
There needs to be a spot on that shelter floor that I can point to and encourage people to get up off their chairs and go to that spot. It should be a spot that provides the big “O”: Opportunity. A spot where if they tuck their head down, lean into the wheel with their shoulder, apply themselves, they’ll know that, ultimately, they will be able to work themselves off the streets of America.
In other words, we simply need living-wage jobs. Then, as a compassionate taxpayer, I can get down to the work of helping people with disabilities. Perhaps in time, many of them will also be able to stand on that spot.
Take Action!
Tell President Obama that as he provides incentives for businesses to help in our economic recovery, he also needs to balance the equation by instituting the Universal Living Wage. Call the White House: 202-224-3121/1-800-459-1887, or email the President using the form at the White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.
Richard R. Troxell
House the Homeless, Inc.
National Chairman, Universal Living Wage Campaign
Source: “Mayors National Housing Forum Fact Sheet” (PDF), U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Image by schmuela (Karen Green), used under its Creative Commons license.
Economic Homelessness, Rent, and Deadened Memories
Economic homelessness is an important concept in the overall picture examined in Looking Up At the Bottom Line. The economic homeless are the working poor who have some kind of a job, but nothing close to a living wage that would provide, for instance, rent. They inhabit cars, shelters, squats, friends’ couches, and other temporary and very marginal quarters. Or no quarters at all.
An interesting thing happened when New York State was electing itself a new governor last fall. Jimmy McMillan, representing a political party called The Rent Is Too Damn High, participated in the televised debate, and his remarks are worth listening to. This video clip gives the gist, in under two minutes. The candidate did not succeed in the gubernatorial election, but that’s okay, because it frees him up to concentrate on his 2012 presidential campaign.
Suzanne Rozdeba conducted an interview with McMillan for the East Village local edition of The New York Times. At one point, the candidate underwent a spell of homelessness himself. The entire interview is highly recommended, and Rozdeba must be profusely thanked for capturing a number of excellent quotations from Jimmy McMillan. Here are just a few:
*Market value is a bunch of crap. It’s a plan to run out the poor.
*You’ve got to stop paying people in the government a football player salary.
*I would have no problem getting any bill passed before the House and the Senate.
*I guarantee you, if I’m sworn in in January, jobs will pop up in February.
*Whatever party I run under, I want them to know I’m not satisfied with anything coming from any elected official.
*We have bird-brained economic leaders. People need money to spend. And it boils down to one thing: the rent is too damn high.
Is McMillan just a freakshow? Maybe not. He was written up in the Wall Street Journal. For a very different establishment, the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson considered the ideas held by the very entertaining politician, and compared them with the ideas of Franz Oppenheimer. Here, roughly, is the argument, and it has a lot to do with homelessness. Economic exploitation, of course, goes way back. Carson says,
In sparsely populated areas of the New World, the state preempted ownership of vacant land, barred access to ordinary homesteaders, and then granted title to favored land barons and speculators. The result is that we see enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use by state-privileged landlords, so that land is made artificially scarce and expensive for those who desire an opportunity to support themselves.
This artificial scarcity exists because the state wrongfully enforces artificial property rights. Of course, the first thing you want to ask is, what’s the difference between an artificial property right and a genuine property right? Capitalism creates artificial private property rights by coercion, backing up the right of a privileged few who control access to natural opportunities. Genuine, legitimate private property, by contrast, is about the right to possess the fruits of one’s own labor, for instance by growing a crop on land that nobody is using. Carson says,
[… T]he privileged classes of landlords, usurers and other extortionists seek to close off opportunities for self-employment because such opportunities make it too hard to get people to work for them on profitable terms. [… T]he artificial dearth of natural opportunities to produce creates a buyer’s market for labor in which workers compete for jobs instead of jobs competing for workers.
When everything is owned by the government plus a lucky few people at the top, the vast majority of the people can’t be self-sufficient, because they have no resources to work with. Which makes them sitting ducks, ripe for economic exploitation. For instance, they wind up paying a grotesque percentage of their income just on rent — or are totally unable to afford even the lowest available rent.
Which brings us back to Jimmy McMillan, a voice of sanity crying out in the wilderness. It puts him in the same realm as Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless. We very much recommend the excellent radio interview (with host Wayne Hurlbert), during which Richard talks how the Universal Living Wage is good for business, and how it can get a million minimum-wage workers off the streets, while preventing economic homelessness for 10 million minimum-wage Americans.
In many cases, those with mental illness or substance abuse problems, or both, fall into the chronically homeless category. A lot of the “chronically homeless” are just plain unfit for the work force. But mental illness can be treated with conscientious medication, followup, and luck. Substance abuse can be treated with 12-step programs and other modalities. People experiencing either condition, or both, can find their way back to being productive members of the work force if there are jobs for them. They can escape the homeless condition, if there are places for them to live within the means provided by those jobs.
Those are two very big “ifs,” as Richard discovered in the late 1990s. He was working with people experiencing homelessness who had two major things going on — mental illness and substance abuse. With great struggle, he secured funding to put 20 people through a “continuum of care” program including detox, substance abuse counseling, housing, job training, and job placement. Despite the reported 100% trainee placement rate, they all ended up homeless within two years, unable to make rent with their minimum-wage paychecks.
“Substance abuse” is an interesting shorthand term. Richard expresses the same idea in different words, as “self-medicating with some memory deadening substance.” There is a valuable clue here, to the whole skid-row, lowest-common-denominator drug culture. There is a question that needs to be asked: What is it about life in contemporary America that makes so many people want to deaden their memories? When we confront that question, we will be ready to make some progress.
Reactions?
Source: “Looking Up at the Bottom Line,” Amazon.com
Source: “The Rent Is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan at the NY Governor Debate,” YouTube.com
Source: “Interview | Jimmy McMillan,” The Local East Village NYT, 01/18/11
Source: “Yes — The Rent Really Is Too Damn High!,” c4ss.org,10/26/10
Screen capture of Jimmy McMillan is used under Fair Use: Reporting.
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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