The figures in The Home Coming sculpture represent various demographics, and today we consider the elderly woman who is being welcomed to share the warmth. Along with consulting past posts, here is another way to appreciate the project, as conceived by House the Homeless co-founder Richard R. Troxell.

In this video, “Home Coming Model,” (3:02), sculptor Timothy P. Schmalz talks about the artistic challenges and rewards of bringing Richard’s vision into three dimensions. During the time when the two were collaborating on The Home Coming, Schmalz visited Rome to meet Pope Francis, in conjunction to donating to the Vatican one of his original sculptures, Homeless Jesus. (See photos at top of page.)

Life’s hostages

Experiencing homelessness is so much more complicated for most women than for most men, because women are more likely to have human connections they view as crucial. There might be a child or several children, and for most mothers, a squadron of demons can’t separate them from their kids.

Remember the story from Arizona, of how Shanesha Taylor left two children in a car for less than an hour to go for a job interview? She was arrested, convicted of child abuse, and sentenced to 18 years of supervised probation.

Remember Tanya McDowell, who was accused of stealing educational services because while homeless, she enrolled her son in the wrong school?

Amber Mehta had her three children taken by Child Protective Services and distributed to three different foster homes, because she and her husband lived with them in a recreational vehicle. It was particularly traumatic because two of the children were still breastfeeding. It’s a long and complicated story, but basically, too many mothers are losing their kids to the system for unjustifiable reasons.

Basic nature

Anatomy is a huge handicap for a woman with nowhere to legally exist. If there is no restroom or portable toilet in the area, a man can at least pee with relative stealth. For a woman, a lot more disrobing is involved, which is awkward, embarrassing, and dangerous under the best of circumstances, and complicated horrendously by winter weather. As for Number Two, that contingency is easy for no one. You not only have to find a concealed space to do your business, but a place to safely leave your belongings.

But back to inequality again. Not all, but most women have to contend with monthly periods, a subject that has only recently come to public awareness. Over the past couple of years, a tremendous amount of press attention has been focused on this problem. “No More Taboo” is an in-depth and scholarly report on the subject from Britain.

Men: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em

A woman might avoid the system, including shelters, to prevent being separated from a man, legally wed or not, whose support and protection she unequivocally needs. Or, at the opposite end of that spectrum, the man whose domestic violence forced her to leave home might be out there looking for her, and avoiding him is at least as important as avoiding the street’s regular predators, and the police, and the child welfare authorities.

In California, The Mercury News headline read, “Facing additional threats, San Jose homeless women often stay hidden from safety net” —  which pretty much tells the whole story. For many women, traditional shelters equal potential victimization. It hurts to say this, but there are even persistent rumors that some male social workers cannot be trusted.

In the process of concealing themselves for the sake of safety, another thing that women stay hidden from is the official homeless count that is used to allocate federal funding. Journalist Ramona Giwargis indicated the scope of the problem:

A survey last year found that about a third of Santa Clara County’s 6,556 homeless were women, echoing a San Jose survey of the city’s 4,063 homeless in 2015. But another study by the county and the nonprofit Destination: Home reported that half of the people on the streets are women.

The discrepancy between the reports revealed a troubling trend: Homeless women don’t go to shelters as often as men… That’s because a coed shelter can be a terrifying place for a woman who’s been raped. It can trigger fears or bring back traumatic memories.

Homelessness is not an equal-opportunity condition, and being female has its own set of hazards. For many women experiencing homelessness, there is constant temptation to trade intimate favors for a place to crash while saving up for the deposit on an apartment — or even just for a night’s lodging. On the other hand, the woman may be too old and/or disabled and/or sick to attract helpful male attention. Which condition is more to be dreaded?

Another ugly aspect is that a woman is never too much of a mess to attract vicious, violent male attention. There is no such thing as being too unattractive to be raped or killed. When a 16-year-old boy raped a 68-year-old woman in a train station, for instance, threatening her with a gun, that was a crime of sheer violence. She was just trying to get out of the rain.

Of course, not all attacks against women experiencing homelessness are sexual or deadly. Ask the 60-year-old who was praying — did you get that? Praying — on a public sidewalk when a teenage boy hit her with eggs.

Injustice of many kinds

Recently, a heartbreaking story made national news when Zaviona Woodruff completed the requirements to receive a college scholarship, but…

[…] she didn’t receive the Kalamazoo Promise, a scholarship guaranteed to any city student who remains in the Kalamazoo Public School system from kindergarten through 12th grade, because she didn’t live in the KPS district. Prior to 2016, she did. However that year she and her family became homeless.

 

The family stayed in a shelter, then moved to an apartment without being aware that it was outside some arbitrary line. A technicality turned into an issue, and the fact that any of this happened stinks. Even though it could have happened to a male student too, and even though apparently the official guidelines were violated, the spirit of the whole altruistic endeavor was violated much more grievously.

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless Mother Gets Job Interview But Doesn’t Have Childcare, Ends Up In Jail,” ThinkProgress.org, 03/27/14
Source: “Breastfed Babies Kidnapped by CPS Because Parents were ‘Homeless”Living out of RV’,” MedicalKidnap.com
Source: “Facing additional threats, San Jose homeless women often stay hidden from safety net,” MercuryNews.com, 07/03/16
Source: “Indiana teenager arrested for raping homeless woman,” ImperfectParent.com, 08/25/11
Source: “Praying homeless woman egged on sidewalk; three teens arrested,” LATimes.com, 04/15/14
Source: “KPS graduate ‘crushed’ after she was denied Kalamazoo Promise,” Fox17Online.com, 07/25/18
Image credit Timothy P. Schmalz

We are meditating on the various figures of the Home Coming sculpture, and what they represent. Last week, we focused on the veterans who are also parents, and this week it is the veterans again, because there is more to say about them.

Looking for statistics, a seeker finds plenty of interesting details. For a lot of people who are still living, Vietnam was “our war.” The veteran depicted in the Home Coming grouping? It was his war, too.

So here is an interesting paragraph from a 2015 report assembled from studies done by the RAND Corporation, the Congressional Research Service, the Veterans Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the U.S. Surgeon General, and others:

The findings from the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study […] in the 1980s initially found that for “Vietnam theater veterans” 15% of men had PTSD at the time of the study and 30% of men had PTSD at some point in their life. But a 2003 re-analysis found that “contrary to the initial analysis of the NVVRS data, a large majority of Vietnam Veterans struggled with chronic PTSD symptoms, with four out of five reporting recent symptoms when interviewed 20-25 years after Vietnam.”

One lesson to take away is that obtaining the numbers is a dicey proposition, for reasons House the Homeless has discussed before. One reason for that is, each human research subject is part of a cohort and a demographic and whole lot of other subcategories, in a place, within a certain time period. Are we going to talk about every vet who was ever diagnosed with PTSD, or the undiagnosed cases too? But if they are not recognized and identified, then how can they be counted?

The same is true of veteran suicides. Even when everyone has the best intentions, there is plenty of room, and incentive, for fuzziness and fudging. If a life insurance policy is involved, but it has a no-suicide clause, labeling this death as suicide might not be in the family’s best survival interest.

All these matters are much more complicated than the general public suspects. Which is why it is so useful to reduce all the abstractions to a very solid thing, a grouping of bronze figures with a story to tell.

We do not know if the vet in the Home Coming statue has ever suffered a head wound or blow to the head that led to traumatic brain injury, but if he didn’t, he certainly had friends in the military who did. We don’t know if he has ever contemplated suicide, but it would not be too presumptuous to assume that he experiences a certain amount of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) , and possibly chronic pain from some past trauma.

Even though statistics come with serious caveats, here are a few random examples:

• Vietnam veterans report lifetime rates of PTSD ranging from 10% to 31%.
• 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have PTSD and/or depression.
• PTSD is under-diagnosed and under-treated.
• An estimated 19% of veterans have traumatic brain injury. That amounts to about 260,000 people.
• 7% of veterans have both PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
• The suicide rate for male VA users (38.3 per 100,000) is higher than for males in the general population (19.4 per 100,000), and the same is true of females (12.8 per 100,000 versus 4.9 per 100,000.).
• Oh, and “some branches of the military do not keep fine-grained data, or any data at all on the suicide rates…”

“Veterans statistics: PTSD, Depression, TBI, Suicide” is a bountiful source of links to sites with lots of numbers. We also recommend a 58-page presentation by Hal S. Wortzel, M.D., who has a list of credentials a mile long qualifying him to speak on “Risk of Traumatic Brain Injury, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Suicide in OEF/OIF Veterans” (Afghanistan and Iraq).

Here’s the House the Homeless directory of posts and documents filled with vital information about these important matters:

• “Helping Veterans With PTSD”
• “Veterans and Suicide”
• “To Prevent Homelessness, Alleviate Veteran PTSD”
• “Homeless Veterans and Suicide”
• “Brain Injury, Neglect, and Self-Destruction”
• “A Book to Help Homeless Veterans”
• “Traumatic Brain Injury — Promising Developments”
• “Stay Current With Veterans, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Kids”
• “Head Trauma, Homelessness, and Crazy”
• “Traumatic Brain InjuryA Protocol to Help Disabled Homeless Veterans within a Secure, Nurturing Community”
• “VA Wastes Miracle Machine”
• “Vital VA Project Got Off on the Wrong Foot”
• “Brain Injury Awareness Day Is March 22”
• “Survey Links Brain Injury to Medical Causes of Homelessness”
• “More Ways to Become Homeless”
• “Prevent Vet Homelessness With Correct Diagnosis”

Reactions?

Source: “Veterans statistics: PTSD, Depression, TBI, Suicide,” VeteransAndPTSD.com, 09/20/15
Source: “PTSD: National Center for PTSD,” VA.gov
Source: “Risk of Traumatic Brain Injury, Post-TraumaticStress Disorder, and Suicide in OEF/OIF Veterans,” SemanticScholar.org, 2015
Photo on Visualhunt

House the Homeless recently discussed the plight of children and pets experiencing homelessness, because we are talking about the sculpture called the Home Coming, two of whose figures represent those beings (partial image to the left). The tallest person in the group is the little girl’s father, a returning veteran.

Bone-weary, angry from a sense of betrayal and unappreciated sacrifice, he wonders if the “promised land” he fought for will ever yield a place for him. With his minimalist pack of gear resting beside him, he shelters the child with his cloak as they enjoy the unexpected gift of warmth from a trash fire.

So, what is going on with American military veterans these days? Progress is made here and there, by fits and starts.

For instance, it was 2009 when the Veterans’ Administration announced that it hoped to end veteran homelessness by 2015. Between 2010 and 2013, a 24% reduction was said to have been achieved. Journalist Nick McCann noted, “Some veterans’ advocates are skeptical of the VA’s goal of ending homelessness among veterans, especially because funding for veterans will be reduced after 2015.”

In 2014, then-First Lady Michelle Obama got behind the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness. The progress made, says Roger Chesley, has not necessarily depended on big expenditures. Bureaucrats have made efforts to lower barriers between their agencies, and coordination between local, state, and federal authorities has grown.

Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe aimed to end veteran homelessness in the state by 2015, and succeeded in housing 743 vets within a year. Virginia seems to be trying to help the most vulnerable, the people with physical and mental disabilities including addiction, with the “housing first” philosophy. Steps one through three are to identify, assist, and house. Then, bring on the counseling and treatment.

The nitty-gritty of housing

HUD-VASH is the country’s largest housing program for veterans experiencing homelessness. Based on the Point-in-Time count, the federal government determines how many housing vouchers to distribute in each part of the country. It is said that nationwide, communities using the vouchers have housed 78% of the veterans who needed help. Depending on their assets and employment status, the individual pays from 30% to 40% of their rent.

Problem is, in many places, for both vets and other varieties of people experiencing homelessness, having a voucher of any kind is meaningless if there are no rental vacancies, or if landlords are unwilling to rent to tenants who receive assistance. Tenants on the taxpayers’ dime need to occupy spaces that are safe, fire-protected, un-infested, and without toxic leaks. Property owners have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, show up for inspections, and make repairs if needed.

As much as they hate expenditures, landlords hate bureaucracy and regulation even more, and tend to resist what they see as unnecessary snooping into their affairs. At the same time, they don’t mind generating paperwork for others, like the applications that have to be filled out and submitted with rental application fees.

A prospective tenant might apply to several vacancies. As journalist Anna Webb says, “They deplete meager resources, leaving nothing for first and last month’s rent and security fees.” She adds,

The HUD-VASH program operates on the principle that housing is a basic human right. It follows a “housing first” philosophy: Start with a safe home, then build from there to solve other problems. HUD-VASH vouchers don’t expire. They’re available indefinitely for the veterans who need them. But in an ideal scenario, a homeless veteran will use HUD-VASH to get healthy, get a job, become self-supporting and leave the program.

The hard-nose landlords are counterbalanced by the rare few who consider it a patriotic duty to accept vets as tenants, and willingly work with the case managers. Webb quotes social worker Amanda Walund, who has been a case worker since 2011:

It seemed that when I first started, we had a good base of landlords, more property managers on board. In the last few years there are fewer property managers who will accept vouchers and rents have increased beyond what vouchers will pay.

And, of course, even vets who are able to rent are subject to the same economic uncertainty as other tenants, because rising rents are always as certain as death and taxes. Another difficulty is that available rental properties may be far away from the medical facilities and other agencies that a disabled or disoriented individual needs to deal with — often, using public transportation that is either inadequate or nonexistent.

Visit the statues section of House the Homeless, and see how to become a part of this exciting project. It is a beacon of hope and an enduring, visual way of telling the story that housed people might not think about very often. It’s the story of a lifestyle with nothing glamorous about it, that millions of Americans are compelled to put up with, and desperate to escape.

They feel invisible and discarded. They need help to get over the hump, and the very large majority are good people who, like the family unit portrayed by the sculpture, are willing to share what little they have.

By the way, The Home Coming will not remain strictly visual. In contrast to its kinship
with the ancient lineage of metal statues, this one will have a technologically up-to-date means of telling its entire story to visitors.

Reactions?

Source: “VA Plans Change for Homeless Veterans’ Care,” CourthouseNews.com, 05/15/14
Source: “Cutting red tape to find housing for homeless veterans,” PilotOnline.com, 06/20/15
Source: “Rent vouchers in-hand, homeless Idaho veterans still struggle to find housing,” IdahoStatesman,com, 04/15/15
Image by House the Homeless

The bridge is frequently used as a poetic allusion to the meanings behind movements. Last week, House the Homeless talked about Bridge the Economic Gap Day, when people show up to demonstrate on literal bridges, and also about children experiencing homelessness.

On that subject, there is plenty more to say, including the quotation from an advocate who believes it is society’s responsibility to build all the bridges from homelessness to hope. Of course the background is that kids are a demographic represented by the Home Coming statue.

In 2015, about half a million people were homeless in America, and about a quarter of them were children under 18. Numerically, that’s close to 128,000. Weirdly, in the same year, the Department of Education believed that it encompassed 1.36 million homeless K-12 students, which is quite a different number.

At around the same time, journalist Patty Machelor wrote about how the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) enumerates people in shelters, under bridges, and in parks, while other strays and stragglers remain unaccounted for. As the writer put it, “HUD doesn’t include families and children who are living in cars, doubling up in rented hotel rooms or temporarily sleeping on a friend’s floor.” The HUD numbers didn’t reflect the doubling of school-age homeless kids since the economic dumpster fire of 2008.

In Nashville, Joyce Lavery of the Safe Haven Family Shelter said of the Department of Education’s assessment,

Sometimes that doesn’t even count children who are of pre-school age or infants. It also doesn’t include children who have dropped out. So we don’t really know the full extent of youth and children homelessness but we know it’s a crisis.

What about 2017? HUD numbers said there were 554,000 homeless people in the U.S., including 193,000 unsheltered people with no access to emergency shelters or transitional housing. Part of the problem was HUD’s perhaps overly-strict documentation process. It is a scientific truism that you can’t prove a negative. What piece of paper can a person get to prove they don’t live anywhere?

In keeping with the trend of explaining complicated concepts as if to a child, this page contains graphics with such titles as “Homelessness is more acute where housing is expensive.” Between 2016 and 2017, the most rapidly growing subgroup were unaccompanied children and young adults, which increased by 14%. The 2017 point-in-time count found more than 40,000 unaccompanied children and young adults, so that symbolizes an average night.

Back in 2014, Kevin M. Ryan wrote about an attempt that was made to legislate improvements in the way children experiencing homelessness are counted. Advocates predicted that reform in this area would add about 900,000 children and families to those served by federal assistance programs.

Ryan, President and CEO of Covenant House International, wrote in favor of the bill that would put federal officials in the back seat by allowing local officials to decide which groups would receive priority help. Younger homeless kids tend to become older homeless kids, and nasty factors intervene, like opioids and human trafficking, and nobody wants that.

Homeless is where they are. Not who they are.

Ryan describes “kids who had one stroke of bad luck, then the house of cards collapsed, leaving them to face homelessness alone… Kids whose parents died, or went to jail, or overdosed, or couldn’t or wouldn’t parent them.”

Late last year, Ryan wrote about a very comprehensive study. The University of Chicago found that, for instance, among the nation’s 13- to 17-year-olds, one out of 30 will be homeless at some time in the course of any given year. In that vulnerable and volatile five-year age range, 700,000 adolescent minors are destined to be on the loose in 2018. In one way or another, Covenant House reaches 80,000 of them, and temporarily houses 10,000.

Homelessness makes it very difficult to do well in school, or even to attend, which makes it hard to earn a high school diploma or even pass the equivalency test. Without that credential, a young person is 3.5 times more likely to be homeless.

This is only one of the numerous vicious cycles that teens can get caught up in. Actually, it’s a better-case scenario, the worst case being that the criminal justice system becomes involved their lives, an event that sets in motion a whole different and even grimmer dynamic.

Richard R. Troxell commented:

Apart from the emotional devastation to these individuals, think about the financial cost to us as taxpayers. Now project a little further into this dark and hazy picture and think about single parents living on insufficient wages just before they fall into homelessness, scurrying to keep ahead of the constable who has come to evict them again.

In response, these kids relocate over and over again, each time enrolling in a new school in an effort to avoid detection. They do not bond with their school chums as we did. They do not join after-school sports activities or join choir or band or chess or book clubs.

They are latchkey kids to a single parent who is scratching at a living, who has no time or energy for their own children. Who would be more susceptible to drugs and gang recruiters? What the hell is happening?! Tell them what we really need… Then go vote.

Reactions?

Source: “More than 500000 homeless in the US,” WSWS.org, 11/21/15
Source: “HUD homeless count not clear on youth, families,” Tucson.com, 11/25/15 Source: “Growing up homeless is new reality for thousands of children in Tennessee,” WKRN.com, 2018
Source: “Estimating the Number of Homeless in America,” TheDataFace.com, 01/21/18
Source: “Counting Homeless Kids, the Right Way,” HuffingtonPost.com, 07/25/14
Source: “Largest Study of Homeless Young Adults: 10 Percent Lack Shelter Each Year,” HuffingtonPost.com, 11/15/17
Photo credit: DFID — UK Department for International Development via Visualhunt/CC BY

Coming up soon is Bridge the Economic Gap Day, on Tuesday, September 4, which is the day after Labor Day. We have a nice collection of archived posts just waiting to satisfy the curiosity of readers who want to support and participate in this nationwide annual event.

Organizations that get involved include unions, faith-based groups, non-profits, businesses, and more. In 2005, House the Homeless co-founder Richard R. Troxell wrote to then-Senator Barack Obama about Bridge Day and the Universal Living Wage.

Here are photos from Bridge Action Day in 2010. In 2015, the 14th Anniversary of Bridge the Economic Gap Day was celebrated. This commemorative page also includes a record of the various campaigns and activities initiated and backed by House the Homeless.

The following year, we quoted Richard’s words:

We need to index the federal minimum wage to the local cost of housing. In this fashion, if a person puts in their 40 hours of work, they will be able to afford a basic rental property… No matter what that rent escalates to, or where it’s located. This makes sense for business as it stabilizes their minimum-wage workforce. This makes sense for the local construction industry (nationwide) that will get to construct housing for the 3.5 million people experiencing homelessness. And it makes sense for the homeless minimum-wage worker who can finally attain housing.

Additionally, our website holds many more resources, like a whole section on the Universal Living Wage, and a copy of letter that Richard recently sent to Spencer Cronk, the City Manager of Austin. This missive recalls the decades-long resistance against “right to rest” laws up to the most recent activities of HtH:

I came with a winning argument that yielded the compromise with Council Member Randi Shade, the Health and Human Services Committee, and the City Council. The people got every point now reflected in the enclosed No Sit/No Lie ordinance guide. We have reissued these cards to our citizens in English and Spanish, and to our police officers four times in lots of 5,000. In the end, we were all winners.

The Home Coming Statue

Last time, we talked about the project that puts a positive face on homelessness through artistic expression. The Home Coming is a work with several components, one of them being canine, and we brought up some of the important things to remember about the human-animal relationships that are, for many people experiencing homelessness, so important to both physical safety and mental health.

We will recount the whole narrative backdrop of the sculpture in a future post, but the salient fact to know right now is that another of the characters in the still-life drama is a child. What do we know about child homelessness in the greatest country on earth, the United States of America?

Homeless children are of different kinds. A baby with its mother is a whole different category of child than a 14-year-old who ran away from an abusive step-parent. Unaccompanied youth are the best at hiding their housing status. They bounce around from place to place, and because youth in itself is attractive, they “clean up nice” when it’s necessary to pass for what is considered to be normal.

In the counting department, it’s a shame when a state official says the only available estimates are “based on overall nationwide perceived percentages of homelessness amongst unaccompanied children.” What? Where does the federal government get its numbers from, if not from the states? Even more discouraging is when the same official doesn’t care about getting numbers anyway, because he or she doesn’t believe any of them.

A circular dynamic happens. Because there are no services they can apply to, kids are not identified as homeless. So they are not counted, and when the time comes for an agency to ask the state or federal government for financial support, the paramount question is, “How many kids are we talking about?” And nobody knows, because… (go back to the beginning of the paragraph.)

Trendct.org presents a number of promising ideas to incentivize kids to make themselves known to the system. For instance, if an adult wants to ask questions, have that person vouched for by a juvenile who is trusted by the other juveniles. Of course, concepts like social proof and personal vetting have been around since cave people days. The trick is, teaching people how to be more competent at winning the confidence of strangers, through authenticity and other ethical methods.

(To be continued…)

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless children: A new strategy to count an invisible population,” TrendCT.org, 05/07/15
Image by: House the Homeless

Consensus holds that between 5% and 10% of people experiencing homelessness have pets, most often dogs. The notable exception, Ace Backwords, lives in the Berkeley hills with a herd of cats that he feeds, photographs, and writes numerous blog entries about.

Most homeless shelters don’t allow pets. But of course, the people who are allergic to hairy animals deserve consideration too. As do the people responsible for keeping shelters clean. Dogs can and often do have continence problems. Even a dog who is trained to only relieve itself outdoors could make a mistake, because institutions run on schedules. There are safety issues, and a responsible shelter can’t let people wander in and out all night long.

Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless says:

We are also now learning that many battered women won’t enter a shelter because they won’t leave their “other child” (dog or cat) with the batterer. In response, many woman’s shelters have now opened their hearts and their doors to these beloved family members, so all battered women can find sanctuary.

Occasionally there is a situation that is unclear, or hard to resolve. What about a blind person with a guide dog? In that case, the Fair Housing Act forbids discrimination against the disabled, and supersedes the no-pets rule. But a City Rescue Mission in Pennsylvania got in trouble for not knowing that, or not caring.

It is probably fair to say that most of the dog owners are street people, because of the hassle. Who is on their side? Depending on where a person lives, either nobody, or a patchwork of a safety net that may or may not be able to help with any given problem. It all depends.

Allies and advocates

In Los Angeles, a park hosts health fairs for people experiencing homelessness and their pets. Pets of the Homeless is a national group with 424 donations sites, which have collected 588 tons of pet food and extended medical treatment to more than 18,000 pets.

In Louisville, KY, the group My Dog Eats First helps out with pet food and supplies, vaccinations, and even spay/neuter services. It’s not just for the sake of the humans. Pets have healing power that helps people, and there is benefit also to the healthy pets who will not wind up in shelters, or worse yet, euthanized. The local volunteers pick up donations, clerk at the Pet Food Bank, and separate jumbo size bags of food into 1 gallon plastic zip bags.

The video on this page shows the process involved in helping to supply My Dog Eats First with food and other commodities to distribute in the homeless community. It was made by Prank It FWD producer Tom Mabe, who has a message for uncomprehending housed people:

I used to get really upset when I would see a homeless person with a dog. I would think, “You can’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of this dog?” But after spending a lot of time with them, I realized that they take great care of their dogs… They’re best friends, there’s all kinds of unconditional love. A dog doesn’t judge the person, a dog doesn’t steal from the person… Maybe think twice, the next time you see a homeless person with a pet.

Mabe also said, “It gives them something to be accountable for,” which is no small matter. Part of that accountability is that a canine companion might also motivate some folks to steer clear of avoidable trouble. You don’t want to go to jail if that will jeopardize your best and only friend.

Aside from giving the human a sense of purpose, a dog often lends protection, or at least some extra-alert senses. If someone is asleep and would be better off awake at the moment, a dog will know it. There are shady humans intent on thievery or assault, and even some very ill people who believe that their divine mission is to execute rough sleepers.

Personal testimony

Becky Blanton, who has experienced homelessness and presented a TED Talk about it, was blocked from renting an apartment partly by the security deposits that her cat and dog would require. (Again, it is hard to blame landlords, because even nice animals can do extensive and expensive damage.) But loyalty to the pets was certainly a factor in her staying in a vehicle, rather than gaining a roof.

HtH has written about the film Wendy and Lucy, in which a heartrending dog-related decision is made. If the pet owner happens to become homeless in a city where people tend to be rehoused pretty quickly, the temptation is strong to hang onto the pet or pets, even if it means living in extremely limited conditions, i.e. outside of the official shelter system. After all, it would be terrible to give up the pet, find a place soon, and later have to think, “If only I’d held onto Buddy for just two more weeks!”

What can people do?

House the Homeless raised awareness by publishing Pet Calendars, two years in a row, and redesigned its logo to include a canine companion (see top of page.) Also relevant is the memorial page for Austinite Judy Lynn W. Beall. If you are someone who carries around extra clothes or water to randomly give out, consider adding some dog food to the stash in your trunk.

NOTE: Actually, this post is a teaser. We will be talking more about a specific little dog named Joey, in the context of a project called The Homecoming.

Reactions?

Source: “He Said He’s Filming The Homeless & Their Pets, But What He Really Does Shocks Everyone,” PawMyGosh.com
Photo credit: Steve Baker on Visualhunt/CC BY-ND

A recent headline reads, “This Is the City Most in Danger of a Housing Crisis, Study Finds.” What they mean is a specific type of housing crisis, defined by certain parameters and formulae.

The page says, “GOBankingRates determined which places are most in danger of a housing crisis based on three factors,” and then proceeds to list not three, but six precisely enumerated factors:

1. Percentage of homes with mortgage in negative equity
2. Total number of homes in negative equity
3. Number of homes at least 90 days late on mortgage payment
4. Negative equity delinquency rate
5. Homeowner vacancy rate
6. Rental vacancy rate

Negative equity is when the person owes more on their mortgage than the market value of the house, so even if they sold it today and turned all the money over to the bank, they would still owe — which is a terrible situation to be in. Being stuck like this influences many life choices. It precludes the opportunity to move away and start over somewhere with a better job market.

In a negative-equity condition, the home “owner” is unable to borrow money for other purchases, and the whole economy goes to hell. As Zillow.com notes:

Negative equity can have a number of other chilling impacts on local housing markets, disproportionately impacting minority communities and owners of lower-valued homes, exacerbating inventory shortages and increasing the likelihood of foreclosure for underwater homeowners.

At the peak of the negative equity crisis in early 2012, nearly a third of all homeowners with a mortgage — 16 million people — had negative equity in their homes. At the end of 2017, roughly 5 million homeowners still were underwater, more than half of them deeply so, with mortgage balances totaling 120 percent or more what their homes were worth.

That sounds bad enough, but it gets worse: 15% of the “underwater” home owners owe at least twice what their homes are currently worth. It must drive people insane, wondering how that is even possible. You’ve been paying the mortgage for years, and now owe more than you did at the beginning. So, if you found someone willing to pony up the market value in cash right now, it would only pay off half of what you owe.

After GOBankingRates published its report, other websites adapted the information and created annoying, time-sucking click-bait versions of it, generally with a title referencing the 54 cities most in danger of a housing crisis (and potentially 54 pages to get through to find your own city). At least GOBankingRates has the decency to place all the bad news on one page.

In the bankers’ analysis, by the way, the five cities most likely headed for a crisis are:

1. Newark, NJ
2. Chicago, IL
3. Hartford, CN
4. Jacksonville, FL
5. Baltimore, MD

The math just doesn’t work out

In most of the country, a minimum-wage worker needs two-and-a-half full-time paychecks to rent a one-bedroom apartment. This is based on the “rule of thumb” conjured up by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to represent the percentage of income a family should spend on housing, which is 30%, or almost one-third.

When the baby boomer generation went to school and learned a subject called Home Economics, the governmentally recommended standard for that ratio was 25%. Americans used to be taught that one dollar out of every four was the proper amount to expect to spend on housing. Now we are told that one dollar out of every three is the correct amount. The switching of that recommended proportion is as egregious as any of the history-wiping imagined by George Orwell in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This is the miserable irony of that line about the 54 cities in danger of crisis. There is no place in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment. If that isn’t a housing crisis, we don’t know what is. Many more than the named 54 cities are in danger of a housing crisis. Many more than 54 cities are already fully in the grip of a housing crisis. This is glaringly obvious from the numbers of people experiencing homelessness, everywhere.

Here, from Zillow Research, is the rundown of the 10 most cruelly, brutally unaffordable rental markets in the land of the free:

1. Los Angeles, CA
2. Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL
3. San Diego, CA
4. San Francisco, CA
5. New York, NY
6. Riverside, CA
7. San Jose, CA
8. Boston, MA
9. Sacramento CA
10. New Orleans, LA

Now, remember those numbers from a couple of paragraphs ago? How one-fourth was the amount that people used to normally spend buying or renting a place to live, and then how the recommended fraction magically grew to one-third?

In Los Angeles now, the median share of household income spent on rent is 47.6%. That means people are spending very close to HALF their income, just to stay housed. And the crisis is everywhere.

Reactions?

Source: “This Is the City Most in Danger of a Housing Crisis, Study Finds,” GOBankingRates.com, 07/13/18
Source: “Housing Data 101: What is Negative Equity?,” Zillow.com, 07/18/17
Source: “A minimum-wage worker needs 2.5 full-time jobs to afford a one-bedroom apartment in most of the US,” BusinessInsider.com, 06/14/18
Source: “10 Most Affordable Markets for Renters,” Zillow.com, 05/31/18
Photo credit: Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious via Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

In Austin and Travis County, the homeless count has grown by 5% in the past year. Almost 3% of public school students declare as homeless, while an unknown number of others are able to conceal the fact.

One Community Impact headline reads, “Austin seeks $30 million to scale its homelessness solutions.” It’s confusing, however, because the current bond proposal asks for $250 million for affordable housing.

Ann Howard, Executive Director of the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, makes a good point, saying, “By doing nothing, we’re still incurring huge costs, so it would be smarter for Austin to spend the money to house people.”

This may be the place to explain a concept called “functional zero” in regard to the homelessness rate. It basically means that fewer people become homeless than return to housing. Some would say that “functional zero” belongs in the category of weasel words, a term credited to Theodore Roosevelt, who did not care for them.

Any city, county, or state could achieve “functional zero” by merely keeping the influx into homelessness balanced with the outflow back into housing. In reality, there could still be half a million people experiencing homelessness, but as long as the comings and goings equal each other, “functional zero” can be proclaimed. Don’t fall for it.

Another weaselly concept

Think about this:

More than a third of Travis County households are cost-burdened, in that they spend more than 30 percent — the standard recommended by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — of their total income on housing.

It’s not journalist Emma Freer’s fault of course, but the concept of being “cost-burdened” used to apply to a different number. Back when the school curriculum included Home Economics, young women were taught that a family should not spend more than 25% of its income on housing. Somehow, somewhere along the way, someone decided to raise the bar.

Cynics might say that “cost-burdened” is just another word for “ripped off.” Freer goes on to say,

Fred Fuchs, an attorney at the Texas RioGrande Legal Association and the director of The University of Texas School of Law Housing Clinic, said many Austinites struggle with burdensome late fees, which can sometimes surpass rent, and laws that allow landlords to consider a prospective tenant’s eviction history for up to 10 years. For those already living near the margin, car trouble or an unexpected illness can reasonably lead to an eviction.

Austin’s Quality of Life ordinances

Richard R. Troxell was interviewed for three hours for the City of Austin Audit regarding the “No Sit, No Lie”; “No Solicitation”; and “No Camping” ordinances. These laws are not engraved in stone, and can be dismissed or amended by the citizenry.

Richard is uniquely qualified to speak on the subject. In addition to co-founding House the Homeless, he has been on the National Coalition for the Homeless board since 1997. For seven years during the last presidential administration he, along with Michael Stoops and Brian Davis, met with the Department of Justice to talk, mainly, about so-called Quality of Life ordinances.

Some of the points they made included what enormous disadvantage it is to have a record, if the person ever considers seeking employment. People in hiring positions are trained to reject the applicants with tickets or Class C criminal histories.

The government makes rules requiring the government to pay police to hand out paperwork and fine or arrest people who will then be unemployable. That costs the government even more money in terms of homeless relief. They also point out how wacky that basic operating policy is.

Issuing thousands of arrest warrants pursuant to the “No Sit/No Lie” ordinance could be described by harsher critics as nothing more than a full employment program for police. As far as anybody else is concerned, there is no upside. If offenders are fined, they can’t pay the fines. If they are jailed, that costs the taxpayers money. Plus, when released from jail back into the streets, people have criminal records and become unemployable, and their existence ends up costing society even more dollars.

Let’s get civilized

Richard points out that even outside the homelessness assistance facilities, people waiting for appointments can only sit on the sidewalk or in the gutter. And guess what? All over the city, even housed people can use the opportunity to sit and rest. Not every person is at the peak of health at all times. A senior citizen out for a health-giving walk might need to sit and rest for a few minutes. A parent with kids might need to stop and clean up a spill, or look at a crying child’s scraped knee, or sort through the equipment bag for the spare pacifier.

Looking objectively at a city, from the point of view of a foreigner or even a space alien, surely it is more seemly for people in public venues to sit on benches than to squat on their haunches or sprawl on the ground. Even without knowing the language or anything about the culture, it is a positive sign when human beings in public spaces are able to use outdoor furniture, rather than share the pavement or grass with squirrels, insects, dogs, cats, and other beings. Even though we are all God’s creatures, some of us, thanks to long history and a little thing called civilization, have grown accustomed to sitting on chairs.

A space alien with an objective point of view might even think, “What the hell kind of a way is this to run a so-called civilization? Their cities can afford all kinds of amenities, like the yearly splurge on winter holiday decorations. Bolted-down metal benches may be costly, but they are a one-time expense. Once installed, they stay forever and require no maintenance. They don’t need to be watered, tuned up, repaired, or replaced. What’s wrong with these people?”

If you’re in Austin, sign the petition!

The long and short of it is, right now the good people of Austin have the opportunity to sign a petition titled, “Get Our Homeless Neighbors up off the Sidewalks & Their Feet out of the Gutters.” It asks for benches for people to sit on, like respected and self-respecting human beings. Yes, the petition asks for dignity and fairness. Be among the first to concur!

Reactions?

Source: “Austin seeks $30 million to scale its homelessness solutions,” CommunityImpact.com, 07/26/18
Photo credit: Arturo Yee on Visualhunt/CC BY

“The Monkey’s Paw” is an immortal tale because it embodies an unassailable truth: Be careful what you wish for. Amazon has not yet named the next city to be blessed or cursed with the company’s presence. Do the competing cities have any clue about what is in store for the winner?

One thing is for sure. Wherever Amazon HQ2 lands, the number of people experiencing homelessness in that city will increase.

The residents of Seattle were manipulated to want Amazon. Having viewed an Amazon recruitment video, Seattle journalist Dae Shik Kim Hawkins implies that professionals all over America were equally manipulated into relocating to Seattle.

Naturally, the company portrayed the town as yuppie heaven — which it pretty much was, and largely still is. This is partly because the city is adept at rendering its homeless people invisible, and “the most helpless communities are being systematically displaced to make room for others.” The writer says:

Rather than eradicate homelessness at its root, the city’s strategy thus far has been to sweep the homeless from public view; destroying their encampments, issuing tickets for their vehicles, and installing hostile architecture that keeps people from sleeping on benches and in city parks.

In Seattle, site of HQ1, the homeless count is the third largest in the nation. Hawkins correlates the era of displacement with the “Amazon boom” of 2012. There are about 12,000 homeless people in King County, and about half of them are unsheltered. In the first half of this year, 52 members of the community died. Last year, Seattle spent over $10 million on “sweeps.”

Snitch culture

Hawkins describes a new smartphone application that sounds like a nifty idea on the surface; a way to report to the city if a traffic light is out of order, and so forth. But zealous citizens also use “Find It, Fix It” to report homeless camps and people asleep in vehicles. In other words, the app has “warped into a powerful instrument for high-tech community patrolling” that makes it super-convenient for annoyed citizens to punish people experiencing homelessness.

It became especially appreciated by residents of a particular upscale neighborhood. The Ballard Alliance, headed by Mike Stewart, took it upon themselves to get the locals riled up about homelessness, but not in any useful or constructive way. Hawkins says,

Stewart’s idea was to use this app to bombard the inboxes of city officials with homeless-encampment sightings around their neighborhood, hoping to create a sense of urgency for the city to remove homeless people from Ballard.

According to August Drake-Ericson, of the Seattle Homeless Encampment Response team, last year the city registered 12,500 homeless-oriented complaints, averaging more than 30 per day, and mostly originating from the new app. When anonymity can be maintained, the idea of being a ratfink is more attractive.

Crisis sometimes produces comical headlines, which happened in July. Examples: “Seattle mayor suggests rental assistance, car repairs could help some homeless” and “Seattle authorities luring homeless off the streets with plane tickets, rent.” Rent money could help the homeless. Who knew?

This is a mayoral plan, christened “one-time diversion spending,” and designed to keep people from slipping into homelessness. In real life, it’s no joke. Often, a one-time expense will tip the scales for an individual or a family. If you need a car to get to work, or else lose your job, and something happens to the car, and you have to choose between fixing the car or paying the rent, that scenario can throw a person into the streets.

It’s also the exact type of one-time financial emergency that friendly intervention, in the form of cash, can actually help. A month or two of rent, donated at the right time, can save the city a lot more than that, later on.

In June, the city council passed a tax on the full-time employees of the biggest local businesses, including, of course, Amazon. Originally, it was supposed to generate $75 million per year for affordable housing and homelessness services, but the corporations wangled it down to $45 million.

That much could be expected. In the kabuki theater of negotiation, the initial demand is always unreasonably high, in order to give the other side a partial win, in the name of compromise.

It didn’t work. The corporations, organized under the umbrella of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, waged an aggressive pressure campaign, and a few weeks after it had been passed, the tax was repealed. Writer/activist Hawkins added a few words about the irony of Find It, Fix It:

If anything needs to be fixed here, it’s the fact that a city with so many resources is not using its financial might and technological prestige to help the vulnerable few.

Reactions?

Source: “An App for Ejecting the Homeless,” TheAtlantic.com, 07/02/18
Source: “Seattle mayor suggests rental assistance, car repairs could help some homeless,” KOMONews.com, 07/02/18
Source: “Seattle authorities luring homeless off the streets with plane tickets, rent payments,” WFIN.com, 07/02/18
Photo credit: Backbone Campaign on Visualhunt/CC BY

There is more to say about Amazon’s headhunting expedition in search of a city in which to establish its second headquarters (which is an oxymoron, but never mind that). No, the problem is that wherever HQ2 lands, it will create a housing shortage, and a housing shortage inevitably creates more homelessness.

Only a week ago, the headline at the National Association of Home Builders announced, “Housing Starts Fall 12.3 Percent As Tariffs Draw Increased Concern,” and the first sentence stated,

Total housing starts fell 12.3 percent in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.17 million units, according to newly released data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Commerce Department… Meanwhile, the multifamily sector — which includes apartment buildings and condos — dropped 19.8 percent to 315,000.

NAHB Chair Randy Noel told journalist Elizabeth Thompson,

We have been warning the administration for months that the ongoing increases in lumber prices stemming from both the tariffs and profiteering this year are having a strong impact on builders’ ability to meet growing consumer demand.

Federal government policies have not only decreased the number of available construction workers, but have jacked up the cost of imported lumber. In only a few months, the higher price of wood added almost $9,000 to the cost of a new single-family house. The largest portion of this market is always single-family homes, which in and of itself does not do much toward housing the people who cannot afford to buy houses.

“Hosting Amazon isn’t all puppies and rainbows.”

That quotation is from Steve Nicholas, of the Institute for Sustainable Communities, who for eight years was Seattle’s sustainability director. He goes on to say,

Skyrocketing prices are not only rendering Seattle housing out of reach for many but also exacerbating the challenge of homelessness: Seattle now has the country’s third-largest population of homeless people.

Among other recommendations, Nicholas urges the winning HQ2 city to prioritize the preservation and creation of affordable housing. No disrespect, but it doesn’t take a college degree or a white-collar job description to come up with such an excellent idea. Anyone who is being “moved along” from a street-corner or “swept” from an encampment of cardboard and plastic dwellings can nail that one. None of this bodes well for impoverished people in a state of bare survival.

Sometimes you have to wonder about the language that news is framed in. For instance, Jonathan O’Connell says of Seattle, “Amazon has contributed $30 billion to the local economy and as much as $55 billion more in spinoff benefits.” Doesn’t “contribute” mean something like “give” or “donate”? Because if we’re talking about payroll here, that’s not a gift.

It’s one party paying another party to perform labor, which is the way these things are usually done, and not especially laudable in itself. O’Connell goes on to quote the corporation’s real estate guy:

Next year, Amazon will complete its most prominent addition — three glass biospheres featuring about 40,000 plants, “a unique environment for employees to come and collaborate and innovate,” Schoettler said.

That’s all well and good for the 40,000 plants, but what about the estimated 12,000 people experiencing homelessness? And speaking of large numbers, the Amazon HQ has registered 4,000 employee-owned dogs. How many tons of dog poop does that constitute per week, and where does it wind up?

Meanwhile, how is the situation around restroom facilities for people who survive in public? Seattle.gov offers a helpful interactive hygiene services map denoting the city’s public restrooms, and showers and laundry services supplied by organizations for those who don’t have their own.

Why then, only a year ago, was Dyer Oxley moved to write,

People relieving themselves on sidewalks or in parks is commonplace… The King County Council recently had to convene a special panel just to discuss how bad the environment around the courthouse has become. A big part of that is people are defecating and urinating in the streets around the building.

Seattle should revisit the public bathrooms idea, and do it right this time. Assign personnel at the bathrooms to ward off illegal behavior and keep them clean. Don’t just set them and forget them. Public bathrooms are not just a means of diverting the public nuisance. Residents and tourists have bladders, too.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is unable to think of any more practical use for his excess billions than to start his own space program. But perhaps he is not entirely oblivious to these matters. Who knows, maybe the plan is to collect all the poop and send it to the asteroid belt.

Reactions?

Source: “Housing Starts Fall 12.3 Percent As Tariffs Draw Increased Concern,” NAHB.org, 07/18/18
Source: “You’ve Won Amazon’s HQ2. Now the Hard Part Begins,” Governing.com, 06/26/18
Source: “What would happen if Amazon brought 50,000 workers to your city? Ask Seattle,” WashingtonPost.com, 10/19/17
Source: “Seattle should bring back public bathrooms,” MyNorthwesto.com, 07/12/18
Photo credit: Ashlyn Gehrett on Visualhunt/CC BY-ND