This post is in essence a continuation of last week’s “Exciting Development in Austin,” so a reader who missed that one might want to catch up.

What will go on there

Disabled, chronically homeless people are at a great disadvantage in many ways. In most places, the local taxpayers are also affected by the medical bills that result from so many people living in insalubrious conditions, with untreated physical maladies. Community First Village will help everyone – the residents, by enabling their improved health; and the larger community, by reducing the hospital bills that result from life in the rough.

Located outside Austin, CFV will be a serene and health-positive environment where a great deal of healing and strengthening will take place. Adequate nutrition, nights of unbroken sleep, and an on-site medical facility will help the residents regain levels of vitality and functionality they have not felt for years. Most will be able to actively take part and contribute to the village’s success. We mentioned many activities last time, and people are already making furniture and growing crops.

A strong recycling program is planned. In the carpentry and welding workshops, skills will be taught and learned. The place will have WiFi, so a motivated person could conceivably sell crafts and other products online. The literature speaks of “micro-business opportunities for employment for residents interested in finding a job with employers assisting within this program,” and also suggests possibilities for occasional work at the nearby Travis Exposition Center.

Vision and hard work

The project’s first phase is expected to be done by the spring of 2015. It was kicked off by a groundbreaking ceremony in late August, with some of the prospective residents turning over symbolic shovelfuls of earth.

On that occasion, House Rep. Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin) received heartfelt thanks, because he sponsored a bill that exempts CFV from property taxes. Passing that bill will no doubt turn out to be one of the smartest moves the legislature ever made. As far as other people and entities who deserve thanks, please forgive any omissions, and post a comment at the end to set things straight!

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The development firm Bury Inc. is involved with the community’s design and MileStone Community Builders LLC with the actualization. H-E-B is helping to start up the commissary, and the local nonprofit organization Caritas will provide caseworkers. Students from the University of Texas School of Architecture designed many of the structures. At Lake Travis High School, the student council and cheerleaders spearheaded a fund drive called “Bring the Homeless Home” which raised $10,000. And of course thousands of volunteers have pitched in and will be donating even more time and energy going forward.

Paying for their stay

Dealing with a hardcore bureaucracy like Social Security is a daunting task even for a housed person with access to all the needed papers and a fully-operational consciousness. For someone who doesn’t own a file cabinet and suffers from physical limitations, pain, and disorientation, these challenges can seem insurmountable. House the Homeless does an amazing job of helping individuals apply for SSI disability status so they can use their benefits to pay the very reasonable rent.

The main driving force is Alan Graham, whose outreach ministry Mobile Loaves and Fishes has been working toward the project for years. Graham, described by journalist Marty Toohey as “a devout man with a sly sense of humor,” sees Community First Village Community as a “promised land” for people who have experienced some of the worst aspects of life on earth. After a recent tour of the property, Toohey wrote:

Graham was careful to note the place is intended to serve the chronically homeless — the portion of the homeless population that, due to mental illness or substance abuse or other issues, cannot keep a home under typical circumstances. For chronically homeless people, said Graham, who is considered one of the nation’s experts on the subject, halfway houses and other “transitional housing” are ultimately ineffective.

One of the most exciting results so far is how Graham and the rest of the CFV support system have inspired other municipalities to step up. A recent OregonLive.com headline reads,

Tiny houses as affordable housing? Austin beats Portland to punch, Eugene follows suit

Is that impressive, or what? Closer to home, a local blogger known as “The Lone Spanger” wrote,

It seems to me that with the continued support of volunteers, donors, and the city, CFV will surely be a success story in the history of homeless housing developments and provide a progressive model for future housing coordinators to follow. I’m looking forward to watching the program blossom and hope it makes a positive impact on the city’s morale towards encouraging more communities like this.

Please visit the Community First Village website to see how you can help!

Reactions?

Source: “Westbanker inspires homeless village,” Statesman.com, 09/03/14
Source: “LTHS students work together to help homeless,” Statesman.com, 09/24/14
Source: “Austin project takes new approach in aiding homeless by avoiding ‘transitional housing’,” TheRepublic.com, 09/18/14
Source: “Tiny houses as affordable housing? Austin beats Portland to punch, Eugene follows suit,” OregonLive.com, 08/22/12
Source: “Hope For the Homeless At Community First Village,” ChallengerNewspaper.org, 08/19/14
Source: “Lake Travis HS Cavaliers – Bring the Homeless Home,” YouTube
Image by mlfnow

In Austin, Texas, something is happening that will unavoidably become a subject of great interest to communities across the nation. The new thing is called Community First Village (CFV), and it is happening because many of the town’s officials and citizens believe that ending homelessness is more economical than dealing with the consequences of allowing it to continue.

Both planning and financial preparation for CFV have been underway for about ten years. By July of this year, the nonprofit group Mobile Loaves & Fishes had raised $6.5 million, completing the first fundraising phase of the project whose cost is estimated to come in at between $10 and $12 million. Compare the price tag for providing this safe haven of “permanent, affordable and sustainable housing and caring support for disabled chronically homeless individuals.” Because the residents will have preventative care, protection from the weather, and a nourishing diet, it is expected that the city’s taxpayers will be spared about $10 million each year in medical bills alone.

The place

Soon, roads will be built and water and sewer lines installed on the 27-acre property. The goal is to erect 225 units – an “innovative mix of affordable housing options” – divided between 100 RV trailers, 100 micro-houses, and 25 canvas-walled tent-cottages. Regarding the number of residents, various news reports are confusing, because 240 is the number most often given. On the other hand, one article mentions two-bedroom units, which seems to imply a certain amount of double occupancy. But then another source says “single residents only.” At any rate, this short piece of video reportage should help to visualize the project.

CFV  will be a gated community, not only to keep out troublesome unwanted visitors, but to allow the inhabitants a sense of privacy they have rarely known on the streets and in emergency shelters. The community will have its own clinic, “a medical facility for physical and mental health screenings and support services including hospice and respite care.” Since this will be a final home for many, a memorial garden and columbarium are also among the amenities. Also, McCoy’s Building Supply is putting up a 5500-square-foot structure:

The building will house a 700 sq. ft. art studio and a workshop where residents can be creative. Part of the operations building will also house offices and a community maintenance shop.

The Alamo Drafthouse is contributing an outdoor theater. Much healthy food will come from “Genesis Gardens,” where 500 fruit trees and a vegetable plot will be cared for by the residents, who will also tend bees and take care of chickens, rabbits, and aquaponically-raised fish that are destined for the dinner table.

The people

There will be an application process, and prospective residents must pass a background check and have provable income. The rent will be on a sliding scale, with amounts cited by various sources as “between $120 and $250,” “$120-450/month,” and “as little as $90.” The facility’s operating budget is estimated at $1 million per year.

The rules will be similar to those that apply in homeowners’ associations, with expulsion as the penalty for messing up. On-site staff members will help out and keep things running smoothly. Guests will be required to register, and can be kept out. There are even plans for a new city bus stop.

For more about the innovative Community First Village project and the people making it possible, please visit again next week.

Source: “Local Austin Homebuilder MileStone Community Builders Part of Community
First!,” BusinessWire,com, 08/26/14
Source: “27 Acre Community First Village Ends Austin Homelessness,” Austinot,com, 09/26/14
Image by Mobile Loaves and Fishes

Jodi Kantor wrote a story for The New York Times that is epic, empathetic, and closely related to homelessness.

One of her sources and subjects was a 22-year-old barista, Jannette Navarro, who supports herself and her 4-year-old son. Kantor describes the situation:

Newly off public assistance, she was just a few credits shy of an associate degree in business and talked of getting a master’s degree…. Her take-home pay rarely topped $400 to $500 every two weeks; since starting in November, she had set aside $900 toward a car….

Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when…. Scheduling is now a powerful tool to bolster profits, allowing businesses to cut labor costs with a few keystrokes.

This Kronos program does not have a humane bone in its body, and Navarro was unable to make any plans more than three days ahead — a dire situation when child care is a constant preoccupation. A worker could speak up, of course, and ask for special treatment, and be a pain in the manager’s posterior. This happens not just at Starbucks but everywhere: a low-level employee who makes waves by asking for a schedule change might reap unexpected consequences, like having her overall hours cut. Whether intentionally punitive or not, stuff happens.

The poor are always being admonished to better themselves via education, but even one night of school per week is impossible if you never know when you will have to work. Uncertain, unpredictable hours can play hell with a family’s budget. It can affect access to preschool and day care opportunities. It gets worse, as Kantor points out:

Child care and policy experts worry that the entire apparatus for helping poor families is being strained by unpredictable work schedules, preventing parents from committing to regular drop-off times or answering standard questions on subsidy forms and applications for aid: ‘How many hours do you work?’ and ‘What do you earn?’

To give credit where it’s due, Starbucks provides health care and other benefits that count for a lot, setting an example that more companies should imitate. In response to the publicity, Starbucks says it will try to do better in the area of erratic and capricious scheduling. Other media noticed this story. On Slate’s DoubleX Gabfest podcast, Jessica Winter said:

These businesses … have offloaded a lot of the natural risk of doing business onto families. So instead of Starbucks, this enormous and rich and incredibly successful enterprise, absorbing the risk of occasionally having an extra barista or two on duty, you have Jannette Navarro risking her child care arrangements, and her relationships, and her home, and her sanity, in order to keep a $9-an-hour job.

Here is Winter’s message for companies that strive to do better:

You create happy, healthy consumers who have more time to go to the mall and have more time to use their disposable income…. I have never understood that divide of how you’re almost destroying part of your consumer base in order to chase maximum profits.

Most single mothers are in such unstable circumstances, one wrong move can bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. When life is so precarious, a seemingly little thing like a schedule change can be the pebble in the pond, with effects that radiate outward in every direction. A lucky family will wind up camping in a relative’s basement, a friend’s dining room, a camper parked in somebody’s driveway, or a garage with no water or electricity. An unlucky family will find itself in a shelter or on the street.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” NYTimes.com, 08/13/14
Source: “DoubleX Gabfest: The Daddy’s Little Princess Edition,” Slate.com, 08/21/14
Image by Nick Richards0

Last week, House the Homeless remembered the good work Robin Williams did on behalf of people experiencing homelessness, but forgot to mention the outstanding gesture he made some years ago, described here by journalist Dustin Volz:

In a stunning moment of candor, Williams testified before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1990 in support of the Homelessness Prevention and Community Revitalization Act, which sought to direct funding to housing-based support centers for the chronically homeless and to boost mental-health services. (A related bill became law later that year.)

Williams is of course not the first celebrity to leverage fame and name recognition into promotion of societal change for the better. This summer, film star Susan Sarandon told lawmakers at a congressional briefing that people experiencing homelessness need to be included as a protected class, as defined by the Hate Crimes Statistics Act.

But often the venue for publicizing a good cause is less formal than the legislative halls of Washington, D.C. Every Christmas, celebrities come out to serve dinner to thousands at the Los Angeles Mission. Last Christmas, hip-hop stars YG and Snoop Dogg financed a $10,000 shopping spree for 60 L.A. shelter kids, and actor Charlie Sheen donated $50,000 to My Friend’s Place, a center in Hollywood that serves homeless youth. Vocalist Cyndi Lauper holds an annual holiday benefit concert to raise money for her True Colors foundation, which helps homeless LGBT youth.

The extremely popular TV series Breaking Bad, which was made in Albuquerque, N.M., gave many of the show’s wardrobe items to be sold at local thrift stores that support the homeless shelter. Because they are not just used clothes but entertainment-industry memorabilia, the donated items fetched good prices. Back in May, wildman comedian Russell Brand shocked some Beverly Hills neighbors by letting homeless friends stay in his multimillion-dollar house while he was out of the country.

But consciousness of social inequity is not recent. In this video clip from San Antonio 20 years ago, country music legend Townes Van Zandt performs “Marie,” his song about a homeless couple.

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In A Deeper Blue, biographer Robert Earl Hardy said of the singer:

Townes had exhibited concern for the poor and homeless since his childhood, and he still made it a habit to give money — often his entire earnings from gigs — to street people.

The Los Angeles Times published a fascinating story by Rene Lynch, who interviewed the winner of the popular televised culinary competition Chopped. The subject, D. Brandon Walker, administers and teaches in a culinary training program for the St. Joseph Center, the venerable helping institution in Venice, Calif. He also fills the post of executive chef, cooking for the Bread and Roses Cafe, which serves meals to people experiencing homelessness. The students get a chance to practice there too. And Walker likes the idea that even people who are broke can have a luxurious dining experience.

Here is the really interesting part. Since the supplies at the Bread and Roses Cafe are donated by food banks and restaurants, the staff never knows what will show up on any given day. They are constantly forced to improvise, creating meals on the fly from whatever is available. It was perfect training for Walker, because the whole format of the TV show Chopped is based on presenting the contestants with a random assortment of ingredients.

So Walker won the competition, and he gives credit to the experience gained from many years of cooking for the indigent people of Venice. The guests and trainees at the St. Joseph Center were very proud of having their very own chef go to New York and win a competition. And Walker says he has the best job in the world. Lynch quotes his inspiring words:

My job is unique in that I am cooking everyday and I’m teaching. We train people who are coming out of all different types of difficulties in their lives…. People who are unemployed or underemployed. Coming out of rehab, or transitional housing, coming out of penal system, or being laid off. We give them the opportunity to learn.

Now, all they need is a Living Wage job!

Reactions?

Source: “What Robin Williams Told the Senate About Homelessness,” NationalJournal.com, 08/12/14
Source: “YG & Snoop Dogg Donate $10,000 To Los Angeles Children,” hiphopdx.com, 12/27/13
Source: “’Breaking Bad’ gives clothes to homeless,” ABQJournal, 02/26/13
Source: “LA chef says serving the homeless helped him win ‘Chopped’,” LATimes.com, 10/27/13
Image by Neon Tommy0

Let’s talk about something nice for a change — like how a beloved show business figure quietly carried out his own plan for making the world a better place. When comedian and actor Robin Williams died last month, some of the media coverage concerned his activism on behalf of people experiencing homelessness.

Many still remember Comic Relief, a 12-year series of concerts that raised $50 million for programs benefitting people in dire need. In 1986, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams were the original hosts. Brian Lord wrote about Williams:

He actually had a requirement that for every single event or film he did, the company hiring him also had to hire a certain number of homeless people and put them to work…. I’m sure that on his own time and with his own money, he was working with these people in need, but he’d also decided to use his clout as an entertainer to make sure that production companies and event planners also learned the value of giving people a chance to work their way back.

The journalist also expressed the hope that the companies concerned had continued to hire people experiencing homelessness to work on other projects after their connection with Williams ended.

Documentary

Actor Paul Walker, who died last winter, is said to have received hate mail because of a 2009 film project called Shelter. The documentary was a collaboration between Walker, his old friend Brandon Birtell, and social worker Ken Williams. During their college years in California, Walker and Birtell both were homeless for periods of time, actually sleeping in cars and living on the streets. Regarding Shelter, Nick Manai explains:

They centered their efforts on detailing the daily lives of four homeless people they befriended…. three women and one old blind man. All four were being helped by Ken Williams’ social service team, but were still sleeping in tough places that were tortuously rugged.

The very wealthy coastal town of Santa Barbara was ideal for an exploration of homelessness, not only because Walker and Birtell had been homeless students there, but because of the extreme income gap between the richest residents and the poorest. While making Shelter, Walker was also shooting a major motion picture called Fast & Furious, on location in Brazil. His dedication to the indie project was such that he commuted back and forth by plane. Reporter Ivy Jacobson says of Shelter, “The film wasn’t large enough to make it to big screen, but it’s still being shown in classrooms all over the country and making an impact.”

Happy Birthday, Little Tramp

A hundred years ago, in 1914, Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the cinema’s quintessential homeless character, not from artistic fantasy but from his own life experience. When this amazing actor and director was only 2 years old, he and his mother and brother were abandoned by the elder Chaplin. As a young lad, Charlie spent time in the workhouse. After their overstressed mother was committed to an insane asylum, the boys became street performers. Paul Whitington writes:

Until Chaplin came along, homeless people were almost invariably portrayed in film as vagabonds, drunks and villains…. [The Tramp was] the most beloved cultural icon on the planet for more than a decade: the plucky loser who refuses to believe that the world is as cruel a place as it seems.

Reactions?

Source: “Robin Williams Required Everyone Who Hired Him to Put Homeless People to Work,” aattp.org, 08/23/14
Source: “A Little Known Robin Williams Story,” BrianLord.org, 08/12/14
Source: “Paul Walker Was Homeless in College: Sent Hate Mail for ‘Shelter’ Movie,” guardianlv.com,12/09/13
Source: “Paul Walker Was Once Homeless: How He Learned Compassion,” HollywoodLife.com, 12/09/13
Source: “Charlie Chaplin stumbled on his most famous creation, the Tramp, a week after making his Hollywood debut,” independent.ie, 08/31/14
Image by Insomnia Cured Here

Last time, House the Homeless considered the inability of small shareholders to influence corporate policy, including executive pay packages. In related news, the Economic Policy Institute gave some statistics about American companies during a chosen time period, 1978 to 2011. During those 33 years, the report says, the compensation received by CEOs “increased more than 725 percent.”

In other words, some of those top executives were making 6 or 7 or 8 times as much as they would have 33 years earlier. The typical worker’s pay increased 5.7 percent over the same time period. The difference between 725% and 5.7% is so ludicrous, you have to wonder if the EPI did the math right.

In 1965, the report says, a CEO was paid about 20 times as much as a worker. In 2011, a CEO was walking away with 231 times as much as a typical employee. Corporate America is permitted to decree that one hour of one Person A’s life is worth hundreds of times as much as one hour of Person B’s life.

In a recent Fortune article, Eleanor Bloxham discussed the ideal CEO-to-average worker pay ratio, which in a sane world would be more like 20-to-1 than 231-to-1. Richard R. Troxell is also quoted in this article, and it was not the first time Bloxham had turned to the president of House the Homeless for authoritative information about homeless issues.

She is deeply concerned with how inequality affects the soundness of the whole social fabric, saying,

Inequality invites us to examine long-held beliefs and the real poverty of greed. It asks us to not only put our brains to work but also to raise our emotional IQs, to challenge ourselves to feel what it is like to walk in other people’s shoes.

Footnote on Foster Care

As a family defense lawyer, Gaylynn Burroughs has known many parents accused of child neglect. One case concerned a young mother named Lisa who called social services because the building’s landlord ignored the raw sewage leaking into her apartment. When a caseworker visited, she asked for a place in a family shelter. Instead, the caseworker took her children away. Adding insult to injury, the system treated Lisa like a criminal, making her take parenting classes, have a mental health evaluation, sign up for therapy, and show up for random urine testing. As for requiring the landlord to make repairs, or finding her and her kids a better place to live, the bureaucracy did nothing.

Mary Ratcliff, an online commenter, wrote that in San Francisco children were routinely taken from parents who lived in dilapidated housing, even when the landlords responsible for the unlivable conditions were the local, state, or federal governments. Burroughs quoted Dorothy Roberts, Stanford University law professor and author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, who states that poor families are 20 times more likely than wealthier families to have dealings with the child welfare system, and that poverty is the main reason why children are sent to foster homes.

Race is a big part of the picture, since black families are four times as likely to be poor. Fifteen percent of American children are black, but 34 percent of the children in foster care are black. But, says Roberts,  caseworker reports make it personal, accusing parents of neglect because their children don’t have adequate food, clothes, education, medical care, or even decent shelter, when the root problem is simple destitution. Going back to the question we asked in a previous post — “Are homeless parents paranoid?” — the answer is “No.” Roberts said:

One thing most women in the United States do not worry about is the possibility of the state removing children from their care. For a sizable subset of women, though — especially poor black mothers […] — that possibility is very real.

Reactions?

Source: “CEO Pay and the Top 1%,” epi.org, 05/02/12.
Source: “Inequality in the U.S.: Are We Making Any Progress?” Fortune.com, 08/04/14.
Source: “Too Poor to Parent?” MsMagazine.com, Spring 2008.
Image by Tax Credits.

For the Christian Science Monitor, staff writer Schuyler Velasco compiled a list of the American corporations where the yawning abyss between CEO pay and employee pay is most apparent. For every dollar the average McDonald’s employee makes, CEO Donald Thompson takes home 1,196 of them. How is it possible that any human being’s time is worth more than a thousand times as much as the time of another human being?

Existential questions aside, McDonald’s is the most egregious example of ridiculously munificent executive compensation, followed by Starbucks and Dollar General. Among the top 10, the least discrepancy is found at AT&T, where the biggest boss makes only 558 times the wage of an average worker.

Ratcheting up Salaries

For Dissent Magazine, Colin Gordon explains the process of deciding how much to pay a bigwig. A show of detached neutrality is made by deferring to the wisdom of a “compensation committee.” The members are other bigwigs with similar job descriptions. Next week, one of those execs will be up for a raise, and guess who will be on his compensation committee? That’s right — the very same guy whose salary he is deciding today. Gordon says:

These compensation committees […] have perfected a machine for ratcheting up executive pay. As a general rule, CEO pay is calculated from a benchmark of peers. The result is a lucrative game of leapfrog. The selection of peers is arbitrary — and often consists of cherry-picking larger and successful firms with higher-paid executives.

In effect — with very limited input from shareholders and no demonstrable connection to firm performance — top executives set their own salaries.

Shareholders Lack Clout

Supposedly, performance-based pay is subject to shareholder approval, and a reasonable person might ask, “Why don’t they take charge, and rein in these greed-heads?” But as it turns out, the deck is stacked. The system contrives to make shareholder influence largely theoretical. Their role is purely advisory and the corporation doesn’t have to do what they recommend.

For a giant business with high-powered lawyers on retainer, it is very easy to circumvent any rule. The corporate entity can hide, even from its own stockholders, exactly what is going on, in what Gordon calls “a concerted effort to camouflage the level and terms of executive pay packages with various forms of stealth compensation (such as lavish retirement deals) or rigged performance measures (such as stock options).” Even worse, there are two classes of shareholders. Gordon says:

Increasingly, shareholding is dominated by the block holdings of big institutional investors (mutual funds, pension funds, and the like). And many public firms use ‘dual class’ shares to distribute voting rights more narrowly than stock ownership.

Stockholding citizens, even the most socially conscientious, have very little clout. And what do the execs get paid for? Who knows, but it’s a pretty sure bet they are not busy figuring out how to reduce the income gap, and pay enough so that none of their employees need to apply for government relief.

Universal Living Wage

Eleanor Bloxham, CEO of The Value Alliance and Corporate Governance Alliance, believes that a company should be transparent about whether it pays a living wage to every person who works for it. For a recent Fortune CNN article, she quoted House the Homeless President Richard R. Troxell about the Universal Living Wage concept, so please go and take a look.

Also, please remember Economic Gap Day is coming up on Tuesday, September 2. Everyone is urged to organize or join a demonstration in a highly visible public place. Check out this video of a past Economic Gap Day to catch the vibe:

The Universal Living Wage means basic food, clothing, shelter (including utilities), public transportation, and access to an emergency room! This must be the minimum standard for every American and all people.

Reactions?

Source: “CEO Vs. Worker Pay: Walmart, McDonald’s, and Eight Other Firms With Biggest Gaps,” CSMonitor.com, 12/12/13.
Source: “Fatter Cats: Executive Pay and American Inequality,” DissentMagazine.org, 04/24/14.
Source: “Inequality in the U.S.: Are We Making Any Progress?” Fortune.com, 08/04/14.
Image by Devendra Makkar.0

When discussing the disparity between big boss pay and average worker pay, the first thing the defenders want us to know is that if top executives let their enormous paychecks be divided among the workers, each piece of the pie would be quite small.

Walmart has a million hourly employees, and 475,000 of them make more than $25,000 per year. For the purpose of this exercise, Danielle Kurtzleben leaves out those upper-tier employees. The other 525,000 workers make less. The CEO, C. Douglas McMillon, makes $25.6 million annually. If he turned over $20 million for distribution among those 525,000 employees, they would each gain only $38 per year.

When cited by industry apologists (which Kurtzleben definitely is not, by the way), examples like this are supposed to convince us to stop picking on the business world’s poor, abused CEOs. But why shouldn’t we encourage such sharing? Even if it is only $38 extra, the workers need it more than Mr. McMillon does. When a family survives on food stamps, every little bit helps. And just think what such a gesture would do for morale and public relations!

Could something like that happen?

Actually, something like that could happen, and very recently it did. At Kentucky State University, interim President Raymond Burse made news by volunteering for a $90,000 pay cut so that 24 low-income employees could have a raise. It will boost their pay rate from $7.25 to $10.25 per hour (and the institution promises to continue paying the higher wage for those positions in the future). This is a very generous example for anyone in an executive position to set, though not a totally unprecedented one.

For the Christian Science Monitor, Hayley Fox notes that at Virginia’s Hampton University, President William Harvey refused a portion, amounting to more than $1 million, of his executive compensation so that low-wage workers could be paid more. No doubt there are other examples of highly paid yet ethically aware earners trying to compensate for the system’s unfairness. Maybe this trend pioneered in academia will spread to other businesses.

But let’s get back to those who see nothing wrong with the huge discrepancy between our society’s most generously and most stingily rewarded employees. They would have us believe that everything is made right by the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) — which Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless calls the biggest scam ever perpetrated against America’s working poor.

First, you jump through the bureaucratic hoops of the application process to get back your own money that you should have had all along. And a crisis requiring money does not wait for our schedule or the government’s convenience. Mainly, the EITC is “chump change” in comparison with — and an unsatisfactory substitute for — a Living Wage that affords a family the basic necessities of life. Richard says:

Business has shifted their financial responsibility of paying a “fair wage for a fair day’s work” onto the backs of the taxpayers of America. The Federal Government has allowed the businesses of America to shirk their responsibility to pay fair minimum wages. Instead of paying what their work is worth, businesses hide behind the pitifully small tax supported stipend that leaves core American workers dirt poor and often subject to homelessness.

We will talk more about income inequality next time, but let’s just mention a few of the reasons why it is bad for the entire country. First, it’s different from general, all-encompassing poverty. Many people who grew up in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, have said they had no consciousness of being poor because everyone was equally destitute, and there was no basis for comparison. Nowadays, all who live in poverty are acutely conscious of exactly what the rich own and spend.

Historically, the consequences of extreme wealth disparity are crippling debt, a reduced standard of wellness, and economic stagnation for many individuals who had hoped and expected to better their circumstances. There is even research from the field of evolutionary psychology to show that when the difference between the highest incomes and the lowest is vast, the murder rate increases. Throughout the economy, general health and growth are negatively affected and homelessness is rampant. The processes of democracy suffer, and the political system is dangerously destabilized as the poor realize how devotedly the government serves the wealthy few. Unlike generalized and widespread poverty, an outrageous degree of inequality is very obvious. People can’t help noticing, and they don’t like what they see.

Source: “What if Walmart’s CEO took a pay cut for his workers?” Vox.com, 08/06/14
Source: “College president takes a $90,000 pay cut to give low-wage workers a raise,” CSMonitor.com, 08/15/14
Source: “CEO Of One Of The World’s Largest Banks: Income Inequality Is ‘Destabilizing,’ ThinkProgress.org, 06/13/14
Image by mSeattle
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House the Homeless has been considering, with dismay, the brisk back-and-forth exchange between the foster care system and the ranks of people experiencing homelessness. An untethered, chaotic lifestyle leads to more of the same in the next generation. Any young person whose past includes periods of homelessness is more likely to face homelessness in the future. Kids who age out of the foster care system are more likely to become homeless. In a vicious cycle, kids from homeless families are often at risk of winding up in the foster care system.

Writer Annie Gowen interviewed the executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, Ruth Anne White, who said “about half of states list a caregiver’s inability to provide shelter as part of their definition of abuse and neglect.” In mid-2012, news came from Washington, D.C., that homeless parents were not signing up with agencies that existed to help them because they feared losing their children.

The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless learned that clients avoided seeking help because intake workers had threatened, if the clients really had nowhere to live, to report them to the child welfare authorities. According to rumor, the city purposely created this climate of fear to scare families away from applying for services in an overburdened system. The Washington Post quoted a Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) spokesperson who said:

[W]hile homelessness alone is not sufficient reason under D.C. law to remove a child from a parents’ care, the agency has investigated families seeking shelter to see if there were other issues of abuse and neglect.… So far, 32 families have been reported … but no children have yet been removed from their parents’ care.

Also in our nation’s capital, the disappearance and probable death of 8-year-old Relisha Rudd caused consternation. Relisha went missing from D.C.’s former General Hospital, now a massive homeless shelter where she and three younger brothers were among some 600 children in residence. They stayed with their mother, Shamika Young (who, incidentally, entered the foster-care system at age 6). Relisha was allowed to leave the facility with her “god-daddy,” a man Young trusted as a longtime friend who had taken Relisha to his family’s home many times before. She was last seen on March 1, and shortly afterward the man killed his wife and then was found dead himself.

Real fear

When questioned about why she had not reported her daughter missing, Young said she was afraid that if she went to the police, the authorities would take her other kids. Apparently, this fear was not unfounded. Records showed that some type of report had been generated three times before that could have led to the four children being placed in the foster care system. Nothing ever happened, but the possibility was perceived by their mother as a real threat.

When Relisha Rudd was in the news daily, some online commenters expressed very sentimental opinions about the superiority of foster care over shelter life or, even worse, street life. How, they wondered, could anyone possibly hesitate to recommend foster care? The sad truth is, it’s all too easy to find foster care horror stories, and all too easy to meet unaccompanied youth who ran away from foster placements to become street people.

The mutability of circumstance presents child welfare agencies with chronic uncertainty. A crisis focuses official attention on the family, but then their situation stabilizes. Then turmoil comes again, followed by relative calm. The rationale for placing kids in foster care is rarely cut-and-dried. Case workers have to make judgment calls all the time. On behalf of Washington’s CFSA, Mindy Good spoke to a reporter who wrote this account:

[I]n 2012, the District had one of the nation’s highest removal rates and one of the lowest in placing children with relatives once they were taken from the home, Good said. A year earlier, the city’s Citizen Review Panel, which is charged with monitoring the agency, issued a report that called for “significant reforms to prevent unnecessary removals — and to prevent the unnecessary harm they cause to children and families.”

In other words, the child protection authorities are criticized and attacked for two opposite reasons — for interfering too much and taking too many kids; and for not removing Relisha and her brothers from their mother’s care. The city’s health and human services, the official bodies in charge of Relisha’s life and well-being, promised a review of their procedures, but no report has yet been issued. At any rate, it is clear that homeless parents are not paranoid, because a very real possibility exists that their children can be taken from them. Sometimes it is necessary; other times it is not in the best interests of anyone.

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless D.C. families, who turn to the city for help, risk triggering a child welfare investigation,” WashingtonPost.com, 06/23/12
Source: “Before Relisha Rudd went missing, the 8-year-old longed to escape D.C.’s homeless shelter,” WashingtonPost.com, 04/05/14
Source: “Body in park tentatively identified as Relisha Tatum’s alleged abductor, police chief says,” WashingtonPost.com, 03/31/14
Image by Lyman Erskine

Every now and then a scandal arises from the foster care system. Earlier this year, Americans were horrified by a story from North Carolina that broke when a law enforcement officer observed an 11-year old boy handcuffed to the porch of a house. The weather was cold, and someone had tied a dead chicken around his neck. It turned out that, along with this foster child, four adopted children lived in the house. The adults in residence were a medical professional — a male who worked as a hospital nurse — and a female Department of Social Services employee who happened to be the county’s child protective services supervisor.

Had no one noticed the abuse and neglect? Some faculty members did, where the kids used to go to school. But the couple who fostered and/or adopted them had unenrolled them in favor of home-schooling. The publicity surrounding this story pointed up the fact that North Carolina has more than 53,000 registered home schools, many of them populated by foster children — some of whom were taken on just for the sake of earning subsistence payments from the government. Since there is no legal requirement to inspect home schools, this means a lot of foster kids are being raised in sequestered environments, ignored and forgotten. The potential is huge for every kind of abuse.

The case made enough of a splash to get several other social services workers fired, and to stimulate a review of the process by which foster-care licenses are granted. Meanwhile, investigators looked for approximately 36 children who had been fostered by the couple in the past.

California

Those former foster kids must be scattered all over the map. Maybe some of them ended up in the Morongo Basin, an area of Southern California whose population includes about 800 people experiencing homelessness. On leaving the area, longtime advocate Rae Packard told an audience,

In my experience working at Morongo Basin Unity Home, women who choose to leave their abuser and go into a shelter most often lose custody of their children. Judges nationwide consider shelter housing to be ‘homeless’ and give custody of the children to the abuser, who is stable in the home.

Remember the House the Homeless post titled “Are Homeless Parents Paranoid?” If paranoia represents an unreasonable or unlikely fear, homeless parents apparently are not paranoid. All kinds of heart-rending scenarios take place every day in offices and courtrooms. A homeless mother faces the real possibility that her kids can be turned over to the violent non-provider who caused all the trouble, or taken by the state and placed in foster situations. Or she can try to stay under the radar and avoid government agencies altogether. This involves teaching kids to lie to authorities, and other habits that can get them in trouble.

Elsewhere in California, journalist Greg Lee interviewed the CEO of the Riverside County branch of Court Appointed Foster Children (CASA). In that county, some 4,000 foster children reside, with another 1,500 in the nearby Coachella Valley. CASA is a volunteer organization with not nearly enough volunteers for its mission, which is to assign each child an advocate to help them deal with the court system. Deborah Sutton-Weiss made a startling statement:

The foster system is broke. We have more homeless children on the streets now than we have vets and that’s a big deal…. What does happen to them is that they either end up homeless, prostituting, in jail or dead.

The authorities take kids from their parents for reasons that are sometimes excellent and sometimes wrong or pointless. Those children grow up in foster homes, age out of the system, and all too often find themselves on the streets. Vulnerable and unprotected, girls get pregnant and have children who either have no place to live or are removed to foster placements. (Either way, they grow up with a greater chance of being chronically homeless.) There is far too much two-way traffic between the foster care system and homelessness, and plenty more about it to discuss.

Reactions?

Source: “Two growing NC student populations: homeless and homeschooled,” BlueNC.com, 11/24/13
Source: “About 800 homeless in Hi-Desert, speaker tells advisers,” HiDesertStar.com, 04/18/14
Source: “Homelessness among foster children on the rise in California,” KESQ.com, 07/22/14
Image by Martin Belam