As we know, it’s National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, and nobody could say that the plight of homeless veterans does not get media attention. Homeless vets are in the news all the time, and we can only hope that awareness is actually being raised.

When Richard R. Troxell of House the Homeless was interviewed by Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business Success Radio, one of the subjects turned out to be America’s veterans. (The entire show is available as a free, on-demand podcast download.)

Richard pointed out that we’re paying taxes so the Department of Veterans Affairs can take proper care of the nation’s vets, but for some reason there is still a lot of need. Part of the difference is made up by thousands of volunteers and businesses who make donations and do pro bono work.

There are large organized events called Veterans Stand Downs, where dozens of donor participants help hundreds of veterans at a time, gathered in a central spot. There are small, ongoing efforts and individual initiatives that warm the heart. For instance, some police departments organize donations of backpacks and basic supplies, including information on where to get various kinds of help, and each squad car carries a pack to give away if the officers encounter a homeless vet.

In San Francisco, a coalition made up of the apparel outfitter Chrome, Planet Sox, the VA, the St. Anthony Foundation, and Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) gives away massive amounts of shoes and socks to the homeless.

Last year, the homeless veterans of Texas lost a great benefactor on the retirement of Dr. Joel Feiner from the position of medical director of the Comprehensive Homeless Center. As reported by Kim Horner for The Dallas Morning News,

At the VA, Feiner served as medical director of a program with long-term treatment that included psychiatrists, psychologists, a dorm, transitional housing, job training and work programs.

Horner learned that the doctor worked with the civil rights movement in the 60’s, and had such unusual habits as inviting patients to call him at home.

Around 200 homeless vets have been in therapy with him, for such conditions as PSTD, severe depression, addiction, and bipolar disorder. He specialized in hopeless cases. The reporter interviewed a formerly homeless veteran, an actual cardboard-box-under-a-bridge kind of guy, who went on to become a GPA 4.0 student who aims to become a teacher, and then quoted Feiner:

We have some very quiet heroes and heroines here — the veterans themselves. Some have been clobbered by conditions they had, through no fault of their own. It’s their ability to keep on that I am in awe of.

Another person recognized as a hero, specifically a CNN Hero, is Roy Foster. Formerly a homeless addicted veteran himself, he co-founded (with another homeless vet) a nonprofit organization and opened Stand Down House, which has been helping ex-military people since 2000. Foster says,

I not only wanted to help homeless veterans, I wanted to help them before they became homeless, before they have to live through what I did. My charity in Palm Beach County, Florida, assists veterans, soldiers, and their families by providing supportive services, financial assistance, housing, mental health service referrals and more.

Foster also belongs to the Palm Beach County Veterans Task Force and the Veterans Advisory Committee. He has lent a hand in burials of indigent veterans and created a local Veterans Court, whose aim is to keep his constituents out of the criminal justice system.

Reactions?

Source: “St. Anthony’s Honors Homeless and Low-income Veterans With New Shoes and Socks,” PR Newswire, 11/08/11
Source: “To homeless veterans, retiring Dallas VA psychiatrist is a hero,” DallasNews.com, 10/31/10
Source: “Once homeless vet’s mission to save his brothers-in-arms,” CNN.com, 11/11/10
Image by MD GovPics, used under its Creative Commons license.

This might be the quotation of the year:

The City of New Orleans cleared out the camp to reduce homelessness in the city.

Is that what they think they’re doing? Amazing. Reduce homelessness by clearing out camps. Who knew the answer could be so simple?

Here’s more of the story, as reported by Tania Dall:

A homeless encampment underneath the Ponchartrain Expressway along Calliope Street is gone… On Friday morning, city workers showed up to clear bicycles, sleeping bags, and other items belonging to the homeless. The city says it will continue patrols to keep this area clear.

About 112 people are said to have lived in the encampment. The city says that 85 were moved to temporary housing, 20 taken to shelters, and 10 “placed on buses to be reunited with family or friends out of town.” That already adds up to 115, and the reporter also says that some of the displaced people went to join Occupy NOLA. So, who knows?

The nonprofit organization UNITY of New Orleans told the reporter,

… 60 percent of the people living in the old encampment suffered from mental illness, 25 percent of those had some sort of developmental disability…

Elsewhere, Bruce Eggler adds detail:

The area under the expressway has been closed and no one will be allowed to sleep or camp there… The Department of Sanitation will remove any mattresses, chairs or other items found there and pressure-wash the area…

According to the mayor’s office,

The city coordinated the relocations and respite housing in partnership with the Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs, Volunteers of America, Travelers Aid, Metropolitan Health Services District, Grace Outreach and UNITY of Greater New Orleans.

But, getting back to Tania Dall’s piece, she said,

… the move came as a shock to some nearby shelters that claim they weren’t given advance notice.

So, what kind of coordination is that? Again, who knows?

Actually, the activities in New Orleans sounds relatively benign in comparison to some of the other cities described by House the Homeless in previous posts. A person could get tired of hearing about “sweeps” and “cleanups.” Seems like there are so many of them these days. As a group deemed undesirable, people experiencing homelessness today are pretty much like Gypsies have been throughout the centuries. Society definitely doesn’t want them in its backyard. They need be cleared out and cleaned up.

On the other hand, either group provides handy scapegoats. In the old days, if a child went missing, the Gypsies were assumed to have kidnapped him or her. Now, if there’s a beer can on the lawn, it must be the homeless people. In reality, whoever dropped that litter might have been a college student, or your spouse.

Either group provides convenient targets for the free-floating aggression of the settled populace. Any time a few local yokels get drunk and go out looking for somebody to beat down, who is out there in the open air, unprotected by locks, or even walls? Gypsies and homeless people.

And the townsfolk get to be all self-righteous, and feel superior to the people who own nothing. And they use the law to take away the very few possessions that remain. News articles blather on about how city personnel or volunteers come out to clean up all the trash after the homeless people have been ejected from the camp they called home.

Sure, it’s a mess, but there’s a dark humor in all this. Where do you take out the garbage, when you live in the junkyard? When you yourself are considered trash, where do you take out the trash?

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Just to have a good sleeping bag can make the difference between survival and despair. Imagine losing your sleeping bag because you went to find something to eat, and when you came back, the place where you had lived was bulldozed into oblivion.

And, really, would it be such an outlandish idea to get rid of the trash and leave the people in place? Couldn’t a city just put some portable toilets and a dumpster near a homeless settlement, and maintain them?

Better yet, what if we had a society where nobody is desperate enough to camp out in the woods? Is there an answer to this? Well, for now, the Homeless Protected Class Resolution could possibly put a stop to some of the worst excesses performed upon people experiencing homelessness.

And, for the future — the one where we don’t have any homeless people — we propose the Universal Living Wage. The exciting new development is that House the Homeless is encouraging the Occupy movement to turn its energy in this direction. (Please see “Living Wage Campaign: The Answer to Occupy Wall Street“) and don’t forget to sign the petition!

Reactions?

Source: “City of New Orleans closes homeless encampment,” WWLTV.com, 10/28/11
Source: “New Orleans ousts about 115 homeless people from underneath Pontchartrain Expressway,” NOLA.com, 10/28/11
Image (partial) by gruntzooki (Corey Doctorow), used under its Creative Commons license.

The book we see over on the right-hand side of the page here, Looking Up at the Bottom Line, is really several books in one. It’s kind of an activist-how-to manual, as well as a history of the struggle for social justice as carried out (non-violently and always with a certain flair) in several different places where Richard R. Troxell has lived, particularly Austin, TX. It lays out the rationale behind the Universal Living Wage, and makes the case for why the ULW should be implemented.

It’s also the place where many individual stories can be found, starting with Richard’s own. Coming back from the Vietnam conflict, he tried college, and then got a bit unbalanced after his father’s death. Like so many other young people have done, he ranged around the country, living in a car, a truck, and even a cave. Out west, he worked as a trail restorer and a firefighter, then bounced back eastward to live as a squatter in a house in a derelict area.

As time went on, Richard settled for a while in a rental house with several other guys, and eventually got married and learned everything there was to know about striving for a home of his own. Not content with that, he set about an ambitious project for reviving an entire neighborhood, and branched out from there into many other public-spirited projects.

As well as his own story, Richard gives us portraits of his various mentors and role models along the way, especially the incomparable Max Weiner, founder of CEPA (the Consumer Education and Protective Association) and the Consumer Party. Then, there are little pocket biographies of a number of people experiencing homelessness in Austin, where Richard founded House the Homeless.

There’s Chris Byrt Lyne, who was a construction worker until he was assaulted and suffered a head injury, and Jaime Maldonado, who was already just barely hanging on when serious dental problems sent his life into a downward spiral, and Kenneth Wayne Staggs, whose work-related injury may prevent him from ever earning a living again, even if a job were available.

Ronald Keith Johnson was held back by dyslexia all his life, but worked as a house painter until an on-the-job injury disabled him. James Hawkins underwent open-heart surgery at age 46, but it was unsuccessful, and he was rendered unemployable. Veteran Eugene Golden, like so many other Americans, lost his home through foreclosure. In these pages is the story of Edward Forrest Dutcher, a casualty of the streets who died around this time last year.

Not to disrespect the men caught in the cycle of homelessness, but the stories of homeless women are particularly distressing, like that of Camee Vega, who escaped with her two daughters from an abusive husband and went on to work at the Homeless Resource Center. And as we’ve mentioned before, there’s the tragic story of Diane Malloy, whose needless death inspired the inauguration of Austin’s annual Homeless Memorial Service.

A few of the thousands of people experiencing homelessness have someone like Richard to tell their stories. There is help and encouragement — for instance, last year, graduates of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop started a writing class for such folks. Thanks to the Internet, many of the homeless are able to relate their own histories online and even publish the tales of their lives.

For The Huffington Post, Gabrielle Canon recounted the life of Carey Fuller, homeless mother of two, and author of the self-published Writings from the Driver’s Side. Canon says,

Fuller was cast into homelessness after the birth of her second child, when she could no longer afford rent as a single mother… Sensing she would soon be on the street, she used the last of her income — a $2,000 tax refund — to purchase the Winnebago… Each day she faced a reality of sleepless nights and life on the move. She worked the midnight shift, printing newspapers for $8 an hour while her two children slept inside their old RV in the parking lot outside.

The only thing unusual about this story is that it isn’t unusual at all. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, around 600,000 American families find themselves experiencing homelessness. And something needs to be done.

Canon says,

This is why Fuller continues to write, to spread her message to others who may be going through something similar, or who may not understand what homelessness in America is really like. She encourages other homeless parents to do the same.

One thing that could be done, that would help a lot, would be the adoption of the Universal Living Wage. The sad fact is, even a person working a full-time job, at minimum wage, can’t afford housing. This is economic homelessness. The benefit of the Universal Living Wage is that it will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.

Reactions?

Source: “Looking Up at the Bottom Line,” Amazon.com
Source: “Carey Fuller Chronicles Her Experiences As A Homeless Parent,” The Huffington Post, 03/10/11
Image by bryan thayer, used under its Creative Commons license.

There are three kinds of writing about the lives of people experiencing homelessness, and, naturally, the most authentic kind is a story told in the first person. When a street person tells the stories of other street people, that should count too, in the “first-person” category.

Ace Backwords writing about B. N. Duncan, for instance. Because these stories are often so similar, and because the lives of the storyteller and the subject intertwine, it’s the next best thing to an autobiography. And certainly a lot closer than anything attempted by a reporter.

Kirsten Anderberg is an outstanding chronicler, and we have mentioned other recorders of the homeless experience, like Mark Horvath, founder of We Are Visible and InvisiblePeople.tv. Horvath’s protracted escape from homelessness finally resulted in a “normal” life — but then he was homeless again, and then housed again.

In June, we reported the most recent development:

Mark Horvath will soon be technically homeless again, this time voluntarily. With another extensive InvisiblePeople.tv road trip coming up, it doesn’t make sense to keep an apartment. The furniture is going to newly-housed families, and the homeless advocate is hitting the road until November, and leaving things open-ended after that.

About one of his new acquaintances among the homeless, Horvath says,

This interview may be the most ‘interesting’ so far since I started InvisiblePeople.tv three years ago, and I am sure it’s at the top of the most colorful. I could have sit and listened to Brotha BlueStocking all day. In fact, this video does not even cover all the wonderful thoughts this man has to share. We have to work on getting people like Brotha BlueStocking their own cameras and laptops so they can tell their own stories, and we can all listen.

Now let’s enter the time machine and share with Mark Horvath the true story of his first night as a homeless person, way back in the mid 1990s. He wrote:

All of a sudden and without warning, I found myself homeless in Koreatown near downtown Los Angeles. I was sober, but I had no money, no place to go and no one I could call for help. I was officially homeless. This was all new to me. I had no homeless training. I had no clue how I was going to survive… I knew that the worst crimes in the city — muggings, beatings, shootings — happened at night to people living outdoors. I knew that when you sleep outside, you are vulnerable to just about everything. I was scared. Probably more scared then I have been or ever will be.

And then, there’s Michael Sullivan, the formerly homeless author of the novel Necessary Heartbreak, who vividly recalls the moment when he knew he had sunk low and his old life was truly gone:

My hair was grimy and my clothes smelled from having been worn for three straight weeks… It was holiday time and the train was packed, but it was my home at night during the winter of 1983-84. I was exhausted from walking so much, searching for a job. A seat opened up between two passengers and I sat down. A well-dressed woman gave me ‘the look.’

Ah, yes, the look that says, “You are something I should be scraping off my shoe.” For a self-aware person like Sullivan, the worst part of the experience was knowing it was the same look that, once upon a time, he had used on other people.

He says,

I was conditioned at a very young age to view all homeless people as worthless alcoholics and drug addicts. They were not human — they were thugs and murderers and a burden to society… During those bleak, frigid winter evenings and mornings, I realized that people who shared those subway rides probably thought of me in the same way.

Another author is Richard LeMieux, whose book is called Breakfast at Sally’s, and who was interviewed about it by someone from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. A formerly a successful businessman with three cars and three boats, he says,

On my 50th birthday, when I was traveling first class… the prospect that I would become homeless just eight years later would have caused me to double over with laughter… I considered myself a self-made man, successful by my own hard work and good judgment. I was confident and believed I had an answer for almost everything.

But when LeMieux first hit the streets, his answers came from the panhandlers and dumpster divers who gave him survival lessons. Suddenly, he was one of “them,” part of the ragged and faceless horde of wanderers, and, among “them,” he unexpectedly found sharing, protection, and respect. Even more so from the church workers.

He says,

When I lived on the streets I met many ‘angels’ who fed and clothed me and many others like me. I have known groups of women who have walked fearlessly down paths into the woods to bring food to homeless people in camps. Those women took dirty clothes out of the woods, washed them that night, and brought them back the next day with milk for homeless children, diapers for babies…

Like many others, LeMieux seems almost mystified at the disconnect between what’s happening at the bottom and what’s happening at the top. Face to face, one on one, he has met literally hundreds of people who were glad to help a down-and-out stranger. Yet the government bureaus and financial centers appear to be staffed by heartless robots intent on causing yet more destruction.

He says,

We live in what we call the greatest country on earth, yet we choose to let men, women, and children live on the streets, in the woods, and in parking lots as if they were living in a Third World country.

It’s a puzzler, isn’t it? And until we get it figured out, here’s what we have for now:

The benefit of the Universal Living Wage is that it will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.

Reactions?

Source: “Chronicling Homelessness: Mark Horvath,” House the Homeless, 06/21/11
Source: “Brotha BlueStocking,” InvisiblePeople.tv/blog, 10/03/11
Source: “My First Night Homeless: A True Story,” The Huffington Post, 04/20/11
Source: “I was homeless; ‘the look’ judged me worthless,” CNN.com, 01/26/11
Source: “Take Five! Q & A with Richard LeMieux,” EndHomelessness.org, 01/29/09
Image by mahalie (Mahalie Stackpole), used under its Creative Commons license.

All of us love love our pets. They’re part of the family. And homeless people are no exception. Download the HtH 2012 Pets Calendar, featuring some of the homeless men and women of Austin with the pets they love so much.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

This calendar is free, but if you would like to donate to HtH please click the PayPal button below.

Suggested Donation: $10

The illustration on this page is a graphic that was shared around on Facebook without attribution. In the comments, folks quibbled over the figures. Then someone opined that the illustration is not meant to be a literal, scientific document, but more of a cartoon. Cartoons are known to be an effective method for swiftly and painlessly transmitting ideas into the brain. That’s how, for instance, MAD magazine so brilliantly created a generation of skeptics that has ripened into the game-changing idealists of the 60s.

Indeed, a bit of research determines that the source of “Homelessness by Income” is The Onion, the satirical humor magazine. Part of an ongoing series of parodies of USA TODAY‘s graphs and charts, it was published more than 10 years ago. And it’s still not funny.

This summer, The Huffington Post included a piece about the “right to rent” concept, which its author, Dean Baker, has been proposing for several years from the position he occupies as co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Baker writes,

Under this proposal, foreclosed homeowners would be allowed to remain in their house as renters paying the market rent, for a substantial period of time (e.g. five years) following a foreclosure.

Incidentally, this may or may not be a sign of lowered expectations, but in a 2009 interview about how to keep people in their homes, Baker said,

And the best way I can think of is, how about we just give people the right to stay in their house as renters, pay the market rent, for a substantial period of time, five to ten years, something like that.

At any rate, the more recent piece explains the tangle that the whole mortgage scene has become, and some of the ways in which people think it can be fixed, and how the working-class homeowner/taxpayer pretty much ends up paying no matter what.

Baker writes,

It is no great handout. People will lose ownership of their home. But it will provide them with housing security for a substantial period of time. And it does it in a way that requires no taxpayer money and no new bureaucracy.

“Right to rent” would not, of course, help all the at-risk homeowners. Without jobs, they can’t pay rent in the house they were trying to buy, or anywhere else. But, for those who can afford it, the benefit would be great.

This idea has been mentioned again just recently, by Henry Blodget, who interviewed Professor James Galbraith of the University of Texas. Blodgett writes,

Professor Galbraith advocates giving homeowners the right to rent properties they formerly owned, which would force the banks to take losses on the original mortgages and then become landlords. Given the political climate, Professor Galbraith does not think the government will launch any programs that will significantly improve the housing market.

Speaking of mortgages, check out this disgusting story: “Top Foreclosure Firm Threw Homeless-Themed Halloween Bash.”

Aside from a small minority of rugged individualists and mentally disabled people who are so out of it, they don’t know what they’re doing, the vast majority of homeless people did not choose that condition. Racial minorities did not choose to be born as members of racial minorities, and the same element of non-choice is there in other protected groups.

They are protected in the sense that when crimes are committed against them for simply being who they are, those crimes are counted as particularly heinous, and are known as hate crimes. The Homeless Protected Class Resolution wants the indigenous homeless population to be legally regarded as a protected group.

Most people who live on the streets, in tent cities and trackside camps, in shelters, in cars, and vans, would prefer to be living in buildings. Why don’t they? Because — duh! — they can’t afford to. In fact, here’s something to consider, in regard to the Homeless Protected Class Resolution. It might not even be needed, if we had the Universal Living Wage.

We’re talking about adequate pay for a standard work week, and adequate means that a person could afford to live on it. Starting with being able to afford a place to live in, which a look at the Universal Living Wage page will show to be less and less possible for more and more Americans.

If you’ve read Looking Up at the Bottom Line, did you remember to “Like” it via every website that offers the opportunity? Did you know that the Universal Living Wage is on Facebook? Well, it is!

Reactions?

Source: “Homelessness by Income,” The Onion, 09/01/99
Source: “Right to Rent: Will the Obama Administration Finally Fix Housing?,” The Huffington Post, 06/27/11
Source: “Transcript: Thom talks to Dean Baker about “Right to Rent”,” ThomHartmann.com, 07/28/09
Source: “Yes, There Are Some Things Our Government Could Do To Help Housing, But It Won’t: Galbraith,” Yahoo! Finance, 10/24/11
Image of Homelessness by Income by The Onion,used under Fair Use: Reporting.

The increasing violence against people experiencing homelessness is a subject that previous posts have barely even begun to touch. The long list of incidents in “HPCR: Protect the Homeless From What?” was only the tip of the iceberg. Of course, the USA is not the only place where this happens, but it’s the place we know most about, and wish we didn’t.

Earlier this year, bizarre news came from Cleveland, OH, where Frank Dienes was charged with aggravated murder, tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse. What he allegedly did was shoot a homeless man in the head and bury the body in a shallow backyard grave. Actually, the victim, Joseph Kopp, was not technically homeless, since he had been staying there for more than a year. Why Kopp’s landlord went from benefactor to murderer is a murky question.

Journalist John Caniglia reported,

The Dieneses’ took in tenants, often people who had few other places to go, neighbors said. They said they believed the Dieneses wanted Kopp to move out, but they were unsure why.

Fifty-eight-year-old Kopp got around on a bicycle. Though mentally ill and resistant of treatment for it, he seems to have been known around the neighborhood as kind, friendly, and gregarious. He once saved up $400 working at odd jobs and donated it to a soup kitchen. Eight hundred people stopped by the funeral home to pay their respects, and 350 went to the service.

Apparently, Dienes tried to establish that he too was mentally ill, having hallucinations and so forth, but the judge didn’t buy it. The plot thickened when police began to look at Dienes again for the 1989 murder of a 10-year-old girl, Amy Mihajlevic, that he had been questioned about in the past.

Journalist Paul Kiska wrote,

Several neighbors say Joe Kopp… told them for years in the 1990s that Dienes killed Mihajlevic… Dienes and Kopp were neighbors 21 years ago in Seven Hills. ‘There was a relationship that went back quite some time and to what extent that relationship was and exactly what it was is something that I do think will be an issue at trial,’ [defense lawyer] Friedman said.

Supposedly, Kopp had even gone to the local police, to report something about Dienes and the dead girl, but they were not inclined to listen to a mentally ill homeless person. At any rate, Dienes is facing a jury trial next month, and no doubt the story will become even more complicated.

Most stories aren’t that complicated. Usually, it’s more like, a group of swaggering young men get drunk and go out looking for a homeless person to assault. Leaving aside for a moment all other considerations of morality and civilization, hate crimes are particularly stupid because they have no utility. Theft is at least understandable — the criminal gets money, or something to sell for money. There’s no profit in kicking the stuffing out of a homeless person.

Maybe that argument would work to stop these predators. They seem to think of themselves as great American patriots. But doing something without a profit motive is very un-American. So, cut it out, violent attackers.

And what about the rest of us, who don’t spend our evenings trolling for victims? We’re tuned in to the other ways in which persecuting the homeless is un-American. American is the Emma Lazarus poem attached to the Statue of Liberty, which explicitly mentions the words “poor” and “homeless”:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Everybody who ever arrived in this country started out homeless. Even the king’s favorites, who were given land, had to build shelter. Everybody’s ancestors included people experiencing homelessness, and some of our family trees have homeless people in them right now. And they’re having a rough time of it. Which is why the Homeless Protected Class Resolution proposes to recognize the indigent homeless population as deserving the rights and protections that go with that protected-class designation.

Reactions?

Source: “Seven Hills businessman charged with killing homeless man,” Blog.Cleveland.com/04/18/11
Source: “Family, community mourn Joe Kopp, slain homeless man,” Blog.Cleveland.com, 04/23/11
Source: “Attorneys for Frank Dienes say he’ll be cleared in Mihaljevic case again,” NewsNet5.com, 05/12/11
Image by striatic (hobvias sudoneighm), used under its Creative Commons license.

Some people feel vulnerable just walking from their car to their house. Imagine the paranoia quotient of being outside practically 24/7. Days are spent looking for work, medical care, or a meal. Or aimlessly filling in time, trying to find a corner where it’s possible to simply exist for a while. Nights are spent, with any luck at all, crowded in with a bunch of strangers who have TB and bedbugs. Sometimes, the nights are spent in parks, alleys, and other dangerous public places. Sometimes, when people have no other choice than sleeping rough, they never wake up.

This little catalog of horrors will quickly exemplify some of the incidents that have become all too frequent and familiar (sources available upon request):

* Cincinnati, OH, April 2010
Four men armed with baseball bats go to a homeless encampment, pick a victim at random, and assault him. (One of these creeps also recently shot the girlfriend of one of the other assailants.)
* Indianapolis, IN, April 2011
A schizophrenic, sleeping homeless man is beaten to death in an alley by a gang of youths, who leave and then return with more friends, to show off the dead body.
* Jersey City, NJ, May 2011
A resident stabs a homeless man nine times, killing him.
* New Bethlehem, PA, May 2011
Two male youths beat an elderly homeless man with iron pipes; a female accomplice drives the car.
* Columbus, OH, May, 2011
Two youths beat a homeless man and his dog.
* Charlotte, NC, June, 2011
A homeless man is assaulted by three teenagers.
*Boston, MA, July 2011
A 23-year-old stabs a 64-year-old homeless man, badly enough to put him in the hospital.
*Anchorage, AK, September 2011
Four youths, three of them technically minors, swoop down on mountain bikes to rob and seriously beat a homeless man.
* Sanford, FL, October 2011
A police lieutenant’s son assaults a homeless man for no reason. (This dude was also previously in trouble for beating up his girlfriend and for shooting somebody.)

Probably the most notorious instance of violence against the homeless, the one everybody has heard of, happened in Fullerton, CA, on July 5, when mentally disabled Kelly Thomas was pulverized by six police officers. After several days, the victim’s family gave up hope and had the life support turned off. Soon a videotape of the confrontation showed up on YouTube, causing outrage.

OC Weekly reporter Nick Schou remarked,

The onlookers discuss how the cops apparently have tased Thomas five times while he was already down on the ground. Disturbingly, you can hear someone, presumably Thomas, sobbing ‘Dad, dad, dad…’ over and over.

Fortunately, the victim’s father Ron Thomas is a former member of law enforcement himself, who personally put a lot of effort into cultivating the public indignation that will hopefully end the barbarous practices of the police department.

The following month’s City Council meeting overflowed with citizens anxious to have their say, reported Marisa Gerber. Many of them gave their own examples of police callousness and even brutality. Fullerton’s City Council decided to hire an independent investigator to look into Kelly Thomas’s death and the comportment of the police in general. It was suggested that some city officials should do the honorable thing and resign their offices. The city manager, with unbelievably inappropriate timing, asked for a raise.

Finally, in September, Officer Manuel Ramos was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, and Corporal Jay Cicinelli was charged with involuntary manslaughter and using excessive force. Gerber filed another story with the explicit title, “Where Things Stand A Day After The D.A. Charged Two Fullerton Policemen In The Beating Death of Kelly Thomas.” She wrote,

Three members of the Fullerton city council… Mayor Richard Jones, Mayor Pro Tem Don Bankhead and Councilman Pat McKinley … are being recalled largely because of how they handled the aftermath of Kelly Thomas’ beating …

Not surprisingly, Mayor Pro Tem Bankhead is a 31-year veteran of the Fullerton police force, and Councilman McKinley was the city’s chief of police for 16 years. McKinley had, in fact, hired the two officers charged in the death of Kelly Thomas.

Ron Thomas and his backers, known as “Kelly’s Army,” then turned their efforts to making sure blame will be shared by the other four officers involved in his son’s death, which is also being investigated by the FBI.

The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) keeps track of hate crimes by state. In 2009, the Coalition counted 74 non-lethal attacks and 43 lethal attacks against people experiencing homelessness in the United States. These are not violent altercations between homeless people, but aggression committed by housed people against people experiencing homelessness.

NCH also sums up the decade:

Over the past eleven years (1999-2009), advocates and shelter workers around the country have received news reports of men, women and even children being harassed, kicked, set on fire, beaten to death, and decapitated. From 1999 through 2009, in forty-seven states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, there have been one thousand seventy-four acts of violence committed by housed individuals, resulting in two hundred ninety-one deaths of homeless people and seven hundred eighty-three victims of non-lethal violence.

Who knows how many unreported attacks and undiscovered murders there might be? And how can all this be ended? Please discover the Homeless Protected Class Resolution and learn how to help.

Reactions?

Source: “Kelly Thomas’ Officer-Involved Death Was Videotaped; Councilman Calls For Release to Public,” OC Weekly’s Navel Gazing blog, 07/25/11
Source: “Fullerton Hires Independent Probe Into Kelly Thomas Beating, Dozens Speak At City Council Meeting,” OC Weekly’s Navel Gazing blog, 08/17/11
Source: “Where Things Stand A Day After The D.A. Charged Two Fullerton Policemen In The Beating Death of Kelly Thomas,” OC Weekly’s Navel Gazing blog, 09/22/11
Image by quinn.anya (Quinn Dombrowski), used under its Creative Commons license.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we all know people who used to be homeless. We all know people who will be homeless. It could even be us. It’s interesting to ponder on the people who have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.

The life of a recently deceased millionaire computer genius Steve Jobs had a precarious beginning, as described by Ivana Kvesic:

Jobs ultimately decided to drop out of Reed College and did so because he trusted that ‘it would all work out ok.’ However, during this process, Jobs became homeless. As a Reed drop out, Jobs did not have a dorm room and slept on the floor of his friends’ dormitories. Being a homeless and unemployed student required Jobs to return coke bottles to earn money for food and walk seven miles across town to get a free meal once a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

British author Colin Wilson was one of the “angry young men,” the creative yet alienated generation whose influence led to what we call the Sixties. After the 1956 publication of The Outsiders, he was recognized as the foremost philosopher of phenomenological existentialism, and went on to a prolific career as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Before The Outsiders, he was just another young bum, by night sleeping rough in one of London’s parks, by day working on his manuscript in the reading room of the British Museum.

Vietnam veteran and multi-book author Bruce Goldwell was homeless in Los Angeles for more than nine years. He is quoted as saying,

To have gone from living in an alley behind Dennis Hopper’s house to now having a book published in another country felt like such a different direction for me. I was no longer falling deeper into despair but climbing the ladder to a whole new level of success.

In the November 2005 issue of Smithsonian Magazine (which is not online), Roy Rowan profiled photographer Gordon Parks as one of the 35 people who made a difference in the world. When Parks was 16, his mother died, and he stayed only a short time with his sister before, as Rowan says,

Her hard-boiled husband soon kicked him out of the house, forcing Gordon to spend his nights riding trolley cars back and forth… and scrounging food to continue going to high school.

Today, thousands and thousands of kids are in that kind of situation, and not all of them are so lucky in finding places to spend the night. (Incidentally, Ben Franklin, whose portrait is on the $100 bill, was a 17-year-old runaway.)

After his first self-produced stage play failed, Tyler Perry called his car home, or inhabited a succession of hotel rooms rented by the week. As an actor, writer, director, and producer in movies and TV — and doing it his way every step of the way — Perry went on to become one of the wealthiest African-Americans in show business, said to have a net worth of about $350 million.

Other current celebrities who were once homeless include Halle Berry, Sylvester Stallone, William Shatner, Hilary Swank, and Jim Carrey. A documentary film called Dressed was made about fashion designer Nary Manivong, formerly a homeless abandoned child. Athlete James Jones grew up in shelters. Mark Bittner, whose life was documented in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, spent 15 years on the street. The list goes on and on.

At AngelFire.com, someone has taken the trouble to compile a list of “Noted Individuals Who Have Experienced Homelessness” — 182 of them, including Charlie Chaplin, Sally Jesse Raphael, Cary Grant, David Letterman, “Colonel” Harland Sanders, Martin Sheen, Shania Twain, Dr. Phil, The Road to Wealth author Suze Orman, and Gautama Buddha.

You are invited to learn more about the Homeless Protected Class Resolution, a document that could impact the life of someone you love.

Reactions?

Source: “Steve Jobs: From Homeless Drop-Out to Innovative Millionaire,” Christian Post, 10/08/11
Source: “Vietnam Veteran Turned Homeless Veteran Turned International Author,” PRLog, 03/13/11
Source: “Dressed, a Doc on Fashionista Nary Manivong, Gets Snagged on Cliches,” The Village Voice, 02/02/11
Source: “Noted Individuals Who Have Experienced Homelessness,” AngelFire, 10/01/11
Image by Kedume (David Alcubierre), used under its Creative Commons license.

In our society, housing is a problem so impossible that people with multiple university degrees have spent entire careers concentrating on one little corner of the problem. And, apparently, haven’t gotten very far. Part of the problem is always the current structure and personnel of the government, whether local, state, or federal.

There are answers to the housing dilemma. And there are local, state, and federal laws. And there is a very small area of overlap, where some of the answers that have been found are congruent with what’s allowed by the law.

Year after year, brilliant young architecture students win awards for designing livable spaces that can be mass-produced, or made from recycled materials or repurposed buildings, or made cheaply from indigenous materials. Plenty of good solutions have been found that could increase both temporary and permanent housing. Where are they? Lost in a maze of zoning laws, code requirements, and other rules that exist all too often to prop up the privileged status of some group or profession, having nothing at all to do with real human needs.

Trailers have always been a cheap housing alternative. Now, in cities where mobile home parks were formerly tolerated, local real estate interests, neighborhood associations, and callous politicians band together to get rid of them. In many places, even house-like doublewide trailers that are anchored down and landscaped are shunned by neighbors.

There are all kinds of solutions. This six-minute video shows a 78-square-foot apartment created by a Manhattan architect who is very happy in it. Sure, there’s a shared bathroom, but many people get along fine sharing bathrooms, including college students and soldiers. A shared bathroom is better than no bathroom at all. An old factory could be retrofitted with hundreds of mini-apartments like this one.

Here is the kind of headline we see all too often lately: “Recession Takes Severe Toll on Low-Income Renters,” a story in which Tony Pugh traces the recent history of housing in America:

Very-low-income renters who don’t receive government housing assistance are considered to have ‘worst-case housing needs’ if they live in poor conditions or their rent consumes more than half their incomes. All family types, all racial and ethnic groups and all regions of the country saw an increase in these distressed renters…

In many areas, government programs are a joke, with waiting lists so long the children grow up before housing becomes available. Incredible amounts of money are spent providing the band-aid of temporary shelter. Emergency and short-term shelter is necessary, of course, but somehow nothing gets done toward providing any lasting alleviation of homelessness. For example,

Massachusetts spends tens of millions of dollars for this yet the long-term result is hundreds of families are still without permanent homes.

The problems of housing are endless, and the whole mortgage mess is almost beyond human comprehension. One of the interesting tales in Looking Up at the Bottom Line, by the way, is of Richard R. Troxell’s days as “self-appointed Mortgage Foreclosure Preventionist.” His activist organization actually convinced a sheriff to initiate a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures in the county. (Apparently this set a good precedent, as the same thing also happened more recently in Chicago.) This is the kind of law enforcement we need more of.

For Richard, his knowledge and experience led to a job, and to his moving west, of which he says,

The town of Austin, Texas had already had a boom in the mid 1980s involving questionable savings and loan lending practices, which had ended in a debacle. The banks had been left holding thousands of foreclosed upon houses and empty buildings across the southwest in its wake. Homelessness had already come to Austin.

In the Homeless Protected Class Resolution (HPCR), Richard takes note of the fact that the U.S. government has adopted the United Nations’ Habitat Agenda, whose aims include:

… protection against discrimination, legal security of tenure and equal access to land including women and the poor; effective protection from illegal forced evictions, taking human rights into consideration, bearing in mind that homeless people should not be penalized for their status…

Signatories to the Habitat Agenda agreed to adopt policies making housing more habitable, affordable, and accessible, even to those who are “unable to secure adequate housing through their own means.”

Here in America, there is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing, and it’s one of the major areas needing change. Massive change. The Homeless Protected Class Resolution can’t make anybody go out and fill the landscape with affordable housing for everyone. But it can go some way toward dealing with the consequences of the fact that everyone does not have affordable housing.

Learn more about the HPCR today, subscribe to the newsletter, and sign the petition.

Reactions?

Source: “Manhattan shoebox apartment: a 78-square-foot mini studio,” YouTube.com
Source: “Recession Takes Severe Toll on Low-Income Renters,” McClatchyDC.com, 02/01/11
Source: “Millions Spent On Motels For Mass. Homeless,” TheBostonChannel.com
Image by Glamour Schatz (Angel Schatz), used under its Creative Commons license.