What Kind of Help Really Helps?

Music is Life @ Djemaa el FnaPeople experiencing homelessness do not always remain adrift. Sometimes they land on a friendly shore. Is it all a matter of luck? Or do their stories contain factors that could be applied more generally? What kind of help was extended to them by nonprofit groups, local businesses, individual benefactors, faith-based organizations, the media, or the government? What kind of help really helps?

Last time, we found that, for veteran Bill Jenkins, the things that made a difference were Alcoholics Anonymous and the nonprofit Veterans First. What helps even more, he told the reporter, is the respect given him by fellow citizens who recognize the contributions he has made to the community.

In the realm of show business, a person’s housing status is less important than whether they make it to the recording studio on time. Of course, it always helps to have a stable residence as a center of operations.

In January, Eminem signed a rapper called Yelawolf, who had been on the streets for about a year, to his record label. Since then, the young musician has been homeless in a whole different way, touring the U.S. and Europe.

Everybody heard about Ted Williams, the widely publicized “Homeless Man with a Golden Voice.” After being “discovered” by a journalist, he was introduced to many opportunities, but was psychologically unable to cope with the sudden changes in his life. This seems to be the theory held by Cord Jefferson, who describes the arc of Williams’s career and reflects,

In the future, it would probably be wise for Americans and the media to remember that people emerging from the depths to which Williams sank need time to recover before they’re thrown in front of cameras and lights and millions of people. Nobody’s saying that it can’t be done, of course, but it shouldn’t be done over night. And when people crash and burn because they weren’t ready for the spotlight, it seems wholly wrong to immediately forget about them.

Vicki Lawrence followed up with a video piece in which she plays a character called “Homeless Mama,” which is seen as either a humorous parody or a mean-spirited attack on the homeless, depending on who you ask.

Country singer Miranda Lambert’s parents were private investigators, a profession which apparently doesn’t pay very well or support a stable domesticity. Journalist Carina Adly MacKenzie titles her article, “Miranda Lambert spent part of childhood homeless bankrupt,” and says,

In fact, her family occasionally sheltered abused women and children at their home. These women inspired one of Lambert’s biggest hits, ‘Gunpowder & Lead.’

In The New Yorker, Dana Goodyear recounted the story of Nathaniel Ayers. This amazingly talented musician suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and went from the Skid Row streets of Los Angeles to being the subject of a book titled The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. And then his story was made into a movie that starred Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr.

In fact, it appears that what turned things around for Ayers was the interest taken in him by Steve Lopez, who first publicized the story of the homeless musical genius in a series of columns, then published the book. Like the golden-voiced homeless man Ted Williams, Ayers and his story captured the imagination of someone with the skill and the platform to make it public.

The other deciding factor was his membership in the Lamp Community, the Los Angeles nonprofit organization that follows the “housing first” principle. For helping people one at a time, there are not enough reporters to go around. Or enough facilities like Lamp.

The good news is that we don’t need to be newspaper journalists or shelter administrators in order to help this situation. There are plenty of different ways to help, and one of them is to learn about, and spread the word about, the Universal Living Wage.

Reactions?

Source: “Eminem signs homeless rapper,” Musicrooms.net, 01/18/11
Source: “A Month Later, ‘Homeless Man with a Golden Voice’ Is Abandoned by His Corporate Friends,” Good, 02/25/11
Source: “Vicki Lawrence as Homeless Mama,” Youtube.com
Source: “Miranda Lambert spent part of childhood homeless, bankrupt,” Zap2it, 11/04/10
Source: “Dana Goodyear, Letter from Los Angeles,” The New Yorker, 05/05/08
Image by Vincent van der Pas, used under its Creative Commons license.

7 Comments
by Pat Hartman on August 11, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Homelessness, The Urban Poor
Posted by Pat Hartman on August 11, 2011

http://www.endhomelessnessblog.com/what-kind-of-help-really-helps/

A Veteran’s Success Story

Homeless in BostonYvette Cabrera, a columnist for the Orange County Register, recently profiled Bill Jenkins, a disabled Army veteran who, after experiencing homelessness for a spell, has now found a place. The publication of the article, “Homeless to respected: Vet earns it” coincided with Jenkins’ graduation to the independent-living phase of his program.

The program is sponsored by Veterans First, described as “the only nonprofit in Orange County, CA offering veterans a wide range of services: case management, counseling, substance abuse programs, job training and placement and homeless shelter.” In the usual way of things, a participant has as long as two years to reach the independent-living stage. Jenkins has fulfilled the requirements in a mere eight months.

Now in Alcoholics Anonymous and sober for nine months, Jenkins lives on his military pension. The apartment he moves into will be partly paid for with federal funds, and he will be subject to case management for a period of time. Someone keeps an eye on the graduates so, if there is any backsliding, they can help before it’s too late.

Cabrera says,

Jenkins is proud of the work he’s done to turn his life around. But he gets even more satisfaction from his work helping other veterans who are still homeless. Others might ignore or look down on these men and women, but Jenkins considers many to be friends and all well worth helping.

At the group home, he was the “Information Liaison” person, responsible for keeping up with and spreading the latest news on available resources and how to tap into them. He speaks to groups, and he helped as a street guide for the Orange County homeless census. Jenkins is working to organize the county’s first Veterans’ Stand Down.

For his service at the cold-weather shelter, the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation gave Jenkins an award. The journalist says,

Jenkins acknowledges that much of his progress is due to sobriety and to having a home base, a place where he can stabilize himself. But there’s more to the equation. Jenkins has carved out a place for himself in society, a role; a reason to stay sober and in a home… ‘It’s neat for me to have people who call me by my first name and know that I’ve made a difference somewhere along the way; where they actually remember me,’ says Jenkins. ‘This isn’t something I want to walk away from.’

In general, there are at least three things to consider about volunteer work. The obvious and empirically proven aspect is that helping others is one of the essential elements in any recovery program. That’s just how people are built, and if it works, don’t fix it.

Sometimes a volunteer situation turns into or leads to paid work, which is even better. A space is left for someone else whose recovery program includes helping others, while the person who now has a paying job can move on, to volunteer in some other area of need.

On the other hand, things could still be better. To make an approximate analogy, large numbers of recovering addicts have become drug counselors. Sometimes, that’s the best they can hope for as employment. Which shows that society still needs a whole lot of fixing. If a formerly homeless person becomes a homeless advocate, it should be a choice made because they have a passion for the work, not a position accepted because there are no better options.

Let’s dare to imagine a world where there is no need for drug counselors or rape counselors, or any other kind of trauma counselors, or even a need for homeless advocates. Let’s go all the way and just end homelessness. Richard R. Troxell is convinced this can be done. House the Homeless supports the Universal Living Wage, the benefit of which is that it will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all of 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless to respected: Vet earns it,” OCRegister.com, 08/03/11
Image by jdn (Jack Newton), used under its Creative Commons license.

12 Comments
by Pat Hartman on August 9, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Homelessness, Social Justice
Posted by Pat Hartman on August 9, 2011

http://www.endhomelessnessblog.com/a-veterans-success-story/

To Avoid Homelessness, Workers Need Better Pay

Abandoned-4“Corporate America’s chokehold on wages” is a piece by Harold Meyerson that appeared in The Washington Post, Austin’s The Statesman, and many other newspapers. The author begins by engaging our interest in the question of why we, as American consumers, are still in a dismal economic situation. The answer is twofold: a lot of people are unemployed, and a lot of people with jobs are underpaid.

Writing in a conversational tone, Meyerson explores the implications of the words and ideas of J.P. Morgan Chase’s chief investment officer, Michael Cembalest. The journalist says of Cembalest,

He asserted in the July 11 edition of ‘Eye on the Market,’ the bank’s regular report to its private banking clients, that ‘US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.’

There are three major reasons why corporate profits are flourishing: low wages, the offshoring of jobs, and innovation stemming from research and development. The biggest factor contributing to swollen profits, Meyerson says, is the low pay. In the 500 top companies that Standard & Poor keeps track of,

… profit margins (the share of a company’s revenue that goes to profits)… are at their highest levels since the mid-1960s…

Meyerson gives a very complete explanation, the gist of which is that, for workers, both wages and benefits have shrunk. He writes,

This decline in wages and benefits, Cembalest calculates, is responsible for about 75 percent of the increase in our major corporations’ profit margins.

As for the causes, there seem to be several. Although good pay is better than easy credit, something went wrong years ago, when it became easier for Americans to get ruinous amounts of credit than to get the adequate wages they needed and deserved. It’s like bringing up a child on cotton candy instead of vegetables. The long-term results can be gruesome.

Also, Meyerson blames the decline of the unions and talks about a hearing held by the National Labor Relations Board in July, during which testimony from 61 witnesses has revealed that…

… union elections have declined 80 percent since 1970… In the America of 2011, there are scarcely any union organizing campaigns. There are fewer union members: Just 7 percent of private-sector employees are unionized, down from 35 percent in the 1950s… The strike as a bargaining tool for workers is now the province of professional athletes, the last American employees who have enough clout even to contemplate taking a walk… Surely the fact that the great majority of American employers no longer have to sit down and hammer out collective bargaining contracts with their workers has contributed to the increase in profits at wages’ expense.

One thing that corporations often forget is that underpaid workers can’t afford to buy stuff. And who are underpaid workers not able to buy stuff from? The corporations. If almost everybody is broke, who is left to fill the role of consumer, customer, or client? In other words, stiffing the workers would seem to be a counterproductive policy, in the long run. Paying people fairly, even generously, is good for business.

Yet, most working people are underpaid. Some have supplemental means, or extraordinary management skills, or three jobs. They contrive to hang on by their fingernails to a viable lifestyle, and experience a relatively high degree of housing security.

Others are the working poor. Even with a full-time job, many workers are unable to afford housing even for themselves. And a family? Forget it. The working poor are tossed from one precarious situation to the next, sometimes living in a vehicle or a relative’s garage, often dependent on an aid program to make it at all, eternally teetering on the edge of disaster. The economic homeless are employed and ought to have every reasonable expectation of being able to afford a place to live, and yet, they can’t.

House the Homeless invites you to learn more about the Universal Living Wage. The benefit of the ULW is that it will end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all of 10.1 million minimum-wage workers.

Reactions?

Source: “Corporate America’s chokehold on wages,” WashingtonPost.com, 07/19/11
Image by Vimages (Pierre Vignau), used under its Creative Commons license.

8 Comments
by Pat Hartman on August 3, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Homelessness, Social Justice, The Urban Poor, Universal Living Wage
Posted by Pat Hartman on August 3, 2011

http://www.endhomelessnessblog.com/to-avoid-homelessness-workers-need-better-pay/

Creating Homelessness in the Antelope Valley, Part 2

Phonehenge West - Schiro

The story titled “L.A. County’s Private Property War,” by the L.A. Weekly‘s Mars Melnicoff, goes into extensive detail about how the ruggedly independent settlers and longtime landowners of California’s Antelope Valley are being cleared out. About five years ago, they noticed an increase in the selective enforcement of zoning rules and building codes, along with general hassling and harassment.

When they got together and compared notes, they realized that something dark, insidious, and deliberate is going on. Paranoia? Doesn’t look like it. Looks like a major land grab, pure and simple, for the benefit of developers with big ideas. The likelihood of this is clear to attorney Robert McNamara of the Institute for Justice, who is quoted:

That certainly does happen. We have seen zoning enforcement that can be explained by nothing else.

Besides, the longest-serving member of the county Board of Supervisors has already revealed his plans for the area on his website. Unfortunately, the place is within commuting distance of Los Angeles. It’s a hardscrabble existence for the “desert rats,” but with them out of the way, corporate investment in amenities could turn the area into… anything.

One after another, families and individuals are being manipulated into leaving, through penalties for victimless misdemeanors and code violations. It doesn’t matter that a community is destroyed. It doesn’t matter how many people are losing what they had worked for all their lives, or how many local businesses go under. Somebody wants them out of there.

Melnicoff says,

Tough code enforcement has been ramped up in these unincorporated areas of L.A. County, leaving the iconoclasts who chose to live in distant sectors of the Antelope Valley frightened, confused and livid. They point the finger at the Board of Supervisors’ Nuisance Abatement Teams, known as NAT, instituted in 2006…

The NAT crew makes first contact armed, and clad in bulletproof vests — an entire team of Sheriff’s deputies, health inspectors, District Attorney’s investigators, zoning officers, inspectors from Building and Safety, and animal control personnel. (Speaking of which, the same kind of multi-agency, heavily armed contingent is sent out against 85-year-old grannies with too many cats. That’s just how they do things in L.A. County.)

The head of the NAT maintains that the safety of his teams is more important than the convenience of someone in an “unknown structure.” Oscar Castaneda, pastor of a historic church in one of the area’s few towns, knows about this. After 22 years of peace and quiet, he was ordered one day to “freeze” in front of his home, out in the middle of nowhere.

An elderly woman in a similarly remote spot exited her cabin to find it surrounded by combatants in body armor, with guns drawn. These crews show up and tell people they are living on their land illegally, and threaten them with liens and bulldozers. People have been jailed for trespassing on their own land. Most of those affected can’t afford lawyers and can’t afford to hire helpers for the wrecking work. People who thought they were safely retired are forced to dismantle their own homes board by board and nail by nail.

Melnicoff says,

Some residents believe that county Nuisance Abatement Teams order the more modest compliance actions first, such as weed-clearing, then build up to ordering residents to remove their homes, saving the county from paying for costly cleanup once a dweller with little financial means is pushed out.

Their methods are effective. The reporter tells of an “off-the-grid family living atop a 4,000-foot mountain,” just trying to be left alone and care for their mentally disabled adult son. The Kirpsies were prosecuted as criminals, in violation for their old trailer homes and scrap-metal recycle heaps. They only avoided prison by agreeing to totally clear the land and move to another state. There’s one family gotten rid of. They had somewhere to go, but others don’t.

Zoning official Oscar Gomez ought to have his own stand-up comedy act. He told Melnicoff that horrid things like sheds and trailers “bring the property value down.” Wait, what? The stakeholders are the people who currently own their land, and who built homes planning to stay there forever and never sell anyway. Why is the county making the “property value” its problem? Why is the county blathering on about “safety,” as if homelessness will somehow be “safer” than even the most ramshackle dwelling?

Kevin Scanlon’s five-minute videotape introduces a few of the people and homes referenced in the article. And treat yourself to Devin Schiro’s enchanting video portrait of Phonehenge West, an architectural marvel 20 years in the making. Many believe it should be preserved like the Watts Towers, the Winchester Mystery House, and other examples of American folk art.

Schiro invites viewers to:

… join a growing community of people who protest what we consider the senseless persecution of a man whose only ‘offense’ is taking a stand on behalf of beauty, creativity, and the inalienable right of free expression.

It is heartbreaking to hear retired phone technician Kim Fahey recount his relationship with the authorities. Fahey became the national media face of this struggle because of the remarkable desert structure, which is being demolished despite the fact that he deliberately built it to exceed the code requirements.

He lost his five-year court fight last month, and has already been jailed and bailed out, and then hospitalized for a medical problem exacerbated by all the stress. He could end up serving seven years in prison, for building a house. On his land alone, there are several people facing homelessness.

Fahey told the reporter,

The story is more important than me, because they are doing this to thousands of people. I’m just trying to bring it to the forefront.

Reactions?

Source: “L.A. County’s Private Property War,” LAWeekly.com, 06/23/11
Source: “L.A. County’s Private Property War (VIDEO),” LAWeekly, 06/23/11
Screen capture of Phonehenge West by Devin Schiro, used with permission.

7 Comments
by Pat Hartman on July 28, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Homelessness, Media, Particular Cities
Posted by Pat Hartman on July 28, 2011

http://www.endhomelessnessblog.com/creating-homelessness-in-the-antelope-valley-part-2/