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USA > History > 2010 > Economy > Poverty (I)
Bill Day
Tennessee
Cagle
15 September 2010
Los Angeles
Confronts Homelessness Reputation
December 12, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
LOS ANGELES — It was just past dusk in the upscale enclave of Brentwood as a
homeless man, wrapped in a tattered gray blanket, stepped into a doorway to
escape a light rain, watching the flow of people on their way to the high-end
restaurants that lined the street.
Across town in Hollywood the next morning, homeless people were wandering up and
down Sunset Boulevard, pushing shopping carts and slumped at bus stops. More
homeless men and women could be found shuffling along the boardwalks of Venice
and Santa Monica, while a few others were spotted near the heart of Beverly
Hills, the very symbol of Los Angeles wealth.
And, as always, San Julian Street, the infamous center of Skid Row on the south
edge of downtown Los Angeles, was teeming: a small city of people were making
the street their home in a warm December sun, waiting for one of the many
missions there to serve a meal.
At a time when cities across the country have made significant progress over the
past decade in reducing the number of homeless, in no small part by building
permanent housing, the problem seems intractable in the County of Los Angeles.
It has become a subject of acute embarrassment to some civic leaders, upset over
the county’s faltering efforts, the glaring contrast of street poverty and
mansion wealth, and any perception of a hardhearted Los Angeles unmoved by a
problem that has motivated action in so many other cities.
For national organizations trying to eradicate homelessness, Los Angeles — with
its 48,000 people living on the streets, including 6,000 veterans, according to
one count — stands as a stubborn anomaly, an outlier at a time when there has
been progress, albeit modest and at times fitful, in so many cities.
Its designation as the homeless capital of America, a title that people here
dislike but do not contest, seems increasingly indisputable.
“If we want to end homelessness in this country, we have to do something about
L.A.; it is the biggest nut,” said Nan Roman, the president of the National
Alliance to End Homelessness. “It has more homeless people than anyplace else.”
Neil J. Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the
Homeless, said he believed that, after years of decline, there had been a slight
rise in the number of homeless nationally this year because of the economic
downturn, and that Los Angeles had led the way.
“Los Angeles’s homeless problem is growing faster than the overall national
problem,” he said, “trending upwards in every demographic, dashing every hope of
progress anywhere.”
In a reflection of the growing concern here, a task force created by the Chamber
of Commerce and the United Way of Greater Los Angeles has stepped in with a
plan, called Home for Good, to end homelessness here in five years. The idea is
to, among other things, build housing for 12,000 of the chronically unemployed
and provide food, maintenance and other services at a cost of $235 million a
year.
The proposal, based on the task force’s study of what other cities had done, was
embraced by political and civic leaders even as it served as a reminder of how
many of these plans have failed over the years.
“This is not rocket science,” said Zev Yaroslavsky of the County Board of
Supervisors. “It’s been done in New York, it’s been done in Atlanta, and it’s
been done in San Francisco.”
Part of the impetus for this most recent flurry of attention is concern in the
business and political communities that the epidemic is threatening to tarnish
Los Angeles’s national image and undercut a campaign to promote tourism,
particularly in downtown, which has been in the midst of a transformation of
sorts, with a boom of museums, concert halls, restaurants, boutiques, parks and
lofts.
The gentrification has pushed many of the homeless people south, but they can
still be seen settled on benches and patches of grass in the center of downtown.
“If you have a homeless problem, then your sense of security is diminished, and
that makes people not want to come,” said Jerry Neuman, a co-chairman of the
task force. “It’s a problem that diminishes us in many ways: the way we view
ourselves and the way other people view us.”
Fittingly enough, it was even the subject of a movie last year, “The Soloist,”
which portrayed the relationship between a Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve
Lopez, who has written extensively about the homeless, and a musician living on
the streets.
The obstacles seem particularly great in this part of the country. The warm
climate has always been a draw for homeless people. And the fact that people
sleeping outside rarely die of exposure means there is less pressure on civic
leaders to act. (In New York City, when a homeless woman known only as “Mama”
was found dead at Grand Central Terminal on a frigid Christmas in 1985, it was
front-page news that inspired a campaign to deal with the epidemic.)
The governmental structure here, of a county that includes 88 cities and a maze
of conflicting jurisdictions, responsibilities and boundaries, has defused
responsibility and made it nearly impossible for any one organization or person
to take charge.
And Los Angeles is a place where people drive almost everywhere, so there are
fewer of the reminders of homelessness — walking around a sleeping person on a
sidewalk, responding to requests for money at the corner — that are common in
concentrated cities like New York.
“It’s easy to get up in the morning, go to work, drive home and never encounter
someone who is homeless,” said Wendy Greuel, the Los Angeles city controller. “I
don’t think it’s seeped into the public’s consciousness that homelessness is a
problem.”
The homelessness task force offered its plan at a conference that attracted some
of the top elected officials here, including Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and
three of the five members of the Board of Supervisors, a notable show of
political support.
“We believe that with the release of this plan, we now have a blueprint to end
chronic homelessness and veteran homelessness,” said Christine Marge, director
of housing for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
Yet in a time of severe budget retrenchment, the five-year goal seems daunting.
Even though the drafters of the plan say that no new money will be needed to
finance it — Los Angeles is already spending more than $235 million a year on
hospital, overnight housing and police costs dealing with the homeless —
government financing of all social services has come under assault.
“I don’t for a minute think it’s not going to require a tremendous amount of
political will to make it happen,” said Richard Bloom, the mayor of Santa
Monica. “Do I think it can happen? Yes, because I’ve seen what happens in other
cities, like New York City, Denver and Boston.”
Still, Mr. Bloom, who said he regularly attended conferences involving officials
from other communities, added: “Our numbers are way out of whack with those
numbers I hear elsewhere. It’s just so much more enormous and daunting here.”
Los Angeles Confronts
Homelessness Reputation,
NYT,
12.12.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13homeless.html
When Home Has No Place to Park
October 3, 2010
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT
LOS ANGELES — Every day, Diane Butler and her husband park their two
hand-painted R.V.’s in a lot at the edge of Venice Beach here, alongside dozens
of other rickety, rusted campers from the 1970s and ’80s. During the day, she
sells her artwork on the boardwalk. When the parking lot closes at sunset, she
and the other R.V.-dwellers drive a quarter-mile inland to find somewhere on the
street to park for the night.
Their nomadic existence might be ending, though. The Venice section of Los
Angeles has become the latest California community to enact strict new
regulations limiting street parking and banning R.V.’s from beach lots —
regulations that could soon force Ms. Butler, 58, to leave the community where
she has lived for four decades.
“They’re making it hard for people in vehicles to remain in Venice,” she said.
Southern California, with its forgiving weather, has long been a popular
destination for those living in vehicles and other homeless people. And for
decades, people living in R.V.’s, vans and cars have settled in Venice, the
beachfront Los Angeles community once known as the “Slum by the Sea” and famous
for its offbeat, artistic culture.
Yet even as the economic downturn has forced more people out of their homes and
into their cars, vehicle-dwellers are facing fewer options, with more
communities trying to push them out.
As nearby neighborhoods and municipalities passed laws restricting overnight
parking in recent years, Venice became the center of vehicle dwelling in the
region. More than 250 vehicles now serve as shelter on Venice streets, according
to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“The only place between Santa Barbara and San Diego where campers can park seven
blocks from the beach is this little piece of land,” said City Councilman Bill
Rosendahl, whose district includes Venice. “Over the years, it’s only gotten
worse, as every other community along the coast has adopted restrictions.”
In the past, bohemian Venice was tolerant of vehicle-dwellers, but,
increasingly, the proliferation of R.V.’s in this gentrifying neighborhood has
prompted efforts to remove them.
“The status quo is unacceptable,” said Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice
Stakeholders Association, a group of residents devoted to removing R.V.’s from
the area. “It’s time to give us some relief from R.V.’s parking on our
doorsteps.”
A bitter debate has raged between residents who want to get rid of R.V.’s and
those who want to combat the problems of homelessness in the community by
offering safe places to park and access to public bathrooms. Last year,
residents voted to establish overnight parking restrictions, but the California
Coastal Commission twice vetoed the plan.
However, a recent incident involving an R.V. owner’s arrest on charges of
dumping sewage into the street has accelerated efforts to remove
vehicle-dwellers. Starting this week, oversize vehicles will be banned from the
beach parking lots; an ordinance banning them from parking on the street
overnight could take effect within a month.
While Mr. Rosendahl supported parking restrictions, he has also secured $750,000
from the city to pay for a pilot program to house R.V.-dwellers. Modeled after
efforts in Santa Barbara and Eugene, Ore., the Vehicles to Homes program will
offer overnight parking for vehicle-dwellers who agree to meet certain
conditions, with the goal of moving participants into permanent housing.
“For people who want help, we’ll support them,” Mr. Rosendahl said. “The others
can take their wheels and go up the coast or somewhere else, God bless them.
It’s not our responsibility to be the only spot where near-homelessness is dealt
with in the state of California.”
While some have expressed interest in the program, many said they did not want
to subject themselves to curfews and oversight or had no means or desire to
return to renting. Mr. Ryavec believes few will participate.
“I will not debate that some people are mentally ill, indigent or drugged out,”
Mr. Ryavec said. “But my stance is that the bulk of these people are making a
lifestyle choice.”
Still, according to Gary L. Blasi, a law professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and an activist on homeless issues, most people choose
to live in vehicles only when the alternative is sleeping in a shelter or on the
street.
“The idea of carefree vagabonds is statistically false,” Professor Blasi said.
“More often, these are people who lived in apartments in Venice before they
lived in R.V.’s. The reason for losing housing is usually the loss of a job or
some health care crisis.”
Even if all the vehicle-dwellers in Venice wanted to participate, the pilot
program will accommodate only a small fraction of them. In Southern California,
though, there may not be anywhere else R.V.’s can legally park. According to
Neil Donovan, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless,
ordinances banning R.V.’s have spread from metropolitan areas into the suburbs
as vehicle-dwellers venture farther afield in search of somewhere to sleep.
“Communities are now forming a patchwork of ordinances, which virtually
prohibits a geographic cure to the situation,” Mr. Donovan said. “If you’re in a
community and they tell you to leave, you can’t just go to the next community,
because they establish similar ordinances, especially in California.”
Mr. Donovan said vehicle-dwellers often end up on the street after their
vehicles are towed or become inoperable. When his organization surveyed tent
camps in California, they found that many residents had come from R.V.’s.
Vehicle-dwellers in Venice are now considering their options, but few expressed
any intention of leaving.
“They can keep throwing more laws at us, but we’re not just going to go away,”
said Mario Manti-Gualtiero, who lost his job as an audio engineer and now lives
in an R.V. “We can’t just evaporate.”
When Home Has No Place
to Park, NYT, 3.10.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04rv.html
At East Village Food Pantry,
the Price Is a Sermon
September 28, 2010
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER
The shopping carts are lined up hours early in Tompkins Square Park, not far
from the dog run, where the East Village’s more genteel residents are unleashing
retrievers and beagles and chatting animatedly. The poor or elderly waiting on
benches to get the free food that comes with a dose of the Gospel seem more lost
in their own thoughts, even though many meet every Tuesday.
A guard, Mike Luke, a powerhouse known as Big Mike who himself was a consumer at
church pantries until he found religion and decided to work for “the man
upstairs,” manages the crowd with crisp authority until the 11 a.m. service
starts across the street at the Tompkins Square Gospel Fellowship. There is
nervous tension because only the first 50 will get in, and suddenly two women
are squabbling over a black cart.
“How do you know that’s your cart?” Big Mike firmly asks one, a fair question
since the carts look alike. But the mystery is cleared up with the discovery of
an orphaned gray cart.
Inside the worship hall, the 50 men and women sit in neat rows in front of a
pulpit and a painting of a generic waterfall while a pianist softly plays hymns.
Their carts are reassembled in neat rows as well.
The room has the shopworn air of Sergeant Sarah Brown’s Save-a-Soul Mission in
“Guys and Dolls.” One almost expects Stubby Kaye to get up and sing “Sit Down,
You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” But people don’t mind having to sit through a sermon
as the price of admission, and few have jobs they need to run to. While they
wait, volunteers fill each cart with a couple of bread loaves — redolent of a
Gospel miracle, except these are ciabatta and 10-grain — a couple of bananas, a
couple of less-than-freshly-picked ears of corn, a box of eggs, a box of
blueberries, even an Asian pear.
The food is donated by Trader Joe’s, the gourmet and organic food purveyor,
which has a store nearby. It usually feeds the kinds of professionals who use
the dog run, but it provides the fellowship with a wealth of unsold baked goods,
fruit and vegetables.
The fellowship was started 115 years ago as a mission to the immigrant Jews of
the Lower East Side but now mostly serves the black, Latino and Asian poor. The
East Village has several other pantries that dispense food without sermons;
their food is government-financed and so must be religion-free. The fellowship
started its giveaways in January and now feeds 250 people during three services
on Tuesdays — one in Chinese — and a single evening service on Sundays and
Wednesdays.
The mission is run by the Rev. Bill Jones, a lively ordained Baptist minister
from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
“People are not only hungry for food, but hungry for the word of God,” Mr. Jones
said. “There’s not just a physical need but a spiritual need.”
Nevertheless, he is aware of the actual hunger. “If you wait for three hours to
get $25 worth of groceries,” he said, “you have a need.”
He affirms that thought to the waiting crowd in a stentorian drawl.
“You all get blueberries today,” he announces. “Some of you get eggs. If you
don’t get eggs, don’t be upset. You neighbor is getting eggs, so be grateful.”
The people who come include Rafael Mercado, 52, who lost his job as a mailroom
clerk four years ago.
“I don’t have the kind of money now to go shopping,” he said, “so I go to many
pantries.” Another is Asia Feliciano, 37, a single mother with a lush head of
cornrow braids. She and her sons, Trevor, 5, and Jordan, 3, live in a nearby
shelter, and they stumbled upon the mission in August while panhandling.
“It puts food on our plates every night,” she said.
Mr. Jones begins the service with a prayer — “Heavenly father, we are so
grateful for the provisions you have brought us for another day.” He then offers
a lesson from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus tells the disciples to love one
another. With ardor that is not quite brimstone, Mr. Jones urges listeners to
love one another as well, not give in to temptations and pray to remain faithful
to God.
Many among the 50 sit stone-faced. But some clearly listen. Though she comes
mostly for the food, Ms. Feliciano indicates that the worship has subversively
taken hold.
“When I have to sit through the service, it opens my eyes,” she said. “So I
started reading the Bible and I asked them for a Bible, and they gave me one.”
Jim Dwyer is on leave.
At East Village Food
Pantry, the Price Is a Sermon, NYT, 28.9.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/nyregion/29about.html
We Haven’t Hit Bottom Yet
September 24, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
Wallingford, Conn.
Marcus Vogt is 20 years old and homeless. Or, as he puts it, “I’m going through
a couch-surfing phase.”
Mr. Vogt is a Wal-Mart employee but he was injured in a car accident and was
unable to work for a couple of months. With no income and no health insurance,
he quickly found himself unable to pay the rent. Even meals were hard to come
by.
(His situation is quite a statement about real life in the United States in the
21st century. On the same day that I spoke with Mr. Vogt, Forbes magazine came
out with its list of the 400 most outrageously rich Americans.)
I met Mr. Vogt at Master’s Manna, a food pantry and soup kitchen here that also
offers a variety of other services to individuals and families that have fallen
on hard times. He told me that his cellphone service has been cut off and he has
more than $3,000 in medical bills outstanding. But he was cheerful and happy to
report that he’s back at work, although it will take at least a few more
paychecks before he’ll have enough money to rent a room.
Other folks who make their way to Master’s Manna are not so upbeat. The Great
Recession has long since ended, according to the data zealots in their
windowless rooms. But it is still very real to the millions of men and women who
wake up each morning to the grim reality of empty pockets and empty cupboards.
Wallingford is nobody’s definition of a depressed community. It’s a middle-class
town on the Quinnipiac River. But the number of people seeking help at Master’s
Manna is rising, not falling. And when I asked Cheryl Bedore, who runs the
program, if she was seeing more clients from the middle class, she said: “Oh,
absolutely. We have people who were donors in the past coming to our doors now
in search of help.”
The political upheaval going on in the United States right now is being driven
by the economic upheaval. It’s sometimes hard to see this clearly amid the
craziness and ugliness stirred up by the professional exploiters. But the
essential issue is still the economy — the rising tide of poor people and the
decline of the middle class. The true extent of the pain has not been widely
chronicled.
“The minute you open the doors, it’s like a wave of desperation that’s hitting
you,” said Ms. Bedore. “People are depressed, despondent. They’re on the edge,
especially those who have never had to ask for help before.”
In recent weeks, a few homeless people with cars have been showing up at
Master’s Manna. Ms. Bedore has gotten permission from the local police
department for them to park behind her building and sleep in their cars
overnight. “We’ve been recognized as a safe haven,” she said.
In two of the cars, she said, were families with children.
It’s not just joblessness that’s driving people to the brink, although that’s a
big factor. It’s underemployment, as well. “For many of our families,” said Ms.
Bedore, “the 40-hour workweek is over, a thing of the past. They may still have
a job, but they’re trying to survive on reduced hours — with no benefits. Some
are on forced furloughs.
“Once you start losing the income and you’ve run through your savings, then your
car is up for repossession, or you’re looking at foreclosure or eviction. We’re
a food pantry, but hunger is only the tip of the iceberg. Life becomes a
constant juggling act when the money starts running out. Are you going to pay
for your medication? Or are you going to put gas in the car so you can go to
work?
“Kids are going back to school now, so they need clothes and school supplies.
Where is the money for that to come from? The people we’re seeing never expected
things to turn out like this — not at this stage of their lives. Not in the
United States. The middle class is quickly slipping into a lower class.”
Similar stories — and worse — are unfolding throughout the country. There are
more people in poverty now — 43.6 million — than at any time since the
government began keeping accurate records. Nearly 15 million Americans are out
of work and home foreclosures are expected to surpass one million this year. The
Times had a chilling front-page article this week about the increasing fear
among jobless workers over 50 that they will never be employed again.
The politicians seem unable to grasp the immensity of the problem, which is why
the policy solutions are so woefully inadequate. During my conversations with
Ms. Bedore, she dismissed the very thought that the recession might be over.
“Whoever said that was sadly mistaken,” she said. “We haven’t even bottomed-out
yet.”
Charles M. Blow is off today.
We Haven’t Hit Bottom
Yet, NYT, 24.9.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/opinion/25herbert.html
Two Different Worlds
September 17, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
I didn’t notice much when a terrific storm slammed into parts of New York
City on Thursday evening. I was working at my computer in a quiet apartment on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The skies darkened and it began to rain, and I
could hear thunder. But that’s all. I made a cup of coffee and kept working.
While I remained oblivious, the storm took a frightening toll in the boroughs of
Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. A woman who was trying to walk home with her
10-year-old daughter from Prospect Park in Brooklyn told me the next day that it
had been the most harrowing experience of her life. “With the wind and the rain,
it was like being trapped in a car wash,” she said. “And then a tree crashed
down on a car right in front of us.”
They ran soaking wet up the steps of a brownstone and the owner, a stranger, let
them come inside.
The winds reached tornadolike intensity. Trees were uprooted and blown into
electrical power lines. Roofs were blown from buildings. One woman was killed,
and several neighborhoods were devastated.
I eventually heard about it on the news.
The movers and shakers of our society seem similarly oblivious to the terrible
destruction wrought by the economic storm that has roared through America.
They’ve heard some thunder, perhaps, and seen some lightning, and maybe felt a
bit of the wind. But there is nothing that society’s leaders are doing — no
sense of urgency in their policies or attitudes — that suggests they understand
the extent of the economic devastation that has come crashing down like a plague
on the poor and much of the middle class.
The American economy is on its knees and the suffering has reached historic
levels. Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty last year, which is more
than 14 percent of the population. That is an increase of 4 million over the
previous year, the highest percentage in 15 years, and the highest number in
more than a half-century of record-keeping. Millions more are teetering on the
edge, poised to fall into poverty.
More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are
poor. More than 15 million children are poor.
The movers and shakers, including most of the mainstream media, have paid
precious little attention to this wide-scale economic disaster.
Meanwhile, the middle class, hobbled for years with the stagnant incomes that
accompany extreme employment insecurity, is now in retreat. Joblessness, home
foreclosures, personal bankruptcy — pick your poison. Median family incomes were
5 percent lower in 2009 than they were a decade earlier. The Harvard economist
Lawrence Katz told The Times, “This is the first time in memory that an entire
decade has produced essentially no economic growth for the typical American
household.”
I don’t know what it will take, maybe a full-blown depression, for policy makers
to decide that they need to take extraordinary additional steps to cope with
this drastic economic and employment emergency. Nothing currently on the table
will turn things around in a meaningful way. We’re facing a jobs deficit of
about 11 million, which is about how many new ones we’d have to create just to
get our heads above water. It will take years — years — just to get employment
back to where it was when the recession struck in December 2007.
If Republicans take over the policy levers, forget about it. The party of Palin,
Limbaugh and Boehner — with its tax cuts for the rich and obsession with the
deregulatory, free-market zealotry that brought us the Great Recession — will
only accelerate the mass march into poverty.
The G.O.P. wants to further shred the safety net, wants to give corporations
even greater clout over already debased workers, and wants to fatten the coffers
of the already obscenely rich.
While working people are suffering the torments of joblessness, underemployment
and dwindling compensation, corporate profits have rebounded and the financial
sector is once again living the high life. This helps to keep the people at the
top comfortably in denial about the extent of the carnage.
Millions of struggling voters have no idea which way to turn. They are suffering
under the status quo, but those with any memory at all are afraid of a rerun of
the catastrophic George W. Bush era. An Associated Press article, based on
recent polling, summed the matter up: “Glum and distrusting, a majority of
Americans today are very confident in — nobody.”
What is desperately needed is leadership that recognizes the depth and intensity
of the economic crisis facing so many ordinary Americans. It’s time for the
movers and shakers to lift the shroud of oblivion and reach out to those many
millions of Americans trapped in a world of hurt.
Two Different Worlds,
NYT, 17.9.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/opinion/18herbert.html
Number of Families in Shelters Rises
September 11, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — For a few hours at the mall here this month, Nick
Griffith, his wife, Lacey Lennon, and their two young children got to feel like
a regular family again.
Never mind that they were just killing time away from the homeless shelter where
they are staying, or that they had to take two city buses to get to the shopping
center because they pawned one car earlier this year and had another
repossessed, or that the debit card Ms. Lennon inserted into the A.T.M. was
courtesy of the state’s welfare program.
They ate lunch at the food court, browsed for clothes and just strolled,
blending in with everyone else out on a scorching hot summer day. “It’s exactly
why we come here,” Ms. Lennon said. “It reminds us of our old life.”
For millions who have lost jobs or faced eviction in the economic downturn,
homelessness is perhaps the darkest fear of all. In the end, though, for all the
devastation wrought by the recession, a vast majority of people who have faced
the possibility have somehow managed to avoid it.
Nevertheless, from 2007 through 2009, the number of families in homeless
shelters — households with at least one adult and one minor child — leapt to
170,000 from 131,000, according to the Department of Housing and Urban
Development.
With long-term unemployment ballooning, those numbers could easily climb this
year. Late in 2009, however, states began distributing $1.5 billion that has
been made available over three years by the federal government as part of the
stimulus package for the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, which
provides financial assistance to keep people in their homes or get them back in
one quickly if they lose them.
More than 550,000 people have received aid, including more than 1,800 in Rhode
Island, with just over a quarter of the money for the program spent so far
nationally, state and federal officials said.
Even so, it remains to be seen whether the program is keeping pace with the
continuing economic hardship.
On Aug. 9, Mr. Griffith, 40, Ms. Lennon, 26, and their two children, Ava, 3, and
Ethan, 16 months, staggered into Crossroads Rhode Island, a shelter that
functions as a kind of processing and triage center for homeless families, after
a three-day bus journey from Florida.
“It hit me when we got off the bus and walked up and saw the Crossroads
building,” Ms. Lennon said. “We had all our stuff. We were tired. We’d already
had enough, and it was just starting.”
The number of families who have sought help this year at Crossroads has already
surpassed the total for all of 2009. Through July, 324 families had come needing
shelter, compared with 278 all of last year.
National data on current shelter populations are not yet available, but checks
with other major family shelters across the country found similar increases.
The Y.W.C.A. Family Center in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest family shelters
in the state, has seen an occupancy increase of more than 20 percent over the
last three months compared with the same period last year. The UMOM New Day
Center in Phoenix, the largest family shelter in Arizona, has had a more than 30
percent increase in families calling for shelter over the last few months.
Without national data, it is impossible to say for certain whether these are
anomalies. Clearly, however, many families are still being sucked into the
swirling financial drain that leads to homelessness.
The Griffith family moved from Rhode Island to Florida two years ago after Mr.
Griffith, who was working as a waiter at an Applebee’s restaurant, asked to be
transferred to one opening in Spring Hill, an hour north of Tampa, where he
figured the cost of living would be lower.
He did well at first, earning as much as $25 an hour, including tips. He also
got a job as a line cook at another restaurant, where he made $12 an hour.
The family eventually moved into a three-bedroom condominium and lived the
typical suburban life, with a sport-utility vehicle and a minivan to cart around
their growing family.
In January, however, the restaurant where Mr. Griffith was cooking closed. Then
his hours began drying up at Applebee’s. The couple had savings, but squandered
some of it figuring he would quickly find another job. When he did not, they
were evicted from their condo.
They lived with Ms. Lennon’s mother at first in her one-bedroom house in Port
Richey, Fla., but she made it clear after two months that the arrangement was no
longer feasible. The family moved to an R.V. park, paying $186 a week plus
utilities. By late July, however, they had mostly run out of options.
They called some 100 shelters in Florida and found that most were full; others
would not allow them to stay together.
They considered returning to Rhode Island. An Applebee’s in Smithfield agreed to
hire Mr. Griffith. They found Crossroads on the Internet and were assured of a
spot. Using some emergency money they had left and $150 lent by relatives, they
bought bus tickets to Providence.
Now, the family is crammed into a single room at Crossroads’ 15-room family
shelter, which used to be a funeral home. All four sleep on a pair of single
beds pushed together. There is a crib for Ethan, but with all the turmoil, he
can now fall asleep only when next to his parents. A lone framed photograph of
the couple, dressed up for a night out, sits atop a shelf.
The living conditions are only part of the adjustment; there is also the
shelter’s long list of rules. No one can be in the living quarters from 10 a.m.
to 4:30 p.m. The news is even off-limits as television programming in the common
area. Residents were recently barred from congregating around the bench outside.
Infractions bring write-ups; three write-ups bring expulsion.
The changes have taken a toll on the family in small and large ways. Ethan has
taken to screaming for no reason. Ava had been on the verge of being
potty-trained, but is now back to diapers. Their nap schedules and diets are a
mess. Their parents are squabbling more and have started smoking again.
Mr. Griffith found that he could work only limited hours at his new job because
of the bus schedule. The family did qualify last week for transitional housing,
but that usually takes a month to finalize. They are still pursuing rapid
rehousing assistance.
Others at the shelter with no job prospects face a steeper climb meeting the
requirements.
Every few days, new families arrive. A few hours after the Griffiths got back
from the mall, a young woman pushing a stroller with a toddler rang the shelter
doorbell, quietly weeping.
Number of Families in
Shelters Rises, NYT, 11.9.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/us/12shelter.html
Wal-Mart Gives $2 Billion to Fight Hunger
May 12, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM
The Wal-Mart Corporation announced plans on Wednesday to contribute $2
billion in cash and food to the nation’s food banks, one of the largest
corporate gifts on record.
Over the next five years, the giant retail company will distribute some 1.1
billion pounds of food to food banks and provide $250 million to help those
organizations buy refrigerated trucks, improve storage and develop better
logistics.
“Hunger is just a huge problem, and as the largest grocer in the country, we
need to be at the head of the pack in doing something about it,” said Margaret
McKenna, president of the Wal-Mart Foundation.
While the economy seems to be turning around, the number of people turning to
charities to help put food on their tables continues to grow. A recent survey by
Feeding America found that 37 million people a year now use its national network
of food banks, a 46 percent increase from 2006. The survey drew on interviews
with more than 61,000 people who use food banks, as well as reports from 37,000
food banks across the country.
Put another way, 1 in every 8 Americans uses a food bank to make ends meet, the
survey said.
More than one-third of those surveyed said they would not have been able to pay
for basics like rent, utilities and medical care without relying on food banks
to offset the cost of their meals — and more than a third said at least one
person in their household was working.
“It is not just the unemployed that are going hungry,” said Vicki B. Escarra,
chief executive of Feeding America.
Wal-Mart began taking on hunger as a cause in 2005, when it distributed 9.9
million pounds of food to food banks; last year, it provided 116.1 million
pounds of food. The company also has donated the services of its staff to help
food banks improve lighting and refrigeration, and develop ways to increase the
amount of fresh food on their shelves.
“We’ve learned a lot about this problem and the kinds of things we can do to
help,” Ms. McKenna said. “We’ve learned, for instance, that there is a huge gap
in terms of the protein and fresh produce that food banks can deliver, so we’ve
learned how to fast-freeze things like meat and dairy. You can’t put 100 pounds
of bananas on a truck that isn’t refrigerated and expect them to be edible for
long.”
Almost one-third of the food Wal-Mart is donating this year will be fresh, and
one of the first cash gifts out of the new grant will go to increasing the
number of refrigerated trucks delivering food to food banks. “These are the
types of resources we don’t get much from other sources,” Ms. Escarra said.
Wal-Mart and other companies currently are focused on how to get food to
children to expose them to fruits, vegetables and meats that traditionally have
not been available to poor families because of limited supplies or high cost.
For instance, the Target Corporation on Tuesday announced a $2.3 million program
to create pantries in schools that can be used to teach children about good
nutrition at the same time they are fed.
Target provided an additional $1.2 million to Feeding America to support other
school-based feeding programs.
Ms. McKenna said she was concerned about getting food during the summer to
children who rely on school breakfast and lunch programs. “We know about sending
kids home with backpacks of food for the weekends,” she said, “but what do we do
to feed them when they aren’t going to school?”
Wal-Mart Gives $2
Billion to Fight Hunger, NYT, 12.5.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/us/13gift.html
City’s Homeless Services Commissioner Resigns
April 19, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN
Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services, said on Monday
that he will leave his post after four years of overseeing one of the Bloomberg
administration’s most demanding agencies.
Mr. Hess said he had accepted a position at the Doe Fund, a nonprofit
organization that helps the homeless find work and housing. He will be replaced
by Seth Diamond, an executive deputy commissioner at the Human Resources
Administration.
In an interview, Mr. Hess said that after he received the offer, he decided it
was time to move on.
“I committed to the mayor to serve the second term, and I did that,” he said. “I
think it’s the right timing for the administration. I’m very proud of the work
that we’ve done.”
Mr. Hess, 54, is the latest high-ranking figure to leave the Bloomberg
administration, in what aides to the mayor have privately described as a
deliberate house cleaning intended to bring fresh faces into City Hall and clear
out weak performers.
Since Mr. Bloomberg decided to seek a third term last fall, he has announced the
departure of 16 high-level aides, many of them agency commissioners, a level of
turnover without precedent during his time in office. The mayor prizes loyalty
and stability — most top aides have remained with him eight years — but became
convinced that he needed to replace much of his cabinet to ensure a successful
third term.
In recent months, Mr. Hess has appeared to be under increasing pressure. During
the four years he has overseen the Department of Homeless Services, the number
of people living in shelters grew to more than 36,000 people from 31,000. In
October, the population in the city shelter system reached an all-time high, in
large part because of the large numbers of families seeking shelter.
Mr. Hess said he attributed the higher-than-usual intake to the poor economy.
“I would just remind folks that the Department of Homeless Services is the final
safety net for New Yorkers,” he said. “Many, many factors outside of this
department’s control determines who ends up at the front door of the shelter
system.”
In his new position at the Doe Fund, Mr. Hess will build the national profile of
one of its programs, called Ready, Willing and Able.
Mr. Bloomberg is close to the group’s founder, George McDonald, and has
personally donated at least $325,000 to the Doe Fund through the Carnegie
Corporation of New York. The donations are technically anonymous but widely
known to be from the mayor, records show.
When Mr. Hess was appointed commissioner in April 2006, he inherited a number of
problems, including a flawed rent subsidy program that was shut down a year
after he came to the agency. That was replaced by another rent assistance
program, Advantage, which is in the process of being drastically revamped.
And Mr. Hess has been dogged by an outspoken group of elected officials and
advocates for the homeless, who seemed to oppose the administration and its
policies at every turn — frequently with placards and microphones on the steps
of City Hall. He was also unable to deliver on one of Mr. Bloomberg’s grandest
goal on homelessness — reducing it by two-thirds in five years. The five years
ran out in 2009.
But Mr. Hess did have his successes, some of them significant.
An Army veteran, Mr. Hess directed his department to focus on housing homeless
veterans, renovating shelters specifically for their use and building new ones.
Street homelessness throughout the city has been drastically reduced in the last
several years, the result of aggressive street outreach by the city and its
contracted nonprofit providers. According to the city’s annual point-in-time
count of the street homeless, the overall number of people living on the street
and in the subways has decreased by 29 percent since 2005.
In an interview, Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services,
praised the work that Mr. Hess has done. But she conceded that the growth in
homeless families in the last four years has been “a frustration.”
“We, as a collective team, have been disappointed that we haven’t seen the
reduction in homeless families," she said. “Nobody predicted the double whammy
of the burst of the housing bubble and the recession and the job loss all
combined. So that’s put a huge strain on the homeless family system in
particular.”
Mr. Hess, a former high-ranking director of homeless services in Philadelphia,
will be replaced by Mr. Diamond, a longtime city official who grew up in New
York, but has relatively little experience working on homelessness.
Mr. Diamond, 47, has devoted much of his career to welfare reform, serving under
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the Human Resources Administration, the city’s
welfare agency.
“Homelessness is not welfare — there are significant differences, and I
recognize that,” Mr. Diamond said in an interview. “But there’s also significant
overlap, both in sort of the mission and in the approach. And I think even
though I haven’t worked directly in the homelessness system, I think I have
enough experience that I can do well there.”
Mr. Diamond said that he hoped to import more of the work-based philosophy that
dominates the city’s welfare agency to the homeless services system.
“What we’ve done there, which I think is applicable in a lot of ways to the
homeless system, is setting high expectations for people, supporting them as
they try and reach those expectations, strongly supporting people who go to
work, and having some consequences for people who fail to take advantage of some
of the opportunities that we make available,” he said. “That’s the philosophy
that we’ve tried in the welfare area, being very aggressive about insisting that
people who can work go to work, providing a range of opportunities and supports
for people as they try and go to work, giving them stronger support even after
they enter the employment market. And a lot of that philosophy, I think, is
applicable to the shelter system.”
Mr. Diamond, a native New Yorker, grew up on Roosevelt Island and attended
Stuyvesant High School. He will begin as commissioner at homeless services next
week.
City’s Homeless Services
Commissioner Resigns, NYT, 19.4.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/nyregion/20homeless.html
3-Day Effort Aims for Accurate Census of Homeless
March 31, 2010
Filed at 2:50 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE (AP) -- Thousands of U.S. Census workers have fanned out to soup
kitchens, city streets and homeless shelters this week in an attempt to count
the nation's homeless, an operation that officials are hoping yields the most
accurate count yet.
The Census Bureau mobilized a small army of enumerators -- the people that count
-- for the three-day operation that wraps up Wednesday. In San Francisco alone,
800 people canvassed 1,700 streets, said Michael Burns, deputy regional director
for the Seattle region. In the Puget Sound area of Washington state, 700 workers
are being dispatched. Enumerators hit both city and rural streets.
But counting the nation's homeless population remains challenging for the
Census, which uses home addresses to send its decennial questionnaire to U.S.
residents. Moreover, the actual questionnaire doesn't have an option for people
without a home.
There's also no agreed definition of homelessness among federal agencies, Burns
said.
Because of that, for the second census in a row, the bureau partnered with
service providers -- faith-based soup kitchens, advocacy groups, shelters and
others -- across the country to reach out and pinpoint areas where the homeless
gather.
In Seattle, information booths have been set up in hygiene centers, for example.
And even after the three-day operation ends, some more outreach will be
conducted.
''That close alliance, working with people at the grass roots levels ... I think
it's definitely going to make for a more accurate count. We're working with
people who know where (the homeless) stay at night,'' Burns said.
The bureau goes beyond the questionnaire to tally the number of people with no
home, and it keeps a separate data set for it.
Reta Stevenson, who was enjoying a game of pinochle at the Family & Adult
Service Center in Seattle, said she had turned down the census workers four
times, but ''I figured if I'd do it, they would leave me alone.''
The 45-year-old, who has been homeless since 1984, said the worker didn't really
explain why she needed to be counted, besides saying she needed to be counted.
She also got a free mug.
Behind the count is money. More than $440 billion will be distributed based on
the Census data. More than $20 billion will go to the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institute. HUD
often works with people with no permanent shelter.
The history between the Census and the homeless, though, is not without
controversy. The last two censuses yielded complaints about how the government
handled the count.
In 1992, Baltimore and San Francisco and a group of homeless advocates sued,
wanting the Census to recount. They charged that the bureau deliberately failed
to count thousands of homeless people, when its tally spanned just one night, in
order to reduce the federal aid available to the homeless.
After the 2000 Census, lawmakers demanded that the Census say exactly how many
homeless people it found, instead of grouping them into a less specific category
called ''other noninstitutionalized group quarters.''
Some of the tensions have not eased, said Neil Donovan, executive director of
the National Coalition for the Homeless. ''Not at the level of decision making,
not at the national level where the resources are, where the resources are
committed,'' Donovan said.
His group's concerns with the 2000 Census included that drop-in centers, health
care facilities and outreach programs were not included. He said the Census has
promised improvement this time around, but that won't be seen until a year or
more from now, when the data is tallied and released.
Undercounting remains a concern for Donovan. He said homeless advocates, HUD and
others have estimated higher homeless populations than what the Census has
tallied.
But in Los Angeles, Herbert L. Smith, president and chief executive of the Los
Angeles Mission in the city's Skid Row district, praised the Census Bureau's
efforts to count members of the city's homeless population.
''They heard the criticisms from the last go-around and I think they're trying
to address these as best they can,'' Smith said. ''They have really touched all
the bases in trying to make the count as accurate as possible.''
The bureau was also hiring former homeless people who graduated from the
Mission's addiction programs to guide census takers through encampments later
this week, Smith said.
Back in Seattle, one thing remained certain to Alison Eisinger, whose
Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness has conducted an annual one-night
count for the past three decades.
''We know by that experience you'll always have an undercount,'' she said.
------
Associated Press Writer Jacob Adelman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
3-Day Effort Aims for
Accurate Census of Homeless, NYT, 31.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/31/us/AP-US-Census-Homeless.html
Families Struggle to Afford Food, Survey Finds
January 26, 2010
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON — Nearly one in five Americans said they lacked the money to buy
the food they needed at some point in the last year, according to a survey
co-sponsored by the Gallup organization and released Tuesday by an anti-hunger
group.
The numbers soared at the start of the recession, but dipped in 2009 despite the
continuing rise in unemployment. The anti-hunger group, the Food Research and
Action Center, attributed that trend to falling food prices, an increasing use
of food stamps and a rise in the amount of the food stamps benefit.
More than 38 million Americans — one in eight — now receive food stamps, a
record high.
The unusually large survey, which covered more than a half-million people,
offers the most recent snapshot of hunger-related problems. And it is the first
survey big enough to provide data on each of the nation’s 435 Congressional
districts and Washington, D.C.
Indeed, its most interesting finding may be just how broad a problem food
affordability has become. In 45 states and 311 Congressional districts, 15
percent or more of those surveyed said they had recently lacked money to buy
enough food.
“While there is certainly more hardship in some areas than in others, the data
also show that this is a nearly universal problem,” said James D. Weill, the
hunger group’s president.
Efforts to measure hunger-related problems often spawn political disputes, and
this one may do so as well. Some conservative critics have accused liberals of
exaggerating the problems to justify increased government spending. Others have
accused the conservative critics of ignoring the problem’s depth.
Avoiding the word “hunger,” the Agriculture Department releases an annual survey
of what it now calls “food insecurity.” Its interviewers ask up to 18 nuanced
questions about how often people skipped meals, cut portions or worried about
running out of food.
Its most recent data, for 2008, found that 14.6 percent of Americans lacked
consistent access to sufficient food, the highest in the survey’s 14-year
history.
The Gallup survey asked just one question: “Have there been times in the last
month when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family
needed?” But it has been asking 1,000 people nearly every day for the past two
years, producing a sample size much larger than the government’s and one that
can track monthly trends.
In the fourth quarter of 2009, 18.5 percent of Americans said they had
experienced problems in being able to afford food, down from 19.5 percent at the
end of 2008. Among families with children, the rates were significantly higher,
at 24.1 percent nationally in the most recent quarter.
Mississippi had the largest number of people with what the report called “food
hardship” (26.2 percent), while North Dakota had the lowest (10.6 percent).
Despite the variation, the data suggests a problem that few areas of the country
escape. Of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, 82 had food hardship rates of 15
percent or more. Likewise, only 23 Congressional districts had a food hardship
rate of less than 10 percent, and 139 had rates of more than 20 percent.
The survey found the biggest problems in the South Bronx. In New York’s 16th
District, nearly 37 percent of the residents answered yes when asked if they had
lacked the money to buy needed food.
Last year’s federal stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act, temporarily increased the average food stamps benefit by 18 percent, to
about $130 a month for each member of a household.
The hardship data is part of the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index, which poses
many questions about physical and mental health. (Gallup’s partner in the
project, Healthways, is a disease management company.)
The food research group bought the data when it learned that the survey included
a question about food-related hardships.
Families Struggle to
Afford Food, Survey Finds, NYT, 26.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/26food.html
A Fight for the Homeless and Against Authority
January 12, 2010
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Burly, bearded and gleefully obscene, Dan de Vaul
does not look the part of the bleeding-heart homeless advocate, sporting as he
does a feather-topped cowboy hat, a large collection of guns and a bushel of
hoary wisecracks.
But for nearly a decade, Mr. de Vaul has been housing dozens of homeless men and
women in a farmhouse and a collection of tents, trailers and sheds spread around
his 72-acre ranch here on the outskirts of this city in central California.
Mr. de Vaul says he is simply doing the work his county cannot or will not do.
But officials say that the housing at Mr. de Vaul’s ranch, known as Sunny Acres,
is substandard, often illegal, and rife with dangerous code violations,
including missing fire detectors and faulty wiring.
Now Mr. de Vaul faces possible jail time, and his activities are sharply
dividing residents of San Luis Obispo and the surrounding county, even as the
county’s surging homeless population — estimated to be 3,800 people — outstrips
the capacity of its shelters, which have about 125 beds.
The feud reached a boiling point in recent weeks after Mr. de Vaul’s conviction
in November on two misdemeanors related to code violations, a judgment that the
authorities had hoped might cajole Sunny Acres into compliance. But Mr. de Vaul
refused a deal for probation and has since been sentenced to 90 days in jail and
fined $1,000 by a judge, who called Mr. de Vaul’s behavior “irresponsible and
arrogant.”
Mr. de Vaul was bailed out of jail, pending an appeal, by a juror who said she
regretted her vote to convict him.
“He’s chosen to take in this undesirable population that most of us turn our
heads to,” said the juror, Mary Partin, an office manager. “I had to do the
right thing.”
But critics question Mr. de Vaul’s motives and methods, like charging tenants
$300 a month for often meager shelter and asking them to perform five hours of
odd jobs a week, like splitting wood, cooking and housework. Others wonder
whether Mr. de Vaul is fighting to do good works or merely obsessed with
sticking his thumb in the eye of authority.
“I believe he truly does care for the people he takes in,” said Bruce Gibson,
the outgoing chairman of the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors. “And
there’s only one thing he cares more about. And that’s fighting with the
county.”
Mr. de Vaul admits to enjoying battling local officials, but he also says he has
been shaken by his prosecution.
“What I’m saying is that I’m in over my head,” Mr. de Vaul said. “And because I
don’t like authority, I’m not going to give up.”
Mr. de Vaul is one of a handful of people who have taken the problem of
homelessness into their own hands in California, often running afoul of
officials. Last summer, the police disbanded an encampment in Sacramento pitched
with the permission of a private property owner, while in Loomis, Calif., a
couple was cited in November for allowing a homeless family to park in a lot the
couple owned.
A ramshackle compound that abuts a row of suburban homes, Mr. de Vaul’s ranch is
not much to look at. A converted dairy barn serves as a kitchen. Cars and trucks
sit in a dirt parking lot, while rusting equipment — bulldozers, a fire truck —
dots the surrounding fields, where the ranch’s cows also make their homes.
Mr. de Vaul, 66, still limps from an old dune buggy accident and lives in the
attic of a barn stuffed with cars and tools; the 101-year-old farmhouse where he
grew up houses homeless people.
Neighbors say they are sympathetic to the homeless but have complained
repeatedly about Mr. de Vaul’s activities at the ranch, including stockpiling
vehicles.
“People say it’s all about the view,” said Christine Mulholland, a neighbor and
former city councilwoman. “But the fact is I have windows in my house, and, yes,
when I look out my window, I see his property.”
Mr. de Vaul’s family had rented the Sunny Acres ranch since the 1930s. One day
in the 1980s, Mr. de Vaul was digging a well at another family property when a
ragged-looking man asked if he could park a camper there. Mr. de Vaul agreed.
About a week later, Mr. de Vaul noticed another man on the property, who turned
out to be a high school friend. He was also a Vietnam veteran and a
schizophrenic.
“No one else is going to help him,” Mr. de Vaul recalled thinking.
Mr. de Vaul bought the Sunny Acres ranch in 2002, and started allowing dozens of
homeless people to live there. Now there are about 30, including Daniel
Brainerd, 45, who came to the ranch after leaving a shelter in Santa Barbara
County.
“It’s not an option,” Mr. Brainerd said of returning to that shelter, while
cooking a meal of cheddar cheese melted on a hot dog. “I don’t like people that
much.”
Jennifer Ferraez, a clinical social worker who recommended Sunny Acres to Mr.
Brainerd, said Mr. de Vaul’s way of dealing with the homeless — putting them to
work and largely letting them deal with their demons on their own time — paid
dividends.
“Dan will take them as they are,” Ms. Ferraez said.
Mr. de Vaul, who says he kicked a serious drug and alcohol habit two decades
ago, says Sunny Acres is a clean and sober facility, and says residents are
required to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
But officials are skeptical, and records from the sheriff’s department show
three calls for people “drunk in public” there since 2007, as well as reports of
theft, battery, disturbing the peace, attempted suicide and compliance checks
for parolees and sex offenders. Mr. de Vaul counters by saying that he has
called in many of those problems himself.
Officials also have safety concerns, including nearly a dozen hand-made wooden
sheds — each with four beds — which Mr. de Vaul coated with crankcase oil, a
flammable lubricant. (Mr. de Vaul says it gives the wood “life.”) The sheds have
been condemned.
County and city officials say they have tried to help Mr. de Vaul bring his
operation into code compliance, offering to waive fees, haul off junk and even
bring architects to the site.
“We really felt the county was bending over backward to have Dan be able to
house homeless people,” said Dee Torres, the homeless-services director for the
county’s low-income service agency. “And Dan would not give a centimeter.”
Mr. de Vaul’s appeal is expected to be heard sometime this year. In the
meantime, he says he will continue to take in the down-and-out.
“It’s just like when you start to drill a well,” he said. “The deeper you get
into it, the more you want to see it through.”
A Fight for the Homeless
and Against Authority, NYT, 12.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/us/12homeless.html
About New York
Where Unsold Clothes Meet People in Need
January 10, 2010
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER
Good ideas have legs. One day in 1985, Suzanne Davis asked a friend, Larry
Phillips, the president of the Phillips-Van Heusen clothing line, if his company
had any excess inventory that could be used by homeless men. A few days later,
Mr. Phillips sent 100 boxes of windbreakers to a shelter on the Bowery.
Then he nudged friends, and 750 London Fog trench coats arrived, followed by
crates of Jockey underwear. “All this merchandise they weren’t going to sell, so
what were they going to do with it?” Ms. Davis recalled.
A few years earlier, City Harvest had been created to rescue edible food that
was going to be destroyed; separately, the Food Bank for New York City was
established to collect and organize food for distribution.
Inspired by these projects, Ms. Davis, then director of the J.M. Kaplan Fund,
organized the New York Clothing Bank to recover unworn garments. It opened in
1986 in a city office on Church Street, and now occupies a 20,000-square-foot
warehouse in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. An executive from J. C. Penney helped
set up the inventory system. Retailers and manufacturers donate goods worth $10
million annually. With a paid staff of three, the bank gives clothing to 250 aid
groups, which help 80,000 people.
Stacked on the warehouse shelves last week were girls’ uniform school blouses
wrapped in plastic, boys’ coats still in bags, boxes of gloves, bundles of
women’s sweaters. The retail sale tags had been stripped.
“Unintentionally, it is one of the city’s best-kept secrets,” said Mary Lanning,
the chairwoman of the Clothing Bank.
Vast quantities of unworn clothing are destroyed every day in the United States.
Last week, I wrote about a City University graduate student, Cynthia Magnus, who
had discovered that a branch of the clothing retailer H & M in Herald Square was
slashing new clothing that it could not sell, then discarding it in the trash. A
cyber-cyclone followed: tens of thousands of people commented on Twitter. H & M
said that it usually donated unsold clothes, and that the 34th Street store was
not following proper procedures. Hundreds of people sent me e-mail. Many said
that they worked at big retailers around the country where useable garments are
routinely destroyed.
The reasons are complex. No business wants to compete with its own garbage, or
risk having people show up at a store seeking refunds on clothes that were never
sold. “That’s why many retailers will damage unsold garments,” said Luis
Jimenez, the director of the Clothing Bank, which is now operated for the city
by Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment.
Some businesses do not want their goods worn by poor people. Ed Foy, the founder
of eFashionSolutions.com, said that brands invest billions of dollars in their
images, using models and athletes, which makes them cautious about where donated
leftovers might end up. “They want us to see that the people wearing their
brands are the people we aspire to be,” said Mr. Foy, a board member of the
Clothing Bank. “They want to know, ‘Who’s wearing the clothing and how can that
hurt my brand?’ ”
From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr.
Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated
clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the
distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of
Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels
removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from
the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem. “Hard workers,” Mr. Jimenez said.
The city stopped financing the bank last year, but Mr. Jimenez was able to get
the landlord — also the city — to reduce the rent on the warehouse to $80,000 a
year from $120,000.
Manufacturers and retailers became far more careful with their donations.
Macy’s, which had been making deliveries to the bank three or four times a year,
sent one. “It was 55 boxes,” Mr. Jimenez said, smiling. “The Gap is very nice,
but they’ve been saying ‘we don’t have anything for you now.’ ”
And much depends on personal contacts. The bank had been getting regular
shipments of diapers from Toys R Us, and expected one in September. “When it
didn’t come, we called our contact there, and got no reply,” Mr. Jimenez said.
“Then in November we got a call — the gentleman had passed away suddenly, and
someone had just gotten into his voice mail. That same week, we got eight
pallets of diapers.”
Now retired, Ms. Davis, the founder of the Clothing Bank, said she was heartened
by the graduate student who disclosed the waste at H & M. Good ideas may have
legs. They also need people to run with them.
Where Unsold Clothes
Meet People in Need, NYT, 10.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10about.html
The Safety Net
Living on Nothing but Food Stamps
January 3, 2010
The New York Times
By JASON DEPARLE and ROBERT M. GEBELOFF
CAPE CORAL, Fla. — After an improbable rise from the Bronx projects to a job
selling Gulf Coast homes, Isabel Bermudez lost it all to an epic housing bust —
the six-figure income, the house with the pool and the investment property.
Now, as she papers the county with résumés and girds herself for rejection, she
is supporting two daughters on an income that inspires a double take: zero
dollars in monthly cash and a few hundred dollars in food stamps.
With food-stamp use at a record high and surging by the day, Ms. Bermudez
belongs to an overlooked subgroup that is growing especially fast: recipients
with no cash income.
About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other
income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times.
In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they
described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no
unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.
Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it
harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent
over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with
a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.
“It’s the one thing I can count on every month — I know the children are going
to have food,” Ms. Bermudez, 42, said with the forced good cheer she mastered
selling rows of new stucco homes.
Members of this straitened group range from displaced strivers like Ms. Bermudez
to weathered men who sleep in shelters and barter cigarettes. Some draw on
savings or sporadic under-the-table jobs. Some move in with relatives. Some get
noncash help, like subsidized apartments. While some go without cash incomes
only briefly before securing jobs or aid, others rely on food stamps alone for
many months.
The surge in this precarious way of life has been so swift that few policy
makers have noticed. But it attests to the growing role of food stamps within
the safety net. One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one
in four children.
Here in Florida, the number of people with no income beyond food stamps has
doubled in two years and has more than tripled along once-thriving parts of the
southwest coast. The building frenzy that lured Ms. Bermudez to Fort Myers and
neighboring Cape Coral has left a wasteland of foreclosed homes and written new
tales of descent into star-crossed indigence.
A skinny fellow in saggy clothes who spent his childhood in foster care, Rex
Britton, 22, hopped a bus from Syracuse two years ago for a job painting parking
lots. Now, with unemployment at nearly 14 percent and paving work scarce, he
receives $200 a month in food stamps and stays with a girlfriend who survives on
a rent subsidy and a government check to help her care for her disabled toddler.
“Without food stamps we’d probably be starving,” Mr. Britton said.
A strapping man who once made a living throwing fastballs, William Trapani, 53,
left his dreams on the minor league mound and his front teeth in prison, where
he spent nine years for selling cocaine. Now he sleeps at a rescue mission,
repairs bicycles for small change, and counts $200 in food stamps as his only
secure support.
“I’ve been out looking for work every day — there’s absolutely nothing,” he
said.
A grandmother whose voice mail message urges callers to “have a blessed good
day,” Wanda Debnam, 53, once drove 18-wheelers and dreamed of selling real
estate. But she lost her job at Starbucks this year and moved in with her son in
nearby Lehigh Acres. Now she sleeps with her 8-year-old granddaughter under a
poster of the Jonas Brothers and uses her food stamps to avoid her
daughter-in-law’s cooking.
“I’m climbing the walls,” Ms. Debnam said.
Florida officials have done a better job than most in monitoring the rise of
people with no cash income. They say the access to food stamps shows the safety
net is working.
“The program is doing what it was designed to do: help very needy people get
through a very difficult time,” said Don Winstead, deputy secretary for the
Department of Children and Families. “But for this program they would be in even
more dire straits.”
But others say the lack of cash support shows the safety net is torn. The main
cash welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, has scarcely
expanded during the recession; the rolls are still down about 75 percent from
their 1990s peak. A different program, unemployment insurance, has rapidly
grown, but still omits nearly half the unemployed. Food stamps, easier to get,
have become the safety net of last resort.
“The food-stamp program is being asked to do too much,” said James Weill,
president of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group.
“People need income support.”
Food stamps, officially the called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
have taken on a greater role in the safety net for several reasons. Since the
benefit buys only food, it draws less suspicion of abuse than cash aid and more
political support. And the federal government pays for the whole benefit, giving
states reason to maximize enrollment. States typically share in other programs’
costs.
The Times collected income data on food-stamp recipients in 31 states, which
account for about 60 percent of the national caseload. On average, 18 percent
listed cash income of zero in their most recent monthly filings. Projected over
the entire caseload, that suggests six million people in households with no
income. About 1.2 million are children.
The numbers have nearly tripled in Nevada over the past two years, doubled in
Florida and New York, and grown nearly 90 percent in Minnesota and Utah. In
Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, one of every 25 residents reports
an income of only food stamps. In Yakima County, Wash., the figure is about one
of every 17.
Experts caution that these numbers are estimates. Recipients typically report a
small rise in earnings just once every six months, so some people listed as
jobless may have recently found some work. New York officials say their numbers
include some households with earnings from illegal immigrants, who cannot get
food stamps but sometimes live with relatives who do.
Still, there is little doubt that millions of people are relying on incomes of
food stamps alone, and their numbers are rapidly growing. “This is a reflection
of the hardship that a lot of people in our state are facing; I think that is
without question,” said Mr. Winstead, the Florida official.
With their condition mostly overlooked, there is little data on how long these
households go without cash incomes or what other resources they have. But they
appear an eclectic lot. Florida data shows the population about evenly split
between families with children and households with just adults, with the latter
group growing fastest during the recession. They are racially mixed as well —
about 42 percent white, 32 percent black, and 22 percent Latino — with the
growth fastest among whites during the recession.
The expansion of the food-stamp program, which will spend more than $60 billion
this year, has so far enjoyed bipartisan support. But it does have conservative
critics who worry about the costs and the rise in dependency.
“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who
is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at
risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable
getting by living off the government.”
Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around
and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses
will create more jobs.
With nearly 15,000 people in Lee County, Fla., reporting no income but food
stamps, the Fort Myers area is a laboratory of inventive survival. When Rhonda
Navarro, a cancer patient with a young son, lost running water, she ran a hose
from an outdoor spigot that was still working into the shower stall. Mr.
Britton, the jobless parking lot painter, sold his blood.
Kevin Zirulo and Diane Marshall, brother and sister, have more unlikely stories
than a reality television show. With a third sibling paying their rent, they are
living on a food-stamp benefit of $300 a month. A gun collector covered in
patriotic tattoos, Mr. Zirulo, 31, has sold off two semiautomatic rifles and a
revolver. Ms. Marshall, who has a 7-year-old daughter, scavenges discarded
furniture to sell on the Internet.
They said they dropped out of community college and diverted student aid to
household expenses. They received $150 from the Nielsen Company, which monitors
their television. They grew so desperate this month, they put the breeding
services of the family Chihuahua up for bid on Craigslist.
“We look at each other all the time and say we don’t know how we get through,”
Ms. Marshall said.
Ms. Bermudez, by contrast, tells what until the recession seemed a storybook
tale. Raised in the Bronx by a drug-addicted mother, she landed a clerical job
at a Manhattan real estate firm and heard that Fort Myers was booming. On a
quick scouting trip in 2002, she got a mortgage on easy terms for a $120,000
home with three bedrooms and a two-car garage. The developer called the floor
plan Camelot.
“I screamed, I cried,” she said. “I took so much pride in that house.”
Jobs were as plentiful as credit. Working for two large builders, she quickly
moved from clerical jobs to sales and bought an investment home. Her income
soared to $180,000, and she kept the pay stubs to prove it. By the time the glut
set in and she lost her job, the teaser rates on her mortgages had expired and
her monthly payments soared.
She landed a few short-lived jobs as the industry imploded, exhausted her
unemployment insurance and spent all her savings. But without steady work in
nearly three years, she could not stay afloat. In January, the bank foreclosed
on Camelot.
One morning as the eviction deadline approached, Ms. Bermudez woke up without
enough food to get through the day. She got emergency supplies at a food pantry
for her daughters, Tiffany, now 17, and Ashley, 4, and signed up for food
stamps. “My mother lived off the government,” she said. “It wasn’t something as
a proud working woman I wanted to do.”
For most of the year, she did have a $600 government check to help her care for
Ashley, who has a developmental disability. But she lost it after she was
hospitalized and missed an appointment to verify the child’s continued
eligibility. While she is trying to get it restored, her sole income now is $320
in food stamps.
Ms. Bermudez recently answered the door in her best business clothes and handed
a reporter her résumé, which she distributes by the ream. It notes she was once
a “million-dollar producer” and “deals well with the unexpected.”
“I went from making $180,000 to relying on food stamps,” she said. “Without that
government program, I wouldn’t be able to feed my children.”
Matthew Ericson contributed research.
Living on Nothing but
Food Stamps, NYT, 3.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html
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