"A safety net that is leaving more people out" by Yvonne Abraham | Globe Columnist, October 07, 2012
“Obviously we want to maintain a strong safety net,” said Aaron Gornstein, undersecretary for Housing and Community Development. “But we also want to make sure we’re spending taxpayer dollars wisely, investing in prevention and permanent housing, and that emergency shelter is a last resort.”
All of a sudden they are concerned about taxpayer dollars. They never seem to be when debt interest payments to banks are due or cutting out a tax check for some well-connected corporation.
The problem is, there isn’t yet enough prevention and affordable housing to save many families from the street. “None of us have a safety net to put under the safety net that has been restricted,” said Jim Greene, director of Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.
What’s frustrating to him, and to others who work on the front lines, is that the state seems unwilling to recognize there is a problem here. State officials seem entirely wedded to the notion that almost everybody has somewhere to stay, even when they say they don’t. They say this is based on experience – that their past investigations have shown people can almost always find someone to take them in.
All that public relations promotion about Massachusetts being the compassionate liberal state is just a bunch of illusion and imagery, folks. Sorry.
They’re not persuaded by the stories of families sleeping in cars and on beaches and in the lobbies of apartment buildings, which they believe are exaggerated by advocates determined to grow the shelter system.
Maybe they should start claiming they are Holocaust survivors. No one would dare question them then.
Privately, they have suggested Greene and others are using poor families as pawns.
That is YOUR LOVINGLY LIBERAL STATE GOVERNMENT, folks!!
Publicly, they wonder if advocates are suggesting homeless families put themselves in dangerous situations just to qualify for shelter.
This is REALLY RANK and SICKENING for a SUNDAY!!!
“I hope they’re not coaching them to do that,” Gornstein said.
Seriously? People who have devoted careers to ending homelessness would advise families to give up homes and put themselves in harm’s way?
It’s hard to reconcile the Deval Patrick who demanded that his party stop apologizing for its values at the Democratic National Convention with the way his administration is handling this.
“I believe the governor when he said it’s about our values,” said Senator Ken Donnelly, an Arlington Democrat who is one of a group of legislators trying to rebalance the shelter regulations. “But they have this feeling that people are somehow gaming the system, and you just look at them and say, ‘What planet are you on?’ ”
They are caught in the bubble of state politic$ -- if you know what I mean.
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Yeah, that's the Democratic state of Massachusetts, yup.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Sentenced to the Streets
Oh, you can always find a place to stay:
"A young couple caught up in the middle; Randy and Jessica Wood didn’t want it all, just for the old American equation of hard work and opportunity to work for them as it had for generations. But, as for so many, the good life remains just out of reach" by Sarah Schweitzer | Globe Staff, October 14, 2012
NORTH ANDOVER — Jessica and Randy didn’t take losses on real estate. They didn’t lose their jobs. But they joined in the easy-credit run-up to the Great Recession, which has left them with a heap of debts that has devoured their paychecks and their future, most recently, their 401(k)....
Across America, political candidates are warring over how best to shore up the middle class.
This after both parties helped in its destruction.
Republican US Senator Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, his Democratic opponent in the closely watched Senate race, barely speak a sentence without mention of the group.
But just who falls into the middle class is a matter of open debate. Economists wield formulas, but more often, middle class is a self-appended label — one that fewer Americans apply to themselves after the Great Recession, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The route to this most basic American dream seems more uncertain than ever.
Jessica and Randy’s bank account doesn’t look middle-class. Their credit doesn’t qualify. Nor does their car, a barely alive 2002 Saturn they call Big Red that’s been sounding like a mournful cat of late.
Yet they will cheer Maisie at her North Andover Soccer Association games. They will enroll Emmett in karate. They will buy a black desk from Ikea, snug enough to fit in the room that was Jessica’s when she was a girl.
“I feel,” Jessica says, “like I’ve been grandfathered into the middle class.”
**********************************
Shortly before 9 a.m., the video screens mounted on clothing racks at Kohl’s announce temporarily slashed prices under headlines proclaiming, “Power Hour Specials.”
“These!” Maisie says in the shoe section, pointing to a pair of particularly glittered sneakers called Twinkle Toes. Jessica nods and her mother puts them in the cart with other back-to-school items. Emmett likes sneakers with Spiderman crawling on their fronts. “No, they’re hideous,” Jessica says under her breath. She picks up blue and fluorescent yellow Nikes with a $59 price tag. “We can do better than that,” she says, putting them back.
At the register, it is Anne who hands over her Kohl’s credit card while Jessica corrals Maisie and Emmett. “How’d we do?” Jessica inquires afterward in the parking lot. “Good,” Anne says. “180 for everything.”
Jessica will pay her back. The store credit card sliced some 30 percent from the price and Jessica doesn’t have one. Neither she nor Randy has any credits cards because no company will trust them with one.
Not with $60,000 in outstanding student loans, and credit card debt racked up in college that still runs into the thousands. “I was buying groceries and books on the card,” says Randy, the cool-headed son of a factory worker who had little means to help him at Alfred University. There once was a charge for a futon when he needed a bed.
Jessica was a theater major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose dramatic flair extended to finances. “Middle class?” she quips now. “I didn’t want to be in any class!” She amassed her debt in a freshman year spending blitz funded by a Discover card she signed up for in the student center on campus. “I went to a cash machine until it said I couldn’t have more,” she said. “I was very artsy, and I wasn’t going to live past 21.”
The debts followed them as they surfed career paths — together waiting tables at a restaurant and counseling troubled teens. After marrying in 2004, Randy turned to beer brewing and Jessica to teaching. There were other gambits along the way. In 2007, they moved West with then-2-year-old Maisie to a yurt in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains where Randy trained to become a wilderness counselor. Randy’s training left no time to earn money. In three months, they were broke.
Back in Massachusetts, they hunkered down. Jessica took a job at a Springfield charter school, Randy became manager of the Northampton Brewery. They blended with the other parents in chunky eyeglasses shopping at the River Valley Coop. They saw Joy Kills Sorrow at the Iron Horse Music Hall. They ran the 5k at Red Fire Farm’s Tomato Festival.
Those are all just down the road.
Financially, though, they were unraveling. They brought home $4,500 a month after taxes, and once they’d paid $1,200 for rent; $1,500 for child care for two children after the birth of Emmett; $500 for utilities, car insurance, and gas; and $800 for food, they had too little left over for the creditors who had come calling.
What, no bailout for them?
They trimmed their handful of extras, buying no-spray vegetables from farm stands rather than organic-labeled ones in stores. They nixed the idea of ski trips. But the demands didn’t relent.
“The credit card companies would bully Randy into paying more than we could afford,” Jessica said. “It was causing heartache in our relationship because it felt like we were more and more trapped.”
They hatched a plan: Randy would become a teacher, a job that offered better hours and greater security than the brewery. In teaching, they saw the promise of jobs that allowed them to do good and escape the factories where, working summer jobs, they had watched workers worry over making quotas and blow their paychecks betting at Rockingham Park.
Yeah, that's all us working slobs do, blow our money. I do every day I buy a Globe. I'll tell you, I wish I made enough to gamble.
But he would have to leave the brewery job to do the two-year training, and they couldn’t survive on one salary.
In April, Jessica’s father called. “If things are hard, there’s always here.”
They were 37 and 38, parents of a kindergartner and a preschooler, and out of options. The four-bedroom house it was....
Oh, they MOVED BACK HOME to the PARENTS HOUSE, huh?
***************************************
Jessica and Randy’s deepened money troubles spring from an economy that seems to them crueler and less fair than the one they’d known. “We didn’t get trapped early on,” Anne says. Tuition at Lowell State was $150 a year. You couldn’t get a credit card if you didn’t have a job. The reward for modest but stable salaries was a fully funded pension.
Well, times $ure have changed.
In the spring, they had considered the pros and cons of opening their home to Jessica, Randy, and the kids. They enjoyed its free-form quiet. She had her book club. He played accordion in high school productions of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Together, they volunteered at a Lawrence kindergarten, where each December, Barry dressed up as Santa Claus, his luxurious white beard grown long.
“We must be out of our minds,” Anne recalls thinking at the time. But then there was this. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for my children,” Barry says....
I think most parents feel that way.
*************************************************
Big Red is dying. A mechanic says the Saturn may sputter for a bit more, but it’s not safe to drive and won’t be until $1,500 in repairs are made.
The $4,000 that Randy and Jessica cashed out of their 401(k) to tide them over during the paycheck-less portion of summer has already dwindled — $140 gone for Lands’ End backpacks for the kids, $220 to Pentucket Medical ExpressCare to treat Randy’s bout of poison ivy, and $500 for Emmett’s preschool deposit.
A mechanic at the garage her parents use says he knows of a 2003 Highlander they could get for $10,000.
They can’t drive their children in an unsafe car. They won’t ask her parents for the money.
So on a searingly hot afternoon, days before the start of school, Jessica sits in the office of a local credit union. She is streaked with dust and sweat from cleaning desks and cutting bubble-shaped letters exhorting soon-to-arrive students to “persevere” in her un-air conditioned classroom. Signs above the loan officer’s desk promise car loan rates as low as 1.99 APR. “Apply today!” Jessica knows better. “Where are the bad credit rates? Because that’s where I’m going to be.”
The officer hands Jessica a laminated page and points to the far right column where rates range from 13.49 percent to 14.09 percent. Small print below tacks on another 2 percent for older models, like the Highlander.
Jessica nods. Sixteen percent is her penance.
“The other day my mom said, ‘You’re in the same boat as 70 percent of Americans.’ But it always feels like a personal failure,” Jessica says. “Like I’ve made these bad decisions and so maybe that’s the way it’s going to go for me.”
That's exactly the way the money-grubbing mind manipulators want you to feel.
A day later, someone from the credit union calls. No, she and Randy may not have a loan — even at 16 percent....
Time for me to get moving.
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And the deepest cut of all:
"Many new city ordinances targeting homeless" by Gillian Flaccus | Associated Press, October 14, 2012
COSTA MESA, Calif. — Army veteran Don Matyja was getting by all right on the streets of this Southern California city until he got ticketed for smoking in the park.
Matyja, who has been homeless since he was evicted nearly two years ago, had trouble paying the fine and getting to court — and now a $25 penalty has ballooned to $600.
Is that what they were fighting for even as they made thousands if not millions of Muslims that way?
The ticket is just one of myriad new challenges facing Matyja and others living on the streets in Orange County, where a number of cities have recently passed ordinances that ban everything from smoking in the park to sleeping in cars to leaning bikes against trees in a region better known for its beaches than its 30,000 homeless people.
Cities have long struggled with how to deal with the homeless, but the new ordinances here echo what homeless advocates say is a rash of regulations nationwide as municipalities grapple with how to address those living on their streets within the constraints of ever-tightening budgets.
Always seem to have enough money for wars though.
The rules may go unnoticed by most, but the homeless say they are a thinly veiled attempt to push them out of one city and into another by criminalizing the daily activities they cannot avoid.
Why not just kill 'em all? That will solve the problem, right?
There’s been a sharp uptick in the past year in the number of cities passing ordinances against doing things on public property such as sitting, lying down, sleeping, standing in a public street, loitering, public urination, jaywalking, and panhandling, said Neil Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
‘‘It definitely is more pervasive and it is more adversarial. I think in the past we found examples of it but it’s not simply just growing, but it’s growing in its severity and in its targeted approach to America’s un-housed,’’ said Donovan, who compared it to a civil rights issue. ‘‘There’s the whole notion of driving while black. Well, this is sitting while homeless.’’
You know, with all the empty houses due to fraudulent foreclosures maybe we could billet the homeless in empty houses until whenever.
Denver this year voted to make urban camping illegal despite protests from homeless activists. Philadelphia banned feedings in public parks in June but the ordinance was put on hold the following month after homeless groups sued the city. And there’s a new curfew for pets that help their owners beg on the Las Vegas Strip.
The Newport Beach Public Library, nestled in a coastal city better known for its surfing and miles of wide beaches, recently updated a policy that says staff can evict someone for having poor hygiene or a strong aroma. The policy also bans lounging on library furniture and creates strict limits about parking shopping carts, bikes, and ‘‘other wheeled conveyances’’ outside the premises.
Library Services Director Cynthia Cowell insists the policy isn’t aimed at the homeless, but the action has nonetheless stirred anger among homeless advocates.
Some cities have seen a legal backlash as homeless advocacy groups sue. Recently, the homeless in Sacramento got checks ranging from $400 to $750 apiece to settle a class-action lawsuit brought after police destroyed property seized during cleanup operations.
In a similar case, a federal appeals court ruled last month that the city of Los Angeles cannot seize property left temporarily unattended on sidewalks by homeless residents.
Oddly, if they were dealing drugs they wouldn't be homeless.
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Also see: Quick Vet Check
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