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homelessness Archives - Page 3 of 3 - ChangingMedia

Apr 25
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Fewer Baltimorians Headed HOME

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | No Comments

They’re back! If you’ve attended a Baltimore Community Association meeting this month, you’ve seen them: armed with letters, announcements, and news from the state’s capitol, legislators have finished a three-month session in Annapolis and returned to the city. As they make the rounds and reconnect with constituents, there is a lot of good news to discuss. While there was much impressive work accomplished, many housing advocates hung their heads at the news that one important piece of legislation had failed — again.

The HOME Act, had it survived in Annapolis, would have required landlords to accept any kind of legal income as a rent payment. Understandably, this would have been good news for people who are experiencing homelessness but hold a Section 8 Voucher. The voucher program is a federal plan that allows tenants to pay 30 percent of their income and provides subsidies to cover the rest of the rent. Despite the ghastly-long waiting list for vouchers, the theory behind the program is that a voucher holder can choose where to live rather than residing in a particular low-income building or neighborhood. This sounds good in theory, but obtaining one does not necessarily lead to housing because many property owners can legally refuse to house tenants who intend to pay with a voucher. (Income discrimination also affects people who use Social Security or pension programs to pay their rent, so the HOME Act could have created increased housing security for many people).

By not passing the HOME Act, this behavior will continue in Baltimore City. Missteps like this one place Baltimore behind other cities in the race to end homelessness. Eleven states and 30 cities have already passed laws prohibiting income discrimination, including Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. If each of these cities is able to allow their citizens equal housing choice, why does Baltimore allow landlords to cater specifically to wealthier tenants?

You can probably guess the answer. Fear and stigma surround homelessness, even in cities that have pledged to end it. There might be abstract support to end homelessness, but it becomes dicey when a formally homeless person is about to become your neighbor. It seems people are much more comfortable donating a dollar from inside a car than passing a low-income person in the hallway of their building. This “Not In My Backyard” mentality deters landlords from accepting Section 8 voucher holders, for fear it might upset other tenants. In reality, low-income housing has been shown not to decrease property values.

Recently, speculation surrounding sequestration suggest that Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget cuts could actually lead to some current Section 8 tenants having their voucher revoked. In New Orleans, 700,000 recently awarded vouchers were revoked last month. It is unknown which cities will be forced to follow suit.

Baltimore should make every effort to preserve the Section 8 vouchers that have allowed low-income individuals safe and affordable housing. It is unacceptable to reverse someone’s path to housing stability. Even more crucial is a system to provide a voucher system that actually works. By working with HUD, federal policy makers, and local landlords to reduce stigma, income discrimination, and evictions, Baltimore could pull ahead in the race to end homelessness.

Perhaps next year Baltimore will be able to catch up to other cities. Until the next legislative session, income discrimination presents a significant barrier to housing, one that will slow Baltimore in its plans to end homelessness.

IMAGE CREDIT. Hasdai Westbrook.
Mar 25
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Let Them Eat Subway

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 2 Comments

I was walking down the street this weekend when two homeless men stopped me to ask for a couple of dollars to buy a sandwich. I told them I didn’t have cash on me but one of the men suggested that I could just go to Subway and buy them the sandwich on my credit card. I agreed and while we were waiting for the sub, he says to me “It’s a shame you didn’t have cash, we would have been able to get cheaper food.” Now my first thought was something akin to “You ungrateful SOB,” but then I realized he was right and in fact being a good steward of my charity. If I had given him the seven dollars I spent at Subway he might have been able to go to the corner store where he could have gotten a decent meal for $4 and still had $3 to put toward his next meal. If I wanted more bang for my buck in terms of impact on his empty stomach I should have just given him cash.

This is a problem with our welfare system as well. There are programs to pay for heating, food, medical expenses, etc. but they are all in separate pots and restricted for a limited purpose. Not only does that mean people are forced to go to dozens of different places with different application processes to meet their needs, they are also not able to budget in a way that works for them. This has led to a black market where people sell or trade their food stamps  to pay for rent, shoes, heat, diapers and other necessities. While some people are appalled by the business of buying and selling welfare benefits, the practice allows people to make ends meet.

So why don’t we just give out money? One argument you hear frequently is that by giving a sandwich I at least know my money is spent on food. If I just gave the man $7 he could have used it to fuel the addiction which caused him to be on streets in the first place or for some other nefarious action which would have left him off worse than before and still hungry. The giving of sandwiches is intended to ensure that the money doesn’t go toward actions that would hurt the recipient but it also prevents them from doing anything with the money that might help them, so that, possibly, they would not need me to give them a sandwich. You can’t build financial stability by saving food stamps in a bank account and then using them to pay your heating bill in the winter. In that way it undermines the financial health of the recipient. The system of earmarking donations assumes that the recipient has become poor because they don’t know how to manage their money. So we take control of their financial future.

Malcolm Gladwell points out that any cost that helps a person out of homelessness is far more cost-effective then just meeting their presumed needs in this fascinating piece. He gives the example of a program in Denver that gives chronic homeless people free apartments because the cost of providing an apartment and a case worker is far cheaper than the housing, medical, and other expenses that come as a result of having them out on the streets. Fellow ChangeEngine author Jasmine Arnold offers another example in her blog about asking versus assuming the needs of homeless people. She cites an article from The Economist profiling a charity called Broadway, which moved 84 percent of their clients off the streets simply by asking individuals what they needed to improve their lives. To quote The Economist piece: “The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

I’d like to challenge the assumption that the way the givers of welfare earmark funds does a better job in lifting people out of poverty than the way the recipients would spend it. As economist  Uwe E. Reinhardt argues, it is in ineffective. If we are looking to maximize the impact on the recipient per dollar we give then we should give money not benefits. Why? We aren’t experts in other people’s needs. What we think people need might be different than their reality but the walls we’ve built around their benefits prevents them from accessing those funds for anything beyond our understanding of what should lift them up from poverty.

Let’s stop defining people’s needs for them. If we’re going to maximize our impact on someone per dollar spent, we’ve got to stop assuming we have the answer and start asking some questions. Let’s stop giving sandwiches and start helping people get the reigns back on their financial futures.

 

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of cobalt
Mar 15
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Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | One Comment

Most people have certain words they hate. Moist. Slacks. I hope not too many people stopped reading just then. For me, the phrase that makes me cringe is “those people.” Unless you are literally talking about a specific number of people near you, it is just not appropriate. Usually, this is a phrase used to fuel stereotypes. “Those people are homeless because they are drug addicts,” or “Those people are too lazy to get jobs.”

Word choice matters. Just like mass stereotyping, labeling people who are homeless can affect the way in which those who are not homeless understand and relate to this population. Instead of “homeless person,” many people in social service or outreach work generally prefer the term “person experiencing homelessness.” It may be a mouthful, but the extra second it takes to say can be the second when someone realizes that homelessness is a condition, not a definition. “Homeless” is not an adjective to describe a person, but rather a measure of the person’s housing situation. It is not the whole picture of an individual. People experiencing homelessness should not be reduced to being evaluated by their lodgings.

I am not trying to exaggerate small problems, and vocabulary is a molehill next to the mountain of homelessness. A friend told me that she recently saw a mother and child walk past a person sleeping on the street. As they passed, the mother instructed the little girl to spit on the person. Actions like that speak louder than any phrasing can. Still, the distinction between “homeless people” and “people experiencing homelessness” is important to service providers, lawmakers, politicians, and the public — those with and without housing.  This verbal reminder can serve as a strong tool; it reinforces the powerful idea that people are experiencing homeless today, but it does not have to be this way. Their “experience” can end.

Many cities have drawn up 10 Year Plans to End Homelessness. By defining individuals as homeless people, there is no room to understand a person’s many other traits and qualities. In Baltimore City’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, the city’s homeless population is referred to only once as “people experiencing homelessness,” and more than 40 times as “homeless people.” Plans in other jurisdictions are written in much the same vein.

The particular words in each city’s plan probably will not be the reason it does or does not work, but the culture that is created with each phrase shapes the attitudes of those who are involved. If the writers and the planners in each city truly expect to see an end to homelessness, that should be reflected in the language used to describe people who are experiencing it.

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of Leah Stirewalt.
Dec 07
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Why The Numbers Matter: How Can We Measure Homelessness?

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | No Comments

Four Thousand. Working at an organization that provides services to those experiencing homelessness, I often find myself trying to explain to others the depth of homelessness in our city. When I do that, I find myself repeating the same number: 4,000. Four thousand, as I’ve said nearly as many times to my family and my friends, is the number of people who are homeless on any given night in Baltimore City.

I both love and hate the statistic. Read More