White Trash For Obama

Nothing spruces up a reliable shitbox car quite like a White Trash for Obama bumper sticker side by side with the classic automotive statement of support for Real Change. I voted for Kerry and Gore, but didn't have the requisite emotional investment those times around to crap up my bumper with their names. This time, it's different.

The question of why poor people often vote Republican, against their economic interest, has perhaps been best addressed by Thomas Frank's What's The Matter with Kansas? Frank argues that the Democrats have abandoned the field on economic justice, leaving the path wide open to a redefinition of class politics by the right in demagogic cultural terms.

Think the 2004 RNC attack ad. "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." Pure class resentment, reframed to hit the left.

While the electoral re-alignment of 2004 was fueled by Democratic candidates who embraced economic populism, the party as a whole remains largely in the back pocket of big money

At this point, however, people still have more reason to trust Democrats with the economy than Republicans, who seem entirely preoccupied with raiding the larders of a sinking ship. Today's New York Times' Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battleground brings welcome news of how the economic meltdown has blown open an Obama lead. While anything can happen between now and November, including a stolen election, martial law and the suspension of the election entirely, or a terrorist attack that returns America to full-on politics of fear, qualified hope springs eternal. In this car, anyway.

Out For The Count

In case you missed it, the New York Times covered the homeless definitions issue that is at the heart of the national legislative debate right now. The article is odd. Somehow, the reporter managed to write 1,100 words on the subject and still miss the point.

This year's renewal of $1.7 billion in federal legislation to fund homeless programs has centered on the issue of whether those who are considered homeless under the Department of Education definition and thus able to attend public school — those doubled up or living vulnerably in poverty motels — should also be eligible for homeless assistance from HUD.

One position is that homeless is homeless, and the nation needs to step up and deal with reality. The other, which is supported by President Bush and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, argues that in a time of limited resources, we need to focus on those who are most desperate.

Several advocacy groups, including the National Coalition for the Homeless, argue that the HUD definition should more closely mirror the Education Department’s. ... These advocates note that many families live in communities where shelters are full or nonexistent. In other places, some say, shelters sometimes bar large families, families with two parents or those with boys older than 10.

“I think we have to take care of our most vulnerable,” Ms. Biggert said. “Shouldn’t children as well as the others be a priority?”

Barbara Duffield, policy director at the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, echoed those concerns. “This is really about our nation acknowledging the extent of the housing crisis and the devastation it wreaks on children, youth and family,” she said. “The housing crisis is bigger than the emergency system put in place to address it 20 years ago.”

Opponents of a broad expansion of the definition counter that demand for shelter beds already exceeds supply. About 700,000 people live in shelters or on the streets on any given day, housing officials say. But federal dollars finance only 170,000 beds.

Some advocates also fear that communities would shift resources from single, mentally ill or addicted people to doubled-up families who were newly classified as homeless. Such families are typically easier to serve and politically more appealing.

“Nobody thinks that these families are having an easy time of it,” said Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “But when push comes to shove, when you’ve got people in apartments and people in shelters and on the streets, the people in the latter group need the help more.” ...

Whatever the number, “we need to deal with the most desperate the best that we can and keep working” toward greater expansion, said Representative Maxine Waters, the California Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity. “We don’t want to create competition and have people at each other’s throats for limited space.”

OK. So let's review. Less than 25% of current shelter receives any federal support. This shelter, numbered at 700,000 or so beds, does not include those who lack housing but are not literally on the street or in a homeless shelter already. Counting these, worry some, would stretch already scarce federal support even more thinly, leading to some sort of ugly Darwinian competition for shelter beds that don't exist. Regardless of which version of the expanded definition gets passed, no new resources will be made available.

When it comes to poor people, the feds are officially out of money. Large badly-run financial institutions, on the other hand, are always a good public investment

Which means this debate, for now, isn't about whether the numbers of homeless people who get help gets expanded. It's more about how accurately we account for the various ways in which poor people are being fucked.

Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, homeless advocates routinely took great pains to point out that families with children make up the great majority of those who are homeless. Those who look homeless — the mentally ill, drunk, and addicted — were the red headed step children of homeless advocacy. These two categories — sympathetic families with kids and somewhat frightening single men — divided neatly across the lines of deserving and undeserving poor. Homeless families got shelter and transitional housing, and single homeless men with problems got hot soup, a mat on the floor if they were lucky, and a bus ticket out of town.

Then came the glitzification (I just made that word up) of our downtown areas and the national preoccupation with ending chronic (read visible) homelessness. Suddenly, homelessness became all about the most dysfunctional: the drunk, the addicted, the mentally ill. These problematic but relative few have become the focus of our concern, and the cure usually resembles small servings of carrot paired with liberal helpings of stick.

"Homeless advocacy" became the new found passion of hundreds of instant experts. Quasi-governmental public/private planning bodies erupted across the country to manage the growing contradiction of growing affluence and poverty in a changing urban landscape. Ending chronic homelessness through ten year plans became the driving paradigm as desperate localities uncritically followed the money that trickled down from the feds. The definition of "chronically homeless" itself began to narrow. The numbers went down. Success was declared.

To now broaden the definition would be to undermine the illusion that means so much to so many. This we cannot do.

The federally imposed Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness template has reduced our scope of concern to the homeless that are bad for business. As for the others, if we don't see them, they don't exist. We can pretend, along with the NAEH's Steve Berg, that raising kids in an exhorbitantly priced, crack-infested transient hotel is the same thing as having "an apartment."

What I'm saying here is this: One can't understand why the federal definition of homelessness should be expanded without first understanding how and why it has been narrowed. The HUD press releases focus on reductions in chronic homelessness. When family homelessness increases, the media is seldom alerted.

Poverty in America isn't news anymore. Not unless it pisses on your sidewalk.

Every Picture Tells A Story

Seattle's Million Dollar Toilet saga has come to a painful yet ridiculous end. The automatic restrooms have been closed off with tiny little padlocks, and the super-loos are up on EBay. The original minimum bid requirement of $89,000 is gone. Apparently there were no takers.

The New York Times took the opportunity to write on this at length last month. Apparently, we West Coast rubes who think we live in a real city make an irresistible target, especially when we're being stupid and indecisive on such a grand scale.

Not surprisingly, bidders have been scarce. What municipality, during this age of homeless criminalization and urban upscaling, is going to set themselves up by purchasing the Emerald City's cast-off vectors of drug use, criminality, and prostitution? It's a case of bad provenance.

With a little more than eight days to go on EBay, bids on the five toilets now range from $306 to $510.

The photo, taken the night the toilets first closed, is by my friend Revel, who recently became my fiancée. This is French for "person I want to marry." We are of the same clan. It's Alpha-love.

The glass giant that looms behind is the Fifteen Twenty One Second Avenue Building, one of four luxury high-rises going up in the neighborhood. If one wishes to convey exclusivity in a common street address, one method is to spell the numerals. The building bathes the neighborhood in bright reflected light. It's all part of this building's specialness, and the very specialness of those who, sometime between this December and May, will occupy this citadel of excellence. To quote from their website:

If one is lucky, there's a time in life when simplicity takes on new meaning. It becomes less about style and more about the ability to appreciate that which is rare and true.

At Fifteen Twenty-One Second Avenue, the architectural profile is tall and lean, the residential windows floor to ceiling, the water and city views a daily gift. Modestly put, it's a downtown home for the confident few.

Private preview appointments available upon request. Priced from one-million dollars.

Nice. I bet they'll have really beautiful bathrooms.

Jonathan Raban on Seattle's Goblin Merchants

Annoyed that Seattle tourists had the gall to bitch to the press about the eyesore of "transients" in this city, author Jonathan Raban decided to take a homeless guy to lunch. He found Real Change vendor Fred Spruitenberg, and the result was a column in Sunday's New York Times. Fred, he found, was a real human being, with thoughts and interests and aspirations and imperfections, just like the rest of us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's a really nice piece of writing.

Fred mentioned Goblin Market, a Christina Rossetti poem that helped Raban frame just what needs to be said about Seattle at this particular moment in time.

Like Fred, Seattle has been a longstanding client of the goblin merchants. The city is littered with expensive toys and baubles, like Paul Allen’s grand folly, the Experience Music Project, a globular, multicolored extravaganza designed by Frank Gehry and known as “the hemorrhoids” by employees of the public TV station that overlooks it, but which now appears to my eye as a cornucopia of goblin damsons, figs and pomegranates.

Likewise, the new $52 million, 1.3-mile streetcar line, a pet project of the mayor, which runs from downtown to the giant construction site of South Lake Union, and whose shiny red, orange and purple cars are cute, quaint and eerily underpatronized. This is the city that a couple of years ago came within an inch of spending $11 billion (including the cost of debt service) on a new monorail system, cool as an iPhone but of doubtful utility.

As the faint breeze from the east strengthens into the frigid wind of recession, Seattle will have to reckon with its weakness for the goblin stuff. A chastening reading of Fred’s favorite poem might be a good place to start.

The Rich Are Giving More ... To Themselves

Call it a sign of the times. As the chasm between rich and poor yawns wider and wider, with the folks in the middle for the most part falling, certain institutional realities have taken hold. The New York Times reported earlier this month that private cash is setting the agenda for urban infrastructure. Apparently, as our bridges and roads and such are crumbling because government has gone broke with war and handing bundles of unmarked bills to the rich, institutions like Yale are flush with cash and spending like drunken Ivy league frat boys.

The message in this outburst of activity, here and in other places across the country, is that private spending, supported handsomely by a growing number of very wealthy families, is gaining ground on traditional public investment. In the case of New Haven, once the recipient of more federal dollars per person for urban renewal than any other city, private investment now far surpasses public outlays.

“For us,” the mayor said, “infrastructure spending has come to mean growing the university. Yale has the money, and what they get from us is the approval to grow.”...

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that government should be spending $320 billion a year over the next five years — double the current outlay — just to bring up to par what already exists.

Meanwhile, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports the following:

Even as many wealthy nonprofit institutions — like museums and universities — are reporting record increases in contributions, other charities, especially those that provide direct services to the poor, are struggling to get donations and keep up with rapidly escalating demands for aid. Some veteran leaders of organizations that serve the needy say they have not faced such a tough time before in their nonprofit careers.

Why? Well, as it turns out, most people aren't doing so well, and the people who are tend to give to their own.

“There are two tiers of income, and donors are in one tier or the other,” says Melissa S. Brown, associate director of research at Indiana University Center on Philanthropy. “Charities with donors in the top tier see big increases, and nonprofits whose donors are squeezed by lost income are feeling the pain.” ...

Colleges, hospitals, arts organizations, community foundations, and other wealthy institutions have in the past decade built their endowments and reserves to insulate themselves from economic fluctuations. In addition, such organizations have been hiring many new fund raisers to focus exclusively on seeking big gifts from wealthy people.

And wealthy donors overwhelmingly prefer those types of institutions: A study released this month of more than 8,000 gifts of $1-million or more to 4,000 nonprofit organizations found that the largest share of those dollars, 44 percent, went to higher education, followed by hospitals and other medical institutions (16 percent), and arts and cultural organizations (12 percent). Social-service groups received just 5 percent of the dollars, according to the study by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research.

A bit further down in the article comes this news from LA on how the homeless are doing.

Other charities in Los Angeles are facing an even tougher time. Beyond Shelter, a Los Angeles charity that has focused on moving homeless families out of emergency shelters and into permanent homes, is struggling to meet payroll next month while trying to help a homeless population that has exploded in size in the past two years, according to Tanya Tull, the charity’s president.

Ms. Tull says she has watched government support decline, while foundations that provided support in the past are making smaller and smaller grants to her charity because they are deluged with requests from other social-service groups.

“Every agency we speak to is turning families away, and the shelters have been full all year,” she says. “I am seeing families with children sleeping in their cars, riding the bus all night, sitting in fast-food restaurants, just to have a place to be. This is a very, very sad thing to experience, after so many years when we thought we were getting a handle on the problem.”

In her 25 years of working with the homeless, Ms. Tull says, “this is the worst I have ever seen in terms of the numbers of homeless families and the fact that the safety net is gone.”

What's this? I recently read that Los Angeles has halved their downtown homeless problem through a creepy combination of repressive policing and high-tech legerdemain. I guess that stuff doesn't really work. Oh, wait, she's talking about homeless families. They don't count.

The rich are having a big party, and we get to come and eat cake. No wait ... the cake's all gone. All they're serving now is crumbs.