We Hold These Truths As Less Than Evident

Events this week have had me thinking about power and how issues get defined; who sets the terms of debate and through that, controls the outcome. Often, this power to define and control works invisibly. This is what makes it so powerful.

Anyone who’s taken the time and trouble to analyze homelessness as a systemic issue knows it’s about declining housing affordability, structural unemployment, and the failure of wages to keep up with inflation. It’s about the globalization of trade that expresses itself in America as our two-tiered, deindustrialized economy. On the one side are an inadequate number of low-wage service industry jobs, and on the other you have the well-compensated professionals who work within an expanding information economy.

Poverty and inequality are growing, and the most vulnerable of us fall out at the bottom.

Homelessness, however, has been redefined. When you hear discussion of homelessness now, it is most likely to mean “chronic homelessness.” The talk here is always of individual dysfunction, its cost to society, and how we’re going to “end homelessness” by getting the most visible homeless (about 10% of the whole, using current definitions) people into housing within ten years. The other side of this “getting the numbers down” is the heightened policing of the urban poor. This, too, is often invisible.

This isn’t ending homelessness. It’s reducing the visible poverty that threatens the profits of developers who have, across the country, invested heavily in an urban condo boom for the winners in the new global economy. It’s sweeping poverty, and its true causes, under the rug.

Follow the money. It won’t win you any friends, but it might open your eyes.

From the Horses Mouth

This week I came across Chronic Homelessness: Emergence of a Public Policy, a 2003 article that long-time homeless researcher Martha Burt wrote for the Fordham Urban Law Journal on recent homeless policy shifts toward focusing on chronic homelessness. Burt, along with Dennis Culhane, is one of the main researchers whose work helped bring Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness into vogue.

Fan of 10YPs that I am, I expected to find something to disagree with. Oddly, I didn't. I was amazed to discover that, in her dispassionate academic way, Burt sees the problems as well as the possibilities. It seems that where we've gone wrong is to adopt a sort of Ten Year Plan boosterism that pretends we can have the good parts while ignoring the troubling barriers that get in the way, as if these issues will somehow resolve themselves.

This has the effect of reducing the whole thing to a bit of a resources shell game that boosts the budgets of some human service providers at the expense of others while focusing on the visible homelessness that urban downtown interests find most troubling. It's a convergence of interests, but it's not "ending homelessness."

Let's start with the good parts. Burt says the research is clear: those who have been homeless long term opt for housing with supportive services when it is available, and, for the most part, they stay in that housing. It's expensive, but no more expensive than the cost of not doing so. Even better, the estimated total number of these people who need to be housed — roughly 150,000 to 250,000 people in a given year — is within the means of a concerted, long-term effort to achieve.

It's interesting that her research shows a more or less break even cost-benefit relationship, as opposed the the savings factors of two or three that we hear from Mangano and company. This strikes me as a more honest assessment.

While this is good news, it's qualified good news. Even as she expresses enthusiasm for the Ten Year Planning strategies then unfolding through the USICH and NAEH, she also cites numerous problems.

The first is that while its no more expensive and more humane to provide housing with services than to leave people on the streets and in shelters, these costs are born by different bureaucratic entities, and a savings realized by one does little to offset an expense borne by the other.

This brings us to the political will issue, and the difficulty of sustaining said will over time.

Finally, even the narrow approach of solving chronic homelessness will take more resources than seems to be politically possible at the moment. The rest of the homeless — families, working poor, etc — are unaffected and may even receive less attention than before as a result of the policy shift.

These problems alone are enough to give any prudent person pause. But the biggest issue is that the structural realities of rising housing costs, low wages, growing inequality, and diminished government support for programs that assist the poor essentially undermine the foundation upon which progress through the means of Housing First would be realized. Burt concludes:

First, housing has to become more affordable. The simplest way to do this is to subsidize housing; research indicates that the public policy that would do the most to reduce the risk of homelessness is subsidizing housing. This involves no need to build more units, no struggles over project siting or zoning or not in my backyard behavior. All it takes is providing those people with the most disparate housing costs in relation to their income the financial resources to remain in place. In addition, new housing needs to be created that is affordable by people earning relatively little despite working regularly — renewed incentives for producing affordable rental housing would greatly help the current situation of inadequate housing supply.

It is also essential that people who are poor today, and their children, have the educational and training opportunities to assure that they are not poor tomorrow. That is, we have to increase the ability of the poorest people in this country to afford housing without requiring subsidies in the future. The problem is, these steps are not in political favor at this time, being seen as the old anti-poverty agenda. Instead, present federal budget proposals actually offer significant cuts in public and subsidized housing — actions that in the long run will work against the federal commitment to end chronic homelessness. Ultimately, the solution to chronic homelessness will rest on the solution to homelessness in general; the latter begets the former. Only a few communities so far have committed themselves to this larger goal.

Seattle is one of those communities, but rather than embracing the challenges of what it truly means to end homelessness, we have over time moved toward a more limited focus on street homelessness. This is inevitable, in that ending homelessness would take political courage and imaginative organizing across class and issue constituencies. We need a broad-based organizing effort that can change the definition of the possible. What we have instead is a lowest common denominator effort that is directed from the top. That's just not going to do it.

Families: The Next Big Thing

The news from Massachusetts this week is that family homelessness is up dramatically. There is a "right to shelter" law in that state that requires an accurate count of families in shelter. In other states, the numbers are less clear, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Massachusetts, where the number of homeless families is now up to 1,800 from 1,400 in June of last year, is not unique.

Not surprising. Federal funding priorities in recent years have been targeted to the elimination of visible homelessness, and local efforts have largely followed the funding. Meanwhile, the sorts of supports that make the difference between mere poverty and homelessness — food stamps, housing assistance, childcare support, access to health care — have all lost ground.

The argument has often been made by the Bush Administration's US Interagency Council on Homelessness and their lap dogs at the National Alliance to End Homelessness that ending homelessness is much easier than ending poverty or solving the housing crisis.

This is true. But only if you're talking about visible homelessness. If you're at all concerned with the other, more invisible, ninety percent of homeless people who don't look like winos, then things get a little more complicated.

When a community commits to housing with services for those with the most severe addictions and mental illness, visible street homelessness will most certainly decrease. When this is combined with intensified policing of the poor, as is the case in nearly all Ten Year Plan cities, you can get those numbers down even further. The business of ending homelessness is good for business.

But this isn't ending homelessness. It's reducing the evidence of homelessness while poverty increases and affordable housing becomes more scarce. It's classic Bush administration perception-management smoke and mirrors.

The next load of shit coming down the pike from the USICH will be Ten Year Plans to End Family Homelessness. This promises to be a good deal trickier.

The first planning conference, sponsored by the NAEH will be hosted right here in Seattle this February. Philip fucking Mangano is already telling us how solving family homelessness will be all about the data.

The overall number of homeless people is up from a few years ago, Mangano said, but nobody can pinpoint an exact number of families because reporting requirements vary widely from state to state.

“Our desire would be to have many more states step up and track the data,” Mangano said. “Research and data, that’s what should drive the resources that we make available. Instead it’s often anecdote, conjecture and hearsay that does that.”

Here's a radical idea. Maybe solving family homelessness isn't so much about the data as it is the resources. Maybe if the feds weren't doing their best to kill public housing and routinely slashing other supports for low-income people, fewer families would be in such desperate situations.

Maybe, if we spent less time tracking data and engaging in gut-busting bureaucratic exercises to chase a few crumbs of federal funding, and more time demanding the government be less beholden to corporations and the wealthy and more concerned for the welfare of ordinary people, we'd see finally some real results.

If it were up to me, one message would come through loud and clear this February. No Resources, No Plan. The feds don't get to put us through their hoops and look all concerned and active on the issue of family homelessness unless they start walking their talk. Otherwise, it's just more smoke and mirrors.

Genesis of a Misinformation Campaign

1.) United Way King County releases a press statement announcing their campaign to raise $25 million to build 1,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people. The press release includes a statement that chronic homelessness in Seattle has been reduced by 10% annually two years in a row.

2.) Nobody notices until the US Interagency Council on Homelessness quotes this misinformation on their website, and I draw attention to the problem that this claim is unsupported by any facts.

3.) United Way of King County gets embarrassed, and excises the offending statistic from the original press release that is posted on their website.

4.) A reporter from Dallas/Fort Worth's Star Telegram writes another one of those annoying "Phil Mangano is the best thing that ever happened to homeless people since hot soup and army blankets" articles, which states that Seattle has reduced chronic homelessness by 20%.

5.) Outraged local activist contacts said reporter to ask where he's getting his information. Reporter produces the map above, received as part of his press materials from the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, thus perfectly illustrating Mark Twain's famous dictum that "There are three kinds of lies: lies. damn lies, and statistics."

Charity Kicks Justice's Ass: Rich Throw Party

Tonight I was poking around at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' website looking for some decent poverty trend data. They've done a pretty thorough job of chewing over the 2006 census info and a few other things, and the news isn't great.

• In 2006, both the number and the percentage of Americans who are uninsured hit their highest levels since 1999, the first year for which comparable data are available, with 2.2 million more Americans — and 600,000 more children — joining the ranks of the uninsured in 2006.
• While median income rose modestly (by 0.7 percent, or $356) for households in general, this merely brought median income back to where it stood in the 2001 recession year. In addition, median income for working-age households — those headed by someone under 65 — remained more than $1,300 below where it stood when the recession hit bottom.
• New Commerce Department data shows that the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record, with data going back to 1929. The share of national income captured by corporate profits, in contrast, was at its highest level on record.
• Other new data shows that income concentration, which increased in 2003 and rose sharply in 2004, jumped again in 2005. The share of pre-tax income in the nation that goes to the top 1 percent of households increased from 17.8 percent in 2004 to 19.3 percent in 2005. Only four times since World War II has the percentage of income received by the top 1 percent risen this much in a single year (in percentage point terms). One of those four times was 2004.
• In the belaboring the obvious department, detailed new tax data shows that the federal tax system has become much less progressive over the past several decades, particularly during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Over the same several decades, pre-tax income inequality has grown as well. Thus, during a period in which economic forces have been generating increased pre-tax inequality, changes in the tax system have exacerbated rather than mitigated the widening of the income gap.

But hey, no need to worry. Americans are getting involved! According to The Corporation for National and Community Service,

Americans over the age of 16 are volunteering at historically high rates, with 61.2 million giving their time in 2006 to help others by mentoring students, beautifying neighborhoods, restoring homes after disasters, and much, much more. Although the adult volunteer rate for 2006, 26.7%, was down slightly from the 28.8% recorded from 2003-2005, a greater percentage of Americans adults are volunteering today than at any other time in the past 30 years.

And we have reason to be especially proud, because Seattle, despite our rapidly increasing income inequality and all of it's consequences for our city, is number five in the nation in volunteering, lagging only behind Austin, TX, Omaha, NE, Salt Lake City, UT, and, in the number one spot, the home of Mary Tyler Moore, Minneapolis, MN.

Also, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness has found the next best thing to Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, and it's Project Connect, a corporate friendly volunteer fest that brings resources and homeless people together to show what can happen when people roll up their sleeves and get to work. Their website now highlights a recent Project Connect in Springfield, MA, attended, of course, by Mr. Philip Mangano, and just look at these outcomes:

• 5 veterans were housed

• 351 applications for Section 8 and public housing were completed

• 141 people received housing counseling

• 76 Massachusetts IDs issued (paid for by the corporate donations)

• 76 birth certificates ordered (paid for by the corporate donations)

• 250 bus tickets issued

• 70 dental screenings

• 21 medical examinations, with 43 follow-up medical appointments made

• 131 chair massages

• 41 foot washes

• 60 haircuts

• 50 pairs of eyeglasses ordered

• 29 Social Security/SSI applications

• 49 MassHealth/Commonwealth Care applications

• 29 veterans benefits applications

• 229 employment & training contacts

• 90 people received legal advice

• 150 people received consumer information and advice

• 21 people received immigration advice

• 65 people made phone calls

• 55 children cared for at the on-site child care center

• 600 children's books given away

And some people say we don't have homelessness on the run!

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the more volunteerism and charity we have, the further we get away from a vision of what social justice looks like, and the more we become a society of haves and have-nots where people are too afraid, tired, hopeless, bought off, or just plain stupid to fight for anything more to the point. Charity makes the radical inequality we've grown accustomed to a bit easier to swallow, because we get to show we care.

The Devil Wears Brooks Brothers

There was a time when I could self-induce a near stroke simply by Googling Philip Mangano, the Bush appointee who heads the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. I knew Phil in a former life when I was active in Boston. For awhile he was the Cambridge Shelter Commissioner. That was a sweet gig. No one really knew what he did, but he was great at it.

He also ran the Boston shelter providers trade association for awhile, which was not to be confused with the advocacy coalition that actually did things for poor people. This was the coalition that did things for service providers.

Phil was widely regarded as an oleaginous chameleon in a nice suit.

So when he got reinvented as the Bush administration's maverick crusader to end homelessness, it sort of made sense.

He and I had dinner together about five years ago, back when he was still new and I was still sort of giving him the benefit of the doubt. He had this stagey "down with the people" routine that I found really annoying, and would affect instant intimacy with anyone who was homeless as he asked for their story and felt their pain.

I guess he still does that.

He had all the elements of his rap down even then. There was the "Massachusetts Abolitionist" line. "Republicans ended slavery and they'll end homelessness too." I did my best to try to pin him down on whether he was a D or an R but he wasn't talking.

There was also the evangelical belief in the power of data and in Housing First, although back then he was still promising that the feds would offer resources. He's pretty much backed off of that one. He was also saying that federal housing policy should focus on those under thirty percent of median income. He doesn't say that anymore either.

When I asked how you could end homelessness without addressing deepening poverty or widening inequality, he said that affluence and poverty were unconnected.

I wonder if most Republicans think that? How convenient.

So, I'm a Phil watcher. It's astonishing to me that this guy can walk into a room full of homeless advocates anywhere in the United States and not get lynched. I used to go nearly apoplectic over his press.

Now I just think it's kind of funny.

Take this article, for instance, Abolitionist Apostle, where he was awarded Governing.com's 2006 public official of the year award. He compares himself to Saint Francis of Assisi. Phil Fucking Mangano, the guy who hobnobs with the powerful, is known for his finely tailored suits, always flies first class, and takes limos instead of cabs.

This article, like many, discusses how Phil's work is a "spiritual calling."

When I really want to torture myself, I read his Religion & Ethics interview, in which he utters the words "I think it simply reminds us that ultimately the issue of homelessness is a spiritual issue. It's not really an ideological issue, it's not a political issue, it's not an economic issue," and again refers to his "Franciscan nature." But if you're really looking to be entertained, skip to the part where he talks about Simone Weil. "She is a patron saint of mine, I would say. When I read her words, it's pretty much sacramental to me."

Another story from New Orleans captures his big vision, no substance style nicely.

"Those same voices have been around for a long time," he says, his voice rising as he heads toward a big point. Those same voices told Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that slavery wouldn't end and that women couldn't be equal, he says. They told Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn that the Iron Curtain would never fall, told Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu that apartheid would never end.

"They were wrong then -- and they're wrong now," Mangano says.

Nice. The day he can reconcile his boss' constant attacks on the poor end 'ending homelessness" will be the day he can invoke Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu without making me want to puke.

But no search is complete until you've seen the Philip Mangano Quote Page.

Here's one that you're better off not over-thinking: “We've been bailing the leaky boat of homelessness ... only to see more people fall in.”

Metaphor isn't one of his gifts.

Another of his favorite lines is that “The very definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” He stole this from Albert Einstein, but it's a good one.

The feds take $52 billion in federal housing dollars away and replace that with $1.5 billion in money for homeless programs, and then wonder why homelessness isn't going away. I'll bet Einstein could figure that one out, even if Phil can't.

The Toothless Yappy Dog Press Conference

Next month is the Twentieth Anniversary of McKinney and the Inside the Beltway Gang is planning to mark the occasion with a press conference and a lobbying stunt that features bittersweet chunks of chocolate and a list of ten things legislators could do this year to end homelessness.

Clever. This call to arms will probably last about a minute for each point on the list. Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

McKinney-Vento is the federal legislation that funds shelter and various homeless services, and is the most significant "win" that homeless advocates can claim. WRAP released a report earlier this year that draws the surprisingly obvious conclusion that you can't replace the loss of $52 billion in federal housing dollars and mitigate the breathtaking hostility to the poor that is shown each year by federal budget priorities with less than $2 billion in McKinney-Vento funding and call that progress.

It never ceases to amaze me how the feds can wave little scraps of money around at "advocates" and service providers and immediately have them running around like yappy little dogs in heat.

Make that dogs in heat who have forgotten how to bark, or bite.

To me, the high point of advocacy was October 1989, when the Housing Now! march brought around 300,000 people to Washington, homeless and advocate alike. I'm less interested in commemorating McKinney-Vento in 2007 than in reinventing the spirit of Housing Now! by 2009. Since then, lobbyists for the homeless in DC haven't brought much of anyone along with them. That needs to change.

The beltway driven, non-confrontational, accommodationist, technocratic, homeless-fearing, ten-year-plan-worshipping politics of the present haven't won us much of anything, other than a broad consensus that the feds are officially off the hook for poverty and homelessness.

Chunks of bittersweet chocolate. Pathetic. It would be more to the point to give them something that smells like dead people.

McKinney-Vento keeps us divided against ourselves and isolated from our allies in the broader labor and anti-poverty movements. Each year, homeless advocates gear up to defend the various pieces of our ridiculously teeny pie against the encroachment of the other subpopulations. Lately it's been the chronically homeless against the families. Soon, we'll be defending homeless kids in schools. Or arguing over whether McKinney should be used to fund housing.

We are right where they want us. Divided, isolated, and largely following the lead of the US Interagency Council of Homelessness to focus on individual dysfunction, and not the systemic inequality that has resulted from decades of disastrous federal policy.

Clever lobbyist gags aren't going to fix this. Homeless advocates should take the occasion of McKinney's twentieth anniversary to ask ourselves "How did we all get to be such salivating dogs as to allow Phillip-fucking-Mangano to pass himself off as the second coming of Mitch Snyder?"

That, I think, would be much more appropriate to the moment.

The League of Women Voters and Me

Last night, I was on a League of Women Voters panel discussing the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. My co-panelists were three members of the CEHKC governing board (Bill Block, Doreen Cato, and Sheila Sebron) and the former Mayor of Kirkland.

Leading up to the panel, I'd been rather conflicted. On the one hand, I want to publicly support the Ten Year Plan. It's a good thing that people want to end homelessness. It's a good thing that the plan has created momentum and has raised expectations. It's a good thing to build housing that gets people off the streets.

On the other hand, I've come to view the Federal Government's Ten Year plan strategy as a means of defining the issue in politically neutral terms and severing homelessness from the broader movement against poverty. The NAEH/US Interagency Council on Homelessness approach exemplifies each of the tactics that Peter Marcuse points out in his landmark Neutralizing Homelessness analysis: Denial of the scope of the problem, narrow specialization, stigmatization through it's focus on chronic homelessness, and isolation of the issue from any broader discussion of poverty.

Additionally, I believe that the federal strategy seeks to devolve responsibility for the issue to the private sector — to churches in particular — and return us to the days when poor relief was largely the province of the faithful.

So, how to be supportive, but authentic at the same time?

As it turns out, it wasn't all that hard. I said we'd heard a lot about the cost-benefit analysis for ending homelessness, but what we really need is a who benefits analysis, and went on to talk about the housing market, structural unemployment, and supply side-economics.

Then I talked about what an asshole Bush's homelessness czar Philip Mangano is for going around saying that homelessness is decreasing, when the 2006 Conference of Mayors report says homelessness is up by six percent, twenty-nine percent of homeless families get turned away from shelter, and that the average length of an episode of homelessness — eight months — is at its longest ever.

I brought up growing inequality and economic vulnerability, and talked about how you can't build power to move an issue by asking people to act on someone else's behalf. You need to address people's own self-interest in limiting inequality and connect that to homelessness.

I said that the lesson of the state legislative session was that, in the absence of a real grassroots strategy, you can make progress only up to the point where it begins to interfere with the ability of well-funded and powerful interests to make a buck off of poverty.

You can't end homelessness without taking on poverty, I said, and you can't take on poverty without organizing for power. And you can't organize for power without appealing to people's own self-interest.

The great thing was that everyone else on the panel, to one degree or another, seemed to agree. What's fascinating about the whole Ten Year Plan phenomenon is that the feds — by raising expectations and then doing so little to deliver — may be sowing the seeds of revolt. The other interesting thing is that there is nothing monolithic about it. It is a multi-layered effort composed of numerous constituencies who all have their own motivations.

Tonight, there seemed to be a real possibility of reconnecting the issues of homelessness and poverty. To me, that is very encouraging news. The Seattle Channel was there, so I'll link the footage of the panel once it comes online.