Dreaming Big With Obama

The Western Regional Advocacy Project, of which Real Change is a proud member, sent this off recently to the Obama transition team. My capacity for hope is still tempered by twenty-eight years of well-earned political cynicism, so I'm not holding my breath. Still, it's good to ask. It all seems pretty reasonable to me.

WRAP is an organization of seven West Coast community groups with, on average, 15 years of service in their communities. In 2006 we formed this organization to serve as a vehicle to bring our collective voices to Washington DC. Toward that end I present to you the following paper we prepared for a congressional staff briefing hosted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office after the release of our report entitled Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures. Since its release we have documented over 25,000 downloads from our website and have distributed our full print run of 3,000 hard copies. The full report (and accompanying artwork) is available on our website for your perusal.

One key recommendation we recently added to this paper is to ensure that affordable housing development is included as part of any economic stimulus proposal. We want to express that at the local level we are hearing a strong call for affordable housing and the proposed economic stimulus package is an ideal opportunity to address the housing and economic crises simultaneously. We can supply you with several examples of Community Housing Developers that have done an incredible job of community development as part of their housing development work -- through local hiring and training, small business generation, use of green technology, and of course paying a living wage to their workforce.

Our briefing paper follows and should you have any questions please do not hesitate to call at the number listed above. WRAP members are also available to meet with you to provide more detailed recommendations and input. We all are truly looking forward to a new day and a new relationship with OUR federal government!!


Thanks,
Paul Boden


Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness, and Policy Failures, written and published by WRAP, documents the direct correlation between homelessness and the massive cuts to HUD and USDA affordable housing programs that began in 1979 and continue today.

The report shows why, after 20 years, the McKinney Act has had no substantial impact on ending homelessness. It shows how the failed policy of having local communities write 5 and 10 year plans to “end” homelessness has pitted them against each other for the miniscule amount of McKinney funding and has shifted the focus away from the lack of funding for affordable housing.

• Between 1978 and 1983 HUD budget authority shrank from $83 billion to little more than $18 billion (in 2004 constant dollars) and has never been more than $30 billion since then (chart 3).
• In 1983 local governments across America began opening “temporary” shelters in response to the emerging numbers of people who had become homeless in their communities.
• The impact of federal cuts to affordable housing programs has been drastic. In 1976, for example, HUD maintained 213,742 existing housing units and built an additional 203,046 to keep up with a growing population. In 2002, HUD maintained only 25,900 existing units and built only 7635 new ones (chart 1).
• HUD funding for new public housing units – the safety net for the poorest among us – has been zero since 1996 (chart 4), while more than 100,000 existing units of public housing have been lost in that same period.
• From 1976-1985 a yearly average of almost 31,000 new Section 515 rural affordable housing units were built, but from 1986-2005 the average yearly production was 8170, a 74 percent reduction (chart 2).
• In 1987 the federal government responded to the growing crisis of homelessness with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, but McKinney funding has never been more than $1.4 billion (chart 3).

McKinney homeless assistance programs have increasingly become a “catch-all” system for people who once were provided for by other mainstream federal government programs. Without Housing documents this trend regarding cuts to HUD and USDA, but it also holds true for domestic violence victims who used to depend on Department of Justice funding, for veterans who depended on the VA for housing and treatment, and for disabled people who depended on HHS funded residential and community-based treatment programs.

The original intent of McKinney to provide funding for communities “facing an immediate and unprecedented crisis due to the lack of shelter for a growing number of people” has become unrealistic because the federal government continues to create homelessness with cuts to legitimate housing and treatment programs.

There are approximately 470 Continuum of Care Boards and more than 290 “Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness” Councils across America, with over 400 10 year plans. Many communities have both, and all are competing for a share of the same $1.4 billion of McKinney funding.

The most surprising aspect of mass homelessness is not that it was created by cuts to affordable housing. It is that the federal government spends more on housing subsidies today than it ever has, but these subsidies overwhelmingly benefit the private housing sector. Federal tax expenditures on home ownership in 2005 were $122 billion, while total HUD outlays were $31 billion – a difference of $91 billion (charts 7 and 8).

Recommendations:

WRAP – along with hundreds of other groups – wants the funding of federal affordable housing programs restored to comparable 1978 levels. We all share this goal, and these recommendations are presented to you as steps needed to get us there.

1) Include affordable housing development as part of any economic stimulus proposal.

2) Reject all current and future proposals to reduce funding for affordable housing, and prioritize access to housing for the poorest among us.

3) Ensure that funding cuts to federal mainstream programs don’t push more people into homelessness; local homeless planning boards should monitor the effects of these federal cuts and report on them in their McKinney applications. McKinney assistance should not be considered a catchall for beneficiaries of other programs after those programs have been cut.

4) Consider the full scope of federal housing subsidies and take action to balance the disparity between housing subsidies for wealthy people and for poor people. We refer you to: the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform report, Simple, Fair, and Pro-Growth (2005); National Low Income Housing Coalition’s report, Changing Priorities: The Federal Budget and Housing Assistance 1976 – 2005 (2004); and the report of the Bipartisan Millennial Housing Commission, Meeting Our Nation’s Housing Challenges (2002). These reports have specific and consistent recommendations about this issue.

5) Ensure that the more than 688,000 homeless children in our public school systems are fully integrated with their housed peers, are provided support to succeed in school, and have homes in which to grow and thrive.

6) Monitor HUD’s use of regulatory language and NOFAs that reprioritize and change the legislative intent of homeless assistance funding, and hold the Secretary of HUD accountable.

McKinney-Vento homeless assistance funding is a vital program for addressing the immediate suffering of homeless people, but if we – as a nation – want to end homelessness, we must do much more.

Thesis On Homeless Subjectivity

I met a couple of cool new people today, and got ten new friends on Facebook. This, I suppose, qualifies as a good day. My friend Trevor turned me on to a talk at UW today on "The Invention of Chronic Homelessness," sponsored by Queer World and UW Women's Studies. Wild horses couldn't have kept me away. Dean Spade, who is new to Seattle University and teaches Poverty Law, brought his PhD candidate friend Craig Willse out from CUNY to talk about his dissertation, From Social Problems to Governance Problems: Health and Housing After the Welfare State.

I parked in the UW Bookstore lot and did my usual thing under those circumstances, which is to buy a remainder or two and save six bucks on parking, thereby convincing myself that the books are somehow free. I selected Granta 96 and On Beauty by Zadie Smith for a total of eleven bucks and change. When I went to pay, I discovered my bank card was missing from my visit to the ATM a few minutes before. As I raced out, thumbing through my wallet, all the plastic and cardboard from the pocket spilled out onto the floor. "Fuck!," I said. The woman standing there between the remainder tables was unphased as she helped me scoop the contents of my wallet from the floor. I got out to the ATM and someone else was there.

"You didn't see a card did you," I asked pathetically. "No," she said. "This machine sucks them back in. I've lost a few here. You won't get it from Bank of America either. A different company services these machines. You'll have to get a new one."

"Fuck!," I thought. As I walked back inside to pay for the books with cash, still thumbing through the cards, I spilled them again in the doorway of the bookstore. Fuck! Back at the cash register, I told the sympathetic bookstore clerk I'd lost the card.

"Well, that happens," she said.

"Yeah," I replied, "but this is the second time I've walked away from my card in an ATM this week.

"Oh dear," she murmured.

"Exactly," I said. As I put the change and receipt into my wallet, the gravitationally challenged contents of my billfold spilled once again across her counter, which set me off on a short hysterical laughing jag that I imagine she found unnerving. I had become the unwilling protagonist in a slapstick comedy about myself.

Happily, I was able to hold it together during Willse's presentation in the packed Women's Studies Conference Room. Here's how he describes his dissertation on his website:

Scholars have demonstrated that under neoliberalism, economic logics drive social welfare policy. They have also shown how national and subnational governments increasingly outsource welfare state functions to private nonprofit organizations. My research suggests that in this context, social problems are transformed into what I term “governance problems.” In other words, the focus of policy and administration increasingly centers on managing social programs, rather than addressing social problems. Thus, in housing and shelter provision, current federal initiatives concentrate on (1) developing quantitative measures for assessing service provision outcomes and (2) establishing “performance-based contracting” protocols for allocating federal, state, and private funds to non-profit organizations. In this move to organizational management, the individual subject (or client) of welfare services is not erased, but increasingly is understood and addressed through statistical population models of risk, recidivism, and cost. I hope my research will offer substantive knowledge about this important area of social welfare policy and administration as well as contribute to theorizing how governance works in “post-welfare state” neoliberalism.

Much of what he said, once you got past the Foucouldian framework and all the grad-student speak that flew about the room, wasn't new to me. Academic lit on homelessness, he said, is a tug of war between the qualitatively oriented ethnographers and the quantitative data-heads over in public health, and these perspectives are both at odds with and informative of eachother. Both have focused on the problem of fucked up people at the expense of examining the fucked up system that produces said people, and this is a problem for those of us interested in system change. Sociology, he said, has turned increasingly from the work of identifying social problems toward being of service in managing them.

True enough. I guess it's important to have realistic expectations.

It was interesting to hear him date the dawn of federal intervention in homelessness to the passage of Mckinney-Vento in 1987, and to describe this in terms of assertion of federal authority by means of funding. Willse has written an interesting paper I haven't read yet on HMIS data collection called The Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations. Data collection systems like Seattle's Safe Harbors, he said, are not about the control of homeless people, as advocates once feared. Homeless people as individuals are way beneath their radar. These data collection systems are about the control of the non-profit agencies that serve these people. Technology, he said, has become a "method of governance." This is about "population management in the neoliberal state." This was something that hadn't fully dawned on me, and made the whole unseemly trek more than worthwhile.

Perhaps it was the brevity of the presentation or the emphasis on the academic framework, or maybe it's just that this is a thesis in progress and Willse's ideas are still less than clear, but the promise of a critique on the invention of chronic homelessness was left largely unfulfilled. He described the evolution from the notion of "housing readiness" through "continuum of care" to Housing First, but none of this was news to anyone who's been in this work for more than ten minutes.

He also spoke of the increasing trend toward cost-benefit arguments for resource allocation, and the contradiction of government focusing on those who, in a more foucauldian universe, we'd properly expect to be left out to die. It's complicated, said Willse: "economic investment and social abandonment run parallel."

Indeed. Here's the thing. There's a whole lot more abandonment than investment going on out there. It's the investment — and the heartwarming success stories of lives and dollars saved — that make the abandonment so much more palatable to the misguided middle-class conscience. We all want so badly to believe.

Here's the other thing. People are left out to die. Now that we've decided that housing with services is the answer to homelesness, no matter how theoretical and underfunded that housing may, in reality, be, we've drawn the line against new emergency shelter and even become a little trigger happy in reducing what we have, regardless of actual demand.

Cities clear homeless campsites and hold up their ten year plans as an excuse. You can't have your tent tonight, we say, because noone should have to live like that, but sometime in the next ten years, we're going to get you the housing with services you really need, because we know what you need better than you do.

So what happens when there isn't enough housing, and when cities across America consider trashing people's survival gear and issuing citations for camping some form of enlightened public policy? People are abandoned, and sometimes they die. They're surplus, they're a problem, and government defines them as trash and treats them like shit. They just want to look good in the process.

When I spoke to Spade and Willse afterwards, I said I was happy that this work was being done. "The radical academic literature on homelessness is very thin," I observed. "Paltry," Willse agreed. Spade had been to the Critical Resistance conference in Oakland last weekend and seen our own Danina Garcia present on a WRAP panel about the convergence of homelessness and civil rights issues of criminalization and incarceration. This was one of the conferences more popular sessions. I'm sure we'll all be talking more. We radicals need to stick together, because soon the fuckers will be coming after us.

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 Sock Puppet Rebellion

The Consumer Advisory Council (CAC) of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is going ape-shit this week because, with all due respect and I say this as a friend, Bill Block sometimes has the political sensitivity of a turnip.

First, a little background. The Committee to End Homelessness in King County has three main groups that meet. There's the mucky-muck Governing Board, which has a few rich business people, some top level human services administrators, a handful of electeds, a United Way President, and a former Governor. They make the decisions. Then you have the Interagency Council. Other than homeless people themselves, these people have the most knowledge and experience because they work in it everyday. They advise the Governing Board, but mostly lack the means to hold them accountable. Then there's the Consumer Advisory Council, made up of those who have actually been homeless. No one has to listen to them at all, but everyone agrees they're an important part of the plan.

Listening to the voice of the homeless is a key piece of Ten Year Planning efforts everywhere. Philip Mangano does it all the time. It lends an aura of saintliness, which he finds useful in numerous situations.

But having a voice and having power are different things entirely. More on that later.

You may have noticed that I used the phrase "the homeless" just now. That was wrong of me. I know this because I've been working in this issue for twenty years and realize that some people find that phraseology to be objectifying and prefer the term "homeless people," or the more cumbersome, "those experiencing homelessness." I also know it because it's in the 15 page handout Bill Block gave members of the Consumer Advisory Council to help them talk about this issue.

The CAC has been feeling kind of stabby over their obviously tokenistic role for awhile. They have no defined relationship, for example, to the Interagency Council, which is where, supposedly, recommendations get formed. Until a few months ago, they had no representation on the Governing Board either. They meet with Bill, and Bill conveys their concerns.

The CAC decided awhile ago that this arrangement lacked a certain, shall we say, formality, and the Governing Board responded by selecting a formerly homeless person to represent them. This person had everything she needed to be effective in this role except any real relationship to the CAC. So that just pissed them off more.

So then the Governing Board said, "OK, we can handle two consumer representatives on our 24 person board. We hand picked the first one. Send us three choices, and we'll hand pick another from those. If we don't like any of the choices, you'll have to send us more candidates from which to hand pick."

That was the deal. The CAC, ingrates that they are, have rebelled against the colonial overlords to insist on choosing their own representative. Dr. Wes Browning, who is probably smarter than anyone on the Governing Board except for Ron Sims, who is really fucking smart, is smart enough to be mostly amused by all of this, but also pissed enough to want to quit the CAC if CEHKC doesn't stop treating them like the total tokens that they probably are.

But that's not why people are freaking out. Apparently, a homeless speakers bureau is forming out of the CAC, and Bill Block helpfully provided them 15 pages of talking points, along with a CEHKC PowerPoint that he'd like them to use. This is where the turnip analogy comes up.

When Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project was here recently, he told a story about when he was homeless and some advocates invited him to speak at a rally. He talked to his friends, and prepared for his big moment. When it was time, he was handed his speech.

This is sort of like that. But it's worse. Because in his turnipy way, Bill has managed to piss off not only the CAC, but also SHARE and WHEEL, who run the Tent City encampments as well as numerous other homeless self-managed shelters. Here's sample Question and Answer #2 (out of 24). This being a blog and not a book, I won't get into a critique of the whole handout.

Q: Tent city isn't a long-term solution. Why is this?

A: The purpose of the plan is to change from just providing shelter to providing long-term housing. There won't be a necessity for shelters or tent cities when the plan succeeds. I should also note that, in context, the tent cities are only a small fraction of the shelter beds in our system. The two tent cities only house 150-200 people (of 2,500 in the shelter system). So in some ways tent city is not really about shelter. What tent city has accomplished is educating communities that homeless people not just "are like us," they are us. Community members have the opportunity to realize that the people living in tent cities are moms, dads, and grandmas just like us. There is extensive testimony from people who have recognized that people who have become homeless are not a different "species." Viewing homeless people as neighbors has been a productive part of tent city.

So, if you're wondering what's wrong with this, it's not the "people who are experiencing homelessness are people too" rap that starts about half way through. The part that has people doing the war dance is the denial that Tent City is anything other than a public education campaign.

Here's the thing. If CEHKC was listening to homeless people at all, they'd know that when planners talk about closing shelters, it freaks people out. That's because there is presently a 2:1 ration of people needing shelter to available beds, and little to no evidence that homelessness is actually being reduced.

People who stay at Tent City do not regard themselves as props. They are people who would otherwise not be sheltered at all. This is especially true in this Brave New 10YP World in which no new shelter is politically possible.

But that's not in the script, is it?

In other news, here's something from yesterday's Seattle Times.

Isaac Palmer, 62, was apparently inside a sleeping bag concealed by blackberry bushes in South Seattle when he was run over by a state Department of Transportation (DOT) contract worker. The King County Medical Examiner's Office said Tuesday that the death was caused by tractor-mounted brush-clearing machinery. ...

After striking Palmer, the subcontractor saw his body roll out of the blackberry brambles toward an access road, according to a Seattle police report. Palmer died almost immediately after the 11:40 a.m. Saturday accident, the report said.

"Everybody believed the site was clear," East said, adding that the area is popular with transients. "This person had crawled into a sleeping bag and burrowed his way amongst the blackberry bushes. He wasn't visible to anybody."

In the days before the accident, police, DOT employees and contract crews were in the area working and advising transients about the upcoming work, East said. They were told to abide by the no-trespassing signs and leave the DOT-owned area.

Raining on Philip Mangano's Rock & Roll Tour

There is an alternative to the Philip Mangano Rock & Roll circus. Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project calls bullshit on federal housing policy and plugs the Without Housing report (2:08 Mins).

We Don't Need Your Pity

The politics of fundraising off of pity (1:20 mins). Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library.

We're Not Quite Seen Equally

Paul Boden talks about homeless people being used by well-intentioned advocates. Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library (1:32 mins).

Paul Boden Can't Sell StreetSheet for Shit

The story in thirty-three seconds. No lesson drawn. No moral attached.

Nothing to Lose

More Paul Boden at the Ballard Public Library. Here he talks about the WRAP Report on twenty-five years of federal housing policy, and says that grassroots people who give a shit will outlast the NAEH. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has yet to respond to the WRAP data (2:14 min.).

An Expert on Panhandling

Who died and made Mangano the fucking expert?

Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library (1:09 mins).

Something's Happening in Our System That's Wrong

Paul Boden talks about coming up from the streets in the Tenderloin in the early 80s. Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library (2:08 mins).

Part of a Community

The homeless label isn't helping us. Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library (1:26 mins).

Charity is Not the Answer to Poverty

Paul Boden advances a common-sense argument for socialism. Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library (56 secs).

Food, Clothing, Shelter

Be careful of what you ask for. Western Regional Advocacy Project ED Paul Boden, May 16, 2007, Ballard Public Library (1:08 mins).

Talkin' Trash in Ballard

WRAP Executive Director Paul Boden gave a talk last night at the Ballard library, sponsored by Real Change and our friends at Trinity United Methodist Church and Sustainable Ballard.

I think I've found the one other person on earth who hates Philip Mangano as much as I do. Boden doesn't like Mayor Newsom much either, and privately describes him as a kind of smiley Kennedy-wanna-be who fucks over homeless people.

The Western Regional Advocacy Project this year released Without Home, a critique of federal housing policy that documents how more than 25 years of federal funding trends for affordable housing have created the contemporary crisis of homelessness and near-homelessness.

WRAP is a west coast homeless empowerment organizer's coalition (see blog) that is working to build a bottom up alternative to business-as-usual. Boden started the organization last year after eighteen years as ED of the San Fransisco Coalition on Homelessness.

Boden will discuss Federal homeless and housing policy today with members of the Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless immediately following the group's monthly meeting.

Paul said stuff that needs to be said and a bunch of people pretty much seemed to agree. We gave away about 30 pounds of WRAP reports before we ran out. I videotaped things, but the download cord got left at the office. So you have to wait, like I do. I'll get something up soon.

WRAP Member organizations:

• Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (B.O.S.S.), Berkeley, CA
• Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco (COHSF)
• Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN)
• Real Change, Seattle, WA
• Sisters Of The Road, Portland, OR
• Street Spirit, Oakland, CA