Building the Political Will to End Homelessness

Last week, Real Change published No End in Sight, the critique of the Ten Year Plan to end homelessness that I posted here last Monday. The editorial, which argued that the Plan lacks a grassroots strategy and ignores fundamental realities, was intended to begin a discussion of how a more bottom-up effort might look.

While there is widespread skepticism toward the Ten Year Plan's prospects for success, there is also broad support for many of the Plan's goals. We hope to begin a conversation that a.) moves beyond what has been a stifled and largely top-down dialogue to have a real discussion of homelessness and poverty in Seattle, b.) builds an organizing model that is capable of moving a broad grassroots anti-poverty agenda, and c.) supports key Ten Year Plan goals by truly building the political will to end homelessness.

Nobody disputes that the major structural issues that stand behind homelessness (A market that does not support affordable housing, an economy in which many people are surplus and many others are poorly paid, and a federal government that has mostly devolved its responsibility for services to the localities and continues to withdraw support) are extremely daunting.

We must, however, move beyond local solutions that offer no challenge to basic structures of inequality. We need to stop accepting that homelessness is a local problem, and that local and private solutions are capable of meeting the need. We need to address the market forces that eliminate affordable housing nearly as fast as new subsidized housing alternatives come on line. We need to build coalition across issues to increase the bargaining power of labor and mitigate the failures of capitalism to meet basic human needs with adequate food, shelter, and healthcare for all of us.

We need to move away from models of managing homelessness and poverty that divide poor people and their advocates into competing issues and subpopulations, and move toward ways of organizing and meeting people's needs that bring us together across barriers of race and class.

None of this happens overnight. As we all work to build grassroots political will for Ten Year Plan priorities, we need to do so in a way that builds power for the long-term and begins to address the deeper problems that create homelessness. Here are a few quick thoughts to help get people thinking in a new direction.

• Poor and homeless people should be meaningfully involved in the process. We should avoid tokenized input. Likewise, we should avoid romanticizing "the voice of the poor." We should be respectful and realistic, and very much about listening.
• The distance between the experience of poor and homeless people and their middle class and affluent allies needs to be bridged by opportunities for dialogue and action that reach across barriers of class.
• The professionalization of anti-poverty and human services advocacy has left us largely without the organized base of support that we need to effectively challenge money and power. Support for ending homelessness needs to be cultivated at a neighborhood by neighborhood level. Lots of people want the same thing. We need to get a lot better at building for power.
• We need to start challenging the idea that little can be done about market forces that decrease the availability of low-income housing. While we should support reforms like the enlargement of the State Housing Trust Fund, we also need to look at how development and zoning policies impact affordability.
• We need to use every tool available, including the citizen's initiative, to challenge the loss of housing affordability in Seattle.
• We need to create more opportunities to come together, learn, and discuss. In the absence of community and dialogue, we often accept paradigms for reform and action that miss the point.
• We need to recognize that there is huge structural unemployment in our economy, and start organizing for policies that address this issue instead of simply blaming the poor.
• We need to get a lot better at working across issues and forming strategic alliances and coalitions. We need to hold the federal government more accountable for its role in increasing poverty and homelessness.

Yes. It's overwhelming. But over the past three decades, poverty, homelessness, and inequality have increased, and our largely depoliticized efforts toward advocacy and emergency sheltering have failed. It's time to broaden the conversation, start rethinking how an anti-poverty strategy that effectively builds for power might look, and to begin taking action in new ways.

A Metaphorical Mugging

Dr. Wes submitted a typically brilliant column to Real Change today . No. That's not right. His columns are brilliant about 37% of the time. Another 42% of his columns are glibly witty in a half-assed sort of way, and the other 21% of his columns are complete shit, and would never see print if we weren't relying upon them to fill space.

But genius a little over a third of the time is better than most of us manage, so we keep him around. Besides, he's the guy who feeds the cat. And he writes for free.

Soon enough, his column will be up on Adventures in Bloggery or at Real Change, but in the meanwhile, here's the gist: Genshiro Kawamoto, the Hawaiian billionaire who's recently made headlines by letting homeless native Hawaiian families move into mansions for token rent or for free, is an irresistible metaphor.

Here's a guy who became insanely wealthy by ruthlessly dispossessing the poor of their land and driving up the cost of housing through rampant real estate speculation, who's now decided it's time to give a little something back.

It's sort of like if I beat you with a tire iron, stole everything you owned, and then sent you a get well card with a $50 Starbucks gift certificate. You might buy a muffin and a coffee with the gift card, since you wouldn't have any other money, but you might still be a little resentful about the mugging.

Or, say you're the federal government. And you've funded public housing at a level designed to eventually produce system-wide failure, viciously attacked all programs that offer assistance to the poor, and invented a hundred creative ways for your friends to make a buck off of poverty, from legitimating extortionate interest rates to desperate people to building a prison-industrial-complex that preys disproportionately upon people of color, and then you've claimed to be "ending homelessness" because you've tossed out some token funding that, in many cases, gets funneled to your base of right-wing Christian supporters who run faith-based social services agencies.

Just supposing.

In most instances, the person who gets to shake the hand that holds the money out doesn't really care what the other hand is up to, or even where else the hand with the money has been.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

The Fetishization of Failure

Earlier this week I mentioned going to San Francisco for an organizers' meeting. In 20 years of anti-poverty work, I've acquired some heretical opinions. This week didn't do much to alter them.

Once, long, long ago, I was 27. I believed change would come once the underclass stopped blaming themselves for their failures and started looking to each other for their power. Nothing seemed more worthwhile than helping to make that happen. I was down for building the revolution.

I spent a number of years propping up various leaders and organizing against the grain.

There was the wheelchair-bound Marxist who lived in a tiny room about three blocks from Boston's Federal Building. He'd send his personal assistant out for vodka first thing in the morning, and by noon or so he'd be headed toward incoherency. I saw leadership potential there but tried to always catch him while it was still morning, when he was only grouchy and paranoid.

Then there was Jack, the genius IQ former bank robber who taught himself to read Goethe in German while he was in prison. He was also a pretty decent jail house lawyer. I hired him to run the Homeless Civil Rights Project that I organized, and after he shot his ex co-director in the head and wound up in a spectacular car crash as he attempted to dump the body, he defended himself pro se at his own murder trial. He lost.

There was also Tim, an Axis II Clusterfuck B personality disorder leader-from-hell if ever there was. He threatened once to smash a computer monitor over my head. Eventually, he broke into our organization's office,stole the computer, and sold it for drug money. He was the project's Director. I hired him too.

Over the years, my fondness for handing power over to charismatic leaders who had done little to prove they could handle it dramatically waned. I grew jaded with organizing projects that were "homeless-led."

By 33, I was done with all that.

I decided that building for power for broad classes of people was more meaningful than "empowering" individual leaders who seldom measured up to the call. I decided that homelessness was something shitty that happens to people, and not an identity, and that while homeless identity politics might be an understandable response to institutional infantilization, it is a poor basis for building a movement.

I stopped hiring people as leaders because they were homeless. I stopped creating positions of power for others to abuse.

I began working through my own relationship to power, and grew to understand that it is not some sort of hot potato that has to be handed off before one gets burned.

Power can be used for both good and evil. And with power comes responsibility. I began working through the thorny issues that this involves, and I'm still working on it.

Poor people deserve respect, but they deserve competence too, especially in their organizers. And they need all the allies they can find. And they need us to stop idealizing poverty.

Whenever I see a foundation who thinks we should have 51% of our board be homeless people because that's the population we serve, I think, "You first."

In some circles, that makes me politically incorrect. Maybe I am. But at least I've thought it through.

This Kool-Aide Kind of Sucks

Yesterday, I was in San Francisco meeting with a bunch of veteran west coast homeless empowerment organizers who hope to challenge the weirdly myopic, DC-driven, chicken-shit, whoredom that passes for national-level policy discussion on homelessness. We call ourselves WRAP, and are carefully nurturing our delusions of grandeur.

The 800-pound gorilla that drives legislation and policy these days is the National Alliance to End Homelessness. They've been selling folks on the idea that homelessness can be ended in 10 years.

Homelessness, they say, is a much smaller problem than housing or poverty, and with the right mix of accountability, services, housing, and bureaucratic tinkering to realign with other systems, we can basically shut the shelters down. All without addressing inequality.

An end to homelessness without all that messy class conflict. How convenient for all of us.

All my friends seem to have arrived at a shared terminology for this theory. We call it, "drinking the Kool-Aide." As in, "You have to pretend to at least like Kool-Aide in this town to even be relevant."

I was talking to a policy geek friend a few weeks ago about her deep, unabiding hatred of all things NAEH, and I said, "You know, I'll bet the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness has been very, very good to them."

Their tax filings tell a surprising story. Up until 2003, when the NAEH budget reached a high of $1.7 million, they were a decent-sized DC policy org whose size hovered at around a million and a half.

But in 2004, when their relationship to the Bush Administration's Homelessness Czar Phil Mangano started to resemble conjoined twinship, something interesting happened. Their budget suddenly zoomed skyward to $6.9 million.

This should be an important lesson to all of us.

Things get a lot easier when your tongue is wedged up the ass of power. But, to push the metaphor, the harder you suck, the more it stinks.

Are We Ending Homelessness Yet?

Here’s a question. How can the federal government claim to be ending homelessness while every year it cuts funding to housing and other programs that serve the poor?

Quick answer: A.) because the numbers are complicated enough to easily lie about, and B.) people who should know better let them get away with it.

Last month, the President sent his FY08 budget to Congress, and it includes what amounts to an 8% reduction in HUD funding from what are likely to be FY07 levels.

What does this mean? I think Barney Frank said it best in his statement: "It is now clear the President is choosing to cut assistance to those in need and resources to our cities and communities in order to finance the tax cuts and the war in Iraq."

It also means that, if this request stands, public housing operating funds will be around 15% short of what is actually needed. It means that CDBG funds for a range of poor people’s programs will be cut by 20%. It means that housing funds for elderly and disabled people will be cut. It means that funding for Section 8 housing vouchers will be cut and there will be a rule change to make them harder to count.

But, on the bright side, there’s another $117 million in Homeless Assistance Grants. Are we ending homelessness yet?