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[Commentary] © 2002 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02143 USA (617) 623-8080

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Homelessness Stories, Jan-May/2002

5/25/2002  2 homelessness stories -

1. Homeless no more - Group has helped 1,400 turn around their lives and buy their own shelter, by Teri Borseti, BG, D11.
   ...Last week, 250-300 Boston-area realtors, real estate lawyers, appraisers, developers, and inspectors paid $35 to attend HomeStart's 2nd annual cocktail reception and silent auction in Boston MA.
   [Well well, this organization has made a breakthrough - they've identified a well-heeled constituency with a self-interest in solving homelessness - presumably because of the devastating effect the homeless have on property values.]
   Guests mingled over cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and heard testimonials from clients whose lives have changed with HomeStart's help. The elegant fundraiser brought in about $30,000.
   [Which was probably more than eaten up in staff time planning it. Compare gov. candidate Mitt Romney's recent fundraiser which netted him $50,000 plus $300,000 for the Mass. GOP, despite their circular firing squad of the last few years.]
   With an annual budget of $1.6m, the organization relies on state and federal funding, but raises about $250,000 a year from individuals, foundations, and events..\.. HomeStart seeks HUD subsidies and helps with move-in costs. Its New Frontiers program uses a rental fund to provide a monthly stipend for one year.
   ..\..About 1,400 people [have been] assisted by HomeStart since it was founded in 1994. "Local shelters were just overwhelmed trying to get jobs for large numbers of homeless people in recovery or with mental illnesses," said Linda Wood-Boyle, executive director.
   [Well as far as that goes, local shelters are still overwhelmed but now with just trying to shelter the skyrocketting numbers of homeless, never mind with getting them jobs! See stories below.]
   "They just didn't have the capacity of resources to help them find housing.... That's when HomeStart was formed with 3 employees and a HUD pilot grant for a little over $400,000. Today we have a staff of 31."
   The primary goal of the nonprofit organization, which has offices in Boston at 105 Chauncy St. and in Cambridge MA at 678 Mass. Ave., is to find affordable apartments for the homeless. Wood-Boyle said 81% of the people placed in housing are still housed a year later. Clients come from shelters like Rosie's Place and the Pine Street Inn.... Last year, 138 (62%) moved to Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, or the South End, Wood-Boyle said.... HomeStart spent $138,372 to help [them]; 69% had monthly income of less than $1,300..\..
   The group also provides "stabilization services," which include workshops and 1-on-1 assistance in choosing a bank, creating a budget, and repairing or establishing credit. \Housing resources manager\ Charlie Cirrone...even helped [one person] with child-custody issues.... "We are ending homelessness one person at a time," said Wood-Boyle.
   [At that rate, they will never end it, because it's being created by the ongoing global downsizing response to efficient technology at a much faster speed. The Timesizing.com approach ends homelessness at a rate of millions of persons at a time by reversing the general modus operandi of economies from running on a shortage of jobs and training and particular skills, to running on a general shortage of labor. Again (see 5/23 below), we repeat Art Dahlberg's words of 1932, "The evils of Capitalism [are] basically rooted in the public's failure to appreciably shorten the hours of labor while labor-saving machinery [is] being injected; i.e...these evils [are] due to the public's failure, from the very beginning of the industrial revolution, to make Capitalism operate under a genuine scarcity of labor-hours, rather than a chronic scarcity of job and business opportunity." The essential design flaw in our economy is that we have not yet implemented an automatic mechanism for smoothy transforming the huge productivity leaps and work savings of technology into financially secure free time for everyone. The Timesizing program changes all that and gets us to the advanced stage where we should be at the dawn of the Third Millennium.]

2. [and there's a neighboring article -]
   Birdhouse sales will help the homeless, by Thomas Grillo, BG, D11.
   [As "Big J" said, "The foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head." Matt.8:20.]
   Boston-area design firms have created birdhouses to be auctioned off to support Shelter Inc. The event, "Birdhouses and Other Flights of Fancy," will be Thursday [May 30?] at 5:30 pm at the Castle at Park Plaza, 64 Arlington St., Boston MA.   Shelter Inc. and its affiliate Family Life Education Inc. serve more than 2800 people annually, providing the homeless with shelter and job assistance.

• Obituaries... - Body of beaten homeless man found, by Douglas Belkin, BG, C12.
  The beaten body of a homeless immigrant from El Salvador was found yesterday morning in a vacant lot in East Boston.... Yesterday, in connection with the death, police were showing people a composite picture of a Hispanic man named Jose with a scarred nose, according to several people the police interviewed..\..
  The victim, about 30 years old and not yet identified by police, suffered blunt trauma to the head and face, police said. The man, who friends said goes by the name of Oscar, frequently slept in a makeshift camp on a dilapidated pier at the corner of Border and Decatur Streets where his body was discovered.... A friend who occasionally let Oscar stay on her couch said he was a heavy drinker and infrequently worked as a day laborer in Chelsea....
  Across the city, another homeless man was in critical condition at Boston Medical Center last night after he was struck by a hit-and-run driver early Wednesday morning on Norfolk Street in Mattapan....

• Welfare in New York, letter to editor by Pres. Arnold S. Cohen of the Partnership for the Homeless, NYT, A28.
  Re "Mayor's welfare plan embraces job training" (front page, May 16): As Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to recognize, work must be more than the fuel to power the "welfare exit" frenzy. Instead, it must be part of a larger workforce development strategy that focuses on the obstacles that people face in obtaining and retaining long-term employment.
  This may require stabilizing a homeless person in permanent housing, or dealing with issues of childcare, literacy, educational deficits or just the lack of real work experience.
  And it must be in jobs that are not the most vulnerable to an economic downturn, and in jobs that pay a living wage with health benefits.
  Until we confront these real-life issues, we may continue to see drops in the welfare rolls, but poverty will continue to rise.
  [Ed. - The only way to confront these real-life issues without massive government micromanagement and taxes, is simply to gradually reduce the workweek, say one hour a year, until the private sector views human capital as such a rare and precious commodity that it starts competing for even the formerly less-competitive elements of that resource (such as the homeless). As Dahlberg said in 1932, "The evils of Capitalism [are] basically rooted in the public's failure to appreciably shorten the hours of labor while labor-saving machinery [is] being injected; i.e...these evils [are] due to the public's failure, from the very beginning of the industrial revolution, to make Capitalism operate under a genuine scarcity of labor-hours, rather than a chronic scarcity of job and business opportunity." Or as we put it, the essential design flaw in our economy is that we have not yet implemented an automatic mechanism for smoothy transforming the huge productivity leaps and work savings of technology into financially secure free time for everyone, so instead we're transforming these wonderful blessings into a curse; namely, the curse of insecurity - from the level of individual employment, finances and investments, to the level of economywide markets, finances and capital flows. The Timesizing program is just such an automatic mechanism, available since 1998. But by our failure to implement it, we have let all of life become insecure. And our music and art, films and magazines reflect this, full of discord and violence. We are far from where we should be on the curve to heaven on earth. In a word, we need timesizing, not downsizing. (Quote is from Arthur Dahlberg's "Jobs, Machines and Capitalism," 1932 edition reprinted by AMS Press, NYC, 1969, page x.)]

• Obituaries - Sam Walton, 59, Jets tackle who wound up homeless, by Gerald Eskenazi, NYT, A21.
  Sam Walton, who as a rookie started every regular-season game at right tackle during the New York Jets' Super Bowl season of 1968, but who ended up a homeless vagrant, was found dead in a vacant apartment in Memphis on Sunday night, the police said....
  Lt. Walter Norris of the Memphis police said that Walton, who "used to go roaming around the streets" and was known in the neighborhood as Boonie, had been dead for several days. "We identified him by fingerprints," Norris said. "He died of a heart attack."...
  Walton played only part time for the Jets the next season, and he was out of football in 1970. He played with the Houston Oilers in 1971, his last year in pro football.... When Walton left pro football, he severed his ties with the game. He was one of the few players who did not attend the Super Bowl Jets' 25th anniversary reunion in 1993. The club printed the roster of players, along with their position, hometown and what they were doing. Next to his name, the club wrote, "Sam Walton, Tackle, Memphis, Unavailable."
  ["There, but for the grace of God (or dumb luck) go I."]

• Homeless caught in budget crunch - Shelters, already overflowing, face state cuts, by David Abel, BG, B1.
  Massachusetts' homeless population [blowout]
  in 1991: 3,898
  in 2001: 6,001
  [That's an average increase of 200 a year.]
  ...The tension in recent months here at the Boston Rescue Mission and other shelters around the state often has been thicker than the air. Last month, overcrowding at Mass. shelters reached an all-time high - on average, they took in 124% of their legal capacity, according to the Mass. Housing & Shelter Alliance. And with [628] emergency "winter beds" financed by the state [go]ing offline today, shelter officials worry the homeless problem is only getting worse.
  The overcrowding has already created fire hazards at shelters such as [here], where the state only allowed 70 people to spend the night 3 years ago. With the number of homeless increasing in Boston, more than doubling in the last decade...the state let the century-old agency house 106 more people, all of whom compete for space in the chapel, lobby, and kitchen.... [It was] 3 years ago [when] the state allowed the shelter to increase its capacity without increasing its space..\..
  But now, with the economic slowdown and state cutbacks, the homeless population has grown again, and the number of people squeezing into the Boston Rescue Mission has ballooned to nearly 60% above its new limit, making it the most crowded shelter in the state.... The shelter is now more than 300% over capacity from its original limit in 1999..\.. "They look like cattle...," says Dennis Gaskell, the Rescue Mission's night supervisor, who only a few years ago was one of the homeless [himself]. "I've never seen it this bad...."
  Over capacity in specific shelters [chart]
  Worcester People in Peril Program, 160%
  Boston Rescue Mission, 158%
  Pine Street Inn, 152%
  The Noah Center in Hyannis, 144%....

• To some, paying tax is symbol of victory - Signifies a leap from welfare rolls, by David Abel, BG, front page, A15.
  ...After years of living in homeless shelters and fighting alcoholism..\..Stephen Webb...recently completed a training program at Boston's St. Francis House. He has found several jobs doing data entry. Though he is still sick and collecting aid from the government, he said he is happy to be giving back [in taxes]....

1. Homeless ranks may grow due to state budget cuts - Their shift to shelters may cost more money -State budget cuts may force evictions of 400, by Chris Tangney, BG, B1.
   Just as the number of homeless families in Massachusetts levels off, officials say, the state budget crunch could force as many as 400 families from their homes in the next month. And they warn that another 1,400 families face eviction by the end of June if the department can't come up with $2.2m for a homeless prevention program....
   The number of homeless families statewide has remained steady for the last three months, the first quarter that figures have not risen in more than two years. Last year, the number of homeless families increased by 20%, according to the Mass. Coalition for the Homeless, and there are currently 1,300 families housed nightly by the Dept. of Transitional Assistance [DTA]....
   Once evicted, many families stay with relatives or friends, but at least 25% will wind up homeless, according to..\..Dick Powers, spokesman for the DTA.... In most cases, children have to leave their friends and teachers and are often forced to move three or four times before they find new housing, an unsettling prospect for a parent and a potentially traumatic experience for a child....
   The department's budget deficit will also result in cuts to two other programs that provide emergency assistance to low-income elderly people and that provide food stamps to immigrants.
   [The phenomenon of admitting immigrants who are not self-supporting or accountably financially sponsored is a recent and strange innovation in American history, having developed only in the last half century.]
   "These cuts create the classic scenario of people with low income being forced to choose between 'heat of eat,'" said Pat Baker, senior policy analyst at the Mass. Law Reform Institute.

2. County tells panhandlers to pitch woes elsewhere - A Colorado dispute over beggars, drunks and rights, by Michael Janofsky, NYT, A11.
   HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo...- The rolling hills here south of Denver are saturated with pricey new subdivisions and huge shopping malls, shining testimony to the soaring growth of Douglas County. Between 1990 and 2000, its population nearly doubled, to 175,766, for a 191% increase, the highest change of any county in the country. [It] has become a bedroom community for...two cities [Denver and Colorado Springs], attracting thousands of affluent families drawn to the easy lifestyle of the West.... The average household income of just above $100,000 is the highest of any county in Colorado..\..
   The new affluence has [been] notice[d by] panhandlers who have found places like Denver too competitive or inhospitable..\.. Richard Larsen, Rick Shaw and James Guschi are three of the newly arrived.... Working the broad intersections of a major state highway with tattered cardboard signs that ask for help, they [take in] as much as $70 on a good day....
   [The NYT should know that the word "earn" is only correct in the context of work. Bad editing, or is Political Correctness muddying yet another area now that illegal aliens are supposed to have the right to vote?]
   For Mr. Larsen, a homeless man from Detroit who spends his nights along the Platte River in Denver - he has been commuting to Douglas County by public bus -...with his cardboard sign that says, "Homeless Vet. Thanks for Any Support. God Bless You"..\..
   But...responding to a rising number of complaints about drunkenness and blocked traffic caused by panhandlers, the county commission on Wednesday passed by unanimous vote, 3 to 0, an ordinance that would outlaw solicitation of public streets. ...Said Lt. Brad Heyden of the Douglas County Sheriff's Dept..., "Usually it's during rush hours, but now it's at all hours"..\..
   Under the new measure, which goes into effect next month after a 30-day grace period, a first offence prompts a warning, the second a fine of $100.
   [A "fine" for people with no money? Brilliant.]
   ...[The] law...also curtail[s] collections by church and civic groups that often work the [intersections] for charity drives. So far, none of [them has] complained. But...Mr. Larsen...said "What upsets me is that they think we're all drunks.... It's not like I love doing this..\.. If I could find something else to do, I would do it...."
   [It all comes down to jobs. And a nation that keeps introducing worksaving technology. And a workweek that despite over 100 years of previous decreases, has been frozen at the same arbitrary level for the last 62 years. And an economics profession that functions merely as technical backup for management schools and has consequently made only trivial contributions to human progress since endorsing FDR's big mistake in 1933. We're still pursuing makework instead of sharework.]

• 'We'd be lost without her' - Dr. Roseanna Means looks beyond suburbs to bring healthcare to city's homeless women - 'How do you think women feel if doctors don't want to touch them because they are scared of getting lice or scabies?' Linda Burton, Women's Lunch Place, by Bella English, Boston Globe, D1.
  At Louis Boston...women pay $295 for a T-shirt and $2,195 for a pair of shoes.... Directly across the street in the basement of the Church of the Covenant, women sort through tables piled with used clothes to find a pair of boots or a scarf or jacket to ward off the cold. "We're right across the street from Louis and a block away from the Ritz," are the directions Dr. Roseanna Means gives when people try to find her at the Women's Lunch Place....
  Means, who also has a solo practice in Wellesley, is used to straddling two worlds. In the suburbs, she sees women who have medical insurance, nice homes, money in the bank. In the city, she sees women who don't know where they will spend the night.
  Three years ago, she finally formalized a relationship she had had with homeless women for years. With a group of women doctors, she formed Women of Means, which provides free healthcare to women in shelters. It is, on many levels, women helping women. Her women-only suburban practice provides the income that allows her to work with her homeless patients.
  "My suburban patients support me by forgiving the days when I am not in my office because I am downtown," says Means.... "My shelter patients support me by showing me how the will to go on cannot be extinguished, even in the face of horrific odds. What binds us together is that we are all women."...
  [God bless this woman! It's not often that you read of someone who bridges our insane income gap as dramatically as she does. This insult to human intelligence can only be solved if we unbundle it, first dealing with the employment gap with Timesizing, and then, armed with the experience that Timesizing provides - and with roughly the same 5-phase program - dealing directly with the income gap (= 'income-sizing'?).]

• Mentally ill inmates, letter to editor by US Rep. Jose Serrano (NY), NYT, A26.
  Re "Ending chronic homelessness" (editorial, March 13):
  Over the last two decades, thousands of housing units for the homeless and people with mental illness have been built in my district in the Bronx. These and similar efforts across NYC have helped lower the [homeless] shelter census. But building more housing is only one solution.
  As you point out, linking people coming out of the criminal justice system to services upon their release is another way to fight chronic homelessness. But NYC is neglecting its duties to chronically homeless inmates and detainees with psychiatric disabilities.
  In 2000, a state judge ordered the city to provide discharge planning to the approximately 25,000 mentally ill inmates who cycle through the city jail system each year. The city faces contempt proceedings for its failure to comply with the order and will most likely pay millions in contempt fines that it would have used to provide the services these people are entitled to under the law.
  [Obvious solution: city spends specified portions of the fine providing the services by benchmark dates, or loses the money to the courts.]

1. By Dr. Henry Shenkin of Haverford, Pa.
   [A good quick summary of how America got its current record homelessness -]
   The increased number of homeless has been directly related to the policy of deinstitutionalization initiated four decades ago at the behest of civil libertarians who believed that patients were confined to mental institutions against their will.
   [The "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of this movement was probably Ken Keesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Again, "the way to hell is paved with good intentions"?]
   Politicians were only too happy to accept such a policy, which helped to reduce the states' budgetary, and therefore their taxation, needs. Patients' families were mobilized (abetted by their shame) to sponsor the campaign, only to realize after the release of their relatives that they could not live with them. With only inadequate outpatient care available, the former inpatients were pushed out into homelessness on the streets.

2. By Pres. Arnold Cohen of Partnership for Homeless, NYC.
   [Arnold mentions affordable housing, mental health and substance abuse treatment and then says -]
   ...But if we are going to genuinely solve "chronic homelessness," we must also address the broader issues of poverty and economic injustice. Access to quality health care and education, real skill building and job training, and a living wage are all required if we are trully to lift people out of homelessness permanently.
   [Again, the random grocery-list approach so beloved by liberals, and again, it falls right into G.K Chesterton's pan-utopian trap - "The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motorcar or balloon." Indeed, Arnie talks all around jobs without actually mentioning them, let alone mentioning the need to share the vanishing work. He speaks of job training for non-existent jobs, and living wages from non-existent jobs, but breathes not a word of the jobs themselves, or where they're to come from. Ah liberalism, thy name is Impotence.]

3. By Heather Barr of Urban Justice Center.
   [Heather just calls for "supportive housing" and, believe it or not, praises Bush.]

4. By Exec. Dir. Vivian Ehrlich of Dorot homelessness prevention, NYC.
   [Vivian calls the elderly the "invisible homeless."]

1. Ending chronic homelessness, editorial, NYT, A26.
   [Watch. The Times editors are going to make the usual WRONG assumption that homelessness is a matter of lack of low-cost housing rather than secure jobs with good pay.]
   ...The solution, based on recent research and pilot programs, centers on 2 approaches.
   1. ...The development of "supported" housing, meaning shelters that include treatment.
      [What did we tell you. Never mind the nationwide labor surplus and job shortage (at the 1940 40-hour workweek level) that generates low pay and high anxiety. Leave that yawning imbalance untouched at the center of the economy and keep running around everywhere but the center trying to adjust the balance. Build special housing ("shelters"), hire hapless social workers to try to explain your stupid blindness to those it's driven insane ("treatment") and charge it all to the taxpayer.]
   2. ...Monitor people being released from prisons, mental institutions and drug treatment centers to make sure they don't wind up sleeping on the streets.
      [Well, let's see. We've got 2,000,000 people in prison. Could be an awful lot get released each month. Half our mental institutions and drug treatment centers have already been closed down so it's too late for them. But it does sound like a LOT of monitoring. Sounds Orwellian. Why not just fix the problem in the middle - convert overtime automatically to training and hiring and if that doesn't create a strong enough demand to draw all our unemployed, welfare, "disabled," and homeless, "mentally ill," and "criminal" population back into the job market, gradually CUT THE WORKWEEK and make it as easy as it should be at the dawn of the Third Millennium at our high levels of worksaving technology and robotization to make a very very good living. And by the way, LOSE the criminalization of "drugs" and just tax them for their social costs as we more or less have started doing with nicotine and alcohol.]
   The money is there.
   [Oh yeah? Where - when you refuse to tax those who have it in unspendable profusion, and even if you do, you're just generating and perpetuating dependency.]
   The ideas are there.
   [You call these "ideas"?!   We call them more of the same pathetic government micromanagement we've had for the past 69 years ever since we chose job creation instead of work sharing. The job creation at the arbitrary 40-hour level was always too little too late - UNLESS...we militarized. So your "ideas" are leaving us with the unspoken but very real military "solution." It solved the Great Depression finally after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Our military-industrial complex has "solved" every recession since then with recent help from our new prison-industrial complex. And now Bushbrain is trying to solve it by a drug "war," a "war" on terrorism, $3½ billion a year "foreign aid" in hopes that the Israel-Palestine carnage will escalate into a full-scale war, threats of dysinformation and pre-emptive nuclear war against a list of "dangerous" little non-nuclear nations. Brilliant? Actually nothing different from what we've always done when we didn't keep the government creation of jobs up with the demand for them.]
   Success will depend on breaking down walls within the federal government and between Washington, states and cities....
   [The hackneyed macho rhetoric of evermore impotent micromanagement. If and when the great minds of the NYT finally really want to solve homelessness, they will advocate dropping our current insane combination of private-sector downsizing and public-sector upsizing and just share the vanishing market-demanded employment for human beings in an age that's spreading automata, robots and nanotechnology everywhere.]

2. Hit-and-run victim died within hours, Texas official says, AP via NYT, A16.
   [This is the one about some dumb woman who somehow managed to crash into a homeless man hard enough for him to bust through her windshield with his head, which then became caught there, with him hemorrhaging profusely and begging her to help him.]
   FORT WORTH...- The local medical examiner said [yester]day that a homeless man who became lodged in the windshield of a car that hit him probably lived just a few hours, not a few days as the police had estimated.
   [Big diff. In a spot like that, hours can seem days.]
   The Tarrant County medical examiner, Dr. Nizam Peerwani, said the injuries to the man, Gregory Biggs, included the near amputation of his left leg, suggesting that he quickly died from blood loss....
   The driver of the car, Chante Mallard, 25, is in the country jail, charged with failing to help Mr. Biggs after hitting him.
   [If she nearly amputated his leg before crashing his head through her windshield, she did more than just hit him once.]
   On Monday, Judge James Wilson of State District Court sealed a confession in which Ms. Mallard said that after drinking and taking the drug Ecstasy, she struck Mr. Biggs, 37, and then drove home with him stuck in her windshield. The police say he died in her garage.... Ms. Mallard told the police that she hit Mr. Biggs in the early hours of Oct. 26, the day before his body was discovered at a park..\..
   ...An informer...told investigators that she overheard Ms. Mallard talking about the "accident" [our quotes - ed.] last month at a party....
   [Yet another weird risk in the "carefree" life of the homeless?]

• Nowhere Man's life of mystery poses challenge for city's shelter system, by Nina Bernstein, NYT, A22.
  Johnny Gamba lost his Bowery hotel cubicle in 1994 to the same social service agency now trying to help him... [photo caption]
  [by finding his social security number to provide...]
  the identification required for benefits to pay for better care or housing. Now city budget deficits and the need to make room for the newly homeless are increasing pressure to resolve cases like Mr. Gamba's...
  [whose attempts to identify himself...]
  quickly turned into word salad...sprinkled with real foreign place names and precise street addresses that left a residue of plausibility..\..
  For years he had been homeless, sleeping in doorways and cellars on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But this elderly gentleman, so courtly and so clean, did not seem like a Bowery bum....
  As ever, Mr. Gamba seems content. "This is not a home," he told a visitor. "This is just a stopover."

• [and now, a little reality-testing on our version of homelessness -]
  Bangladesh - Fires leave thousands homeless, Agence France-Presse via NYT, A6.
  A huge fire in a Dhaka slum destroyed several plastics factories and left as many as 5,000 people homeless....

• Florida - County called hostile to homeless people, AP via BG, A2.
  WEST PALM BEACH - ...The National Coalition for the Homeless...did judge that Atlanta, San Francisco, and New York were the "absolute meanest" cities for the homeless. Also listed were Salt Lake City, Chicago, Honolulu, Baltimore, Pontiac MI, Santa Cruz CA, and Austin TX. California was listed as the meanest state.
  [So much for "laid back" Calif.]

• A deposit plan with no return for scavengers - For hundreds of people in New York, redeeming is the sole source of income, by Kirk Johnson, NYT, A20.
  Walter Johnson [is] a busy man. Most of the week he works his way through Midtown Manhattan, six square blocks each night. Fridays, his best night, he hits the East Side. Eighteen-hour days are not uncommon, he said.... Mr. Johnson...is hard-working and homeless.
  He collects and redeems cans and bottles for their 5-cent deposits, making $15-30 a night as an entrepreneur in a subsistence economy of nickels. "I don't get any money from welfare or anything else, and I don't ask for nothing," said Mr. Johnson, who came to New York 40 years ago from South Carolina. He became homeless about a decade ago after he lost his job and then his apartment. "This is an honest dollar," he said....
  ...The We Can redemption center...pays out $3,000 to $5,000 a day in deposit money. Mayor Bloomberg has suggested eliminating the redemption program, with the city keeping the 5-cent deposit. [photo caption]
  [He'd do better to raise the deposit to 2/7 of the price of the drink, the way it was 50 years ago. Yep, a 2 cent deposit on top of every nickel bottle of pop. The deposit was 29% of the total price of every bottle, 40% of the net price without the deposit. Now that was recycling!
  [A raft of letters to the editor about the above story appeared on Feb. 27, titled "Message in a recycled bottle," 2/27/2002 NYT, A24. One by Timothy Bal of Montgomery NJ even suggests Bloomberg raise the deposit on the cans etc. - by a factor of 10!]

• Massachusetts activist tapped for homeless council, Globe staff via BG, A2.
  WASHINGTON, DC - Philip Manganao, head of the Mass. Housing and Shelter Alliance, has been appointed by...Bush to be exec. dir. of the Interagency Homeless Council.
  [But is the Homeless Council really homeless? No -]
  The Council is an independent federal organization that coordinates the activities of 15 federal agencies to help provide housing and services to the homeless.
  [Quite a paradox - earning your livelihood in a nice government job and paying the mortgage on your home by "serving" the homeless - without just taking them into your home like Mother Teresa. Come to think of it, FIFTEEN federal agencies and we can't make homelessness history in this country!? Oops, the umbrella agency makes 16. How about we dissolve those SIXTEEN federal bureaucracies and just buy some big apartment buildings around the country with the money we're saving?! Let's cut all this crap and just DO IT.]

1. Missouri: Rise in the homeless, by Elizabeth Stanton, NYT, A19.
   ...42% over the last 3 years, according to a study by the Missouri Assoc. for Social Welfare. The study found that St. Louis and its neighboring counties led the state, with a 69% increase from 1998 to 2001. The Assoc. asked shelters across the state to record the number of people they served on 2 specific days last year [and found] a daily average 16,425 people used the shelters.

2. Homeless in California, letter to editor by Policy Dir. Rebecca Vilkomerson of San Francisco, NYT, A22.
   Re "In famously tolerant city, impatience with homeless" (news article, Jan. 18 [see below]):
   Approximately 40% of San Francisco's homeless people are members of families with children. There are currently 150 families on the waiting list for emergency shelter. While our politicians want to criminalize homelessness, homeless people can hardly be expected to use shelters that don't exist.
   The pool of subsidized housing shrinks every year, jobs are disappearing and welfare time limits are setting in. As the social safety net disintegrates...
   [No, "as we dismantle the social safety net" - without a better alternative in place!]
   families lose their housing. We see young children and their parents in this situation every day at our organization.
   [After the babyboomers hit the job market around 1970 and wages started to stagnate, it only took 10 years for stressed voters to begin expressing their fear and defensiveness by jumping into fundamentalist religions and voting for "tough on crime" "tough on unemployment" politicians like Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush. That's already turning our Great Society into our Sad Society.]
   Rather than sweeping people out of sight, we need to focus on permanent solutions at the federal and local level, starting with safe, affordable housing.
   [No, starting with plentiful on-the-job training and good jobs. Too many progressives start with side issues - housing, health insurance, childcare, sexism, racism - ignoring the central issue - employment. Mounting numbers of dependent people in low-cost housing is not a sustainable or permanent solution. For sustainability, it all comes down to jobs.]

• Reasons sought in homeless deaths, by David Abel, Boston Globe, B1, B7.
  [Why? Isn't that our hidden agenda? Isn't that why we make people homeless, in our wonderful "Richest Nation in the World'/"Land of the Free"?]
  Kim...pointed to where a friend of his dropped dead. Drinking in the bitter cold with a few buddies yesterday, the gaunt 40-year-old homeless man and 3 pals who have lived on the streets with him for years argued about what did their friend in. ...Like the others [he] wouldn't give his full name. "It does no one good to sleep outside when it's 10° out...." Their friend, who neither they nor police would identify, was one of four homeless people found dead in Boston within a 48-hour period last week....
  [Don't let any too-little too-late relatives find out and start throwing lawsuits around!]
  City officials weren't ready to blame the cold for the deaths yesterday, and they said at least two may have overdosed on heroin....
  ["That's RIGHT. It's their own goddam fault!"]
  "He was a real nice guy," Kim said of his friend who died after many years living on the streets. ...The man in the tattered winter jacket said his friend's death is no mystery. "A lot of people just can't stand the cold," he said..\..
  [Inside headline (p. B7) -]
  Homeless deaths worry officials
  [Suuure, they do. The system, as we have designed it, is working, albeit, as usual, inefficiently - we don't want the similarity of the Nazis to become too noticeable to anyone, especially ourselves. We want "our share," without limits. We want "our share," regardless of how useless the excess is to us and how many others get zilch. We never consider that every single fundamental advance in human evolution was an advance in the technology of sharing, the prerequisite for cooperation, construction and power - language, the calendar, writing, loyal opposition, quantification, programing....]

• The Church steps and the homeless, letter to editor by Exec. Dir. Douglas Lasdon of Urban Justice Center of NYC, NYT, A30.
  Re "City to appeal court order over homeless at church" (news article, Jan. 18):
  When Mayor Michael Bloomberg says it is not humane to let homeless people sleep on the steps of a Manhattan church, he implies that the [choice] here is between the steps and a shelter. Not true.
  If New York City wins its lawsuit against the church, the homeless will not end up sleeping in a shelter but on steps in another part of the city.
  The dispute is really about whether the homeless can sleep on the steps in a wealthy district.
  [And one of the big (dys)functions of wealth in the Greatest Country in the World is, of course, to totally insulate one from the problems created by the unlimited concentration of money.]
  If the church loses this case, the homeless will not end up sleeping in a shelter but in a part of the city where the real estate is not so pricey and its owners no so powerful and well connected.
  [Not that they ever use it to get below the bandaid level of any national, state or even local problems.]
  Mayor Bloomberg deserves some leeway as he figures out how to run our city. But if he insists on trying to fool the public, he will lose [their] confidence and dissipate the goodwill necessary to govern.

• In famously tolerant city, impatience with homeless - San Francisco cracks down on street people, by Evelyn Nieves, NYT, A14.
  ...Bad luck and worse health - colon cancer - have left..\..Tricia T...at 58, completely broke, having lost her job as a telemarketer 8 months ago and her apartment not long afterward. After her clothes and shoes were repeatedly stolen in a city shelter, she began panhandling on a street median to raise money for a $40-a-night hotel room. Ms. T. (who said she did not want her last name in the newspaper out of humiliation at her condition), said the spare change that drivers handed her was the only public assistance she received. "I don't know what I'd do," she said, her eyes tearing up behind thick glasses, "if I didn't have this option."
  She may soon find out. A proposed ordinance designed to curb panhandling would ban loitering on median strips, with violators subject to a $500 fine and six months in jail.
  [Well, it's obvious what this is going to do - move the homeless off the streets and into the already overcrowded jails, where they will be duly brutalized by criminals and, if they survive, converted into criminals.]
  The proposal is one of many that legislators in this city known for its tolerance have recently introduced that point to a growing impatience with San Francisco's highly visible population of people living on the streets. Other proposals would create a [hot] line for...report[ing] quality-of-life infractions like loitering, and an ordinance that would ban sleeping in public.
  ["Quality-of-life infractions"!?? How about the quality-of-life infraction perpetrated by rich executives in terms of depriving people of their livelihoods through no fault of their own via layoffs, even when the company is in profit?!!]
  "I'm walking past people who are sick in the streets," said Tony Hall, a city supervisor who suggested the ban on sleeping and relieving oneself in public (which require that the city double its shelter beds, to 3,500, and open about 100 public toilets). "It's getting to me and it's getting to other people." Mr. Hall's sentiment resounds in cities across the country.
  [Life in the so-called "richest country in the world," the so-called "Land of the Free." What good is this precious freedom to Tricia T., and Ella in our previous story? Please, God. Let Tony Hall or someone real close to him get sick and laid off and pummelled by "bad luck" like many homeless. He needs to find out first hand how homelessness "is getting to" ... the homeless themselves. That's the only way that Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley learned that layoffs weren't such a capital idea after all - his sister was laid off and devastated by the experience.]
  "Nationally, a big reason driving the phenomenon of the criminalization of homelessness is concern about the visibility of that population, especially with respect to how they affect businesses and tourism," said Maria Foscarinis, Exec. Dir. of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, an advocacy organization based in Washington..\..
  [America's answer to drugs - criminalize them! Now America's answer to homelessness - criminalize it! Does America learn nothing from its own history? - such as the failure of prohibition, 1919-1933...]
  But advocates for homeless people say that at a time when a bad economy and a tight housing market are creating record levels of homelessness, more and more cities are responding by cracking down on the consequences of homelessness - the sleeping, urinating and shopping-cart-hauling habits of homeless people - rather than by addressing the causes....
  [And ultimately, it all comes down to jobs. And that all comes down to either sharing the vanishing work, or continuing the mindless preservation of a 62-year-old level of the workweek despite decades of work-saving technology - forcing many out onto the street and making it easier for many others to make a dishonest living than an honest one. And now the two groups seem about to merge in the "homes" of the latter - jails and prisons.]

• A street to call home - Some homeless people call one spot their own, day in and day out, by Sally Jacobs, Boston Globe, D1.
  ...Ella, homeless for nearly a decade and the mother of three children, knows her customers. People, she explains, are far more likely to give her money if they see her in the same spot each day; they read her regularity as a sign that she doesn't use the money for alcohol or drugs. They think she is responsible. Ella no longer drinks.... Plagu[ing] her [are] seizures for which she takes medication, hearing loss from a childhood firecracker accident, asthma,...depression [and] a learning disability..\..although she graduated from the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in 1983.... Ella receives a monthly SSI check of $575 and says she is unable to work.... Raised by her godmother in Roxbury after..\..her mother was...killed by a drunk driver when she was an infant [and] her father disappeared, she moved several times and gave birth to three children, each with a different father. By the early 1990s, she was on welfare and living in Lynn. And when her landlord raised her rent, she moved into a shelter and then onto the street. She gave each of her children...up for adoption.... Ella has not...used birth control during the three years she has been with Ivan [and tells him] "how lucky we are that I haven't gotten pregnant...." Like many women on the street, Ella dwells within a group, made up mostly of men, for protection. At night, they all sleep in a heated office building nearby, thanks to the building manager....

• [reader lays it on the line -]
  Homelessness in 2002, letter to editor by Harold Langus of Poughkeepsie NY, NYT, A30.
  Re "On an icy night, little room at the shelter" (front line, Jan. 5):
  Very simply stated, in the year 2002 here in the United States, everyone should have a warm and safe place to sleep. There is no excuse for its being any other way.

• Israel bulldozes houses in Gaza, photo caption, NYT, front page.
  Women sat in the rubble [weeping] after the Israeli Army razed Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip yesterday, in retaliation for the killing of four soldiers. A U.N. official said more than 500 people were homeless. Page A3.
  [Can anyone explain to us the difference between this "retaliation" against random innocent civilians and terrorism? Or why our U.S. tax dollars are supporting these actions to the tune of $3½ billion a year under the euphemism of "foreign aid"? Is Israel rolling back decades of work by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League? Are the Israelis even supposed to be in the Gaza Strip in the first place? Haven't they been occupying this area illegally for decades? In creating and maintaining the state of Israel, have the U.K. and the U.S. played Dr. Frankenstein? The main article starts -]
  Israel, in reprisal for killings, razes Gaza refugee homes, by Joel Greenberg, NYT, A3.
  The Israeli Army retaliated [yester]day for the killing of four Israeli soldiers Wednesday by Palestinian militants by bulldozing dozens of houses in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, leaving hundreds of homeless people searching for their belongings in a five-acre sea of rubble. The action in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, was the largest Israeli demolition operation in more than 15 months of violent conflict with the Palestinians. Since the start of that uprising, the army has destroyed scores of homes and large swaths of agricultural land....
  [Followup - "Israeli army faces storm for attack on Arab houses," by James Bennet, 1/14/2002 NYT, A7. Maybe there is a God.]

• On icy night, little room at the shelter - When demand exceeds supply for a warm bed in a cold season, by John Fountain, NYT, front page.
  MINNEAPOLIS - ...On a frosted winter's night the lottery bowl rattles...at St. Stephen's RC Church..\.. At 7 pm, weary-eyed men [wait] for their lucky number to be called.... The jackpot: a warm meal, a hot shower, a chance to do a load of laundry, a place to lay their heads. The men here call this the Cadillac of homeless shelters in the Twin Cities [= Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota].
  The prize is good but the odds are bad.... The Rev. Pat Griffin, pastor of the church, said St. Stephen's began using the system several years ago as a "simple, fair way" of doling out beds when demand began to far exceed supply..\.. The director of the shelter, Allyson Hoberg...was standing [in a] room filled with about 70 men.... [From photo caption:] Only nine spots were available for the night..\..
  Ms. Hoberg told the men, "We've got two 30-night beds, and 44 people" vying for them.... "We've got seven one-night beds and 61 people." \So\ in a few minutes, most of those in attendance would have to search for some other haven from the \9°\ temperature outside...and a strong wind.... Some would find grimmer...accommodations in a former morgue now converted to a shelter [and another] called the Tramp Camp,...both...filled with...thin mats over hard floors [and] the former morgue provides no food or showers and only a portable toilet..\.. For others there was the street....underneath a bridge, in abandoned buildings or in an icy car..\.. The few county shelter beds are largely limited to those who are on public assistance..\..
  As homelessness rises across the country, particularly among the working poor, there are few metropolitan areas where the absence of a home is harder felt than here.... A survey this spring found that 5,226 people sought shelter in Minneapolis and St. Paul on a given night, with 698 of those turned away. Those numbers are small compared to, say, New York City, which has about 30,000 people in shelters and an untold number in the streets. But unlike New York, Minnesota provides no legal right to shelter [and] six years ago, Minnesota prohibited able-bodied single adults from getting public assistance.
  [Presumably because "able bodied" people should be able to get a job, stay employed, and quit being "goddam parasites." However...]
  The Wilder Research Center, which surveys homelessness in the Twin Cities every three years, found recently that 41% of homeless men and women in 2000 were employed, compared with 19% in 1991.
  [So of the 70 men waiting for the bed lottery in Minneapolis, 41%x70= 29 = nearly 30, are working. So much for the "richest country in the world" when we have a huger heritage from the past in terms of life-easing technology than ever before in history, but zero technology in place for spreading its benefits. One person can grab it all and starve all the rest. Bill Gates has grabbed over $50 BILLION and yet, every second person in this country will babble, "Oh I don't begrudge Bill Gates one penny of the money he's earned." And never mind the unspendable concentration of spending power - what about the concentration of working hours - the pervasiveness of overtime, paid and unpaid - while the guy nextdoor is about to lose his house because he can't get enough pay to make the mortgage. And it's not all the top brackets. Four pages later, we have an article titled, "Investigators say elevator union members were paid for no-show jobs," by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A13, which includes the news, "Prosecutors said that for one day - April 27, 1998..\..Pres. John Green of Local 1 of the International Union of Elevator Constructor{'s} son-in-law, Terence Carr...had been paid for 30 hours of work:
  • 10 hours, including 2 overtime hours, at 10 Hanover Sq [in NYC]
  • 12 hours, including 4 overtime hours, at Riverside South
  • 8 hours at Battery Park City
  ...One worker, who testified before the federal grand jury in Brooklyn and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that because of no-show jobs, workers from other construction trades often have to run the elevators themselves. One prominent construction executive who insisted on anonymity said some industry officials have looked the other way on no-show elevator jobs, believing that they were reserved for injured of sick workers who badly needed the income." Of course, Pres. John Green denied everything. But back to the Twin Cities -]
  The study also found that the average monthly income of homeless adults was $622, while the average rent in the Twin Cities area for a one-bedroom apartment was $664.
  [...never mind food, etc. The disparity would be more compelling if we were told the rent for a one-room ("studio") apartment, not a larger "one-bedroom."]
  Men like Joe McCaughey...a construction worker at a temporary-help agency..\..had to be at work in the morning. So they could not afford to look too long for a place to bunk for the night. Mr. McCaughey...said he earned $7 an hour....
  [Well, what's a matter with that?! That's $7x40x4= $1120/month, and one-bedrooms are only $664, studios presumably cheaper! Here's the matter - "it all comes down to jobs."]
  But he had not been lucky this winter, though he said he felt luckier than most of the others surrounding him. At least, he said, he could sleep in his rickety Ford station wagon which he equipped with a propane heater and mounds of wool blankets.... But...he noted, there was no substitute for a real bed....
  [He was unlucky in the lottery this night, but later another of the church's shelter called with one more bed available and he got it. So...]
  He would have a shower, a bite to eat and a warm place to lay his head. At least for one night.
  [And CEOs want to know where their markets have gone? And economists want to keep prating about the fallacy of the lump of labor? It's not even a stable lump. It's a shrinking iceberg. And chipping off a piece of it doesn't even guarantee you a home any more. It's not just jobs any more, it's good jobs, defined as jobs that pay enough to make the rent. So forget the lump of labor, it's the lumping up of employment and skills and pay on proportionately fewer people and more machines, computers and robots that's the problem. And the idiot savants in the nation's economics departments are all but ignoring it. Blind guides, straining out gnats while swallowing camels. A maximum investment of research at points of minimum return.]

• State [of Massachusetts] seen adding to homelessness problem - ID, work rules keep many out of shelters, by Megan Tench, Boston Globe, B1.
  ...Organizers wit the Mass. Coalition for the Homeless say...hundreds of the region's growing homeless population are being forced to live on the streets because requirements to enter shelters or obtain transitional housing - like having a Social Security card or birth certificate - are being more vigorously enforced by the state Dept. of Transitional Assistance. ...Rules allowing alternative forms of identification in times of crisis are being ignored.
  ...Transitional Assistance...spokesman Dick Powers said...with only 968 beds in its 75 shelters, the state is facing a huge shortage [and] about 300 families are already being housed in hotel or motel rooms. The state therefore has to be careful that all the beds are going to eligible families or individuals, he said....
  A survey conducted by the [Coalition] revealed that 82% of families living on the streets were rejected by the state for reasons such as not having proper ID or earning too much money through odd jobs....