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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, Jun-Sep/2002

9/27/2002  homelessness in the news -

• The right to shelter, letter to editor by Ralph Nunez, Pres. & CEO of Homes for the Homeless of NYC, NYT, A30.
  Re "City to pay millions to homeless forced to sleep in an office" (front page, Sept. 20):
  ...If Linda Gibbs, the city's commissioner of homeless services, receives court approval for a plan that would allow the city to remove families \who\ reject permanent housing...from the shelter system for 30 days, she must be careful that the temporary removal and placement of their children in government-supervised care does not become the first step into the foster care system.
  [Once we implement flexible adjustment of the workweek and by sharing the vanishing work and linking training to overtime, make it easy for everyone to support and house themselves, we will in fact move closer to being able to step children of persistently homeless parents into the foster care system with a clearer conscience.]

• [another venture into the bizarre -]
  2 arrested over video of homeless, by Rick Lyman, WSJ, A18.
  A video popularized on the Internet that shows homeless men pummeling one another, pulling out their teeth with pliers and hurling themselves into walls has resulted in the arrest of two Las Vegas men...Zachary Bubeck...and Ryan McPherson [for] conspiracy, solicitation of a felony crime and illegally paying people to fight. They were arrested in La Mesa, Calif., where at least one scene was filmed.... The 57-minute video [was called] "Bumfights, A Cause for Concern."...
  [More likely, dumb "entrepreneurs" a cause for concern.]

• Housing the homeless mentally ill, editorial via NYT, A26.
  ...A quarter century ago, [NY] state began closing its discredited psychiatric wards....   25 years ago the reintegration of people with mental illness into their communities was the goal. ...Planners envisioned...a system more responsive to patients' needs that would provide a range of options for care. Instead, there was no place for many of the discharged patients to go, and because of the state's failure to provide adequate oversight, some fell prey to unscrupulous adult-home operators..\.. Now there's a new set of scandals.... The disclosure of appalling conditions in some privately run adult homes has forced the Pataki administration belatedly to look into reform of the state's haphazard system....
  [There's an oxymoron for you.]
  One estimate is that as few as half of the nearly 15,000 people now living in adult homes, at a per capita annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $40,000, belong in that setting. The others, it's believed, would benefit from less institutional living arrangements, like small-group homes or private apartments, so long as medical and support services are available. Bitter experience has shown that if these programs aren't run well, the mentally ill can end up on the streets, a danger to themselves and others....

• Millions for homeless for nights in office - New York settles a dispute over the lack of emergency shelter, by Leslie Kaufman, NYT, A26.
  New York has ended years of wrangling over money to be paid to homeless families denied emergency shelter. [photo caption]
  New York City [NYC] has agreed to pay millions of dollars in penalties dating to 1995 to homeless families who were forced to stay overnight in a Bronx office while awaiting emergency shelter, a violation of court orders. The agreement, disclosed yesterday at a hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, resolved years of wrangling between advocates for the homeless and the city over how and when the penalties would be paid to the families. It is part of an effort by the Bloomberg administration to disentangle the city from a web of lawsuits left over from the previous administration. It also prompted lawyers representing the homeless to drop a motion seeking to have the city's commissioner of homeless services, Linda Gibbs, held personally in contempt.
  The penalties the city will pay have accrued since 1995, when the city agreed in a consent decree to pay up to $150 a night to families who had sought emergency shelter but were instead kept overnight at the Emergency Assistance Unit [EAU], the Bronx office that is the city's primary intake center for homeless families....
  It was not immediately clear how many families would be covered or how much the total payment would be, but the average family would have spent one to three nights at the EAU and would be paid $150 for the first night and $100 for each night after that....
  [Wouldn't it be easier just to share the vanishing work on a citywide basis, and by making it easier for people to support and house themselves, render obsolete, once and for all, the pressures for taxpayers to do so?!]
  Another contentious issue faded when the city said it would comply with a court order to close the River Avenue Annex, a former jail used a stopgap measure to house homeless families overnight by next Wednesday....

• Some in shelters are too picky, New York says - New York's shelter system seeks to oust the too-picky, by Leslie Kaufman, NYT, front page, A17.
  [It seems that in NYC, beggars can be choosers.]
  ...It may seem strange that a homeless person would describe herself as choosy about where she will live, but in NYC, which is under court order to give free temporary shelter to all those who say they have no place to live, families in the shelters can refuse available permanent housing with little penalty..\..
  Sara Kelly, a lively articulate mother of 6 [ever heard of contraceptives?!] was explaining why she and her family have stayed in a homeless shelter for more than a year instead of moving to an apartment.
  • It's hard to find a 3-bedroom apartment in NYC she can afford.
  • Landlords don't like single mothers, teenage boys and homeless people,
  • and [landlords] lie about making repairs.
  • She does not want a neighborhood that is "druggy."
  • She must live near a hospital because 2 of her children have asthma.....
  Now, as part of a larger effort to move families out of the system faster, the Bloomberg administration would like to make changes. It decided to pursue a policy, begun bly Rudolph Giuliani when he was mayor, that would allow the city to eject families who repeatedly refuse to take apartments that meet government standards.
  New York is under strong fiscal pressure to change its shelter system, which houses a record 8,696 families, an increase of roughly 33% from September 2001. Each family costs the city about $2,800 a month. If the number of families in the system continues to grow at the present rate, the city will exceed its emergency shelter budget for this fiscal year by $27 million, according to an analysis released last week by the Independent Budget Office.
  [Ready yet to subsidize contraception and sterilization especially for the non-self-supporting?]
  The Dept. of Homeless Services does not collect data on how many apartments families turn down before leaving the system,...
  [Funny how they never collect data on the most important variables. Another big one they miss is the number of non-self-supporting American residents.]
  ...but its research shows that the average time a homeless family spends in what is supposed to be emergency shelter has grown to 315 days, from 285 days in September 2000.
  To further support its case, the administration for the first time released its figures on housing searches. They showed that this July, families in the system looked at an average of 1.34 apartments each. The city would like each family to see at least 8 residences a month.... The specialists, shelter workers who function mainly as real-estate agents, work directly with families to look for and visit apartments. They estimated that 50-75% of their clients were unreasonably picky.... "They don't want to live in Bushwick or Crown Heights," said one specialist.... "They want to live in Park Slope or Midtown Manhattan."
  Before the end of the month, the city hopes to ask a court to allow officials to remove such families from the shelter system for 30 days and place their children in government-supervised care....
  [Is the day coming when self-support will be so easy and require so few hours per week that we will routinely break up the few residual non-self-supporting families and reversibly sterilize the parents?]
  

• NY City is ordered not to use jail as a shelter - Families are to leave by Sept. 25, judge says, by Leslie Kaufman, NYT, A12.
  ...Justice Helen Freedman of State Supreme Court....
  [Meanwhile, the letters roll on -]
  When families call a jail their home, letters to editor, NYT, A22.
  • By Kenneth Rummenie of Buffalo NY.
    ...Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in deciding to house homeless families in the Bronx House of Detention for Men, followed the lesser-of-two-evils reasoning and correctly so. [However,] in bureaucracies, temporary solutions tend to become permanent. Don't allow this to happen here. Set a target date...for permanent housing for those who have been living in the jail....
    [Looks like Judge Freedman may just have done so.]
  • By Richard Grayson of Davie FL.
    ...Until city officials come up with a plan to end using the jail as a homeless shelter, they should at least do what many volunteers at homeless shelters have done: spend a night with the residents. From Mayor Bloomberg on down, city officials should take turns joining the NY families in the jail. This gesture would at least in part undo the message to children in the Bronx House of Detention that they are there because they have done something wrong.
    [Or confirm the message by association with sleazy politicians?]

• The wrong shelter - Jail isn't a place for homeless kids, op ed by Bob Herbert, NYT, A25.
  [Finally, Bob tears himself away from Tulia, Texas (see excerpts from his first piece on 7/29/2002) to attend to Mayor Bloomberg's economical housing of overflow homeless families in an unused detention facility (see below 8/11-12/2002 #1).]
  The Bronx House of Detention for Men is not much farther than a long fly ball from Yankee Stadium. [It] is no longer used to incarcerate prisoners. [It] is a gloomy structure, a grimy aesthetic horror that went up during the Depression and remains a monument to the many ways that life in the big city can go wrong.
  The first thing that greets you when you step inside in the bad smell. Then you notice the elaborate metal doors with the electronic locking system. It is not a good place for children. But that, apparently, has yet to dawn on the mayor of New York....

• Shelter as a choice?, letter to editor by Prog. Dir. Deborah Fader of Partnership for the Homeless, Brooklyn NY, NYT, A18.
  Re "For 2 stepsisters, 2 choices on homelessness" [see 8/23 below]:
  ...Make no mistake.... these are families with young children and no place to call home, who are desperate enough to subject themselves ot the dehumanizing effects of life in a city shelter.
  The choice of living in a shelter or being crammed into a small apartment with other families - what kind of option is this to give vulnerable children and their parents?
  [Both the choices of homeless dorms and small apartments are too little too late. We should be thinking about third and fourth choices - free and easily available nationwide birth control, and nationwide full employment via work sharing instead of makework (which is also too little too late). It all comes down to jobs, and with automation and robotization, jobs come down to sharing the vanishing work and allowing the job market to absorb our huge hidden unemployment so wages and spending rise - or, we won't have any markets left because the wealthy just don't spend that much of their huge holdings. And work sharing - with on-the-job training (OJT) - means timesizing, not downsizing.]

• 2 sisters, 2 ways to deal with homelessness, by Leslie Kaufman, NYT, front page.
  Destinee Caraballo...is seeking housing from the city. Her stepsister, Maria Soler, is staying with relatives. [photo caption]
  They are two stepsisters. Both are unmarried mothers on public assistance, both were raised in the same apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and both say they do not have enough money to pay rent. Yet only one of them is homeless.
  This summer, an epidemic number of families calling themselves homeless has flooded the city's shelters. As the pressure builds, even ferocious advocates for the homeless will quietly acknowledge that the system may be attracting some people with an ability to make other choices, albeit unpalatable ones....
  Although the term homeless conjures images of desperate families reduced to lugging their belongings in battered suitcases, families rarely come to the city's primary shelter intake unit in the Bronx from the street. Instead, they most often arrive at the Emergency Assistance Unit from doubled-up situations, tired of the overcrowding and sometimes hopeful that the system will be a short road to low-rent housing.
  In the case of the two stepsisters, the line between hard-pressed and homeless is less stark than it miight seem. In fact, as the two sisters might say themselves, the difference in the paths they chose is not so much about rent as about differing views of how best to help their families.
  • One sister thinks it better to double with relatives in crowded conditions than subject her children to the city's troubled system.
  • The other believes that the shelter is a trial she must pass to achieve the independence she desperately wants.
  [Independence, without a job? Independence, with a self-supporting situation requiring only 20-30 hours a week, which is certainly the range we should be in by now with all our work-saving and high-efficiency technology, instead of stuck back at an outdated 40-hour workweek that was too high even when it was legislated in 1940? (A 30-hour workweek bill passed the US Senate by a large majority (53-30) in the interregnum between Hoover and FDR in 1933 but was blocked by a jealous and clueless FDR to his own regret just two years later, when his mass of socialist controls and programs were failing to make any serious dent on the Depression.) Let's quit worrying about the side issues and deal with the central problem. It's much much harder for people to support themselves and their families than it should be in a nation chock full of efficient and work-saving technology. The workweek, after gradually cutting in half from 1840 to 1940, has not budged a minute since then, despite much more technology. The idiotic response of our business leaders to technology in terms of downsizing instead of timesizing has cut their own markets and made everyone so insecure that no one wants to be the first to leave the office at night and the workweek is actually lengthening again to levels we haven't seen since 1910, 1900 and even 1890. The purpose of technology is to make human life easier, by freeing us from work and reducing working hours. And it's not an option. We either do it, or we weaken our consumer base by downsizing our workforce and wind up with much more productivity than we can sell - result: recession, or worse.]

• When shelter feels like a prison - Memories of a homeless childhood, op ed by Charmion Browne, NYT, 4-13.
  During my early childhood, I lived in four ro five different homeless shelters in NYC.... My mother had financial difficulties as a single mother taking care of my brother and me on her own..\.. It's a good thing my mother found employment when she did: otherwise I, too, might have been like one of the homeless children in the city today, left without even a shelter to live in because of overcrowding.... A line for food, cramped space, no privacy - sounds a lot like a prison to me. The only difference now is that the city is calling a homeless shelter what it really is.

• Cots can't solve a homeless crisis, 6 letters to editor, NYT, A18.
  [Herewith, 2 excerpts -]
  1. By Delaine Heliotis of Somerville NJ.
     I wonder why no one has considered the Governors Island buildings as suitable temporary shelters for the homeless. They appear, at least externally, to be in fairly good condition. Surely Governors Island would provide a far more pleasant living space than a jail.
     [In another letter, Merna Maher of Prior Lake MN suggests trailers, such as "the Federal Emergency Management Agency [uses] when there's a hurricane or a flood." In this case, it's a flood of poor people, caused by our lack of an automatic mechanism to adjust the workweek downward as waves of worksaving technology assumes more and more of the tasks of our economy, and our lack of effective immigration policy, caused by our repeated amnesties for migrants too desperate to respect our immigration laws. Are they really any different from the people our current uncapped concentration of work and income have rendered too desperate to respect our drug laws or our private-property laws, over two million of whom we have currently under lockup?]

  2. By Leah Oppenheimer of Sag Harbor NY.
     As a young girl, my family and I spent a homeless spring and summer in a series of motels. It was a time of deep shame and confusion for my siblings and me. This is a trauma that I assure you reverberates through generations. ...In my family, which has recovered economically, the scars can be witnessed in the child-rearing practices and chronic illness of some of us.
     I am astonished that the Bloomberg administration would use a former jail building as a temporary shelter for families with children older than 6. How will these boys and girls maintain any sense of their families' goodness when they are placed in a facility meant for criminals? The long-term costs will be paid by every other system in the city - and of course by the children themselves.

• New York City's homeless logjam, editorial, NYT, A28.
  The City of New York and lawyers for the homeless have been at each other's throats for more than 20 years, but the problem is only growing in severity.... The primary problem is a shortage of affordable housing, brought on by the fact that in the 1980's, the federal government got out of the housing business, leaving the city alone.
  [There's a new angle. And here's another excuse -]
  In addition, the state subsidy for a homeless family of three in NYC is $286 per month, less than a third of what is needed for a two-bedroom apartment....
  [This begs the question, how come this whole homeless issue didn't surface in the 40s and 50s? Well, aside, as colleague Kate points out, from the prevalence of rooming houses, the answer is that at that period we still focused on the root cause - joblessness. Now TPTB (the powers that be) have almost totally finessed and suppressed the jobless issue, and are narrowly focused on inflation and the unending stream of detailed symptoms - housing, foodstamps, "The Chiiildren," drugs, prisons - on the facile assumption, bolstered by braindead sniggering at the imaginary Lump of Labor Fallacy, that there are Puhlenty of Jobs out there and if you can't find one, it's your own damn fault and we don't care. Well, it's still the problem of the 40s and 50s, jobs, and that's how the Timesizing.com Party solves homelessness = sharing the vanishing human work as one sector after another mechanizes, automates and robotizes.]

• Testing the mayor - Housing of the homeless in a jail reflects the lack of other options - Trying to avoid the perception of worsening the quality of life, by Jennifer Steinhauer, NYT, A17.
  ...The specter of children sleeping on prison cots, just beyond a wall of razor wire and among strangers - a week after a 16-year-old with a history of mental illness killed himself in a Harlem shelter - underscores how few good solutions there are to the city's homeless problem.... Carmen Garcia...an unemployed security guard who has slept on the floor for the past week with her four children and her husband, Richard Vazquez...described a chaotic and miserable scene. "I never saw anything like it in my life: babies lying on the floor, even newborns," she said. "We filled out the papers. They told us to wait and we waited"..\..
  Legislation passed in the early 1990's prohibited the city from using such shelters for families.... But [Mayor] Bloomberg saw no other options.
  [No other options for a multimillionaire mayor, whose campaign set records in campaign spending???]
  His decision was driven largely by the untenable situation of scores of families sleeping on the floor of the Emergency Assistance Unit, which he visited on Sunday....
  [So he's personally involved enough to visit on a Sunday but he's not personally involved enough to wave a finger, mobilize a tiny fraction of his many millions of dollars, and get them into alternative housing that's not a prison. And he's certainly not imaginative enough to initiate a city-level worksharing program that would put this problem back where it belongs, in the private sector. Maybe he's stymied by the part of it that is a public-sector problem, the fact that repeated immunities for illegal aliens means this country has absolutely no effective immigration policy. Well, we have an answer for that part of it also.]

1. 8/12 Desperate for family shelters, New York uses a former jail, by Michael Cooper, NYT, A15.
   With more homeless families applying for shelter than the city has been able to find space for each night, the Bloomberg administration reopened an old jail in the Bronx yesterday...the Bronx House of Detention for Men..\..as a temporary shelter for homeless people and their children.... A record 8,400 homeless families are now in the city's shelter system, and the number of families applying for shelter rose by 25% in the year ending June 30 over the previous year. So many families have sought shelter at the Bronx intake center..\..the city's only homeless intake center, the Emergency Assistance Unit..., that...against a court order and city rules, the center, which is supposed to find shelter for families, instead became a shelter of last resort, and hundreds of families spent the night on its floors....
   [Gittin' harder fer us good ol' boys to keep the faith that this is the best country there is.]

2. 8/11 Ending homelessness, letter to editor by Chairman Rev. Michael Kendall of Commission of Religious Lenders of NYC, 4-12.
   The shameful and violent condition of the Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx that contributed to the death of Jason Wilson ("Mentally ill boy kills himself in shelter hotel," news article, Aug. 8), and the pain of so many other homeless people, must end. Homelessness is a human tragedy, not an occasion for punishment. Surely, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised, we can find a better way. Our homeless brothers and sisters, and especially children, need real homes.
   [Our solution? Bring down the 62-year-old workweek and make it A LOT easier for people to feed, clothe and house themselves. There is no functional reason for a 40-hour-or-more human workweek during the Robotics Age, let alone the longer hours many people are working out of sheer layoff-inspired job anxiety. Waves of miraculous technology mean we should ALL be living in a heaven of shorter workweeks and higher pay - without exception! That we're not is due to our own brains being stuck in the sands of the past, when "work hard to get ahead" made sense. It doesn't any more. Now we must centrifuge our vanishing human employment and dynamize our spending power instead of immoblizing it in unspendably massive "black holes" in the top income brackets. It's time to spread and activate the spending power to match the enormous productive capacity technology has given us.]

• Fight homelessness, letter to editor by Pres. Arnold Cohen of Partnership for Homeless of NYC, NYT, A16.
  Re "A homeless problem is back: Overnight in a city office" (news article, Aug. 7 [apparently not in our AZ & NM "National Edition" of the NYT]):
  The Bloomberg administration's plan for homeless services has many commendable strategies, but there are two serious flaws.
  1. It falls short of creating affordable housing - a key to ending homelessness.
  2. Moreover, no additional money is budgeted for new initiatives.
  New York City spends almost a billion dollars annually for homeless services, much of it for emergency measures. It's time to put real solutions on the table. We cannot afford to wait. With a 32% increase in the number of homeless families in the last year, the human cost is incalculable.
  [But there's no saying that whatever you do now, there won't be a 64% increase next year - until you address the root of the problem and make it A LOT easier for people to get training and jobs, and that means adjusting the workweek slowly downward until all the unemployed, welfare, disabled, force-retired, unwillingly dependent and dependents of resentful sponsors are vacuumed by market forces into a voracious job market, similar to the war years (WW2) when employers practically shanghaied people off the streets to get help and not even Galbraith and his Wage and Price Control Board could stifle rising wages and benefits.]
  [Compare on the same page -]
  The City's hunger crisis, editorial, NYT, A16.
  Long hidden by the puffed-up image of abundance, a crisis of hunger in New York City has been worsened by rising unemployment and underemployment since 9/11. According to the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, more than 1,000,000 City residents depend on hard-pressed food pantries and soup kitchens for their basic needs. One-quarter of them [250,000] are from households with one or more members who have jobs but not enough income to survive. They have turned to charity because all else has failed them.
  [This is America's greatest city? - And the Wall St Journal on Thursday tried to maintain that the USA was better than Europe? Name one city in Europe that has 1,000,000 people dependent on food pantries and soup kitchens.]
  In this picture, one major failure has been the City's handling of the food stamp program. More than 800,000 low-income New Yorkers get food stamp assistance, but there are at last that many, by conservative estimates, who do not get food stamps even though they could qualify.... Mayor Rudolph Giuliani...never appreciated what an economic boon the program could be for the City. The federal government pays all food stamp benefits and half the cost of administering the program: the City and state pay the rest. But the benefit to the City, at an average $94 a month per recipient, far outweighs the expense....
  [Pathetic.]

• Homeless woman's role in rescue brings praise, AP via Arizona Republic, A5.
  ST. LOUIS - A homeless mother of three who helped a TV news photographer resuce a driver trapped in a burning truck received dozens of offers of money and support from people moved by her plight. Mary Whitehead...said the generous response to her part in the rescue of...Doris Householder was "overwhelming and exciting."...
  Whitehead and Bobby Hughes...a news photographer for KTVI-TV, pulled Householder from her pickup truck after it crashed and burst into flames on a highway exit ramp early Wednesday. Another man also helped in the rescue but left before anyone learned his name. Householder lost part of a leg and remained hospitalized Friday in fair condition.
  Whitehead and her three children, who move between shelters and low-budget hotels, were in their broken-down car when they heard the collision. Hughes arrived a short time later. "The whole cab was engulfed in fire," Hughes said. On the passenger side, he could see the woman, but the door was stuck. With help from the other man and Whitehead, he eventually broke a window and got Householder out.
  By Thursday, Community Women Against Hardship, a private organization that supports families in poverty, established a special account to accept donations for Whitehead. A foundation also offered help with proceeds from a celebrity basketball game....
  Despite the offers, Whitehead and her children - Cartez 14, Mikeisha 12 and Kierra 11 - remained homeless Thursday night.... She said the rescue taught her "that if you can lend a helping hand even a little, it's worth trying." ...Hughes said, "I don't consider myself a hero. But what Mary did was amazing. She prayed and comforted that woman."

• Homeless in Canada, letter to editor by Can. MP Peter Goldring, NYT, A26.
  Re "Amid prosperity, Toronto shows signs of fraying" (news article, June 16):
  Toronto and other Canadian cities have allowed the homeless and affordable-housing situation to decline into a deplorable state. ...Canada does not have a natonal housing strategy.
  Two years ago, our minister of homeless, Claudette Bradshaw, committed the Canadian federal government to spending $753m on more nonprofit and transitional shelters. These approaches are not proving effective. The problem in Canada is not the amount of money; it's how ineffectively the money is being spent!
  [Again, the TImesizing strategy is to cut the lame over-focused approaches and just dry up the gross labor glut by trimming the workweek until joblessness is small and wages are large. What's this Canadian Member of Parliament's prescription?]
  In contrast, during my visits to New York City shelters this month, I saw a well-managed system that not only gets people off the streets at night and into clean beds (there are no floor mats in New York as there are in Canada), but also assists New York's homeless toward independence. Canada is indeed light years behind New York in its thinking.
  [Phew! After all the plaints we've heard on this page about New York's homeless provision deficiencies, Canada must be in tough shape if NYC is its nirvana.]

• Mayor to fight eviction ban for shelters - Wants to oust residents deemed uncooperative - A challenge to a court ruling that defeated the Giuliani administration's eviction attempts, by Nina Bernstein, NYT, A24.
  Mayor Michael Bloomberg will appeal a state court ruling that baarred the Giuliani administration from ejecting homeless families [deemed uncooperative] from shelters and putting their children in foster care.... The appeal picks up a challenge to the 21-year-old court decree that obligates the city to provide shelter to every homeless person.... The Bloomberg administration...wants freedom from court oversight to achieve the goals of its new homeless policy.
  With homelessness at record levels, City Hall plans to increase government housing subsidies to homeless families and provide them with a larger percentage of the city-owned apartments that are set aside for low-income families. But the nonprofit contract agencies that now provide 90% of shelter beds to a record 33,800 people nightly remain strongly opposed to a provision of the new plan that would eject families that the city deems uncooperative, barring them from shelter for 30 days and offering their children temporary foster homes....
  Frederick Shack, president of the Tier II Coalition, which represents the nonprofit agencies...said homeless mothers sometimes had good reasons to ["not cooperate" and] reject apartments offered by the city, because, for example, they were near a mother's abusive partner or endangered a disabled child....
  The administration is now facing contempt charges for leaving an average of 90 families a night to sleep on the floors and benches of the city offices that provide entry to the city's shelter system...said..\..Steven Banks, the lawyer who represents homeless plaintiffs in the continuing litigation over the 1981 decree....

1. Housing in New York, letter to editor by Chairwmn Naomi Bayer of Housing First! of NY, NYT, A24.
   Among our most persistent public policy myths is that housing is to homelessness as highways are to traffic. The more you build, the more there is.
   [Assuming she has misused the word "myth" to mean "falsehood," there's nothing false about this generalization unless specific programs are in place either to provide training and jobs to traansform the homeless into 'homeful' or stop more homeless from moving in from out of town or both. New York had liberal welfare policies in the 60s and 70s and people poured in to take advantage of them.]
   The Blueprint to End Homelessness provides an action plan grounded in what all the research on homelessness tells us: Access to affordable housing, with services as needed, is the only thing that actually makes a difference.
   [We find this near-sighted approach incomprehensible. As if people can do anything without decently paying jobs. And as if government needs to do anything except establish a self-regulating workweek adjustment system so that every citizen can easily make a living out of the gradually diminishing pool of urgently demanded (and therefore well-paying) private-sector employment (which could be done on a city-scale basis). Do-gooders so frequently make the mistake of dealing with the low-level highly specific symptoms instead of the underlying general problem. But then, that guarantees that the particular approacher's own job. Ah, the pervasiveness of job desperation in human society prior to automatic adjustment of the workweek against broadly defined unemployment. Here comes Naomi's pitch for how much we need her job -]
   The Housing First! coalition calls for a long-term plan to create and preserve more than 185,000 units of affordable housing, a major step toward ending homelessness....
   [oh yeah? - how she gonna stop more than 185,000 homeless from coming to New York once word gets out?]
   ...and tackling the serious housing crisis facing virtually all New Yorkers.
   [Whoah, there's a stretch! Some of the richest people in the world have pieds-à-terre in New York City.]

2. [oops, Naomi may be getting her wish anyway -]
   Mayor seeks shift in policy on homeless in New York - Easier entry to shelters, with a push for independence, by Jennifer Steinhauer, NYT, A22.
   With homeless at record levels in New York City, the Bloomberg administration plans to significantly increase the number of government subsidies for apartments, the first such increase since 1995.
   [But then -]
   City Hall also wants to evict those few residents of the shelter system who do not aggressively seek permanent housing, while at the same time making the shelter system more accessible to those in need....
   [Oh, like the unaggressive aren't in need?]
   The combo of increased housing and pressure on shelter residents to become independent is part of a significant shift in priorities and goals of the Dept. of Homeless Services.
   The number of homeless families increased 22% during the current budget year, which end June 30, leading to 33,840 people in the shelter system as of yesterday, the highest recorded level since...the city began tracking homeless figures [in the 1980's]. The administration is finalizing an ambitious agenda this week that officials say will place greater [emphasis] on the causes of homelessness and on its prevention....
   [- well, the cause of homelessness is our failure to share the vanishing work, and it would be lovely if the Bloomberg administration suddenly saw the light and started implementing city-level worksharing as many Japanese cities are currently doing, but solving the causes and preventing homelessness are -]
   - goals that have bedevilled the last three mayoral administrations.
   [- and are likely to bedevil the next thirty-three without Timesizing (or a 'nice' big war), because we get ¾ of the way thru this article before we see a mention of jobs, and even then -]
   ...The administration will not link the closing of welfare cases or the failure to participate in work programs to shelter rights....
   [Another tidbit we glean from this article -]
   There is a restraining order against the city forbidding it to bar disruptive clients from shelters....
   [thus making it less onerous for many to stay overnite on the streets - real practical!]

• End homelessness? We need the will, letter to editor by Chmn. Roy Gainsburg of Partnership for the Homeless NY, NYT, A28.
  Re "A plan to end city homelessness in 10 years" (news article, June 13) [which appeared in our New England edition as "A home for all New Yorkers is goal of a 10-year plan," A33 - see below]:
  You report that more than 33,800 homeless people are living in NYC shelters today, a population that skyrocketed by 26% in the last year alone,
  [- and according to the story below on 6/13, 41% of New York City homeless are children -]
  and that the city spends close to $1 billion a year on homelessness. Clearly the short-term bandaid approach to homelessness has failed.
  [So what does he recommend? A long-term random list containing 2 bandaids (#1 & 2), 2 real solutions (3 & 4, provided by Timesizing Phase Four and Phase Two respectively) and one meaningless phrase (5) -]
  Solutions must be multifaceted:
  1. affordable housing
  2. supportive services tailored to the needs of individuals
  3. living wage jobs
  4. effective job training and
  5. antipoverty efforts
  Ending homelessness in 10 years is humane, makes economic sense, and is achievable. The only missing ingredient is political will.
  [An advanced Timesizing economy would end homelessness as a matter of course, by creating wartime levels of labor shortage without the war and enabling everyone to afford housing.]

• Appeals Court backs church homeless camp, by Nina Bernstein, NYT, A32.
  A federal appeals court has backed the right of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Midtown Manhattan to let homeless people sleep on its steps without fear that they will be rousted by police. The unusually swift ruling, framed in terms of religious freedom [the outdoor sleeping space could be proven to be provided out of a "sincerely held religious belief"], could have national signficance, legal experts say....
  The City [of New York] had tried to overturn a lower court's preliminary ban on police action to disperse about 20 homeless people who sleep nightly on the steps and perimeter property of the Church, near Tiffany's and Trump Tower in the tourist district....

• A home for all New Yorkers is goal of a 10-year plan - National effort could help shift the costs - A plan to help those in shelters reflects an emerging national consensus, by Nina Bernstein, NYT, A33.
  In a 10-year plan to end homelessness in New York Citiy, a statewide coalition of 150 nonprofit housing and social service agencies is calling for the addition of 16,000 apartments tied to social services, an increase in rent subsidies and more accountability by government agencies for people they release into homelessness.... Ted Houghton [is] the author of "The Blueprint to End Homelessness in New York City," a plan sponsored by the state's Supportive Housing Network..\..
  Bolstered by a Bush administration pledge to end chronic homelesness in a decade, the plan reflects an emerging national consensus among those who provide services for the homeless that money must be shifted from managing expensive shelters to expanding the supply of suitable low-income housing.
  [Like individual housing units are going to be less expensive than dorm-style shelters?]
  More than 33,800 people, 41% of them children, now sleep in the city's shelter system each night, and the city spends close to $1 billion a year on homelessness.... The plan, which would...seek more federal money, calls for doubling the supply of apartments linked to social services over the next decade, adding 13,000 to the 15,000 such dwellings for chronically homeless single adults and adding 3,000 to the existing 370 apartments for homeless families with unusual problems. But it also calls for more low-cost housing and rent subsidies, saying the major problem to be overcome is the city's housing shortage and growing gap between low incomes and rents....
  [In short, it calls for more expensive, taxpayer-funded bandaids instead of a Timesizing-modernized labor market to balance employer and employee power and provide decently paying work in such a way that everyone could support themselves and afford housing. But then, far be it for any of these nonprofits to actually fight for the ]
  

• Pine Street Inn keeps tight grip on cash reserve -...Faces quandary over financial priorities, by David Abel, BG, front page.
  As the region's largest homeless shelter bemoans proposed state budget cuts, warning it may be forced to slash an array of vital services, it's sitting on unprecedented cash reserves and paying six-figure salaries to its top five officials. Unlike most social service providers, the Pine Street Inn took advantage of the past decade's boom to save money - so much that the shelter's cash reserves balooned from about $2.5 million in 1994 to more than $15 million last year.
  [Seems like the top officials are taking advantage too - of homelessness.]
  The heady times also enabled the shelter to pay its president, Lyndia Downie, $134,500.
  Although the shelter serves as a last line of defense against rising homelessness and hunger, and Downie and other officials foresee cuts in services as steep as 25%, they say they have no plans to use the reserves to offset the shelter's coming cash crunch. Nor do they have any intention of cutting salaries, which are in line with those paid elsewhere.
  [Whaaat?! Six figure salaries for the "angels" who run homeless shelters? They're turning out to be just another bunch of hogs gorging at the public trough. And working with the homeless? They must have partitioned brains worthy of sociopaths.]
  "We have to think about the long-term interests of the organization," Downie said. As for salary cuts to senior staff, she said, "It's the last place we would want to go."...
  [Well, maybe you better go work for Enron or Andersen, sweetie. This revelation may just have signed the death warrant of the Pine Street Inn. Where do you draw the line? This "homeless shelter" dba taxpayer ripoff-and-taxshelter appears to be just another opportunity for concentrating the nation's spending power in unspendable "black holes" - which is the whole root and cause of our chronic recession.]
  [Followup - a Globe editorial did a big backtrack on this story the next day, "Sheltering the reserves," editorial, 6/11/2002 BG, A22, saying stuff like, they need big reserves, Massachusetts needs healthy non-profits, etc., never addressing the larger questions of how we provide self-support for everyone at easy hours-levels that match our mounting levels of work-saving technology. And what's the meaning of "non-profit" status anyway when there's no more cap on their executive pay than of that of for-profits firms? The biggest leak in national and global economies, and in prevailing economic theory, is still the unlimited concentration of spending power beyond all functionality - in short, economists' own much-ignored "marginal efficiency of capital."]
  [More followup - "Shelter salary questioned," letter to editor by Beverly Davies of Beverly MA {highly mnemonic!}, 6/12/2002 BG, A22, says "I suppose that a salary of $134,500 is well deserved by Lyndia Downie, president of the Pine Street Inn, and provides the necessary funds for her to pay the mortgage and feed her family three squares a day. But when she is "serving" {our quotes - ed.} a clientele who have not the luxury of mortgage payments or feeding themselves regularly, it seems that giving low priority to salary cuts for senior staff is unconscionable. {In other words, if you want bigbucks, do go work for Enron, Andersen & ilk as we suggested above - ed.}   I agree with the Globe's editorial in yesterday's morning paper {followup above} that spending down the cash reserve of the Pine Street Inn too far would be irresponsible. But it must be possible to reorder priorities in some way so that clients are not put more at risk than they already are.]

• Mental patients are shuffled between troubled institutions - In one case, a resident ended up in a homeless shelter, by Clifford Levy, NYT, A16.
  When [NY] state officials moved in March to close Seaport Manor in Brooklyn, long one of New York's most notoriously troubled adult homes for the mentally ill, they pledged to do all they could to protect the safety and well-being of its nearly 300 residents.
  [This is reminiscent of the stories of Bedlam in London in the 1700s. Perhaps we were making progress in this area for a few decades, but as in so many other areas in the last generation (the "me" generation?), this area has deteriorated.]
  But the home's discharge records and interviews with officials show that the state, in coordination with Seaport's management, has merely been relocating many of the profoundly ill residents to other adult homes that have their own histories of neglect....
  The officials seem at times to have accepted any alternative. Seaport's discharge records show that a 46-year-old resident was dropped off at a homeless shelter, and two others went to a place that the state has identified in the past as an unlicensed adult home....
  [Ya gotta wonder about the priorities of people like Bono, who go running off to exciting dramatic Africa for people to help, when they're all over America.]