Street roots
9
June 20, 2014 ~
BODEN, from page 8
people living without housing, I don’t see
how you can disregard the dramatic impact
and effect that these massive federal cuts 1
had on the living conditions of people in
local communities.
I.B.: How has the lack offederal funding
affected local communities in tackling the
issues of homelessness and housing?
P.B.: It has divided and conquered a hell
of a lot of them.
The 10-year plan to end homelessness
was going to end homelessness. The five-
year plans during the Clinton Administration
were going to end it before that.
The publicgets this messaging about
homelessness initiatives, but across the
country, 10-year plans are 12 years old. The
situation, for families especially, is worse.
You have this disinformation m order to
make local governments feel like we are
addressing the problem, or at the very least
giving the pretense that they are addressing
it. The public receives these messages
through the newspaper, on the radio, and .
on TV, so it must be true.
When these plans fail to achieve their
goals, the public begins to think that people
experiencing homelessness must be
dysfunctional. We have really reinforced that
it’s their alcoholism, or mental health, then-
laziness, their sloth, their viciousness,
they’re sexual'predators; They are other
than us; Which is where thè criminalization
of the homelessness comes into play.
The one thing we seem to have no
shortage of funding for is jail, police,, and
security. You create an ‘“Us vs. Them”
atmosphere and then the answer is to get
rid of them. To make homeless people
disappear.
The problem that they’re finding (and .
this was true in the Depression era with the
Anti-Okie laws and Sundown Towns) is that
if you’re not stopping<the floodgates of-
people that are ending up on the street,
your policing of them becomes never
ending.
I.B.: How do you think we can combat
that? What can local government, advocates,
and communities do?
P.B.: All of us that are participating in the
ten-year planning processes and in the local
homeless coordinating boards and in the
delivery of services from the funding that is
available, we should all stop and say, ‘You
know what? We don’t just need more
hollowed out homeless plàns. Wé need
federal funding for affordable housing’.
It took local communities doing
organizing that created what we now call
HUD in the first place. That wasn’t that
long ago, it was 1937. That’s within ohe
generation. It was created because
government was forced to respond to the
needs of local communities.
We need to elect local representatives '
that will fight with the government on our
behalf and then get them elected to the
federal level once they do it. We have a
Budget Authority: $17.6 billion (in 2004
constant dollars): 77 percent less than
1.978 budget authority. Contemporary mass
homelessness emerges nationwide;
• Emergency homeless shelters, funded by
the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, open across the country.
• Local governments and police begin
enforcing vagrancy laws and passing
ordinances that target people experiencing
homelessness.
• Congress passes the Stewart B.
McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of
1987, the first major federal legislation
devoted solely to addressing
homelessness.
poster from 1936 where the Mayor of New
York had images of homelessness that said,
‘Must we always have this?’ Now the Mayor
of New York is touting broken windows and
hiring guards to patrol subways to make
sure there are no fare evaders, but primarily
to make sure there are no homeless people
sleeping oh the subways.
Is the Mayor of New York honestly
pushing for. the restoration of this funding?
No. And back in 1936 mayors were pushing
to create state and federal programs to
support housing.
We can’t sit around and think that
Obama’s going to fix it; it’s not going to
come from the sky. It has to come from the
community that says these are rights that
we’re equally entitled to. Why would you not
want a government that says housing,
healthcare and education' are values that we
all are entitled? We have no problem with |
businesses making a profit, that’s a
significant priority within government If
there’s no profit for any corporation in the
equation with our public parks, schools,,
housing system, healthcare system, it’s not
a priority for our government. A perfect
example of this on issue of housing is the
Mortgage interest reduction action
programs up that spend more than $140
billion a year.
I.B.: Let’s talk about the housing mortgage
interest reduction program.
P.B.: It’s Where you borrow money to buy
a house, you pay interest on the money that
you borrowed, and then you’re able to write
a percentage of that interest off on your
taxes that you pay to state and local
government. It is a subsidy from the
government for the fact that you are ,
purchasing housing. Rentals have nothing
similar in place.
We’ve wiped out the subsidies for rental
properties'to poor people. What little is left
is screehe^oj^^Baqral grounds^ and w hether
the governm ent can afford it? On the
economic stimulus side of things, there’s no
cap. It comes down to collecting money
versus allocating money.
The bottom line is, if you owe me $50 and
I tell you to keep it, I just gave you $50.
From a simple math perspective, money not
collected is the same as money spent In a
political realm, money not collected is a
stimulus. The money’s going to mortgage
interest companies, to banks,'to realtors, to
construction companies. When the money’s
going to poor people, it’s charity, it’s '
welfare, and we have to limit i t
We do $34 billion in affordable housing
funding for prior people and we screen the
hell out of who’s eligible for it. We complain
about it all the time, and we set up systems
for oversight for review that would put the
IRS to shame. We do $144 billion in subsidy
for homeowners and we call it “Economic
Stimulus” and we put no cap on it
whatsoever. The government didn’t stop
investing in housing. It stopped investing in
housing that applied to poor people.
I.B.: Talk to us about the history of the
* Rural homelessness is a growing crisis
largely ignored.
1990s: USDA Section 515 program
creates only 2,853 rural affordable
housing units. The program created
30,175 units in 1976.
• HUD Low/Moderate-Income Housing
Budget Authority: $19.2 billion (in 2004
constant dollars); 75 percent less than
1978 budget. Funding for construction of "
new public housing units halted. More than
150,000 public housing units are lost over
the next 14 years.’
2000s:
♦ 2000: National Alliance to End
Homelessness launches 10-Year Plans to
criminalization of the poor in the United
States.
P.B.: In doing the research, we
discovered about a 40-year pattern of laws
tailored to local communities targeting the
same group, going back to the 1860s, and
with the alms houses in England, going back
even before t h a t .
In the 1860s, San Francisco created what
they called, “ugly laws,” and they swept the
country. Basically, the laws say that
maimed, diseased or mutilated panhandlers
needed to .be swept off the street.
Then you had the “Sundown Towns,” the
Japanese Exclusion
Act, you had Jim
We keep rel«iwnti»g the
Crow. There’s this
pattern of local
wheels of public
governments seeing
pla a a ia g processes a»d
this social and/or
economic issue
federal priorities,
they’re freaking out
thinking If we can jnst
about and saying, “I
can’t fix this, so I’m
h it this one m agic p ill,
going to get rid of jt,”
then
wsr II fix it w llh o n f
If local
communities can’t
lo o kin g at what werw
address the
created« I th in k itfs a
underlying causes for
classic example o l cause
a social program due
to the lack of
and effect and
resources or political
connectlag the dots, a n i
will they eventually
begin to use their
going back to, ÀWhen
legal authority to.
d id the housing crisis
create laws to try to
solve the problem.
starti what- happeiied-
It’s usually followed
rlg h t before If s ta rte li
by well-crafted public
relations campaigns
and le trs see 11 tha t
targeted at the media
w
a s irt the p rim a ry cause
to make the general
of i t / y ;
population scared of
homeless people.
What better way to
self newspapers than to dehumanize people?
You use fear to instill in people a desire to
make “it” go away. Everybody hates the.
boogeyman. You turn the squeegee guys in
New York into the boogeyman, no one’s
going to complain when they disappear, or
ask where they go, because they don’t care
where they went.
When we looked a t movie trailers from
the 1930s and 40s, it was exactly how they
were justifying Anti-Okie Laws. American
citizens traveling across the country in
search of something better were often times
portrayed as rapists or felons. The message
was, “We need to protect ourselves by
making these people from Oklahoma go
away or not letting them into California.”
If you look at the quality of life
enforcement programs — they say people
can’t sit, or stand still o r lie down. They say
in certain circumstances you can’t eat or
sleep. Well then, if I don’t have a home,
what the fuck can I do? Walk.
The irony is, while we call these offenses
“crimes,” every human being has to
engaged in these activities to simply
survive.
End Homelessness.
• 2003: USDA Section 515 program creates
783 rural affordable housing units.
• 2006:37 million people live In poverty In
the United States.
• 2007: Federal fax- expenditures on home
ownership: $102.8 billion; HUD Low/
Moderate-Income Housing Assistance
Budget Authority; $30.9 billion (in 2004
constant dollars).
• 2008: Recession sweeps across United
States and world; homelessness spikes
dramatically, especially among families,
and tent cities reemerge across the
country. I • - ; . I : ! |H 1 | 1 I j I 8 H 1
• 39.8 million people live In poverty in the
United States.
• The Housing and Economic Recovery Act
of 2008 establishes the National Housing
Trust Fund (NHTF). The goal of NHTF is to
build or preserve 1.5 million units of
affordable housing over 10 years.
• 2009: Roughly 3.4 million families
experience foreclosure — 60 percent of
foreclosures are caused by unemployment.
• 2013:48.5 million live in poverty in the
United States. As many as 3.5 million
people experience homelessness in the
United States.
Figures compiled by the Western Regional
•