Can we give Florida back to Spain?

A growing number of Sunshine State communities have cobbled together resources to pay self-proclaimed experts to make life more miserable for homeless families and adults. Take Robert Marbut, whose website introduces him: “Robert G. Marbut Jr., Ph.D. First as a volunteer, then later as a City Councilperson and agency CEO, Dr. Robert Marbut has worked on homeless issues for over three decades…In 2007, frustrated by the lack of real improvement, and as part of the concept development for the Haven for Hope Campus, Dr. Marbut …developed The Seven Guiding Principles of Transformation.” Welcome, Dr. Marbut.

He blithely dismissed 60% or more of the homeless population—families—in his recent assessment of Sarasota’s homeless problem. Sarasota’s Herald-Tribune reporter Jessie Van Berkel wrote, “Halfway into a daylong inventory of Sarasota's homeless system, he had already spotted gaps. For homeless families, there is almost no place to go.” And this expert recommended they build a “new emergency shelter (that) would house people who get locked up for crimes associated with the homeless, such as drinking in public or panhandling.” Oh “those” people. But families?

The resort community acclaimed for their wealth, “Sarasota has more Park Place neighborhoods,” has a gap for homeless families. At high risk of homelessness: thousands in poverty, not to mention those experiencing domestic violence, foreclosures, divorce, unemployment, health issues and natural disasters. And Sarasota has one family shelter, the beleaguered Family Promise organization, that can handle a whopping 4-5 families at a time.

Gaps? I’d say. I sure wish this seemed more urgent, but it appears to me that Dr. Marbut was hired to further Sarasota’s reputation as unfriendly to homeless persons. Even before Mr. Marbut came a-calling, Sarasota was dubbed “meanest city” for their anti-homelessness activities. But back to families...

Over 900 school kids have been identified as homeless, most with families, in this posh community.

Ben Kunkel, director of the United Way’s 211 (information) call center, begged for help in dealing with homeless families. “…our few family shelters (now only 1) are full and the calls are escalating at alarming rates. Yesterday, 3 families with nowhere to stay walked into our call center.  It is very difficult for us at the 211 Hotline because we have nothing to offer, and can only listen to their desperation…” He added, “Last month, we received 27 calls from families in Sarasota living in their cars, with no place to park for the night, and many more calls from couples, afraid to admit their children are with them for fear of their being taken away.”

Sure sounds like more than a gap.

It gets worse. In December, the Salvation Army shuttered their family shelter, 5 rooms (12’ x 14’ with a bathroom) because of mold. They told families to call the beleaguered 211 hotline. Helpful.

Inspired by Dr. Marbut, The Army is thinking of resurrecting their shelter, but would compromise with the “expert’s” tough love recommendation of 5-7 nights maximum. They’d offer up to 2 weeks, down from their 8-week max in pre-mold days. Generous. And totally ridiculous to think families experiencing homelessness can jump through massive hoops to attain housing in 14 days.

Perhaps most disturbing is the SA commandant’s utter ignorance about the daunting poverty challenges facing families.  Major Ethan Frizzell’s “solution” to families not having sufficient income to afford housing,  “‘Here, what we need to focus on … a new class of housing, which is livable wage housing,’ Frizzell said. ‘If one of our residents is working two jobs in the area, they should be able to find a place to live within that livable wage.’”

I’d think he was kidding, but I’ve learned that these esteemed organizations tend to sometimes slip into insanity, like the SA family shelter that charges homeless families $60 weekly for services, according to a family member (who used to be a SA officer), who also shared, “My mom is one of their poverty wage workers who, sadly, has to collect the fees.... and had to pay the fee herself when she became ill, lost her house, and had to pay to stay in the same shelter she works in.”

Not so fast. Did they mention anything about the, um, less-financially-endowed (LFE)? Or those trying to keep the LFEs alive?

Nope.

The Post’s shortcomings were called to task by blogger Kathryn Baer. She gets it, “The Post‘s approach also minimizes sequester damages because it takes no account of the impacts of cuts agencies made to avert — or partly avert — the impacts they’d predicted.”

Evidently the teachers serving disabled students don’t deserve a WP mention. Nor do the teachers’ aides or expendable school staff who will also get their hours slashed or be sent packing. LFE students or parents won’t complain much either.

Homelessness and subsidized housing didn’t rate either, although shelters are pummeled by the 1-2 punch: summer crowds (yes, homelessness tends to soar in the summer when domestic violence increases and families and individuals are booted to the street because it’s not freezing cold) and slashed funds.

My friend Lesly runs Hope Haven, a hectic and respected shelter in DeKalb, IL. She reports a $20,ooo sequester-related shortfall. That’s a big chunk of change for those operating hand-to-mouth on shoestring budgets.

Holy Family shelter in Willimantic, CT recently contacted me with an urgent plea for funds because they will not be able to make payroll.

And I'd be negligent to ignore the reality that my nonprofit, HEAR US Inc., is experiencing. Sales of our DVDs and books to help schools and communities understand homelessness as it affects families have withered. Sequester related? You betcha!

Families exiting homelessness with the hope of finding a place to live are typically helped by subsidized housing, aka Section 8 or rental vouchers. A quick scan of news stories related to sequester cuts and housing vouchers turns up a slew of dire headlines, like this Houston story where up to 10,000 families will feel the pain. Imagine the dismay of being told your housing assistance, the difference between homelessness and independence, is being yanked as you were on the way out the shelter door.

The Post’s blithe dismissal of minimal cuts to the plethora of federal agencies, “the ‘meat cleaver’ of sequestration often became a scalpel. It spared crucial programs but cut second-tier priorities such as maintenance, information technology, employee travel and scientific conferences,” misses the fact that someone depends on their paycheck for doing these jobs. For example, the cuts to conferences trickle down and smack the hotel maids, food servers, etc.

One force, albeit greatly diminished, in the poverty struggle is media. Hats off to AlterNet for their continued comprehensive coverage, including the comprehensive  Hard Times USA series!

This spring I jumped on the New York Times for their lack of coverage. Word trickled up to Margaret Sullivan, their public editor. I was surprised to hear from her, and delighted that she at least broached the issue of mainstream media’s dearth of poverty coverage, confirming that the NYT was guilty as charged. I wasn’t the only one harping and evidently the issue resonated much louder than expected.

One meager but worthwhile strategy in advocating for LFE populations is to engage media. Over the years I’ve developed invaluable relationships with decent humans who work for less-than-decent media conglomerates. I’m willing to apply this strategy to the recent WP’s pathetic sequester coverage.

So here's a little something we all can do: Let’s email the writers of the story and urge them to cover the LFE viewpoint as impacted by The Sequester.

Social media gives us the tools to organize movements to improve our world. Fostering awareness and understanding of how draconian economic policies affect the LFEs will not change the world overnight, but it will shine a light on the bigger story. Then you can enjoy a guilt-free cold one poolside on a hot summer day.

Flowers, candy, breakfast in bed, and beautiful kid-drawn cards. But if any of those mothers happens to be low income with a serious health issue, they might be celebrating their last Mother’s Day with their families.

“Stacy,” of my widely circulated March 11 Hard Times story, recently shared gruesome news with me. She’s been diagnosed with cervical cancer and needs surgery, an $8,000 procedure. Trouble is, New Mexico is one of those budget-conscious states that thinks they can balance their budget on the cervixes of mothers who scramble stalwartly to keep their kids alive and out of child protection custody.

Stacy and her mother-dependent young children are mired in that category despite her exemplary parenting skills. Single adults and parents with “too much” income are ineligible for medical care.

Motherhood and apple pie don’t hold any importance in NM, and too many other states, if the mothers are poor. The Nation’s Greg Kauffman observes, “With so many employed single mothers earning poverty wages, the lack of income support programs and health care in the US completes what is seemingly a perfect storm of financial insecurity.” When you look at full-time mothers like Stacy, who cares for her 7 children with aplomb but limited income, meager child support and minimal welfare, the storm intensifies.

My web research for leads or answers for Stacy got bogged down in Obamacare dysfunction. Maybe the Affordable Care Act will be fine and dandy, but finding info on what states offer for people in poverty is less than satisfying. “Health care, coming soon!” boasts the New Mexico government website. Yeah, soon, just what you want to hear when you have a medical crisis today.

State governments, rebelling over the fed’s intrusion into their statewide healthcare fiefdoms, are working hard to thwart the inevitable, a semblance of affordable health care availability to those who fall outside the Medicaid boundaries. Caught in this power struggle: millions of parents and adults whose lives evidently mean nothing.

Infuriating me further were the websites that lure the desperate seeker in by their promises. If you’re not overwhelmed by crisis and you have a modicum of ability to ferret out truth from sales pitches, you get spoon-fed pabulum that a sixth grader could have compiled with a tad more honesty. “The only problem is that healthcare insurance plans are not always the most affordable and are actually often overly priced and expensive. Because of this, you may not have insurance for you and your children but there are options. You can apply for Medicaid in the state of New Mexico which would ultimately help you to get health insurance for your children and yourself.” Bull feathers.

Do the math: $8,000 “retail” for the procedure by the doctor who’s not telling my friend about the possibility of getting Medicaid assistance. She’ll check with Planned Parenthood and the NM Human Service Department that boasts “Serving 1 in 3.” What does that mean? I’m not going to even guess. Worst case, Stacy gets no treatment and dies. I’m sorry, but that’s what happens when cancer runs rampant.

Then the state has 7 children to place in foster care. What cost to the state? What cost to her children?

The U.S. ranks so embarrassingly low when it comes to health care for women in poverty that our national knuckles drag. Kaufmann points out that “Prior to welfare reform in 1996, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, sixty-eight received cash assistance; but by 2010 that ratio dropped to just twenty families. States have discretion to determine eligibility and time limits, so there are virtually fifty different systems. In a majority of states, the benefit levels have fallen below 30 percent of the official poverty line—so less than $6,000 for a family of three.”

OK, upside. Let’s see. Well, Stacy has a support network of sorts, a mother and friends who will take care of her kids while she recovers from surgery, if she gets it. And they have a humble home. That’s better than homeless families who struggle to cope with a medical emergency that knocks the parent down for the count. Although some places are starting to put together a plan to keep the kids out of foster care, you can bet the “perfect storm” that Kaufmann refers to brews in the stormy seas of homeless and impoverished Motherly Love. 

So, can we quit being distracted wrangling over the homeless definition issue and start really doing something about it?

Embarrassing truth be told, how to define homelessness has been a time-consuming hassle for years. Those of us who’ve worked with homeless families and youth, more so those who are in that deplorable situation, would point to the stark reality: millions of families, youth and adults, don’t qualify as “literally homeless,” HUD’s extremely narrow definition including those on the streets or HUD funded shelters, thereby excluding them from what little help is available. Foreclosure crisis, poverty’s rise, economic meltdown and decades of government cutbacks be damned….

More people who have lost housing (isn’t that at the crux of homelessness?) are doubled-up (or worse) with others, staying in motels, campgrounds, vehicles, storage units, or otherwise in unsheltered conditions. The U.S. Department of Education uses the more realistic definition. Schools have identified a record number of 1,031,069 homeless students. That’s probably about half, but it’s at least a good, hard number, albeit excluding include younger or older siblings and parents.

One longtime opponent of expanding the definition is Dennis Culhane, professor at University of Pennsylvania.

The latest edition of a respected journal, CQ Researcher (www.cqresearcher.com), comprehensively explored the issue of homeless students. In it, Professor Culhane made his position known on the homeless definition issue, as did my friend, colleague and public policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, Barbara Duffield.

Culhane points out, “…Eligibility does not automatically entitle the homeless to housing, income or services, so expanding the definition without expanding the resources would effectively leave many more people with little or nothing.”

To which I respond, “Well, duh.”

Seriously, expanding the pathetic $2 billion to something in the neighborhood of $20 billion to address homelessness is critical. The cost of not doing so, in long-term and short-term harm done to children and youth is incalculable. For those interested in the issue of homeless children, youth and families, the Institute of Children, Poverty and Homelessness just released their comprehensive American Almanac of Family Homelessness.

How do we make a case with our dysfunctional Congress about the need for additional resources if we keep the number artificially (and I’d add immorally) deflated at HUD’s delirious 635,000 or so?

I just can’t picture House Speaker Boehner and Senate President Reid deciding to compassionately expand funding.

The definition issue has been going ever since the 1987 enactment of the McKinney Act, the federal approach to homelessness. Since then, government slash-and-burn tactics have pushed millions of babies, toddlers, children, teens, young adults and parents and single men and women to the streets, with HUD concentrating, with mixed results, on the most visible minority, “chronically” homeless adults.

Their seeming refusal to help vulnerable kids and families escape the danger and discomfort of homelessness baffles me. Marcia Clemmitt, author of one of the CQ stories, explores why the HUD numbers and DOE numbers are so vastly different. Culhane, she writes, believes HUD’s declining homeless census is attributed to trained observers and a slight bump of Obama stimulus spending.

Culhane dismisses the education numbers garnered by school district homeless liaisons documenting homeless students and families self-reporting. I’d point out that they’re looking at the whites of the eyes. And if more overworked liaisons did their jobs better,  the school numbers would likely be doubled. Real people. Documented.

And, for the record, as I travel under my HEAR US banner and talk with local do-gooders—the shelter staff whose HUD-funded shelters struggle with the human tsunami—I constantly hear how the vaunted Point-In-Time count is little more than a shot in the dark required to satisfy HUD’s requirements. Trying to make it sound like anything more is disingenuous.

Can we quit the war of numbers? Can we as a nation admit we have a problem? Can we count the millions of our sisters and brothers who languish without a place to call home instead of quibbling dispassionately about who’s “literally” homeless?

We’ve made incremental progress, certainly not enough if you’re standing at the outside looking in. I’d suggest a week without a home for the ivory tower denizens. A reality check. Those not “literally homeless” could teach a thing or two. If that doesn’t work, I’ll point you to Maggy, my hair stylist.