Category Archives: Government programs

What Not To Buy: Dictating the Choices of Low Income Families

About being poor, Food stamps (SNAP), Government programs, Harrassment, Hunger, People, Poverty, Solutions to Hunger, Solutions to Poverty, Working poor

As the debate over Food Stamps receives media attention, once again conservatives, the gullible, and the ignorant do not understand what Food Stamps themselves provide. Whenever this government program is brought up, like welfare, conservative media enjoys reporting on instances of misuse and abuse of the system–except unlike welfare, people cannot purchase anything but FOOD with Food Stamps. Fox News analysts in particular report on instances of people using Food Stamps to buy movie tickets, toys, electronics, cigarettes, even tickets to Disneyland, and the simple truth is that none of these statements are true. Jon Stewart essentially equates this kind of “rumor reporting” to be no better than believing chain emails threatening bad luck if one doesn’t  continue the chain.Food Stamps can only provide those who receive them with food. However, as everyone knows, people need more than food to survive day to day, and from many comments I’ve read on tumblr regarding this debate, it often takes scrambling in order to make up money to pay for the inedible necessities. Thus, the prospect of cutting Food Stamps even further only hurts those who need this program in order to survive because it ruins an already strict budget.

The controversy about Food Stamps continues because some conservatives believe that the government should regulate what people should be purchasing. As Jon Stewart jokes, in his segment What Not To Buy: What Would Jesus Soil, poor people shouldn’t purchase junk food because that’s bad for their health, but they’re also looked down upon if they purchase higher quality luxury foods (they’re abusing the system, they don’t really aren’t poor if they can afford those foods). Thus, low income families are being ripped apart by the media with classism, thus perpetuating stereotypes and classist discourse about poverty.

Taking Action

About being poor, Government programs, News link, Solutions to Homelessness

As we transition into the part of the semester in which the underlying theme is about what  the government is doing about the homeless population, I found an article which shows how taking one step can make a huge impact. On March 8th, The Los Angeles Times published an article about having a safe space for homeless people. In Sonoma County, supervisors lifted the ban of people sleeping in their cars. They realized that for some people, living in their cars is their only option. They made a Safe Parking Program that allowed homeless people the opportunity to park their car in a designated lot and could keep their cars there overnight.

This program provides a safe space for homeless people. One man described it as “heavenly” and was grateful for this safe space. While reading, I was asking myself why is this just happening now? This is a great program that should have been brought about sooner. One woman states “A man walked up to me and his entire face and beard was covered in frost”. This just shows how action needed to be taken. It is said that four men died from freezing to death, which is another situation that should not have happened. By lifting this ban and allowing this safe space program, homeless people not only feel safe, they also being taken out of bad weather conditions that they would have to face if they were sleeping outdoors.

After reading this article, I am confident in some of the steps our government is taking towards helping homeless people. If more ideas and solutions like this were put into action, homeless people would be given a better outcome.

Safe Space Program provided these people with a place to park their car and sleep overnight

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-santa-rosa-homeless-parking-20140309,0,3081428.story#ixzz2vbYjWG6y

 

Raising the Minimum Wage

About being poor, Causes of Homelessness, Causes of Hunger, Causes of Poverty, Government programs, News link, Poverty, Solutions to Poverty

Image Detail

I saw this image on an Upworthy article, which can be found here. This map shows how many hours a minimum wage worker in each state would have to work per week simply to afford a 2 bedroom apartment, without paying more than 30% of their income. Not a single state’s minimum wage is high enough to adequately cover the costs of housing without working at least 65 hours a week. This means that housed minimum wage workers are either having to sacrifice other necessities for life such as food, child care, transportation, etc., or they are having to work two or more low wage jobs. Most likely, many low wage workers are doing both of these things just to survive.

We have seen several examples throughout this course (and on this blog) that show that a huge cause of homelessness is the imbalance of housing costs and wages in America. It seems so obvious that the current state this nation is in is not sustaining so many of its members. Raising the minimum wage is one way we can start addressing this issue. Gov. Peter Shumlin (Vermont) and Gov. Dan Malloy (Connecticut) wrote a piece on CNN’s Opinion section called “No brainer: Three reasons why a $10.10 minimum wage is good for America.” Their third reason was that “it’s the right thing to do. No American working 40 hours or more a week deserves to live in poverty.” The governors go on to debunk the bogus arguments many make against raising the national minimum wage: “Republican governors across the country have also stood in the way of progress. Some have pandered to stereotype, suggesting that a raise in the minimum wage should be rejected because it would only help young workers rather than acknowledging that 88% of workers who would be affected by moving the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour are over the age of 20, and more are over the age of 55 than are teenagers.”

There is no logical reason that the minimum wage shouldn’t be raised. It is clear that this would be a good start to counteracting the cost of housing and to abolishing homelessness.

Florida Town That Banned Blankets For The Homeless Reverses Course

Government programs, Homelessness, Uncategorized

The ThinkProgress article can be found here. In 2013, Pensacola, Florida issued a law that “made it illegal to sleep ‘out-of-doors…adjacent to or inside a tent or sleeping bag, or atop and/or covered by materials such as a bedroll, cardboard, newspapers, or inside some form of temporary shelter.'” The city council pushed for this law in order to boost the aesthetic quality of the city–a.k.a, Pensacola was experiencing the same discomforting feeling that Santa Monica is recently experiencing. Essentially, the city council, through this law essentially wanted to force homeless individuals to leave their town given the harsh stereotype that homeless people are “an eyesore” upon a city.  The city’s mayor defined homelessness insensitively “as ‘camping,’ a benign term that minimizes the plight of people lacking reliable access to food and shelter”–because camping, connotatively can be at least described as one’s personal choice (rather than a societal issue). As the article describes, after intense backlash recently, given the coldness of this winter in even Florida this time of year, the mayor and the city council are working to repeal this law and are taking steps toward looking at the homelessness problem in their city. Sadly, it took a backlash of public outrage in order to instigate a degree of human decency, and given that the mayor needed to “reflect and pray” on the proposal to change the law in order to cease “banning blankets.”

Pensacola, Florida and Santa Monica, California, however, are only two of several cities and their councils that are looking to criminalize homelessness and looking desperately to find ways to ignore the societal problem and instead push it elsewhere to another city or back onto the shoulders of charity organizations. What disturbs me about this article is these people were elected to serve the people, which includes the homeless. These individuals have the power to actually induce effective change in their cities and yet they choose to be selfish.

 

County to County

Government programs, Homelessness, Portraits of Homeless

This weeks data exercise put faces to the countless numbers of people who are homeless. While researching Riverside County I found that there was 31% decrease in homelessness between 2011 and 2013. In 2011 the homeless population was 4,321 people and in 2013 the homeless population was 2,979. Of that 2,979, 1,888 people were unsheltered and 1,090 were sheltered. Within Riverside County, the city of Riverside had the most homeless people at 571.

These may just seem like numbers but each one represents a specific individual. Seeing these numbers and the methods they used to come up with these statistics really put things into perspective.  I was surprised by the numbers in Riverside County because I thought that the numbers were a  lower compared to other counties. During my research I found that San Bernardino is the poorest county in California. The fact that Riverside County and San Bernardino County are so close to each other really shows the effect that bordering cities have towards one another.

For example, Pasadena, California tends to be an extremely upscale city. With that being said, homeless people often are not present. But less than 15 minutes away in Downtown Los Angeles is the greatest population of homeless people living on skid row. Our society stereotypes people to where we think they should reside. People believe that if someone is homeless then they should be with the rest of the homeless population. This is something that needs to be changed and by doing research and making people aware of the homeless populations within their own counties gives them the opportunity to step in a try to make a difference.

http://dpss.co.riverside.ca.us/files/pdf/riverside-county2013homelesscountandsubpopulationsurvey-6.3.pdf

126,000 Millionaires & 58,000 Homeless

About being poor, Anti-Poverty Programs, Solutions to Homelessness

In this Huffington Post blog post by Joel John Roberts, an interesting solution to homelessness in L.A. is presented. Roberts reports that there are 126,000 millionaires in the Los Angeles area, living it up in their mansions and driving their Lamborghinis past the 58,000 people living on the street. What if the millionaires of L.A. took care of the homeless? Roberts suggests a “Two-for-One” program, where two millionaires can “pay for a person’s mental health care. Pay for the cost of rehab. Provide the means to get a job. Cover the tab of an apartment security deposit. And pay $1,000 per month for a tiny apartment.” Though this suggestion is not a completely serious one, it proves a point. It shows how ridiculously huge the gap is between the rich and the poor and it shows how easy it could be to solve the issue of homelessness in L.A. and other stratified cities in the U.S., if the people at the top only cared enough to do so. As Roberts states, “We [Los Angeles] are the epitome of the first world clashing with the third.” I believe that this solution could work, if only there weren’t so many stigmas against the homeless. If we could open people’s eyes and show them the reality of the homeless issue, they would understand that it can happen to anyone and that the people who live on the streets are not “lazy” or “just looking for a handout,” and they would be eager to help.

What do you think about this solution to homelessness? Would it ever happen? If it did happen, would it really work?

What are some other creative solutions to homelessness that you think would solve the problem?

Priorities in the Wrong Places

Books and Films, Government programs, Homelessness

This week in class, we got the opportunity to see a very informative documentary called “Taylor’s Campaign”. This followed around a man by the name of Ron Taylor while he was in the process of running for council on a platform of improving the lives of homelessness. He himself was once homeless for a period a little longer than ten months and decided to take a stand and make an effort to help improve the lives of the other homeless in the city of Santa Monica, California.
Not only does this movie just follow Taylor around while he campaigns, but gives an inside story of the struggles of homelessness in the city of Santa Monica with. The city has more than enough power to improve the lives of the homeless, but they choose to focus their time on trying to cut services for them while trying to hide them away from tourists, to not scare them away and ultimately increase revenue. There are many instances that the movie shows that the city could be doing more. A housing structure had to be built, but the problem was that there were only three-to-five beds for women while there were at least forty-to-fifty for the men. The services put in place to serve and protect the people are putting unnecessary time into harassing the homeless around the city. The police cite misdemeanors for shopping carts and kick others out of spots they found for the night to sleep in. It was also interesting to see how much time the police use to pointlessly hassle the homeless. In Lee Stringer’s book, Grand Central Winter, the cops use arresting the homeless for their own personal gain. One example of this is when the main character and his friend are woke up to an officer who was “calculating the overtime it will be worth to arrest the two of [them].” (44 Stringer) And these are people who are not trying to cause trouble to begin with. They are down on their luck and are doing anything they can to survive. A few of the homeless have a system to collect cans and bottles for money, and at the same time they are “doing a service for the city” by recycling, but the city would just rather bother and hassle them in hopes that they leave and go back to the shadows away from the residents and the tourists.

“Housing first. Community next.”

Anti-Poverty Programs, Government programs, Homelessness, News link, Organizations, Solutions to Homelessness

This blog post from the Huffington Post provides an interesting insight on a possible solution to homelessness. What Joel John Roberts argues is that the key aspect of solving homelessness is a sense of community. Only three weeks into this course, we have already seen several examples of the importance of a simple human connection. A perfect quote regarding this comes from the film “Taylor’s Campaign” (1997): “we are not just looking for a handout, but are looking for just a hand.”  Though charity and “handouts” help, people do not want to be seen as a project; something to be fixed and then forgotten about. The homeless want to be a part of the community, just like everyone else. The only way to really help these people is to extend our kindness and humanness to them. The program described in the article has made a lot of progress in housing homeless people, yet the author/agency director even acknowledges that it needs to be taken a step further in order to maintain this progress. As Roberts states, “A weekly visit from a case worker, or an open case management office in the building, does not create an intimate, supportive community for a person who has been isolated on the streets for years.” He stresses the importance of a supportive and warm community that can ease homeless back into housed living. People too often forget how easy it is to make a person feel like a human being. Solutions to homelessness need to take a step further and include humanity and caring.