Saving Money with a Home

Homelessness, Solutions to Homelessness

It actually saves the city money when they work together with the homeless to find a place to live. This is a really interesting fact that I learned while researching a variety of articles on homelessness. There have been a number of studies that have shown this fact, from ones in Florida, Colorado, and etc., but this one comes from Charlotte, North Carolina, where researchers at the University of North Carolina Charlotte studied a new apartment complex that was for homeless people.

This complex opened in 2012 starting with 85 units. The rules for the place are that each resident has to pay thirty percent of their income towards rent. The income ranges from any money from a job to benefits from the government. The rest of the costs are covered by a combination of local and federal government grants and private donors. In the first year, taxpayers save about $1.8 million because of two areas that had less a burden of homeless people which were health care and incarceration. With this housing complex being open, the residents visited the emergency room 447 fewer times than in past years. Also they were arrested 78 percent less during that first year as well. Because of the large amount of success that the housing complex was having, the Charlotte City Council approved about $1 million to have the Moore Place expand to 120 units.

For more information and links to the other city’s studies, click this link

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/24/3418140/charlotte-homeless-study/

Systemic Causes of Homelessness

Homelessness, ,

Vincent Lyon-Callos Inequality, Poverty, And Neoliberal Governance Ethnographic analysis emphasizes that there are systemic causes to homelessness. Shelters are resources for the homeless, but their strategies for providing assistance doesn’t address these systemic causes. The staff at shelters often have programs that ‘normalize’ homelessness and provide medicalized treatment plans as if homelessness individuals simply need to be cured. If an individual doesn’t conform to the shelter’s rules or challenges them or their programs in any way, become labeled as deviant and essentially get left behind. Shelter staff have little room to work with to make any changes and this lack of power within the system causes many problems and shortcomings with assistance.

This system is toxic and unproductive. They do not help the people and often blame the individual when that is not the case. Vincent Lyon-Callos arguments about systemic change mirrored much of the same notions from another book, Daniel Kerr’s Derelict Paradise. Daniel Kerr provides an in-depth history of the city of Cleveland’s homeless probelms and how it developed due to the influence of structural causes. Shelters are  a huge part of the causes Kerr mentions as the assistance to the homeless is institutionalized, which we see in Vincent Callo’s ethnography. The formula that the shelters today have been shaped to adhere to focus on the individual rather than the structure.

To see Daniel Kerr’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Derelict-Paradise-Homelessness-Development-Cleveland/dp/1558498494

For Vincent Lyon-Callo’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Poverty-Neoliberal-Governance-Ethnographies/dp/1442600861

Solving Homelessness or the Homeless Blemish?

Homelessness, How we should treat each other, News link, Reflections on our Reading, Solutions to Homelessness

There is a “dash movement taking place in Santa Cruz, California. According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel article, “’Dash’ deployed for solving Santa Cruz Country Homelessness”,  the multi-agency cooperative 180/180 Initiative has a goal of offering “180 people a 180 degree life change” by a deadline of July 1st. A secondary goal was also created to place 25 of the city’s most visible homeless people, along with a group of 12 from Watsonville, on a course towards permanent supportive housing within 100 days by May 7th.  The 100-day dash plan is a specialized tool that gives partnering agencies and officials who wouldn’t usually get involved a finite timeline and achievable goal.

 

Although this project sounds promising, with 8 people currently being helped and two already housed in Watsonville, there seems to be the same lingering goal to get the chronically homeless away from the downtown commercial areas where they reside. Homeless Services Center Executive Director Monica Martinez is even quoted in the article saying “Everybody has their reason why (they want to get the homeless off the streets), but we all agree we want it to happen.” This reminds me of Wasserman and Clair’s book  At Home on the Street: People, Poverty, and a Hidden Culture of Homelessness, and how their participants discussed how the programs shouldn’t be pushed upon them and that they should be choices. My interpretation of this article seems as if this plan isn’t entirely for the homeless’ best interest, but to remove them from living in commercial areas where their presence isn’t wanted, which was an issue also raised in the book. These chronically homeless people they are “helping” are not being seen as people, but as a blemish on the downtowns of Santa Cruz and Watsonville. As much as this would like help out the homeless community, I fear that it is not enough to solve the chronic problem.

“Keep your coins, I want change”

About being poor, Homelessness, Reflections on our Reading, Solutions to Homelessness

“Keep your coins, I want change”. This is something that truly stuck out to me during one of the presentations last week. This statement speaks great volumes about the needs of the homeless. Coins do not do anything, but change does. Between this and our conversations in class, I was able to recognize the resources that would benefit the homeless. Through various organizations, help centers are offered to teach life skills to those who are homeless. There resources are aiming to provided life lessons, skills, and goals to make a lasting impact.  It related to the metaphor: “If you give a man a fish you feed him once, but if you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a life time”. This is the kind of action that needs to be taken.

Having resources such as resume building, job skill training, and educational classes we are offering needy people the chance to have a life that they are in need of. I feel this needs to go beyond local non profit organizations and have a bigger impact within the government. A great population of our country is homeless, and sometimes it seems like many options are not put into full force to make a lasting impact. We have learned a lot about how one person can make a difference with their voice, but actions are louder than words. I hope to find out more information, especially from my internship, and see exactly what they are doing within these resources and seeing the lasting impact that they have on people finding jobs and getting off of the streets.

Lyon-Callo✅ individualizing

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After going over the readings in Vincent Lyon-Callos: Inequality, Poverty, And Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry, we get an outline of the larger problem (hunger and homelessness) by attacking the micro incidents as mentioned in class. All the sub categories make up what we may think are the reasons why hunger and homelessness is not decreasing and instead increasing. One of the main points my group focused on was medicalizing homelessness. It is the theory or the usage of diagnosing, detecting and treating disorders. Most of the common disorders found for those who have become homeless in depression, sexual assault, loss of family member(s), and many others. It is the idea that there is something wrong with the individual not the society as a whole. It is the production of self-blame and self-governing that will allow one to get self-help treatments. For example if a homeless individual has a drug problem they can choose to go through a 12 step program, if another individual was sexually assaulted they go to counseling, things of this sort. By allowing volunteers and staff members of shelters to continue this belief and practice it promotes the repetition and assumptions that homeless people have something wrong with them, the notion that they have become homeless for one of those main reasons that are typically related or assumed of homeless in general.

The material and the first few chapters of the book are truly intriguing. The question that was asked by the professor startled me. Is this what is really occurring or does the author just want us to believe this. I think many of the stuff mentioned is true, at least from my personal experiences helping out in the shelters but I don’t think it is always the case.

Modern day vagabond

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This week on a popular website there was a person who was around our age who shared his experience of hitch hiking the around the US with no money, phone, or ID. He slept outside and ate for free.

This struck me so much because he shares the views that so many of the “hobos” did in the 1890 to 1920s, the idea of just traveling around the United States and making it an adventure. He really did look at it as an adventure, he in essence didn’t do it because he had to, but because he wanted to. It’s just a striking resemblance to the vagabonds and the way they acted, care free, just enjoying traveling around with no job. He really was a modern-day. When he was asked what made him decide to do it his response was “I was 20, I wanted to radically change the direction of my life, and what better way to do so? I learned about things I could never have imagined existed and I’ll tell you it was one HELL of an education.”

You would think that this whole vagabond mentality wouldn’t come up again, that people would be happy with how they live now and you just wouldn’t expect someone to willing go through something like this in our modern age where the idea of being without a home and job is looked so down upon.

Here is a link to the full reddit discussion.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/20wx5g/i_spent_almost_2_years_hitchhiking_throughout_the/

And here is a tabled view of all the questions he responded to and his answers to them.

http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/20xrb2/

Problematic Discourse

About being poor, How we should treat each other, Local organizations, Organizations, People, Poverty, Reflections on our Reading

On Saturday I worked at my internship organization’s weekly food bank and observed discourse about poverty.

At my organization, there are “food box runners” who carry out the boxes to the clients’ cars or wherever they wish. These runners are usually male volunteers who can lift a decent amount. I recognized the some of the same people doing it as last week, but there were new volunteers doing this job. One of the senior volunteers (or one of the pastors, I’m not exactly sure) within the organization was explaining what these runners needed to do. I overheard parts of the explanation, and there were one huge red flag. The volunteer, Bob*, said what I expected him to say, smile and be respectful,  but then I heard him say “These people come here with low self-esteem and depression. They don’t want to be taking these boxes but they have to.” Bob already had preconceived notions about these people, and it made me think about the discourses of Lyon-Callo’s book Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance and other discourses that we’ve been discussing in class. My organization proclaims to be giving people a sense of dignity, but this struck me as problematic because you don’t give dignity to people by assuming that they have low self-esteem and depression; it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I think it skews the way you view the clients. Those runners likely behaved differently toward the clients than if they hadn’t been told that. If I had been in Bob’s position, I would have just told the runners to be respectful and kind like I would tell any other person working at my organization. I wouldn’t add the problematic discourse additionally.

“City Demands Church Stop Sheltering the Homeless”

Homelessness, News link

The article,“City Demands Church Stop Sheltering the Homeless” addresses a nationwide trend of cracking down on both those trying to help the homeless and those who are homeless.  One worker from a church that served the homeless comments how the homeless people have feelings and basic needs just like all people. This relates to the common theme of treating homeless people with dignity and respect.

Politics must be involved that prompted the conclusion that the church has inadequate zoning permits. People in power have access to resources and the ability to enact laws and pass legislation. In my home town members generally agreed that there was a need for another homeless shelter, yet the disagreement resided in where. Nobody wanted the homeless shelter by them.  Perhaps a large reason why is because of the negative untrue stigmas attached with being homeless.  I wonder if people knew more about homelessness if their perception would change. Maybe some of the people living around the church were upset and did not want the church to act as a warming shelter for homeless people and voiced their concerns to public officials.

Not allowing the church to help homeless people also prevents non homeless people from interacting with homeless people. While interacting with homeless people the housed population will be able to witness the humanity in homeless individuals which can help combat with negative stigmas. The relationships and interactions that develop might be shared with community members and facilitate in developing a more accurate perception of homeless individuals which will be beneficial in challenging existing structural inequalities.

 

The Real Causes of Homelessness

About being poor, Causes of Homelessness, Government programs, Homelessness, People, Portraits of Homeless, Poverty, Solutions to Homelessness

I found this story written by Mollie Lowery that hit on many of the points we have been making in class about what truly causes homelessness. Lowery writes the story of a chronically homeless woman named Lourdes. This story is powerful in pointing out the many different flaws of our current system and the ways in which we treat the homeless. I see a lot of the arguments Vincent Lyon-Callo makes in his book  Inequality, Poverty, And Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry (purchase on Amazon) within Lourdes’ story. One of these arguments is that our society medicalizes homelessness. The best way I can describe this is by pulling a quote from Lowery’s story of getting Lourdes back into housing: “I began each day with reassurances that if Lourdes got in the car with me, I wouldn’t take her to a mental hospital. Such fear and distrust do not emanate from some genetic pathology. It comes from years of being marginalized, excluded, exposed and traumatized.” Both Lyon-Callo and Lowery emphasize the very important fact that the systems that we have in place to “help” homeless people place the blame on personal attributes, rather than acknowledging that the problem comes from these systems that create inequalities.  Though we have many systems in place to try to help the ever-growing number of homeless, Lowery stresses that “a far more humane, effective — and cheaper — strategy would be to prevent people like Lourdes from winding up homeless in the first place.” Rather than putting a band-aid on the problem, we need to focus on preventing the problem from ever happening. And this involves seeing the true cause of homelessness instead of focusing on “individual pathologies and solutions.”

Sheltering Industry

Government programs

Reading Vincent Lyon-Callo’s book “Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance,” the talk about staff definitely reminded me of the shelter I am interning at.  It speaks about the staff being professionally trained to fix the people who come in, and that is exactly how it is at my shelter.  There is a very particular training for a specific type of person, and it does not apply to all of the residents at the shelter at all.  All of the residents, however, are grouped into this category that makes them all seem as though they came from the exact same situation.  The shelter I am interning at is a domestic violence shelter, and so there are some similarities between the women, but there is not a cookie cutter story behind them all.  Every resident comes with their own very different story, and it is up to the staff to decide how to deal with that situation.  For the most part, the staff treat them all the same regardless of what has happened to them or what the resident has come from.

http://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Poverty-Neoliberal-Governance-Ethnographies/dp/1442600861