If Government Stopped Creating Homeless People...
I spent last weekend in DC, and was thinking about how small the homeless population would be if government and government funded organizations would stop assisting people to become homeless. For example, all the laws that make it illegal to be poor only make it more likely that a person will become homeless. The heavily subsidized hospitals and medical industry send a lot of people into the shelters in our community. Health insurance companies depend on government to stay in business, but work to figure out ways not to cover people or send bills that can quickly bankrupt a person. The public mental health system and the alcohol treatment programs use the shelter system as a housing option for their clients. The alcohol system actually uses the shelters as a punishment for those who are unwilling or unable to stick with a program.
The disability programs keep people poor for the rest of their lives and do not provide even enough money to afford housing. In fact, the rules for remaining on the program do not even allow any additional income for an individual receiving a disability check. Any gift or income is actually taken immediately out of their check. They get a monthly living allowance that actually does not allow them to live anywhere in the United States, and any additional income is taken out of their check to make sure that they stay poor. If we could just take care of those on Social Security Disability and keep people out of the shelters, the homeless population would decrease dramatically.
The re-entry system is actually no re-entry at all. Incarceration leads to homelessness in many cases. The first thing cut in times of budget troubles are the social work staff. We punish more people with jail than any other industrialized country in the world, and then we do a horrible job reintegrating people into society. The government also needs to figure out what to do about sexually based offenders in our community. In the name of public safety, we have actually set up a system in which it is almost impossible to reintegrate for those having completed a sentence for a sexually based offense. Ironically, this is making our communities less safe since these men are sleeping, largely unsupervised, on the streets of every major city in America.
Our welfare system does not provide enough health care or child care that will allow a family to survive. There is still massive disparities in lending to minority populations by government regulated mortgage institutions. There is an ungodly wait for re-determination on their child support payments when they lose their job or become homeless.
If government were just willing to work to prevent homelessness, we could reduce the population by 80-90%. We appreciate the new prevention program, but until all branches of government and every government employee makes this a priority, we are never going to make any changes.
Brian Davis
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.
Showing posts with label government failures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government failures. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Monday, March 31, 2008
Worst HUD Secretary in History Steps Down
Good Riddance!!!
The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson is stepping down today. This is welcome news for America's homeless and those living in subsidized housing. He came in with such promise as a former Public Housing Director and then proceeded to dismantle public housing in the United States. Jackson just did not understand this job, and became the worst HUD secretary in the 40 some year history of the post. Here are some lowlights of his career:
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board
The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson is stepping down today. This is welcome news for America's homeless and those living in subsidized housing. He came in with such promise as a former Public Housing Director and then proceeded to dismantle public housing in the United States. Jackson just did not understand this job, and became the worst HUD secretary in the 40 some year history of the post. Here are some lowlights of his career:
- His biggest failure is New Orleans rebuilding. He eliminated public housing in New Orleans and has yet to build back any subsidized property. The one bright spot is that when people say we need smaller government and there is no reason to have a strong government we can point to New Orleans as the outcome of this policy. Government can rebuild a community like we did after the San Francisco earthquake unless we have neutered the government to the point that it is no longer able to function.
- He rewarded his friends and tried to punish those who disagreed. He bragged about withdrawing a contract from a contractor who had complained about Bush. He also held the Philadelphia Housing Authority hostage until they rewarded a piece of property to his friend.
- He attempted to starve public housing agencies to death.
- He left us with nearly $3 billion in underfunding in the Section 8 Project Based Housing program leaving hundreds of thousands of building owners scrambling to figure out how to pay their mortgages. This is a problem that the next administration will have to address.
- He was asleep at the wheel with regard to the foreclosure crisis. HUD owned property from foreclosed housing are mounting in most communities, and the HUD Secretary was baffled by the problem.
- Because of the foreclosure crisis and housing instability, tax credit projects in the United States are teetering. These projects make housing slightly more affordable to lower income people then the market. It is less attractive for investors to put money into these properties with the housing market in decline. Again, we heard the crickets chirping from the HUD building in DC when we asked about these problems in our local community.
- He pushed this silly and offensive "chronic" homeless initiative on the rest of the country while at the same time reducing affordable housing to families. Jackson pushed for cutting the homeless funding pie among more groups without increasing the size of the pie. In a time of increased homelessness this only lengthened the stay in shelters by those populations not in style anymore like families and non-disabled adults.
- He has refused to take a position on any pending bill in Congress as announced at the Cleveland City Club discussion from a couple of weeks ago.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Failures of Government 3
Your Government In Action--OHS II
It is so easy to pick on the Office of Homeless Services when you realize that government created the office in 1992-3 when there were 9,500 homeless people in Cleveland in order to have one group who could focus on the problem and reduce the number of people who find themselves homeless. Fourteen years later, there are 20,000 homeless people and no end in sight. It is no wonder that government gets a bad name with a track record like OHS. This group's primary purpose is to bring in government funds to the county, but they have a book club that meets every other month to talk about the problems over coffee. This group is improperly called the OHS Advisory Board since they advise no one, but it is always nice to talk about homelessness for two hours every eight weeks.
Anyway, they canceled the book club this week instead asking the homeless experts to crowd into a small room to listen to some "experts" from around the country talk about how to better serve families who become homeless as part of the Enterprise national conference. In our weekly effort to demonstrate how your government fails you, I give you the OHS family homeless forum. This invitation only meeting was an attempt to get some handle on this growing population that is overwhelming the shelters. NEOCH raised concerns about the growing problem of homeless families in a forum we held in March 2007. We had actual homeless families give a snapshot of the horrible (soon to be on our website under solutions/public policy) conditions women and children face when they become homeless in Cleveland. It is one of the fastest growing sub population in our community, and it is a near certainty that a Mom and Dad will have to break up in order to get into a shelter. For the OHS forum, we were all pushed into a little room at the Renaissance Hotel (my least favorite place in Cleveland) to hear how other communities are doing so much better than Cleveland. In the ultimate humiliation, we had to listen to the woman from the National Alliance to End Homelessness tell us that Columbus, Ohio is solving family homelessness, and Cleveland is way behind our neighbors to the south.
There was so much wrong with this three hour workshop that I could write a book, but I will just give you the top 10 failings of this conference workshop. I have to tell you that I am not a big fan of conferences. In this day of the internet, just put your powerpoint on the internet and let me go look at the information. In addition, what the hell do people from New York, Washington or Portland know about Cleveland or what will work locally? My feeling is that unless you can tell us how to decrease homelessness by half with a detailed funding plan and without causing others to take their place in the shelter line than you might as well be coming to talk about the proper color scheme for painting the living rooms of shelters. Your tax dollars and government resources in staff time went into this conference designed to give us ideas for how to reduce family homelessness. What went wrong with this forum:
1. The national groups have no credibility with regard to family homelessness. Enterprise-- national, National Alliance to End Homelessness, and the Center for Urban Community Services along with the research they base their work on are all part of the problem. They have pushed a funding mechanism serving long term single adult homeless people stealing resources from women with children who find themselves homeless.
2. All of these groups continue to use the offensive term "chronically" homeless, which makes it seem as though homelessness is some kind of medical condition.
3. The statistics used are bogus. How do you measure decreases in the shelter population when only a few cities in the United States have guaranteed access to shelter? All the other cities see decreases in shelter populations by closing shelters or limiting access.
4. They kept referring to "Housing First" successes, but all of us in the business know that housing first programs are directed at single adults. HUD is giving preferences to programs in funding housing first programs that serve single adults, and so why did the presenters keep mentioning a program that does not serve families?
5. These programs that the presenters talked about may be cool, but there is no money to fund them in one of the poorest cities in America. They do not understand how bad off we are locally, and they never tell us where we are supposed to get the money for these programs. We don't need anymore ideas; we need bundles of cash.
6. They always talk about these incredibly expensive programs to serve only 67 people. We have thousands of families who need help in Cleveland (probably 50,000 households). We need more Yugos or even Scooters, but they keep showing us Cadillac programs. How many times would you go back to the car dealership, if every time you asked to see an old Ford Festiva they would bring out a new Hummer?
7. It is fiction to think that the County Child Welfare, Hospitals, or Jails will give up their money to homeless or housing programs even if we can demonstrate that we will take a few homeless people out of their systems. There are so many thousands who use these public systems, none of them would even realize that a couple of families got into housing. As I have said many times, we need to build 5,000 units of affordable housing a year before any of these systems, including the shelters, would see any decrease in their clients.
8. Why do these national groups keep talking about getting homeless people to rely on "mainstream resources" instead of homeless programs? Everyone who knows anything realizes that the mainstream resources are too difficult to access or have incredible waiting lists. We know disability assistance, public housing, and subsidized housing all have three year waits, and cash assistance, child care help, and food stamps all have huge limitations that make them difficult to access. Many view the Ohio Lottery as a more likely social service program than most of the "mainstream" government resources.
9. The Portland/Seattle program that was highlighted is only 2 years old and only served 67 people. How does this help us? It was so new and served so few people it does not meet our needs. No one ever asks how do we balance the needs of keeping the thousands of homeless people alive with the intensive and expensive needs of some of the population?
10. The report that was just completed on preventing homelessness and preserving affordable housing in our community, Heading Home, was never even mentioned. This was a report in which OHS and other government entities helped write and contained a series of seven or eight recommended solutions for our community that was not even referenced or available at the forum. What a missed opportunity.
Those are three hours I will never get back. It just goes to prove that our current society measures success based on the ability to place your thoughts on a power point slide over actual accomplishments.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
It is so easy to pick on the Office of Homeless Services when you realize that government created the office in 1992-3 when there were 9,500 homeless people in Cleveland in order to have one group who could focus on the problem and reduce the number of people who find themselves homeless. Fourteen years later, there are 20,000 homeless people and no end in sight. It is no wonder that government gets a bad name with a track record like OHS. This group's primary purpose is to bring in government funds to the county, but they have a book club that meets every other month to talk about the problems over coffee. This group is improperly called the OHS Advisory Board since they advise no one, but it is always nice to talk about homelessness for two hours every eight weeks.
Anyway, they canceled the book club this week instead asking the homeless experts to crowd into a small room to listen to some "experts" from around the country talk about how to better serve families who become homeless as part of the Enterprise national conference. In our weekly effort to demonstrate how your government fails you, I give you the OHS family homeless forum. This invitation only meeting was an attempt to get some handle on this growing population that is overwhelming the shelters. NEOCH raised concerns about the growing problem of homeless families in a forum we held in March 2007. We had actual homeless families give a snapshot of the horrible (soon to be on our website under solutions/public policy) conditions women and children face when they become homeless in Cleveland. It is one of the fastest growing sub population in our community, and it is a near certainty that a Mom and Dad will have to break up in order to get into a shelter. For the OHS forum, we were all pushed into a little room at the Renaissance Hotel (my least favorite place in Cleveland) to hear how other communities are doing so much better than Cleveland. In the ultimate humiliation, we had to listen to the woman from the National Alliance to End Homelessness tell us that Columbus, Ohio is solving family homelessness, and Cleveland is way behind our neighbors to the south.
There was so much wrong with this three hour workshop that I could write a book, but I will just give you the top 10 failings of this conference workshop. I have to tell you that I am not a big fan of conferences. In this day of the internet, just put your powerpoint on the internet and let me go look at the information. In addition, what the hell do people from New York, Washington or Portland know about Cleveland or what will work locally? My feeling is that unless you can tell us how to decrease homelessness by half with a detailed funding plan and without causing others to take their place in the shelter line than you might as well be coming to talk about the proper color scheme for painting the living rooms of shelters. Your tax dollars and government resources in staff time went into this conference designed to give us ideas for how to reduce family homelessness. What went wrong with this forum:
1. The national groups have no credibility with regard to family homelessness. Enterprise-- national, National Alliance to End Homelessness, and the Center for Urban Community Services along with the research they base their work on are all part of the problem. They have pushed a funding mechanism serving long term single adult homeless people stealing resources from women with children who find themselves homeless.
2. All of these groups continue to use the offensive term "chronically" homeless, which makes it seem as though homelessness is some kind of medical condition.
3. The statistics used are bogus. How do you measure decreases in the shelter population when only a few cities in the United States have guaranteed access to shelter? All the other cities see decreases in shelter populations by closing shelters or limiting access.
4. They kept referring to "Housing First" successes, but all of us in the business know that housing first programs are directed at single adults. HUD is giving preferences to programs in funding housing first programs that serve single adults, and so why did the presenters keep mentioning a program that does not serve families?
5. These programs that the presenters talked about may be cool, but there is no money to fund them in one of the poorest cities in America. They do not understand how bad off we are locally, and they never tell us where we are supposed to get the money for these programs. We don't need anymore ideas; we need bundles of cash.
6. They always talk about these incredibly expensive programs to serve only 67 people. We have thousands of families who need help in Cleveland (probably 50,000 households). We need more Yugos or even Scooters, but they keep showing us Cadillac programs. How many times would you go back to the car dealership, if every time you asked to see an old Ford Festiva they would bring out a new Hummer?
7. It is fiction to think that the County Child Welfare, Hospitals, or Jails will give up their money to homeless or housing programs even if we can demonstrate that we will take a few homeless people out of their systems. There are so many thousands who use these public systems, none of them would even realize that a couple of families got into housing. As I have said many times, we need to build 5,000 units of affordable housing a year before any of these systems, including the shelters, would see any decrease in their clients.
8. Why do these national groups keep talking about getting homeless people to rely on "mainstream resources" instead of homeless programs? Everyone who knows anything realizes that the mainstream resources are too difficult to access or have incredible waiting lists. We know disability assistance, public housing, and subsidized housing all have three year waits, and cash assistance, child care help, and food stamps all have huge limitations that make them difficult to access. Many view the Ohio Lottery as a more likely social service program than most of the "mainstream" government resources.
9. The Portland/Seattle program that was highlighted is only 2 years old and only served 67 people. How does this help us? It was so new and served so few people it does not meet our needs. No one ever asks how do we balance the needs of keeping the thousands of homeless people alive with the intensive and expensive needs of some of the population?
10. The report that was just completed on preventing homelessness and preserving affordable housing in our community, Heading Home, was never even mentioned. This was a report in which OHS and other government entities helped write and contained a series of seven or eight recommended solutions for our community that was not even referenced or available at the forum. What a missed opportunity.
Those are three hours I will never get back. It just goes to prove that our current society measures success based on the ability to place your thoughts on a power point slide over actual accomplishments.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Failures of Government
Your Government in Action--OHS
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." --Abraham Lincoln
I am a big fan of government, and government employees are the most honorable profession in America. I think government is usually the best answer to problems. I have faith in our fire and police protection, in our road crews, and our teachers over a private contractor doing this work. Government overseen by concerned citizens does housing, job creation, and developing a social service safety network best. I have regular contact with government officials, employees, and politicians, and so I see the best and worst of people paid by tax dollars. I want to mention on a weekly basis in this blog when government fails us. These are your tax dollars, and you should be aware when your public employees drop the ball.
This is not to suggest that privatization is the solution. In fact, I wish all the shelters were under the direct control of government with all the shelter staff employed by some public entity. Services would be much improved and the employees would have all the rights and benefits associated with government service. They would be paid better and the standards for employment would be a lot higher. But in saying all that, there are people currently employed on your dime who do not serve the best interest of the public or make bad decisions with your tax dollars. I want to pass along those bad decisions or bad acts of government every week in a new feature we are calling: "Your Government in Action."
Installment #1: Office of Homeless Services
The new Ohio InterAgency Council on Homelessness with all the state departments (education, jobs and family services, development, etc.) and a few advocates not employed by government all together trying to get a handle on homelessness. After interviews with homeless people, it was discovered that families are suffering in this state, and do not do well in the shelters. We have written extensively on this and under solutions on our website there is an entire family homelessness report. Anyway, they put together a demonstration grant that will serve 120 families in danger of becoming homeless in 5 communities in Ohio. This is just a two-year project to see what will work, and then move forward with a broader program for Ohio. The program requires case management intervention before the family with children is forced into a shelter.
Cuyahoga County has 19,000 to 20,000 evictions a year which is by far the largest in Ohio. Many social service providers came forward interested in this program or interested in a new revenue source. The local County Office of Homeless Services instead of asking each provider to submit an outline for a plan for how to use these dollars, Ruth Gillett, Director of OHS, sat all these groups in the same room to work out a collaborative application with every other group supporting the results. It is hard to criticize one non-profit when sitting in the same room, and certainly it is not a venue for the development of innovative ideas. The one group that has contact with thousands of people facing eviction, the Cleveland Tenants Organization would be the natural key partner in this new project. As often is the case in this community, friendships trump best practices. So, in the end one provider with close ties to the Office won the right to go forward and compete for the 5 grants given in this state. CTO will have to refer families to this project if the state provides funds for Cuyahoga a demonstration grant, but will get no money. The case management organizational partner does not have a history in working with homeless Moms and is not part of the current homeless continuum of care. Both are good groups, but I am not sure we got the best ideas with the best possible outcomes. We hope that the state looks favorably on the Cuyahoga County grant, but the process for putting on paper our best and most innovative ideas was inept.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." --Abraham Lincoln
I am a big fan of government, and government employees are the most honorable profession in America. I think government is usually the best answer to problems. I have faith in our fire and police protection, in our road crews, and our teachers over a private contractor doing this work. Government overseen by concerned citizens does housing, job creation, and developing a social service safety network best. I have regular contact with government officials, employees, and politicians, and so I see the best and worst of people paid by tax dollars. I want to mention on a weekly basis in this blog when government fails us. These are your tax dollars, and you should be aware when your public employees drop the ball.
This is not to suggest that privatization is the solution. In fact, I wish all the shelters were under the direct control of government with all the shelter staff employed by some public entity. Services would be much improved and the employees would have all the rights and benefits associated with government service. They would be paid better and the standards for employment would be a lot higher. But in saying all that, there are people currently employed on your dime who do not serve the best interest of the public or make bad decisions with your tax dollars. I want to pass along those bad decisions or bad acts of government every week in a new feature we are calling: "Your Government in Action."
Installment #1: Office of Homeless Services
The new Ohio InterAgency Council on Homelessness with all the state departments (education, jobs and family services, development, etc.) and a few advocates not employed by government all together trying to get a handle on homelessness. After interviews with homeless people, it was discovered that families are suffering in this state, and do not do well in the shelters. We have written extensively on this and under solutions on our website there is an entire family homelessness report. Anyway, they put together a demonstration grant that will serve 120 families in danger of becoming homeless in 5 communities in Ohio. This is just a two-year project to see what will work, and then move forward with a broader program for Ohio. The program requires case management intervention before the family with children is forced into a shelter.
Cuyahoga County has 19,000 to 20,000 evictions a year which is by far the largest in Ohio. Many social service providers came forward interested in this program or interested in a new revenue source. The local County Office of Homeless Services instead of asking each provider to submit an outline for a plan for how to use these dollars, Ruth Gillett, Director of OHS, sat all these groups in the same room to work out a collaborative application with every other group supporting the results. It is hard to criticize one non-profit when sitting in the same room, and certainly it is not a venue for the development of innovative ideas. The one group that has contact with thousands of people facing eviction, the Cleveland Tenants Organization would be the natural key partner in this new project. As often is the case in this community, friendships trump best practices. So, in the end one provider with close ties to the Office won the right to go forward and compete for the 5 grants given in this state. CTO will have to refer families to this project if the state provides funds for Cuyahoga a demonstration grant, but will get no money. The case management organizational partner does not have a history in working with homeless Moms and is not part of the current homeless continuum of care. Both are good groups, but I am not sure we got the best ideas with the best possible outcomes. We hope that the state looks favorably on the Cuyahoga County grant, but the process for putting on paper our best and most innovative ideas was inept.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
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