Ending Homelessness: for real

Current community efforts to help homeless people should continue. When we have a flood, we have to get people to high ground, get them fed and keep them warm.

People will always have problems, and people will always have some problems they need the help of other people to solve. There is not one human problem that isn’t easier to solve when you are in safe, clean, secure housing. There is not one human problem that isn’t harder to solve when you’re homeless.

My husband has a doctorate in math, and I checked this with him to make sure I'm right: If you have 100 people and 80 houses, at one person per house you will have 20 homeless people. If you move all 20 of those people into houses, you will displace 20 currently housed people, and still have 20 homeless people. If you improve the health, income, and education level of all the people currently homeless, you will have 20 healthy, wealthy, and well-educated homeless people.

I also checked this math with him: If you start with 20 homeless people, build 20 new houses and tear down 30, you will have 30 homeless people. The only thing Wes found wrong with that is that in real life, we are not losing housing at one-and-a-half times the rate we are creating it, we are losing housing at four times the rate we are creating it.

Building more affordable housing would be a step in the right direction. What we really need to do is rebuild the middle class. And just as labor and unemployed were allies in the campaign to create unemployment insurance, you -- what is left of the middle class and the people who are very poor and who are homeless -- need to be allies in building a society that will not have a big black hole in the middle.

• We need to decrease the wealth divide. "Redistribution of wealth" is a dirty term to many people, so stop it: stop redistributing wealth from the majority at the bottom to the minority at the top.
  
  Much of the accumulation of wealth depends on unpaid labor, like that of volunteers and mothers and even homeless people. A living wage is the minimum fair return for labor. A labor force with strong bargaining power was one of the forces that built America's middle class. A strong middle class is the backbone of the country and the mainstay against homelessness.
  


• We need to change the housing market.
  
  
  
  • Make it profitable to create affordable housing. Some methods could be: tax incentives, subsidies, federal housing money.
  
  
  • Make it unprofitable to destroy affordable housing. Some possible methods: tax penalties; a legislative cap on condo conversions.
  
  
  • Get the federal government back into the creation of housing.
  
  
  A rising tide really does lift all boats, IF it rises from the bottom up. When everyone has housing, the economy booms. Nobody really benefits from having large numbers of people outside, unsheltered, hungry, and sick. It's an accident that occurs as the result of systems that some people do profit from. Change the system and more people will profit.
  


• Remember the potholes? Studying other cities that don't have potholes, to see what they are doing right? Countries that have a fraction of the homelessness that we do also have universal health care. It's time to bite the bullet and get it here.
  


• Let's change the social attitude. It is NOT virtuous to promote your own gain without regard for any cost to others. We ARE responsible for, and to, each other.
  

Speaking of responsibility: How can you claim to care about a homeless person's future when you do not take care that he survives tonight? When I am told that "increasing shelter now is politically impossible," I know that all the talk about caring for homeless people is lip service. If you care about somebody, if you value them as a person, you do whatever it takes to keep them alive. That means MORE shelter right now, not less. It means allowing Tent Cities or any other interim survival mechanism until there is enough housing for everyone.

There is no either-or, short-term solutions OR long-term solutions. If we care about each other, we keep each other alive tonight AND we work to make the future better for each other.

If we care about each other, we will continue to increase our efforts to take care of people who are now homeless, get them out of homelessness, and prevent other people from falling into the hole. And, because we care about each other, we will also change our economy, our housing market, our government policies, our health care system, and whatever else it takes, to eliminate the black hole of homelessness forever.

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This is part 4 of my speech at the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless Conference, May 2007. The first three parts were:

1. The Pothole Analogy
2. A Word to the Housed
3. Reality Check for Committees to End Homelessness

Reality Check for Committees to End Homelessness

Here in Seattle, the group in charge of our "Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness" is called the Committee to End Homelessness. Other areas of the U.S. have their own Ten Year Plans and their own Committees. Whatever they are called in other cities, these are equal realities across the country:

1. There are more people homeless now than when all the "Ten Year Plans" to end homelessness began.
   
   
2. More of the people with the most severe problems are ending up out on the street late at night when all the shelters are full.
   
   
3. More people are dying outside, homeless and without shelter, every year.
   
   
4. Violence against homeless people is increasing.
   
   
5. With all the new low-cost housing created, three times as much is lost to redevelopment and condo conversions. We have a net loss.
   
   
6. The wealth gap is widening, the middle class is vanishing like buffalo, job insecurity has become the new norm.
   
   
7. Health care costs keep rising, along with the numbers of people who can’t afford health insurance.
   
   
8. At a Roots of Poverty conference I attended years ago, incarceration was identified as one of the roots of poverty, and to this day, nothing has changed. The U.S. has the highest number of people incarcerated than any other country in the rest of the world, and it’s giving Communist Red China a run for the money for the world record. We’ve already got their official numbers beat. Let’s see if we can beat their unofficial numbers!
   
   
9. Our social fabric is cut to shreds. Lack, or loss, of a social network is the most basic reason a housed person becomes a “homeless person.” The lack, or loss, of a sense of community, of responsibility to our neighbor whatever her religion, politics, or even personality, is the basic reason the black hole of homelessness exists for her to fall into.
   
   
10. Respect for human dignity is at an all-time low. The homeless person who is at the bottom of the housing market is also at the bottom of the clothing market, and he doesn’t go naked, does he? No. THAT would offend our morality.

Forty years ago, people had problems. We had alcoholics, drug addicts, mental illness, domestic violence, people with physical disabilities and severe illnesses who were not able to work, people getting out of prison, people getting out of the hospital, people getting out of foster care – all of the reasons given for why people are homeless today. We had a fraction of the numbers of homeless people that we have today.

What has happened over the last forty years?

1. The real income (purchasing power) of 60% of our population has gone down.


2. The federal government has invested less and less money in housing. Since 1996 they've spent $0.


3. In private housing development, developers seek the most profit out of every square inch of real estate, resulting in the continual destruction of low-cost housing in order to put up high-cost housing.


4. The cost of health care has continued to rise, while less and less of the population have any form of health insurance.


5. The numbers of homeless people have skyrocketed.


6. The stigma of homelessness was created. Unemployment insurance was won by a campaign of working people and out-of-work, often homeless people, allied. Most housed people at that time had no problem seeing themselves in the shoes of someone who was homeless. Now “homeless” is a separate class, and homeless people are to be treated differently than anyone else is treated.

What happened in the last forty years was, we created homelessness. In order to end it, we have to reverse what we did to create it.

So far, none of the Ten Year Plans are doing that.

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This is part 3 of my speech at the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless Conference, May 2007. The whole sequence is:

1. The Pothole Analogy
2. A Word to the Housed
3. Reality Check for Committees to End Homelessness
4. Ending Homelessness: for real

A Word to the Housed

We all know homelessness hurts homeless people. Some are beginning to realize that homelessness hurts all of us.

The full reality is, the same system that creates homelessness creates most of your problems, too. You work hard to help people who often yell at you because they can't yell at the people who are really abusing and frustrating them; you accomplish something each day but the scope of the problem keeps getting worse; then you go home and wrestle with the bills and worry over how you are going to pay for your son's dental care or your daughter's education.

We're all in this together. To get out of it, we all have to work together. The noble housed people don't have to rescue the poor homeless people; the oppressed homeless people do not have to force the privileged housed people to rescue them. All us chickens have to work together to rebuild the leaky henhouse. 'Cause guess what? There's nobody here but us chickens.

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This is part 2 of my speech at the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless Conference, May 2007. The entire sequence is:

1. The Pothole Analogy
2. A Word to the Housed
3. Reality Check for Committees to End Homelessness
4. Ending Homelessness: for real

The Pothole Analogy

Imagine this scenario:

One of your downtown streets has a big pothole in it. It's been growing for years, and other than a lot of new hires in the auto repair industry, nothing much has been done about it. Public pressure is rising. Finally, the city government acts. They do a serious study, and they find that people who have pothole accidents have a lot of problems. Nearsightedness, ADD, alcoholism... and that although the towing and auto repair industries have been booming for years, they haven’t decreased pothole accidents.

With a lot of publicity (and not much money) the city starts a Pothole Accident Prevention Program (PAPP). Towing companies and auto repair companies that wish to do any business with the city are required to refer the drivers in pothole accidents to counseling, so that they will get treatment for their problems and avoid potholes in the future. The most lucrative contracts and tax breaks go to the companies whose customers go the longest without another pothole accident. None of the companies are given any authority to fix the pothole.

The auto industry goes along with the PAPP because it’s politically impossible to get money to fix potholes right now, and at least this way something is being done. And isn’t it good to help people who have problems like nearsightedness, ADD, and alcoholism?

In real life, of course, the city would just fill in the pothole. Right? A city that had a high occurrence of potholes would try to make its streets more pothole-proof – right?

Homelessness is a hole in the street. The people who fall into that hole need help to get out of it. They have problems that need to be addressed. All of that is necessary and worthwhile action. It will not end homelessness, any more than auto repair and driver education will end potholes.

---

This is part 1 of my speech at the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless Conference, May 2007. The entire sequence is:

1. The Pothole Analogy
2. A Word to the Housed
3. Reality Check for Committees to End Homelessness
4. Ending Homelessness: for real

The war on science

Nova had an excellent documentary recently, "Intelligent Design on Trial." You can still view it online.

The push to teach "Intelligent Design" on an equal footing with the theory of evolution is part and parcel of a determined assault on the standards of intellectual inquiry that underpin democracy itself.

The foundation of democracy is liberalism, and the foundation of liberalism is the premise that truth is discovered by free inquiry -- and is always in the process of discovery. Anyone and everyone can make a claim, anyone and everyone can challenge a claim, and all debate is public and based on publicly available evidence.

In the worldview of a certain kind of conservative, there has to be an Authority over everything. When scholars say that truth is not subject to the authority of Scripture, scriptural conservatives think that they are trying to replace that authority with something else. In the worldview of those scholars, however, truth IS the authority, and the only authority.

This is intellectual humility. Enlightenment inquiry acknowledges the limitations of human reason, and therefore requires that all claims be subject to independent test, and always open to question and revision. The more tests a claim stands up to, the more credible it is -- but nothing is absolutely certain, because we aren't absolutely perfect.

To claim that "revealed truth" IS absolutely certain is not "humility" -- it is the ultimate in egotism. The claim that you know God and you know what God said and you understand it beyond question, the refusal to subject your own worldview to any test, are the hallmarks of religious fundamentalism, and they are hallmarks of arrogance. It is no coincidence that the same people who make these claims call democracy "demoncracy" and believe it should be severely restricted. Democracy depends on open dialogue more than it depends on the vote; an open dialogue in which all claims can be tested independently, and there is no special authority over truth.

"Intelligent Design" is not a scientific theory, because it is not testable; it provides no structure on which testable predictions can be made. This is not simply because the proponents of ID do not understand science. It is because they do not want to understand science. The concept of a truth that is independent of authority and always subject to question is inconceivable to them. It frightens them. And until they can confront this fear and accept the reality that the truth IS beyond perfect understanding, they will never understand the scientific debate.

The debate must continue, but it must continue by the rules of scientific reasoning; Enlightenment intellectual ethics. Do not allow those rules to be subverted by "Intelligent Design" proponents trying to run onto the football field with a baseball bat to slam the frizbie into the basket.

Why I won't vote for Ron Paul

Some of Ron Paul's positions -- like opposition to the war in Iraq, the War on Drugs, and the Patriot Act -- appeal strongly to liberals and conservatives alike, and many internet activists have flocked to him as a candidate that can bring a real revolution to Washington.

But the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. For Ron Paul, the ideology of "individual liberty" overrides the liberty of physical individuals, and also overrides physical fact. Sacrificing individuals to ideology and denying concrete fact to maintain an abstract idea have caused great harm in human history, and I won't encourage more of it.

I don't demand that anybody agree with me with 100% ideological purity before I work with them on anything. I'll gladly work with Ron Paul in opposition to the war in Iraq, the War on Drugs, and the Patriot Act, and in any other common cause. But I don't think making a man President who rationalizes imposing his own morality upon others under the ideology of "states rights" to be any improvement over a man who rationalizes imposing his own morality upon others under the ideology of "God's will."

Specific examples:

• Ron Paul supports using state force to make a woman bear a pregnancy to term against her will. He (and his followers) rationalize this as "supporting individual liberty" on the grounds that
  1. It is state government using force to tell a woman what she can do with her own body, not federal government.
     
     Whether my neighbor, my church, my city, my state, or my federal government imposes on my liberty, it is still an imposition on my liberty.
     
     And Paul's voting record in Congress is inconsistent with this. He introduced federal legislation (the Sanctity of Life Act) to define human life as beginning at conception. He voted in favor of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act which federally overrides state abortion laws. Ron Paul, an "unshakable foe of abortion" in his own words, is perfectly willing to use federal power when it aligns with what he considers to be right.
     
     
  2. It is protecting the individual liberty of fetuses. By making abortion legal, argues Paul, "the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the 'right' of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the 'property rights' of slave masters in their slaves."
     
     There is an obvious difference between a slave owner claiming rights over the body of another person, and a woman claiming rights over her own body.
     
     I do consider the lives of fetuses to be important, and I want to protect them. That is a major reason for opposing making abortion illegal. It is simply an ineffective way to preserve fetal lives. To care about actual, physical human beings is to seek practical ways to actually save lives. To make abortion illegal is to sacrifice real people -- both women and children -- to abstract principle. That is a besetting human evil, and my personal pet peeve.
     
     
• Ron Paul opposes equal rights for non-heterosexuals. Again, his rationale for how this supports individual liberty is contorted, and his actions aren't even consistent with that rationale. .
  
  1. States should be allowed to decide their own laws without interference from the federal government.
     
     Yet Paul says he would have voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law declaring same-gender messages cannot be recognized as valid by the federal government, and need not be recognized as valid by any state, even if the marriage was licensed by another state. Again, Paul is only opposed to the federal government when it enforces something he does not agree with, like a woman's control over her own body or a person's right to marry regardless of gender. He will readily use federal power to enforce morality that he does agree with.
     
     
  2. Any state has the right to "pass laws concerning social matters, using its own local standards, without federal interference." Therefore the Supreme Court should not override state anti-sodomy laws or state restrictions on right to marriage.
     
     But the 10th Amendment states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." (Emphasis added.) Those who holler about "states rights" always seem to skip that last clause. If a state government claims powers over individuals that exceed the legitimate interests of government, it is the right and proper use of federal power to step in and protect individual right This is in accordance with the Preamble which declares the intentions of the Constitution: "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
     
     
  3. Defending personal liberty means protecting the right of individuals and groups to discriminate against others.
     
     This is Paul's rationale for opposing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and why he thinks the Boy Scouts have the right to not let gay men be scoutmasters or gay boys be scouts.
     
     By these rationales, state governments could pass legislation banning the very existence of the Boy Scouts, and Ron Paul could not object. I would, personally. I think that the rightful role of government is to protect the fullest freedom of any individual that is consistent with the equal rights of others. That means, sometimes, protecting us from other individuals.
     
     
  
  
  4. The military policy of "don't ask, don't tell" should be maintained, because homosexuals should not be treated any differently than heterosexuals.
     
     But homosexuals are not treated the same as heterosexuals under the current policy. Nobody is discharged in the military for openly declaring themselves heterosexual, for showing up at a social function with a partner of the opposite gender, or for being known to have performed sexual acts with a member of the opposite gender.
     
     Ron Paul says "if there is homosexual behavior in the military that is disruptive, it should be dealt with. But if there's heterosexual sexual behavior that is disruptive, it should be dealt with." His support of "don't ask, don't tell" demonstrates that he considers all homosexual behavior to be disruptive. He opposes the use of "the power of the state" to enforce morality that he does not agree with, like the equal rights of both homosexuals and heterosexuals. He supports the use of "the power of the state" to enforce morality that he does agree with, like the unacceptability of homosexuality.
     
     


• Ron Paul opposes Network Neutrality, claiming that it is "regulating the internet."
  
  Laws against rape and theft are "regulating human activity" also, but I've never heard a libertarian object to them. Prohibiting ISPs from handling internet traffic in a discriminatory manner, like degrading the performance of one website while giving priority to another, is a regulation that protects equal individual rights, like laws against theft and rape do.
  
  


• He opposes embryonic stem cell research. Supporters claim he only opposes federal funding of such research, consistent with his "smaller government" principles.
  
  But Paul introduced the "Cures Can Be Found Act" of 2005, which would provide tax credits for "qualified" stem cell research, storage and donation, specifically excluding any facilities that use embryonic stem cells. Once more, Ron Paul supports using the federal government to support what he agrees with, he is only against using it to support what he doesn't agree with.
  

There are more problems with Ron Paul's positions, described in detail at EMPTV. Some of them I have to research further, because Paul may have indeed been misrepresented. For instance: Asked if he supports "bring abstinence education funding onto equal ground with contraceptive-based education," Paul said "yes." Since he doesn't think there should be any federal funding for any education, including contraceptive-based sex education, this "yes" answer may simply mean he does not support funding abstinence-only education either.

There are some criticisms of Ron Paul I consider totally invalid:

1. That he is a racist, based on quotes from a 1992 newsletter written by someone else.
   
   
2. That he is a white supremacist, neo-nazi, conspiracy nut based on the ravings of some Ron Paul supporters. Oh come on. If the postings of some nuts on Daily Kos does not make Daily Kos a "hate site" then the ravings of some Ron Paul supporters does not make Ron Paul a nut.
   

There is quite enough in Ron Paul's own words to take honest issue with.

Dennis Kucinich Jumps the Shark

I agree with Andrew Sullivan (and not for the first time). Dennis Kucinich has jumped the shark.

I do not consider Dennis Kucinich's siting of a UFO to put him in La-La Land, but proposing to take Ron Paul as a running mate does. Close examination of evidence indicates that there are, indisputably, some Unidentified Flying Objects -- flying objects sighted that haven't been identified. Close examination of Ron Paul's statements indicates that he will sacrifice living individuals to the ideology of "individualism" any time they come in conflict.

Dennis, Ron Paul doesn't deserve your support.

And this will "balance the energies"??? Isn't the New Age dead yet?

Dr. Wes, Messiah

The concept of a "warrior of peace sent from God" is not exclusively Jewish/Christian. The concept was real to Wes at age 7, strongly influenced by Hawaiian traditions. His experiences as the "Fort Devens Messiah" can be followed in reverse chronological order on his blog, Runoff. I've constructed this list for those who want to read it in chronological order.

1. Fort Devens Messiah
2. Fighting For Peace
3. Peace Takes Some Hits
4. Victory
5. Soldier Like Me

Very young children can be heroes.

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