Today’s New York Times Page One recession-porn dispatch is so unrelentingly hackneyed that William Shatner ought to read it aloud to bongos. 

Who you calling hack-kneed?

And it neglects to mention that the hero – a gruff homeless-encampment leader – is a convicted child rapist.

The mug shot of camp leader John Freitas

We’re pretty sure Dan Barry’s story about a community of homeless folks living under an overpass in Providence, R.I., originally began with “It was a dark and stormy night…” because it is littered with high-school cliches of the first order and reads like the work of a 17-year-old who just put down his first Raymond Carver story.

If we are to build sound public policy, we must see challenges for what they are, not what we wish them to be, and not what moralistic tales we may be told.  Heartless though this sounds, we cannot afford to romanticize the poor out of their reality.  If we swallow the fables, we simply enable the tellers – and often we should not.

Timothy Webb, 49, left, and Bruce, 59, live in a tent city, dubbed Camp Runamuck, in Providence, R.I., under an overpass stretch of Route 195 that is scheduled for demolition

Here’s a paragraph [text from the New York Times article is in blue Palatino – Ed.].

The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon:

Already we are in the land of treacle.  Brigadoon, as imagined by Lerner and Lowe, is a Scottish village that has been enchanted to appear only one day a century, preserving it (Time-Machine style) from the ravages of history as a social Eden.  Not so Camp Runamuck:

– a boozy brawl, the wielding of a knife taped to a stick. But the community handled it, he says with pride, his day’s first cigar already aglow.

Because we are all the heroes of our own lives, we all tell stories about ourselves.  We particularly like embroidering for strangers:

One was told we’ll discuss this in the morning; the other was voted off the island, his knife tossed into the river, his tent taken down.

Because the two men in the fight had violated the community’s written compact, they were escorted off the camp, away from the protection of an abandoned overpass.

So there goes the Brigadoon metaphor – in the real Brigadoon, immortality required everyone to stay.

Camp Runamuck, from the Times feature story

Informal settlements often get their start in underused terrain.  This location is ideal – the overpass being abandoned, little traffic flowed by, allowing uncontested occupancy.

The chief flicks his spent cigar into that same river. There is talk of rain tonight.

For a moment, I’ll just get out of the way and let Gawker smack the journalist:

Jesus, is that foreboding and melancholy, or what? And just out of nowhere—the guy is throwing away a cigar, then there’s a period, and all of a sudden people are talking about rain! Also randomly inserted into the narrative with a heart-stabbing force are the following sentences, loaded with submerged meaning just like an iceberg which is what Hemingway said all writing should be like:

Behind him, the camp stirs. Other tent cities have sprung up recently around the country, but Rhode Island officials have never seen anything like this. A tea kettle sings.

Just like camping? Camp Runamuck, from the New York Times

Weary of shelters, the couple pitched a pup tent in Roger Williams Park, close to a plaque bearing words Williams had used to describe this place he founded: “A Shelter for Persons in Distress.” But someone complained, so Mr. Freitas set off again in search of shelter. The March winds blew.

(Reasonable people can disagree about the success, or lack thereof, of Barry’s attempts at lyricism, though we’d add that reading him in the cold, hard light of day gives us an advantage.)

Our guide through Providence’s village of the damned is John Freitas:

The chief, John Freitas, is 55, with a gray beard touched by tobacco rust. He did prison time decades ago, worked for years as a factory supervisor, then became homeless for all the familiar, complicated reasons.

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A profile in profile: John Freitas, as he wished to be seen

Note the passive voice, as if homeless happened to him rather than by him.  Gawker catches this too:

One of those reasons, not mentioned by Barry but pointed out by NYTPicker, might have something to do with the fact that Freitas was once on Massachusetts‘ list of 10 Most Wanted Sex Offenders. From Massachusetts’ Sun Chronicle [March 21, 2008 – Ed.]:

Freitas was convicted of rape of a child and indecent assault in the late 1970s in New Bedford. He was convicted again in 1985 in New Bedford Superior Court where he was sentenced to a 5- to 7-year prison sentence for similar charges, police said.

We are all familiar with jailhouse lawyers, their every conviction a frame by an oppressive state conspiracy; so too within the homeless population we find some adept at spinning stories of sympathy.  Mr. Freitas seems one of those.

John J. Freitas, 54, turned himself in at the Attleboro District Court before local detectives took the Level 3 sex offender into custody for booking at the police station. Freitas’s move followed a media blitz by law enforcement officials earlier this week seeking information to his whereabouts.

Freitas, who was added to the state’s 10 Most Wanted Sex Offenders List on Monday, was the subject of a search by local detectives and the State Police Violent Fugitive unit.

Leave it to Gawker to sum up:

Of course, reporting that little facet of the Chief’s troubled history might have rendered him a slightly less sympathetic character, and interfered with Barry’s ability to memorialize him thusly, in purple:

At least tonight there is a communal dinner: donated chicken, parboiled and grilled; donated corn on the cob; donated potatoes.

From the Providence Journal: Mr. Freitas talking with police

Donated, one presumes, from local charities and homelessness agencies.  Decent people do wind up homeless for stretches of time, and charity flows not just from government but also from private citizens.

People line up with paper plates.

The rain falls harder, pocking the river’s gray surface, surrounding the dark camp with a sound like fingers drumming in impatience. The chief hears it, but what can he do? He finishes his dinner and lights another cigar.

Mr. Freitas’s Hemingway persona appears carefully constructed to impress the gullible.  A few days after the Times article Gawker lampooned, the Providence Journal reported (on August 4):

EAST PROVIDENCE — John Freitas, arrested at a homeless camp for failing to register as a sex offender, is out on bail.

Freitas, the leader of Camp Runamuck, a group of people living in tents on the Seekonk River, was arrested Friday night by East Providence and Providence police.

Update: he violated bail and was arrested again August 5.

Mr. Freitas arraigned in Providence Wednesday, August 5

Mr. Freitas ought not to be romanticized.  He is a serial child rapist:

According to the Massachusetts Office of Public Safety, the former New Bedford resident was convicted of charges of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 in 1978, 1986 and 1987. He was also convicted on a charge of raping and abusing a child in 1978.

These convictions evidently led Mr. Freitas to migrate a few miles across the state border into Rhode Island, out of reach of the Massachusetts police.

State law requires Freitas to register as a sex offender in Rhode Island if he was also required to register in Massachusetts, Healey said.

Freitas yesterday declined to comment on his arrest. A spokeswoman for Camp Runamuck said the group wants to focus on the issue of homelessness in Rhode Island, rather than on Freitas.

Mr. Freitas, from eastbayri.com

So the Times story can be seen, in the end, simply as a bit of flowery romance that gave the Camp Runamuck residents visibility and increased the political cost of evicting them.  From the August 14 Boston Herald:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Residents of a tent city in East Providence agreed on Friday to leave their spot under an I-195 bridge in three and a half weeks, but they said they are not happy about it and might still try to fight it.

They also filed a claim Friday against Providence and East Providence, saying the cities have an obligation to provide for the needy and indigent, a move their lawyer said they hoped could secure them a new camp site or other help.

As we saw in Los Angeles some years back, such tactics are popular among homeless advocates.  Cities have been enjoined from arresting people for vagrancy unless they can demonstrate availability of adequate homeless shelters:

Last week [April 21, 2006 – Ed.] the oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, via a 2-1 ruling, handed down a decision that is already sending shock waves through Los Angeles politics.  As the Los Angeles Times reported it:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Los Angeles Police Department cannot arrest people for sitting, lying or sleeping on public sidewalks on skid row [just east of the historic core. -- Ed.], saying such enforcement amounts to cruel and unusual punishment because there are not enough shelter beds for the city’s huge homeless population.

Visibility creates sympathy.  Sympathy creates political capital.  Political capital creates negotiating leverage.

In the agreement reached with the state, the homeless residents of Camp Runamuck said they will move out from under the highway by noon Sept. 8. In return, the state agreed to help them sign up for social services such as subsidized housing, food stamps, and disability benefits if they’re eligible.

From the New York Times: Camp Runamuck at dusk

Runamuck resident Christopher D’Ambra, 32, said he’s lived at shelters before and doesn’t want to go back.

Among his complaints: they’re unsafe, have restrictive hours, are overcrowded, and people who stay there can’t leave their things there during the day.

Better than living with a Level 3 sex offender?

Everyone has a story, usually more than is mentioned.

[Mr. D'Ambra's ex-girlfriend took out a restraining order against him even though he says he did nothing abusive.]

Level 3 sex offenders are considered by the state to be the most likely to commit new sex crimes.

The real answer is to get these people off the streets and into a life-changing program.

Barbara Kalil, taken by Christine Hochkeppel

The lawsuit against the cities was filed earlier Friday under a statute that one of the camp residents’ lawyers, Neville Bedford, said requires the cities to provide for the poor and has not been used since 1873.

Neville Bedford, hoping to use an 1873 law

I doubt that 1873 legislators would have been swayed by this situation.

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Just say yes, and an anonymous person vanishes

A moral-philosophy question rattling through cyberspace asks, If you were offered $1,000,000 to make someone disappear, would you?

Happy to make the stain of homelessness vanish?

Actually, as documented in this New York Times article, the cost is much less than that:

They are flown to Paris ($6,332), Orlando ($858), Johannesburg ($2,550), or most frequently, San Juan ($484).

Outward bound: from NYC to somewhere else

They are not executives on business trips or couples on honeymoons. Rather, all are families who have ended up homeless, and all the plane tickets are courtesy of the city of New York (one-way).

Have a nice trip!

The Bloomberg administration, which has struggled with a seemingly intractable problem of homelessness for years, has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city since 2007 –

Although this rate is a modest one every two days, something about this smacks of human trafficking … or does it?

– as a way of keeping them out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family.  

National and state borders are more than merely economic gradients, they are also judicial ones.  A poor person in New York City represents a municipal liability much greater than the cost of that same person back home.  So it’s well worth New York’s while to expel those it can – provided it’s done voluntarily..

All it takes is for a relative elsewhere to agree to take the family in.

Faced with a civic obligation to deal with epidemic severe poverty, municipalities try two strategies.  The first is overcrowding, used two centuries ago in eighteenth-century London, as I’ve previously posted, when English packed the poor like sardines into hulks:

Back in the late eighteenth century, when it was easier to maintain the comforting notion that people with more money were intrinsically better than those without, the hopeful theory arose that ‘those people’ were genetically different — predisposed to failure, crime, and squalor — so if we could just isolate them from the rest of us, society would be cured.  (Much talk of “ridding the body of society from disease” and so on.)  And back then, although being poor was by itself not a crime, taking such steps as stealing a loaf of bread (thanks, Victor Hugo!) were enough to land you in prison indefinitely, so there was an explosion in the prison population that happened also to coincide with a huge growth in the urban poor.

The only known photograph of a hulk: HMS Defense

With so many of the urban poor finding their way to prison, London started running out of places to put them.   Enter the hulks:

William Eden, the Home Office secretary to whose lot it fell to deal with the resulting crisis, estimated that alternative accommodations would be needed each year for about a thousand convicts, far more than could be crammed into the already overcrowded gaols and bridewells of England.  A decision was taken to retain in English waters certain of the ships engaged in the convict transportation, and to utilize them there as places of confinement. 

HMS Discovery, home to 500 convicts

The arrangement was viewed as a temporary expedient, and thus it was first authorized by Parliament for only two years.

By the way, note now a ‘temporary expedient’ gets extended, and extended.  Such things happen to governments (see rent control), even when they are indefensible (see rent control):

It was an arrangement that had no defenders. Conservatives condemned it because of the likelihood of its exacerbating the criminality of offenders. Liberals agreed and furthermore deplored its inhumanity. But in spite of these constantly renewed expressions of chagrin from all quarters, it was an arrangement that endured for eighty years.

When overcrowding fails – lack of space, lack of health, endless cost – cities often try the second strategy – transportation.  England’s use of hulks overlapped with transportation to America (ended 1776) and Australia (begun 1788):

Transportation punished both major and petty crimes in Great Britain and Ireland from the 17th century until well into the 19th century.  A sentence could be for life or a specific period.  Exile was an essential component and thought a major deterrent. Transportation was also seen as a humane and productive alternative to execution, which would most likely have been the sentence to many if transportation had not been introduced.

Do you know the way/ to Botany Bay wo wo wo

Today’s transportation, unlike the eighteenth century’s, is voluntary for the transportees, and hence welcome.  It’s also in reverse, sending people back from the dark side of the economic moon they have found themselves.

Many of them are longtime New Yorkers who have come upon hard times, arrive at the shelter’s doorstep and jump at the offer to move at no cost. Others are recent arrivals who are happy to return home after becoming discouraged by the city’s noise, the mazelike subway, the difficult job market or the high cost of housing.

“I didn’t expect the city to be the way it is,” said Hector Correa, who was in a homeless shelter last week and flew home to Puerto Rico on Tuesday.

Nothing but ggreen?

“I was expecting something different, something better.”

“You think we’re made of money?”

Mr. Correa and his companion, Elisabeth Mojica, and their two young sons, both also named Hector, arrived in New York in May to live with his mother.

Social liberals out there, take note: the profiled family is unwed, both parents are unemployed, and they came to New York to stay with the children’s grandmother.

But after they failed to find jobs and the bills began to mount, his mother threatened to kick them out.

I wonder why.

Out of cash, they checked into the city intake center for homeless families in the Bronx.

Social-support networks are predicated on the Pelagian principle that all of us are born innocent.  Work long enough in a social-service agency and you may convert to Augustinian skepticism about the observant herd.  Do not romanticize the poor.

“The person I spoke to in the shelter informed me that if I have a person I could stay with in Puerto Rico, that I could get help to go,” said Mr. Correa.  They will stay with Ms. Mojica’s father.

Hector Correa and Elisabeth Mojica were at Kennedy Airport on Tuesday to fly home to Puerto Rico, to stay with her father (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times).

The promise of a better job draws many a rural immigrant to the bright lights and big city.  But sometimes the jobs are back home, and so should be the family.

[Mr. Correa had] worked as a mechanic in Carolina, on the north shore of the island. 

“I feel very happy because I’m going to be able to get back to do the things that I know how to do,” he said.

Moving Mr. Correa back home not only lightens the city’s economic burdens, it should make Mr. Correa economically more productive.  A win for everyone, especially when cities have only so many economic lifeboats, and we’ve seen the powerful correlation between a fixed address and gaining a toehold into the job market.

I emphasize again, all this is voluntary:

At the intake center, social workers ask families about their housing options in other places. If a family says that they have relatives who might be willing to take them in, and social workers confirm their report, the family could be on a plane, bus or train within hours, although the city will sometimes wait a few days to avoid the expense of last-minute fares. The Correas flew to San Juan for less than $1,000.

City officials said there were no limits on where a family can be sent, and families can reject the offer and stay in city shelters.

Here’s your alternative

Those transported to Australia had no say in the matter.  A critical difference between then and now.

 “We want to divert as many families as we can that need assistance,” said Vida Chavez-Downes, the director of the Resource Room, a city office with 11 social workers, two managers and an administrative assistant who help relocate families. “We have paid for visas, we’ve gone down to the consulate, we’ve provided letters, we’ve paid for passports for people to go.” 

Odd how the morality of something swings based on optionality and choice.  Glowing through Ms. Chavez-Downes’ words is the genuine desire to help.  She sees them not as miscreants or paupers but as customers.

“Anyone who comes through our door.”

Indeed, those who have relocated their whole families can be seen, like the Depression’s great Dust Bowl migrants, as economic dislocation’s unlucky victims.

Dust poor and getting by

Immigrant homelessness can even be seen as an extended form of family stranding:

In the past, the city contracted with the Salvation Army for a now-defunct program called Homeward Bound, but only for single adults and couples, not families with children. Both versions followed the example of Travelers Aid, a 150-year-old nonprofit organization that provides stranded and homeless people emergency aid so they could return to their homes, and which still exists today. Other cities have experimented with similar programs, but they are largely focused on adults without children.

Nor does New York see this as simply dumping its garbage over its neighbor’s fence.  Like outplacement or prisoner reorientation, the service requires pre-service counseling and post-service followup.

Once a family leaves New York, homeless services officials say they follow up with a phone call to make sure they arrive safely, then make a few more calls over the next two to three weeks. In rare cases, they will advance the family up to four months’ rent, a one-month security deposit, a furniture allowance and a broker’s fee.

For a program like this to be defensible, it must reduce recidivism. 

City officials said that none of the families that have been relocated have returned to city shelters.

Is that enough?  At least one of those invested in seeing this problem thinks they do not:

The program fails to address the underlying problems that brought the families here in the first place, said Arnold S. Cohen, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for the Homeless, an advocacy group in New York.

It is neither New York City’s task to improve Puerto Rico’s economy, nor within its power to do so.  Lifting our lamp beside the golden door means an entry to opportunity, not dependency.

A gateway to jobs, not to welfare

“The city is engaged in cosmetics,” Mr. Cohen said. “What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless.”

Except that they are not.  Mr. Correa and his family are returning to their familial support network, and to a job he left.  So too is this family:

Sometimes the journey to and from New York is quick. Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, both 20, owed back rent on their apartment in Fayetteville, N.C., so they came to New York on Saturday with their 5-month-old, Inez.

Fleeing one’s debts for a fresh start is, if not entirely honorable, entirely understandable.

If we left behind our debts, we also left behind our shame

Like those Dust Bowl Okies, Mr. Little and Ms. Martin immediately sought work:

They planned to stay in shelters while they looked for jobs, and went straight to the intake center.

Unlike rural environments, where one can pitch a roadside tent, urban migrants are either sheltered or homeless.

That wouldn’t work in Midtown Manhattan

Then relatives of Mr. Little, who worked at a telephone center serving insurance customers, scraped up enough money to pay their back rent, and homeless services workers confirmed that his mother would be around to help. By Monday night, they were waiting outside Gate 73 at the Port Authority Bus Terminal to board their 7:15 p.m. Greyhound to Greensboro.

Does this sound like ‘engaged in cosmetics’?

Are these people mournful?

“We were going to come here and then find work, you know, because there’s always work in New York,” Ms. Martin said, as Inez bounced on her knee.

Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, with Inez, returned to North Carolina after only a few days when relatives paid their back rent (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times).

Mr. Little said, “Once we found out we could keep our apartment, there was no point in staying here, because I can go back to my job in North Carolina.”

When it comes to employment, there’s no place like home.

“There’s no place like home.”

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In America, generally speaking, if you’re homeless you have a problem beyond mere poverty; something about your situation (substance abuse, domestic abuse, mental problems, a physical disability) is wrecking your life. 

The crisis of homelessness in Maine has lasted thirty years and resulted in millions of dollars being spent on shelters, emergency services, and corrections for individuals and families experiencing homelessness.  

Based on self-report –

Self-reporting is notoriously flawed, with massive potential for inherent bias:

– 28% of people who are homeless also struggle with mental illness, substance abuse, or co-occurring disorders, a fact that makes finding stable housing and needed community supports especially challenging in difficult economic times.  

After all, who wants to own up to a disability, particularly a drug- or alcohol-related one?

Most shelter providers report a higher percentage of persons experiencing mental illness living in shelters based on their observation and professional assessment throughout the years.

Unless we want to put these people out on ice flows, or let them die of exposure under bridge abutments, as a society we need an organized response to providing the assistance these people need to rebuild their lives.

Where your life begins again? 

Mercy Housing’s Hotel Aromar

It starts with housing, a particular kind known as permanent supportive housing (PSH), defined generally as:

Permanent supportive housing is affordable rental housing with support services for low-income or homeless people with severe mental illness, substance abuse, or HIV/AIDS. Some support services are offered in the home, and some are offered outside the home.

There are different types of permanent supportive housing, including furnished single room occupancies (SROs), group homes, subsidized Section 8 apartments, and shared living arrangements.

Anyone can understand why PSH is charitable, and it is certainly appreciated by the recipients:

The tenant interview included a one-page 16 question survey about each tenant’s quality of life before and after moving into permanent supportive housing. The exhibit below shows responses to questions regarding work, learning, health, relationships, understanding oneself, and independence. The seven point scale for all 16 questions ranged from Terrible (1) to Mostly Delighted (7).

Even if self-reported, the differences are too large not to be real

Is it cost-effective?  I’m fairly certain that nearly all PSH studies in an urban context show net cost savings.

They’re trying to prove it.

How about rural?  Yes, it is, according to a new study, The Costs of Rural Homelessness in Maine (text excerpted in dark green font) and reported on the Web site of Funders Together (which also offers a great PowerPoint introduction, from which I’ve pulled slides for this post). 

[Kudos to the four authors: Melany Mondello, Shalom House; Jon Bradley, Preble Street; Tom Chalmers McLaughlin PhD, University of New England; Nancy Shore PhD, University of New England. – Ed.]

Start with the executive summary:

Permanent supportive housing allows people with disabilities who were homeless significantly more efficient and appropriate housing and service delivery with tangible cost savings.

Statistics you’ll have difficulty arguing with

This study matters because it is exclusively rural:

This study is the first statewide cost of homelessness data collection effort in the nation to be conducted in a rural setting.

The rural distinction matters greatly because most of us, being city-dwellers, figure that in the country nobody’s homeless – and in fact, in the country it’s easier to hide out of sight.

Rural homelessness is often hidden because people live in doubled-up situations, garages, barns and abandoned buildings instead of on the street or in a shelter. 

Someone could be living here

Rurally homeless people with disabilities tend to rely on their support network of family and friends to find temporary housing instead of relocating to shelters.  

The rural poor thus miss out:

Due to the existence of this temporary network of resources individuals and families may not qualify for housing assistance.

The shrinking circles of housing poverty: from the overcrowded to the chronically homeless

Yet the Maine study shows that addressing chronic homelessness in a rural setting nevertheless produces dramatic changes in their lives:

·         32% reduction in service cost by providing permanent supportive housing to people with disabilities experiencing homelessness in rural areas

This is broken down into several subcategories, starting with basically eliminating use of homeless shelters:

That’s a graphic, isn’t it?

·         Permanent supportive housing placements reduced service costs: shelter by 99%

Justin Nickerson and his wife Tammy Harris with their son William eat breakfast at the Mid- Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville recently. At right Sabrina Perri and her daughter Heaven get ready to leave the shelter by 8 a.m. and can return for the evening by late afternoon.

The reason is simple: shelters are where rural people go when the alternative is freezing at night.

Across all housing types, permanent supportive housing was highly successful in helping homeless individuals and families with a disability stay out of shelters and remain stably housed

Study participants’ shelter usage plummeted more than 99%, when the six months prior to permanent supportive housing are compared to the second six months in housing. Bed nights in emergency shelters fell from 5,944 to 51. Correspondingly, the cost of emergency shelter provision decreased from $363,010 in the six months prior to housing entry to $2,082 in the second six months in permanent supportive housing for a savings of $360,928.

Not in shelters, and not in jails

Naturally the service costs go down, and so do the mental health costs:

·         57% reduction on expenditures for Mental Health Services, illustrating a shift away from expensive psychiatric inpatient care to less expensive outpatient community-based services

Compared with jail, emergency shelters, or hospitalization, placing the chronically homeless in permanent supportive housing saves the state money, net and all in

·         $219,791 six month cost avoidance total for all 163 tenants

·         $1,348 per person cost avoidance (for six months)

That works out to about $225 per person per month, net cost savings. 

To achieve these savings, and for that matter to provide accommodations to residents needing PSH, there must be a physical structure compatible with housing a PSH resident.  That housing has to be specially developed, and it’s costly.

It took a lot of money to cut that ribbon:

Opening a Mercy Housing new PSH property in Colorado

Where do homeless people find permanent supportive housing, and how do they pay for it?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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All of us here represent the landowners

Since then, societies have used many different proxies for voting status, of which the principal one has always been, where do you live?  It has its legitimacy: because place is fixed, address is verifiable, and a person should have only one primary residence.  (Even today, to open a UK bank account, you need a UK address and have to show a utility bill or other proof of delivery.)

So prevalent is this association – adobe = citizenship – that among our euphemisms for vagrancy is ‘no fixed address.’

Addresses also matter not solely for their symbolism but as the channel by which the formal sector – including government – reaches to the informal.  Lack of an address cuts you off from benefits, and is yet another barrier to escaping homelessness.  Now technology is changing that, as profiled in the Washington Post:

On D.C. Streets, the Cellphone as Lifeline
Homeless People Turn to Technology to Track Assistance and Opportunities

To the usual trappings that help many homeless people endure life on the streets — woolen blankets, shopping carts or cardboard box shelters — add the humble cellphone.

Today, it’s not unusual for the homeless to whip out Nokia 6085 GoPhones (with optional Bluetooth and USB connectivity), stop at a public computer to check e-mail or urge friends to read their blogs.

Despite being homeless, Gwendolyn Bell manages to keep a cellphone. “A cellphone is the only way you can call to keep up with your food stamps, your housing application, your job,” says Rommel McBride, who spent six years on the streets.

Ms. Bell’s cellphone also demonstrates another principle of housing finance ecosystems: people will pay for what they want to consume, not what you give them for free.  

[S]ome conservative commentators … bemoaned a society where people who don’t have homes can afford mobile phones.

We all choose what we can afford.  Used properly, cell phones are invaluable.

Conversely, once you can contact an individual, here or she has existence and psychological proximity even if she’s separated by a half-dozen time zones.  When you call a colleague on his or her cell phones, how often is your first question, Where are you?

We’ve gotta stay connected

Once reliable contact is established, people gain formal visibility, which gives them political legitimacy.

It’s another sign of a society in transition by way of technology, as businesses shed physical addresses for cyberspace and homeless people can establish an online presence and chase opportunities digitally.

The cell phone is generation-skipping technology, and it’s revolutionizing the world even faster than is the Internet.

“Having a phone isn’t even a privilege anymore — it’s a necessity,” said Rommel McBride, 50, who spent about six years on the streets before recently being placed in a city housing program. He has had a mobile phone for a year. “A cellphone is the only way you can call to keep up with your food stamps, your housing application, your job. When you’re living in a shelter or sleeping on the streets, it’s your last line of communication with the world.”

Throughout history, we’ve tended to punish poverty (by throwing people into work houses, for example) and thus made it impossible for people in poverty to escape from it.  To be saved from economic drowning, you have to be visible to the lifeboat.

We’re getting a strong signal now

Advocates who work with the District’s homeless estimate that 30% to 45% of the people they help have cellphones. A smaller number have e-mail accounts, and some blog to chronicle their lives on the streets.

As communications technology gets cheap, communications use skyrockets.  In terms of urban planning and civic society, this is an unalloyed good thing.

“Phones are really a lifeline for many people,” said Adam Rocap, director of social services at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit drop-in center for the homeless. During a string of attacks against homeless people sleeping downtown in the fall, two victims called 911 for help after they were assaulted, he said.

Cell phones enable people to form networks, and to tap the formal networks.

At Miriam’s Kitchen this month, dozens of cellphones snapped to attention and captured photos of first lady Michelle Obama when she stopped by to serve lunch.

A patron of Miriam’s Kitchen uses a cellphone to take a photo of first lady Michelle Obama as she helps serve lunch. “Phones are really a lifeline for many people,” says Adam Rocap, director of social services at Miriam’s Kitchen.

But the technology is advancing so quickly that a simple cellphone is fairly cheap. At the Communication Connection, a store at Seventh Street and Florida Avenue NW, Donald Camp sells plenty of pay-as-you-go phones for less than $30.

The $29.95 Samsung A500 comes with 200 minutes. The H2O Wireless is $20 with 200 free minutes. There is no bill to pay. Once the minutes are gone, owners can return to the store and add time for about 10 cents a minute.

“Sometimes, they pay [for minutes] with cups of coins,” Camp said.

Given that each minute is hard-earned, there is a brisk economy to the way many calls are conducted. “It’s ‘Hello. How you doin’? Okay. Goodbye,’ click. You don’t get but a minute of my phone time,” said McBride, who uses his phone primarily to set up face-to-face conversations, rather than chat his minutes away.

My colleague David Porteous is part of the effort to pioneer mobile banking.  Even as the phone is an information lifeline, it can be a financial lifeline as well – particularly as money becomes ever more abstract, informational rather than tangible.

Some get their phones from relatives who want to know they have a way of staying in contact. Ronald Collins-El, 45, got one from his nephew. While he stays at the homeless shelter on the campus of St. Elizabeths, he uses it to keep in touch with family members and to organize his numerous medical appointments, payments and bills.

Ronald Collins-El is homeless and utilizes three cell phones, one of which he uses for a phone book.

Cell phones make possible extended family networks.  The phone answered by your relative is a phone not resold for drugs, and a link back to the family.

“When I was married and housed, I had a cellphone,” he said. “I still have a life even though I don’t have a house.”

Or take the case of Chris, 42, a recovering crack cocaine addict who asked that his last name not be used because he keeps his homelessness a secret from his employers.

Chris got an entry-level job at Verizon Center last year. He tried to get back on his feet, but each time, he missed calls from his boss, who often dialed a soup kitchen or shelter switchboard. Eventually, he was labeled unreliable and lost the job.

Reliability means connectivity.  Until the coming of cell phones, ground phones meant domiciles.  Or the boarding house pay phone.

Look, kid, I got an important ransom-note call to make, can I get some privacy?

This time, he got a pay-as-you-go cellphone and gave his boss the number. “I live up near the Capitol — give me a call anytime if you need extra hands,” he told his employer, being vague about where he bedded down each night.

He received numerous calls to come in early or to work an extra shift. After less than a year on the job, he was promoted. “No one there knows I’m homeless,” he said. “I would never have been able to do this without the cellphone.”

As a substitute for permanent housing, might the cell phone be an electronic lifeline out of the poverty trap?

“When I was married and housed, I had a cellphone,” says Ronald Collins-El, who uses three phones. “I still have a life even though I don’t have a house.”

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Women, children, and credited cast members first

You have lifeboats in the water.

But you have fewer lifeboats than passengers.

We thought they were enough, for the ship could never sink

What do you do?

Get away from the wreck as quickly as possible?

As reported in the Boston Globe, that dilemma confronts Julia Kehoe:

Julia E. Kehoe, the commissioner of the Department of Transitional Assistance, which oversees state shelters, said the system is “overburdened” and must change to provide services more equitably.

Trying to provide services equitably: Julia Kehoe

[Full disclosure; I worked with Julia when she was executive director of the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership.  MBHP does great work, and Julia's good people, so I'm biased. – Ed.]

Key to these programs is the department’s name, Transitional Assistance.  As the Web site says:

At DTA, we provide individuals and families with food assistance, job assistance, cash assistance and emergency shelter.

DTA administers benefits such as Food Stamp Benefits, Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), Emergency Aid to the Elderly, Disabled and Children (EAEDC) and Emergency Assistance (EA).   Because DTA emphasizes transitional assistance, recipients are encouraged to participate in education, training and job search activities to assist in obtaining employment, which helps us all achieve our potential and maximizes our independence.  With our support, our clients are given the tools to improve their lives. 

Basically, you have two choices:

Fill the lifeboats with the first in, and then repel all boarders.

Have a rotation, some in and some out of the boat.

Leo, you’ll have to understand, I’m in the lifeboat

If you’re going to choose a rotation, what rules might you select?

Less than two years after vowing to end homelessness in Massachusetts, the Patrick administration has proposed new regulations that it acknowledges could force hundreds of homeless families back on the street.

Consider me exasperated by the sophist false dichotomy set up in the opening sentence.  Supply is not being cut.  Rather, in forcing ‘hundreds of homeless families back on the street,’ as the Globe puts it, the Patrick Administration is proposing to bring hundreds of other deserving families off the streets. 

The regulations, scheduled to take effect April 1, would deny shelter to families who:

1. In the last three years, had been evicted from public or subsidized housing, or ‘had abandoned such housing’ without good cause. 

2. Fail (a) to meet a new 30-hour per week work requirement or (b) to save 30% of their income. 

[Both sentences rewritten for clarity. – Ed.]

So we have two tests. 

1. Were you in affordable housing and then left it, either because you were kicked out or because you walked away without a good reason?

2. If we have been giving you free housing, have you put the time to use (the work requirement) and put aside the money you’d otherwise have had to spend on housing?

Do either of them seem unachievable to you?  Unreasonable?

I take some convincing

What about these rules?

They also would:

3. Reduce from six months to three months the period families can remain in shelters after their incomes rise above state limits.  [Emphasis added.]

4. Force out families absent from shelters for at least two consecutive nights as well as those who reject one offer of housing without good reason.

5. Deny benefits for families whose members have outstanding default or arrest warrants.

6. [Deny benefits to] those whose only child is between ages 18 and 21, unless the child has a disability or is in high school.  [In our society, 18 and above is a child no longer. – Ed.]

Do any of those seem unduly draconian to you? 

Thought not

Some thought so:

Advocates for the homeless decried the proposal, which comes at a time when more homeless families are seeking beds in state shelters and remaining there longer. This month, the state is providing shelter for a record of nearly 2,700 families – one-quarter of them cramming for weeks at a time in expensive, often unsuitable motel rooms.

Whatever the choices, it’s not easy

“This is not the time to change the safety net,” said Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. “The number of people in need of shelter is like nothing we’ve ever seen. There’s never been such a desperate need for housing, and these changes could be devastating. They couldn’t come at a worse time.”

Don’t mess with my safety net when I’m falling on it

While I understand Ms. Frost’s concern for her constituents, the issue isn’t whether we need more homeless housing – we do – but whether, given the finite supply, we give it to those where it will make the most difference.  Hence, I’m with Ms. Kehoe:

“It is certainly not our intent to be punitive, and we understand the difficulties families are facing,” Kehoe said. “But we are responsible for transforming the system, and particularly at a challenging time, it is absolutely critical that all stakeholders need to work together to make sure that families have the greatest chance of moving out of shelter and poverty.”

And she has the evidence on her side:

While hundreds of families will likely lose their shelter beds, she said the changes would open space for qualifying families, many of whom the state is now paying an average of $85 a night to stay in motels. Last week, more than 630 families, including about 1,000 children, were staying at motels, waiting an average 22 days for a spot at the state’s 59 shelters.

Thus we have families staying in motel rooms – at the state’s expense (average $85 a night, or a whopping $2,550 per month) – because there is no room in the homeless-shelter lifeboats. 

Sometimes the choice is living in a car

By reducing those eligible for shelter, Kehoe said the new regulations would save the state $520,000 this fiscal year and more than $11 million in fiscal 2010. “Given our limited resources, we wanted to encourage people to find housing or stay where they are, rather than encouraging them to come into the system,” she said.

Now are you more willing to push out into the market those who have been evicted from affordable housing, who haven’t used their time in the shelter to work or save a little money, who are staying in the shelter even though their income has risen, and so on?

I haven’t finished using it

There’s also the Law of the Observant Herd: forcing out those who aren’t diligent or who disrespect the benefits they are receiving sends the best possible signal to all those who are wondering which behavior to adopt.

But those who work with the state’s neediest residents said the new “harsh restrictions” will only make it harder for the homeless to find a way out of poverty.

They will make it harder for some homeless; they will make it easier for some other homeless.  A rotation policy isn’t anti-poor.

They said many of the regulations are open to interpretation and risk being applied unfairly if a shelter director doesn’t consider an explanation reasonable.

Keep thinking!

That’s always true of any regulations.  The alternative is to save everybody, which the state can’t afford.

But Kehoe insisted the regulations will be applied fairly and noted they provide exceptions for:

Families trying to pay down their debt

Those who hold jobs that might make them reluctant to accept a housing opportunity too far away

Others who can’t find affordable housing after their income rises above welfare limits.

Hard to argue with any of that.

You think it’s hard to argue?  I’ll show you hard to argue!

She and other state officials said the regulations are part of the administration’s effort to overhaul the shelter system by more quickly moving the homeless into more permanent housing. In 2007, state officials moved the last homeless family out of a motel and heralded it as part of their new strategy to help all of the state’s homeless find permanent housing.

So the state was making progress — then the recession hit, and the demand has spiked.  (Rents are down a little, not enough to make a difference in housing consumption.)  That spike has spurred the state to innovate in pursuit of efficiency:

As part of that plan, the state recently merged the welfare agency’s emergency shelter programs with housing programs run by the Department of Housing and Community Development and is now planning eight regional networks to better coordinate homeless services and housing.

Homeless shelters aren’t affordable housing, although they can overlap in customers and purposes. 

And this month, the state revised the way it pays shelters, holding back thousands of dollars in payments until homeless families are housed.

‘Pay for performance’ should work for shelters as much as it works for the sheltered. 

The state now withholds its final payments for a year after the family leaves the system, as part of an incentive for shelters to extend their services to help keep the families housed.

Our goal, remember, is to get people out of shelters and into self-sufficiency.

“We know the severity of the problem, and we’re trying to provide a comprehensive approach,” said Bob Pulster, executive director of the state’s Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness.

Pulster (on the left), seeking a comprehensive approach

He and others said they expect to receive millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package, which they hope will ease the state’s growing burden.

But they said federal money won’t stop the new regulations from taking effect – and the imminent changes have Grace Monteiro worried.

The 28-year-old mother of a toddler has been in and out of shelters and apartments for several years. In the fall of 2007, six months after landing a $15-an-hour job as an administrative assistant, she was forced to move out of a shelter because she exceeded the income requirements, which is now an income of $1,578 a month for a family of two.

Ms. Monteiro and her son appear to be the archetypal customer we are trying to help – someone who is teetering on the cusp of self-sufficiency. 

”It’s a catch-22,” Grace Monteiro, with her son Keegan, said of housing regulations for the city’s homeless. Monteiro, 28, has been in and out of shelters and apartments for several years.

So she moved into an expensive studio apartment – she couldn’t find affordable housing in time – but she had trouble balancing the rent with her other expenses.  Within a few months, Monteiro lost her job [What reason? – Ed.] and she and her son moved into a state-subsidized motel room and then back into the shelter system.

She says three months isn’t long enough for many families to find affordable apartments, which are increasingly scarce.

Certainly, there’s no doubt that affordable apartments are hard to come by here.  Ms. Monteiro needs roommates or a sharing arrangement.

As a result, she thinks the new regulations will just encourage more parents to avoid working.

“It’s a catch-22,” she said. “I want to get a job, but I’m afraid to get a job. I don’t want to repeat what happened last time.”

Although I’ve never been homeless, I’m convinced that you are what you live in – and if you’re homeless, you cannot possibly be as effective in your life and your work as if you have some stable housing.

“Because if I don’t have housing after three months, then what? This just makes it harder to do the right thing.”

The right thing is to find a way out of the poverty trap within three months, or manage the lifeboats to give someone else a try to do so. 

Kate, honey, don’t you think it’s my turn in the lifeboat?

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