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Though the lawsuit is ongoing, city workers started installing “no oversize parking” signs on nearly all of the city’s streets in August, at a cost of $1 million, severely limiting places where recreational vehicle residents could park in Mountain View. It is just one city among dozens taking action to remove RVs and those who live in them through such bans.

“There were more people against us than for us,” Janet Stevens, 63, a plaintiff named in the lawsuit, said of the November election. “[But] it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with street safety.” For Stevens, who has watched the city change as more tech company employees have moved in, the fight around housing affordability and the RV ban comes down to Nimbyism and “a lack of support and true understanding of who [vehicle dwellers] are to start with.”

The lawsuit underscores Stevens’ analysis. “[Mountain View] is in the heart of Silicon Valley where, in recent years, an economic stratification has yielded significant wealth for some, but skyrocketing housing prices for all,” the complaint read. “As a result, many of Mountain View’s long-time residents have been priced out of the housing market and forced to live in [RVs] parked on the City’s streets.” Most of those living in recreational vehicles, like Stevens, grew up in Mountain View, lived in the city as adults, and rely on city services to survive. Stevens is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and has chronic fatigue syndrome and high blood pressure. In addition to her friends and neighbors, Stevens’ medical team and support group are located in Mountain View. “If I was to leave here I don’t know. [I’d be in] deep, deep trouble being able to find doctors that were understanding and willing to support my treatment for my diseases that have multiple realms of symptomatology,” Stevens said.

Proponents of the ban say it’s not so much the recreational vehicle residency itself, but the eyesore of the oversize vehicles, the waste disposal on city streets, and the lack of regulation. Advocates for equitable housing policy counter by saying Measure C is a proxy ban on poor people: a targeted attack on the city’s residents who can’t afford the increasing rent prices in one of the most expensive regions in the country. While the median household income in Mountain View has doubled in the past twenty years, income inequality in the Silicon Valley has ballooned, growing at twice the state and national rate. Almost 20 percent of the region’s households have no savings. For many, the area rent — now $2,500 per month — is impossible to afford.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” said Nantiya Ruan, a professor of law at the University of Denver. “Inequity and that imbalance of power just means that people become more and more disadvantaged and pushed out of communities and don’t have a voice in government and everything else that stems from that.”

According to Ruan, this leaves wealthy residents with even more authority. “There is a lot of power for communities to regulate how their space is used,” she explains. “And so, what municipalities are doing is making it hostile for those who need to sleep in their car or sleep in their RV by doing all sorts of different zoning code laws.”

The history of targeting and discriminating against undesired community members is baked into the American legal framework. Redlining is the most well-known example of this. In addition to the federally sanctioned segregation that kept Black people from building wealth in well-to-do neighborhoods, so-called “sundown town” laws forbade non-white people from remaining within city limits after the sun set. Oregon banned Black people, and some municipalities required Native, Japanese, and Jewish people to leave by 6:30 each evening. California also maintained an “anti-Okie” law, which banned unemployed people and migrant workers from entering the state in 1937.

Ruan argues these policies live on in the network of bans on RV residency, though — unlike discriminatory laws of the 20th century — vehicle laws don’t explicitly target poor people. Even if they did, given that there’s no constitutional protection for economic status, Ruan says, making these laws difficult to challenge in court. These laws are “really about focusing on keeping people out of public space and therefore out of [public] consciousness,” Ruan said. “[The laws] keep them from being visible, right? [Politicians think] nobody wants to see visible poverty.”

Mountain View isn’t the only city instituting laws on vehicle residency. Los Angeles instituted its own ban against parking for “habitation purposes” in 2017, affecting the then-total of 7,000 homeless people living in their cars. Neighboring suburbs of Los Angeles, such as Culver City, Santa Monica, and Malibu all have bans on sleeping in one’s car overnight. This April, Carlsbad city officials updated their city codes to include a ban on camping within city limits as well as parking oversize vehicles overnight on city streets. Those who want to park their vehicles within city limits overnight are now required to obtain a 24-hour permit and are restricted to acquiring six permits per month. In August, city council members in Flagstaff, Ariz., voted to keep a law on the books that bans camping — including vehicle camping — at the dismay of locals who have been pushed out of their homes by increased housing prices and wildfire. Following the approval of an ordinance that requires residents to move their vehicles every three days, the city of Eugene, Ore., is considering its own parking ban in “industrial commercial areas.” And in Lacey, Wash., plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against the city for effectively banning RVs and those who live in them by way of a city ordinance that limits the number of hours a vehicle can be parked on the street.

In lieu of providing housing, some cities are creating “safe parking” programs with dedicated spaces like church parking lots where vehicle residents can park overnight. Mountain View has one such program, and plays host to a third of all safe parking lots in Santa Clara County, but there aren’t enough spots for every person who needs one. Moreover, Stevens says she applied three times for a safe parking spot but never heard back. Even if she had been approved, she doubts she would have accepted, given the lot’s restrictions.

Katie Calhoun, a PhD student at the University of Denver who studied the efficacy of the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, says it’s common for safe parking programs to have restrictions, such as prohibiting the consumption of alcohol. Designated safe parking lots did make residents feel safer in Denver, though the average duration of stay in the safe lot was three months, after which just under half of vehicle residents continued to live in their car.

The City of Mountain View could address the claims of public safety concerns by establishing a waste disposal site where residents can easily access it and pushing for more safe lots. And, of course, the city could stop exacerbating the housing crisis by, among other things, not approving the destruction of rent-controlled apartments. For those who aren’t able to access a safe lot in cities with vehicle residency bans, there aren’t many alternatives aside from risking a police encounter, potential arrest, or moving to a town that doesn’t have a ban on the books.

As for that eventuality, Stevens says, “There is no preparation for that. Except for maybe, you know, driving around looking for a town where they’ll accept me to live.”

Officers from the Gainesville Police Department and Florida Department of Corrections announced over a loudspeaker that residents had six hours to vacate before demolition of the camp, in defiance of the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation to leave encampments intact during COVID-19. Florida’s state public health website provides no guidance on protecting people experiencing homelessness from COVID-19. Moultrie left with just one change of clothes.

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When the 37-year-old set up camp in November of last year, she made strong connections with others who lived there, people at higher risk of contracting illnesses even before COVID-19. Since the eviction, she’s been worried about their safety.

“I lost my community, and it’s hard to know if my friends are alright,” Moultrie said. “I can’t pay to keep my phone on all the time and neither can they. I’m so angry at what happened […] I worry about my former neighbors who probably don’t have a place to stay now. At our camp, many of them had houseplants and pets, it was nice. We weren’t a typical community, but we were still a community.”

She holds a handwritten list with her lost friend’s phone numbers as we speak outside of her current homeless shelter, GRACE Marketplace. GRACE, formerly Gainesville Correctional Institution, was converted to a secular shelter in 2014. The shelter does ‘bed checks’ to make sure residents are in their rooms three times a night, which Moultrie is not used to after living freely in her camp.

“If you’re not there for bed checks two nights in a row, they kick you out,” Moultrie said, “You have to be on the street until you’re allowed back in.”

The camp was established in November of last year, after other options had failed. GRACE was at full capacity, so people started camping around the edges of the shelter’s property, which the campers and GRACE called “Dignity Village.” At its peak, the camp was home to around 220 people.

They camped there so they could use GRACE’s hygiene services and other resources. When the City of Gainesville ordered Dignity Village to shut down in January, Moultrie and about 50 others set up a new camp in the woods nearby, on Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) property. FDOC officers were upset by their presence, and asked Gainesville PD to threaten the campers with trespassing charges if they refused to leave.

Many camp members left between March and May, for fear of arrest. Moultrie and the last 20 residents were evicted on May 14th by the Gainesville PD and officers from the FDOC.

According to a 2019 survey, there are an estimated 752 homeless people in Gainesville’s Alachua County, 191 of whom were in shelters. GRACE currently has the ability to house 141 people. Their capacity has been reduced by 25 percent to reduce risk of spreading COVID-19. Those who can’t make it in are often waiting outside of the facility, hoping for a chance at a roof over their heads.

“I think the big question raised by this eviction is, if they can’t be in these places, then where can they be?” asked Kirsten Anderson, litigation director at Southern Legal Counsel. “GRACE doesn’t have enough space for everyone, and you’re going to see more situations like this because people have to exist somewhere. But it’s often criminalized.”

Shelter access is particularly important during the current pandemic.

CDC guidelines specifically state: “If individual housing options are not available, allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are.” This is a precautionary measure meant to control the spread of COVID-19.

“Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers,” the guidelines say. “This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.”

A Southern Legal Counsel press release says that the CDC also encourages federal aid from FEMA and the CARES Act to be used for emergency housing, but that Gainesville officials have not secured housing for the people they are displacing.

Requests for comment were made to the Gainesville PD and FDOC. Shelby Taylor, City of Gainesville Communications Director responded in their stead.

“The Gainesville Police Department has worked compassionately with representatives from GRACE Marketplace over several months to transition people experiencing homelessness into a more stable housing environment,” Taylor said. “But GPD serves to protect the rights and property of all property owners in the city of Gainesville. In May, at the request of FDOC officials, GPD was asked to notify people camping on the property that they were trespassing.”

Taylor went on to say that the eviction effort was coordinated with representatives at GRACE.

“It would be safe to say that the capacity of all the shelters in Gainesville is about half of the homeless population,” said GRACE Executive Director Jon DeCarmine. “For all of the narrative that people are safer at home, it does not make sense to evict anybody in the middle of a pandemic.”

However, DeCarmine confirmed that GRACE worked with Gainesville PD and FDOC to evict Moultrie and other campers from the nearby encampment, claiming that it was done out of fear for residents’ safety after an incident involving a drunk driver nearly hitting people in their tents.

DeCarmine said GRACE offered beds and services to those who were displaced. However, Moultrie said she was only offered a bed at GRACE after she went to the local university’s newspaper, The Alligator, about the eviction. She claimed her fellow campers did not get beds, and said she feels lonely and constantly under surveillance at GRACE.

She still hopes to see her friends again, but doesn’t know if it will ever happen. In the meantime, she’s working on forming a nonprofit that helps fellow homeless people by providing food, first aid equipment and the basic necessities of life. She recently got accepted to Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville to study Public Health. She’s going to stay at GRACE for as long as she can. While it’s not her ideal situation, she knows that it’s hard to survive without shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People aren’t asking for much,” Moultrie said. “Just three meals a day and suitable shelter. This city, any city, should provide that to everyone during a time like this.”

The spread of this coronavirus coincides with the greatest number of unsheltered residents living on the streets of San Francisco: about 8,000 adults, 71 percent of whom once had a permanent home in the city. Jacintho, the director of addiction medicine at HealthRight 360, a clinic that has provided comprehensive support to people experiencing homelessness for over 50 years, says health care practitioners who serve those experiencing homelessness are rushing to aid a population that has long been forgotten by the city.

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Physicians and other care providers say what’s notable about the city’s response in assisting the most vulnerable San Franciscans is that the strategies deployed during the emergency are exactly the tools city leaders had been dragging their feet on implementing, such as stopping police sweeps, working with hotels to set up housing, and making sure those experiencing homelessness have access to comprehensive preventative health care.

California’s Bay Area was one of the first regions in the country to institute a shelter-in-place order, which drew ire among advocates. At first, those experiencing homelessness were exempt from the order, and later were advised to “seek shelter.” How exactly were the tens of thousands of those suffering from homelessness supposed to follow the order? And, because sheltering in place is the centerpiece of the public health response to the pandemic, how do we provide everyone with the space and security to follow these recommendations?

These are exactly the kinds of questions that Margot Kushel, a physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the city’s safety net hospital, thinks about. “There is no medicine as powerful as housing,” she says. “Homelessness is completely incompatible with health.” Housing stability has manifold impacts on those experiencing homelessness, and studies have shown that nearly 90 percent of recipients of organization-supported rehousing or rental assistance are housed in permanent homes a year after their initial transition.

Kushel, who has advised on what model policies should look like to help people make the transition from living on the streets to secure housing, says city medical teams are now conducting direct outreach to those living in unstable housing, like tents. Based on age and other medical vulnerabilities, physicians help those living on the streets understand what their options are for locating temporary shelter. Given that shelter is the first priority of physicians and policy makers, the epidemic has exposed how closely tied housing and health are.

Shelters, which typically offer clients housing for a set number of months, have relaxed some of these requirements and the city is working to make 6,555 hotel rooms available. But it’s work that has to be conducted carefully; the city can’t force someone to live in a room that’s not in their neighborhood or is located away from their community. “That’s a huge thing for the homeless population,” Jacintho says, “the shuffling of them to shelters.” This temporary housing is also the first step in seeking permanent housing solutions, not an ultimate solution.

Educating those seeking aid has made some of the everyday care work more complex. In pre-COVID times, Jacintho says, he would sit face to face with a client to go over their needs, symptoms, progress, and concerns, but now he’s communicating with them via a computer or a phone. Telemedicine might be a natural shift for someone who uses devices every day, but for those experiencing homelessness, Jacintho says it’s “definitely a shift for [his clients] culturally.”

The outbreak has meant a downturn in those coming into clinics, for others. Chuck Cloinger, the chief medical officer at St. James Infirmary, an occupational and health safety clinic for sex workers in the Bay Area, says that their mostly-volunteer team has focused on street support in order to aid clients.

Cloinger and his team are focused on making sure that essential health services that may not appear to be directly related to coronavirus management don’t fall through the cracks. Though they’re no longer conducting health screenings in their mobile clinic, the St. James Infirmary van goes out once a week to facilitate needle exchange and deliver other essential goods like hot foods and groceries.

At first, the spread of COVID-19 among unhoused residents was slower than those with shelter, but as of April 13 at least 90 people at a shelter in the city have tested positive. Unsheltered San Franciscans are already medically vulnerable, and with coronavirus testing still lagging far behind the necessary levels, the true number of impacted unsheltered residents is unknown.

If anything, Kushel hopes the recognition of homelessness as a public health crisis in and of itself — and one that can be remedied or even eradicated through systemic change — is a matter of what she calls “political will.”  Even though San Francisco voters passed Measure C in 2018, which would tax large companies to fund services for those experiencing homelessness, the money is still tied up in court. With early action from the San Francisco Department of Public Health and coordination with hotels to mitigate coronavirus as a public health concern, advocates may be right to wonder when it is that living on the streets without shelter will be seen as an issue of public concern as well.

The San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team was unable to respond to a request for comment.

It began with a $90 citation. Willis, who is a construction worker, was living in her car with her baby and parked near the worksite, but often couldn’t move her car to avoid parking tickets due to the demands of the job. She could barely scrape together enough money to put $5 in the gas tank to get to work, much less pay for a $90 ticket. Between taking care of Tobias and trying to find stable housing, the ticket became the last thing on Willis’ mind. She told herself she’d pay for it when she could save up enough money.

Then she received a second ticket, and then a third, and a fourth. Over the next few months, she had multiple tickets and late fees that added up to hundreds of dollars she couldn’t afford to pay.

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One day, when she returned from work, her car — and all of her belongings — were gone. In San Francisco, accruing five or more unpaid parking tickets meant the car would be towed. If she wanted the old 1997 Lexus back, Willis would have to pay a $537 tow fee and all of her parking tickets. Willis didn’t have the money, and a few weeks later, the tow company auctioned off her four-wheeled home.

Willis’ story echoes that of the more than 1,200 homeless San Franciscans who live in their vehicles and face the threat of having their homes towed by the city. With shelter waitlists that are consistently more than 900 people long, vehicles are often homeless people’s last resort for some semblance of safety and shelter before sleeping directly on the streets.

Losing her car was the start of a downward spiral. Willis found herself constantly asking people she knew if she could stay with them, even for just a couple of nights. Some days it was with her godsister, other days a friend that she knew, but sometimes there was no one to take her in.

“When they took my car, I started trying to sleep on the bus or sleep on BART,” Willis recalls. “I didn’t go to sleep for days because I didn’t have anywhere to sleep.”

The instability led to depression, suicidal ideation, and the loss of her job from the mounting stress of street homelessness.

“It started a never-ending cycle of debt and poverty,” Willis says. “If I was able to keep the car, I would have been able to keep my job.”

The tows and parking citations are viewed as a tool to enforce parking regulations by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency; it wants to deter bad behavior, especially for more serious violations, such as blocking a handicapped zone.

However, for those who are unable to pay those tickets, the city’s form of debt collection for sometimes only a few hundred dollars means losing a family’s most valuable asset, their car— or home. According to a 2019 report by the Lawyers Committee of Civil Rights, 50 to 60 percent of vehicles towed for unpaid parking tickets or unpaid vehicle registration are sold by the tow company.

Tori Larson, an attorney working specifically on this issue, says, “I get calls from people every day who are living in their vehicles. When they get their cars towed, they have to start from zero. It’s a disproportionate punishment for an unpaid fine.”

In 2018, the group filed a lawsuit challenging San Francisco’s practice of towing cars for unpaid tickets. The case argues that the practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

San Francisco, which charges the highest tow fees in the country, discounts tow fees for low-income individuals to $238 dollars per tow. After the first four days in the storage yard, an additional $52 fee incurs each day. That’s not including payment for parking tickets or unpaid car registration that may have gotten the car towed in the first place. The money adds up fast and, for many, could total thousands of dollars. SFMTA tows almost 4,400 of these vehicles each year.

SFMTA has proposed lowering the tow fees to $100, but for low-income and homeless communities, “coming up with $100 is like coming up with a million dollars. People don’t have this money,” says Anne Stulhdreher, director of the Financial Justice Project, which works to reduce the disproportionate impact of fines and fees on low-income communities.

Many Americans would struggle with paying that fee. According to a 2018 report from the Federal Reserve, 40 percent of Americans would be unable to cover a $400 emergency expense, such as a car tow or parking citation.

Stuhldreher has been working with community groups to reduce the burden of towing and parking citations on low-income and homeless communities for the past several years. While she notes that this is an important first step, more needs to be done.

What’s more is that the City is actually losing money for enforcing its tow program. Overall, the City’s tow program loses $4.7 million annually with low-income tows representing about $1.4 million of the deficit. Each tow costs around $299 in city administrative labor and $275 to the tow company, Auto Return, which tows and stores the vehicles. It’s a lose-lose situation for both the city and for those most impacted by the tow fees.

Homeless advocates have long called for a moratorium on the towing of vehicles that people live in, but the significance of this demand has heightened in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. A set of guidelines to respond to the pandemic put forth by the Coalition on Homelessness urges the city to end towing, stating that “these individual accommodations make it possible for people to self-quarantine.”

The vehicles also present a form of stability that would allow people to keep in contact with health care workers, maintain their health, and securely store their belongings, including medical documentation and medication, the organization said.

Last November, San Francisco opened its first safe parking program in hopes of alleviating the struggles that those living in their vehicles face after almost a decade of advocacy from community organizations and vehicularly housed people. However, its 30-car program — which will be terminated at the end of this year — far from meets the need of the hundreds of homeless San Franciscans living in their cars.

Those living in their vehicles not only face the threat of losing their homes to towing, but are also subject to harassment from police. In San Francisco, as with many other cities across the country, vehicle inhabitation is illegal — and could lead to a fine of up to $1,000 or up to six months in jail. Although the penalty is rarely enforced, advocates say police use the threat of the law frequently to force people who are vehicularly housed to move from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“They flash lights on the car, hit your window with a flashlight, and tell you you have to move,” Willis says of the police that would come by late in the night while she tried to get a few hours of rest. There were few places where she could park at night without being towed, ticketed, or told to move. “I didn’t know where to park — I’d park by the water, but I was scared. I tried to park where there were multiple cars so I could be safer.”

MiQueesha is still homeless. She sleeps on friends and family’s couches when they’re able to let her stay there. She’s hoping to finish school at San Francisco City College in construction management, earn her real estate license, and have more time to spend with her son.

With the help of her son’s grandmother, Willis has been able to purchase another car that she’s working hard to pay off. This time of year, though, construction work is slow.

She says, “Hopefully, this one isn’t towed.”

The highest-profile spat has been between Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, the former of whom gave millions of dollars to the campaign to pass Proposition C, while the latter has derided the initiative as “quick acts to make us feel good for one moment in time.”

But this debate isn’t really about tech companies and the political preferences of their wealthy CEOs. Proposition C is about our priorities at a time when wealth and power are more concentrated in America than they have been in decades.

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Were Proposition C to pass, taxes would increase for 300 or so of the city’s biggest businesses, raising $250-$300 million  for homelessness supports. (Last year, the city spent $380 million on homelessness programs, so this proposal would increase that funding by at least 65 percent.) At least half of the new funds must be dedicated to permanent housing, which research shows is the most effective way to combat homelessness, with the remainder split between mental health care, shelters, and prevention efforts.

“The idea is simple. It’s about taxing our largest and wealthiest corporations and redistributing that to our most vulnerable communities,” said Sam Lew, policy director at the Coalition on Homelessness. “The everyday San Franciscan won’t be impacted by this tax. It’s really those who are making the most profit and asking them to pay their fair share and give back to the community.”

If this sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because it is. Seattle’s city council passed and then rescinded a corporate tax to bolster funding for homelessness prevention in April, backtracking after the city’s biggest companies — and most prominently Amazon — objected and threatened to put a direct vote over the issue onto the ballot in November. Amazon also halted a construction project in the city during the dispute, threatening to blunt its economic activity if the tax remained in place.

“I and other people out on the streets have reached the conclusion that this is not a winnable battle at this time. The opposition has unlimited resources,” said one city council member who voted first for the tax and then for its repeal.

A similar dynamic is at play in San Francisco ahead of November’s vote. The threat from big businesses, such as Square, Lyft, Stripe and the others who have donated to a “No on C” campaign,  is that Proposition C would kill jobs or deter companies from coming to the Bay Area without solving the homelessness problem. However, a report from the city controller found that were the tax enacted, there would only be 725-875 fewer jobs in the city over the next 20 years, amounting to just 0.1 percent of total employment, while the measure would provide housing for thousands of people.

One of the selling points for Proposition C campaigners is that the measure would simply offset some of the tax benefits that corporations received in 2017 courtesy of the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress. It would also begin to counteract some of the vast under-investments that the federal government has made in affordable housing funding since the Reagan administration, says Lew.

“Because of that huge divestment in public housing, there’s been an increase in homelessness across the United States and there hasn’t been a reinvestment in that in the last 30-35 years,” she said. “What we’re saying in San Francisco is that we’re going to be leaders in providing housing for people who need it. We’re actually going to spend the money that we need to spend to house people.”

San Francisco has about 7,500 people who are homeless, according to the latest data, which is almost certainly an undercount due to the inherent difficulties in accessing the homeless population. People experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are also disproportionately people of color or members of the LGBTQ community, per the city’s most recent survey.

Homelessness in both San Francisco and the U.S. has risen in recent years for many reasons, but one of them is growing economic inequality. In California and San Francisco in particular, that inequality is boosted in no small part by the presence of America’s tech titans. Plenty of research has shown that tech clustering is responsible for the growing wage gap in big cities, and for the divergence between wages in those cities and elsewhere. And that clustering didn’t happen completely organically: San Francisco provided tax breaks to tech companies that settled in the city, with one known as the “Twitter tax break” saving companies $34 million in 2014 alone.

Tech workers, especially at the richer end of the income scale, have seen their incomes rise in California. However, everyone else hasn’t been so fortunate:  According to a recent report, wages for 90 percent of California workers are lower than they were 20 years ago.  There’s also no shortage of stories about other inequalities in the Bay Area, on everything from food to transportation to education.

Even a decent paying job is no guarantee of affordable housing, thanks in part to the tech-industry driving gentrification and increased housing prices in California’s major cities. Average rent in San Francisco varies depending on how it is calculated, but many analyses place it above $3,000 per month. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renting a modest two-bedroom home in the city requires a wage of more than $60 per hour.

These figures, not which tech CEO said what on Twitter, get at the essence of Proposition C. The only question that really matters is: Will San Francisco will ask its wealthiest corporations to pay slightly more so that thousands of currently homeless people can have a roof over their heads?

“We’re on this national platform now because two CEOs of tech companies are fighting about whether it should be passed,” said Lew. “But at the end of the day we’re fighting for a measure that’s going to save lives regardless of what billionaires are thinking.”

Five of the cots are for women and five for men, which is far short of the demand. The room is empty now, in mid-afternoon, but by 6:00 p.m., when the shelter opens, young people will be lining up for a chance to snag a few square feet of space for the evening, and maybe a shower and a hot meal.

“We turn away at least 8 youth per night,” says Madye Henson, Covenant House Washington’s chief executive officer.

Henson has added extra beds for hypothermia season and is planning a permanent expansion to 20 beds this year. In combination with its other programs, that would bring Covenant House’s total emergency shelter capacity to 77, making it the city’s largest provider of emergency shelter for homeless youth. But compared with the D.C. General Family Shelter for families with children, with 264 beds, Covenant House is still tiny.

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The shortage of shelter beds for homeless youth is endemic across the country. Youth homelessness has been a low priority for federal funding and largely an afterthought in communities’ efforts to fight homelessness. Instead, young adults have been thrown into the system for chronically homeless adults, despite their very different needs and the dangers they face in adult shelters.

As a result, millions of young people are going without the shelter and services they need, at enormous downstream costs for government. “Shelter providers can tell you that some of the [homeless] adults they see now are the same people they saw as kids,” says Barbara Duffield, executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on ending youth homelessness.

As many as 1 in 10 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25—or 3.5 million young people—experience homelessness over a 12-month period, according to the Voice of Youth Count survey, a new study by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. About half of this is “couch surfing,” which could include crashing at a friend’s house for a few days between apartments but typically involves more long-term housing instability. The other half is “explicit” homelessness, such as sleeping in cars, sheds, or under bridges. And while homelessness is often perceived to be an urban problem, the Chapin Hall study found that rural youth were just as likely to have experienced homelessness as youth in cities.

“When most people think of homelessness, they think of older adults or families on the streets, not adolescents or young people,” says Matthew Morton, principal investigator for Chapin Hall’s research. “We’ve always assumed young people were running away or acting out but not becoming chronically homeless over time.”

Morton’s research validates what’s long been evident in places like the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC)’s “drop-in” center for homeless youth—a brightly painted row house in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. While places like Covenant House provide space at night, LAYC is one of only two places in the city where homeless youth can find a safe place to stay during the day. Young people can get something to eat, take a shower and brush their teeth, talk to counselors, get help finding a job, and even do some laundry. The center also distributes 9,000 diapers a month to homeless young moms and maintains a roomful of donated clothing in all shapes and sizes.

John Van Zandt, the center’s director, says that about 30 to 35 young people come in every day. While the majority of these are regulars, about 100 or so every month are first-timers.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, there’s a turkey roasting in the oven of the communal kitchen on the top floor of the row house. One young man is doing his laundry, carefully separating whites from colors. On the ground floor, in what would otherwise be the living room, there are several desks and computers for staff and a row of chairs where half a dozen young people are hanging out. Some are scrolling through their smartphones, one man with long braids and ripped jeans is working on his resume with a staffer, and two others are resting on bunkbeds in a small room at the back. A lot of casual banter is flying. The atmosphere is relaxed.

An African American man named Trevor is among the young people sitting in the chairs at the front of the room (he did not give his full name for privacy reasons). His build is tall and stocky but his long-lashed features are delicate and his beard closely shaved. At the moment, he’s getting ready to leave for a part-time retail job at a cosmetics store downtown. Many of the youth who come to LAYC have jobs, but they don’t earn nearly enough to afford D.C. rents.

Trevor has been homeless since his grandmother, his only relative, passed away four years ago. “She did everything for me,” he says. For a while, he coped with alcohol. “You know how they have the wine in the plastic containers that hold three glasses?” he says. “I would drink three of them a day … But I wouldn’t be like drunk,” he adds quickly. “I don’t like to show up at work drunk.”

Trevor is 26 years old, technically past the age that he’s eligible to receive the center’s services (which is 24), but he has nowhere else to go. At night, he’s been staying at Casa Ruby, a shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth nearby. By day, he is often at LAYC.

Van Zandt hears dozens of stories like Trevor’s every day. “About 40 percent of the youth we serve identify as LGBT,” he says. “We have a lot of young trans youth here. Others have differences with their families and decide to leave. Some of them have babies, and their parents tell them, ‘If you’re old enough to have a baby, you’re old enough to be on your own.’” Other young people have been incarcerated but then released with no place to stay, while others are fleeing backgrounds of domestic violence or substance abuse or are aging out of foster care. Still others are what Van Zandt calls “generationally homeless,” with parents who are homeless, too.

Piled up against the walls of Van Zandt’s office in the basement are kitchen bags and paper sacks filled with clothes and random belongings—all left with him for safekeeping by the center’s clients. Each pile is its own story.

“That hamper down there is a boy who’s in jail,” says Van Zandt, pointing to a white plastic basket filled with sweatshirts and other clothing. “So we’re hanging onto his stuff till he comes back.” Van Zandt also says young people are allowed to use the center as their mailing address. “We have two huge mailboxes upstairs full of mail,” he says. “Hundreds of youth use this as their permanent address—packages, checks, you name it. I’m sure the DMV is wondering why there are so many people who say they live at 3045 15th Street.”

Despite the depth and breadth of youth homelessness that is obvious at places like LAYC and Covenant House, until only a few years ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) did not acknowledge homeless youth as a distinct population with distinct needs. Rather, HUD’s approach to homelessness has tended to be monolithic, with a particular focus on the highly visible, chronically homeless adults you see on park benches or sleeping in doorways.

One way this inattention to youth homelessness manifests itself is in the way that HUD determines the extent of homelessness in the country. On one night in January every year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) coordinates a nationwide count of the number of people experiencing homelessness by gathering data from shelters and transitional housing programs and sending volunteers into the streets. In 2017, this count found that 553,742 people were homeless as defined by HUD—that is, living in shelters, transitional housing programs, or out in the open (unsheltered). Until 2013, however, HUD did not explicitly count youth ages 18 to 24 (instead lumping them in with adults), and it wasn’t until 2015 that HUD’s official point-in-time counts included “unaccompanied young adults” in their own category.

Moreover, the way that HUD defines homelessness still results in a gross underestimate of homeless youth. “This count has been very oriented to adult patterns of homelessness and where adults are likely to go,” says Nan Roman, President of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. In D.C., for example, the 2017 point-in-time census found just 238 homeless youth (as defined by HUD)—a number belied by the experience of people like LAYC’s Van Zandt and Covenant House’s Henson. Nationally, the homeless youth count was 36,010—orders of magnitude below the figures from Chapin Hall’s research.

The problem with the federal numbers is that HUD doesn’t consider homelessness to include couch surfing, which advocates say is the predominant experience of homeless youth. “Young people are the hidden homeless,” says advocate Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth.

For one thing, young people tend to avoid shelters, encampments and other places where they are more likely to be seen—but also less likely to be counted—out of justifiable fears for their safety. A recent study of homeless youth released by Covenant House International and Loyola University found that 91 percent of the youth surveyed had been approached with “work opportunities” that turned out to be “fraudulent work situations, scams, pandering, or sex trafficking,” and that one-fifth had ultimately been victimized by this kind of trafficking.

It’s also often not clear when young people begin an episode of homelessness. “Young people aren’t fine one day and then sleeping under a bridge,” says Chapin Hall’s Morton. “Homelessness often involves a trajectory. A young person might run away a couple of times or sleep on someone’s couch or with a relative or neighbor. And then over time if these challenges they’re experiencing continue, running away or couch surfing becomes sleeping in the car or on the streets.”

That kind of instability was the experience of Carla R. of Fairfax, Virginia, who fled her abusive parents at age 17 while pregnant with her first child. “I was living in a lot of different places,” she says. “I was living at my sister’s house, my son’s father’s sister’s place, then my boyfriend’s friend’s place sometimes.” At one point, she stayed with her boyfriend’s mother, who was renting out space in her house for extra cash. She says she slept on the floor with at least a dozen other people scattered throughout the house. “I had bedbug bites everywhere.”

Nevertheless, Carla would not have been considered homeless by HUD.

The definition of homelessness matters because of its impact on the resources available—a principal purpose of HUD’s annual count is to help communities allocate their funds for preventing and ending homelessness. Undercounting homeless youth means that localities are in turn underestimating the extent of the problem and limiting what they spend on shelters and services targeted to youth.

According to Jasmine Hayes, deputy director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, HUD spent $2.38 billion on homelessness assistance in 2016, but just $134 million on youth-specific services. Congress has also consistently underfunded services available under the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, passed in 2008. While the law authorizes up to $165 million a year, actual funding has stayed flat at $119 million, Hayes says.

As a result, young people aren’t getting the services they need. Carla, for instance, was able to avoid the trajectory into street homelessness through a residential housing program for young mothers run by Second Story, a nonprofit based in Fairfax County, Virginia. The program helped her arrange for child care, improve her parenting skills, find a job, and even attend college. Today, at age 25, she has a well-paying job at a defense contracting agency and owns her own condo.

But she’s one of the lucky ones. According to executive director Judith Dittman, Second Story is now the only nonprofit in Fairfax County serving homeless youth, while five other shelters have closed their doors over the past few decades because of funding cuts. Despite Fairfax County’s reputation for affluence, the county reports more than 2,300 homeless children in its schools, and Dittman says there is consistently a waitlist of at least 20 to 30 youth for Second Story’s housing programs. “The need is just immense,” she says.

When a young person comes into an emergency shelter, many localities administer a standardized questionnaire, called the “Transition Age Youth Vulnerability Index – Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool” (TAY-VI-SPDAT), to assess the severity of a young person’s situation. The questionnaire asks, for example, how many episodes of homelessness a young person has experienced in the past three years, and whether they’ve ever been assaulted or engaged in risky activities such as exchanging “sex for money, food, drugs, or a place to stay.” It also includes questions about a young person’s mental and physical health and connections to family and friends. The higher the score, the more desperate the young person’s situation.

For example, says LAYC’s Van Zandt, “If you score high on the SPDAT, [it could be that] you’ve been trafficked, you’re addicted to K2 [a synthetic marijuana], and you’re bipolar.” But resources are also so scarce that it’s often only the young people in the direst of situations who are able to get help, while preventive services for people who are on the cusp of chronic homelessness are almost entirely absent.

That, says Morton, is the greatest tragedy of the current federal non-response to youth homelessness. “We’re forcing a cycle of waiting unless young people have suffered long enough to deserve services,” he says. “That’s the problem with the way the system works. Every young person who asks for help should get help.”

Instead, the lack of help and resources means that many of today’s homeless youth are almost certain to be tomorrow’s homeless adults. The result is not just greater costs for government but the catastrophic—and all too avoidable—loss of human potential.

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Such ordinary places tell extraordinary stories of a health crisis and premature mortality amid surging death rates. In affluent Orange County, homeless deaths rose 74 percent in 2015 from the year before, reaching 188. Last year saw the toll rise to 201. Similarly, the homeless death count has risen in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Clara, and San Diego counties in recent years.

A significant contributor to the increase is drug overdose, which has replaced HIV as the primary homeless epidemic, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But another explanation is the historically unprecedented graying of our homeless population. Half of the nation’s chronically homeless are now over 50, and they suffer from accelerated aging—dying of ordinary conditions such as heart disease and cancer as many as 25 years earlier than the rest of us.

“Fifty is the new 75,” says Dr. Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco, who studies homeless health and regularly treats middle-aged people for advanced geriatric illnesses.

With homeless life expectancy ranging between 42 and 52, and so many rounding this milestone, the time for meaningful intervention is fast disappearing. It’s thus more crucial than ever to shine a light on homeless people’s health, lack of medical care, and the circumstances of their deaths.

The following 10 images offer unusually intimate, eerie portraits of the places, though not necessarily the exact spots, where homeless people spent their final moments in Orange County in 2015 and 2016.

PEDRO SAJCHE CHAN, 31

Ruth Barnwell, a 73-year-old resident and president of the Congress Heights tenants association, said that she told her landlord about raw sewage in the basement in July 2015, but they didn’t do anything about it until the following October. Barnwell has been living in Congress Heights for 34 years, but she says that they didn’t start having these issues until 2013.

“That’s when we found out the building was going to be turned into high-rises,” she says.

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In 2013, two years after acquiring four of the five Congress Heights buildings, Sanford Capital and City Partners submitted a plan to the Zoning Commission to demolish the apartment complex and install 446,000 square feet of luxury offices and condos in its place. The tenants allege that Sanford—which has already racked up more than 200 housing code violations in its 19 apartment buildings across the city—has been intentionally letting the conditions degrade so that residents will be forced to move out to make way for the new development.

Robert Green, a 68-year-old resident who lives on a fixed income, says that the company has gone as far as soliciting damage. One day, as he was walking out of his apartment building, an electrician who was walking into the building stopped him. “You still live here?” The man asked. Green said yes.

“They paid me to go downstairs and mess up some wires,” he told Green. (Sanford Capital did not respond to requests for comment.)

If Sanford’s plan is to drive residents out of Congress Heights, it’s working: Since 2013, the number of occupied units of affordable housing has dropped from 49 to 13.

*          *          *

The Zoning Commission approved Sanford’s development plan in 2015, but the company can’t act on it yet. The plan requires control of all five of the Congress Heights buildings; Sanford currently owns four. In January, the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development repossessed the fifth and final piece of the Congress Heights puzzle: the vacant building at 3200 13th St SE. But the remaining residents, who would be forced to move, aren’t letting it go without a fight.

On September 6, the Congress Heights tenants association delivered a letter to Mayor Bowser’s office with a simple request: Instead of letting Sanford buy the vacant building in a public auction, let the current residents exercise their Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) rights to have their chosen nonprofit developer build 200 units of affordable housing on the land.

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act wasn’t designed for situations like the one in Congress Heights—it grants renters the first right to purchase their property if the building owner wants to sell. The building at 3200 doesn’t have any tenants; it’s been vacant for years. But since it’s part of an entire neighborhood that will be demolished under the redevelopment plan, the tenants of the surrounding buildings have a vested interest in who ultimately controls the building.

If the district puts the building up for public auction and Sanford acquires it, Sanford will have assembled all the necessary pieces to execute its luxury development plan. But if the tenants are assigned ownership, they’re hoping that Sanford—now unable to complete its redevelopment—will cut its losses and sell the remaining buildings to the National Housing Trust (NHT). NHT would then execute its own plan to build 200 units of affordable housing on the land.

In either case, the current buildings will be demolished and residents will, at least temporarily, be displaced. The difference is what happens after the buildings are rebuilt.

An executive of City Partners has said that if it executes its redevelopment plan, “All current residents will be offered the chance to move back into the new building at their current lease rates.”

This is a common promise that developers offer residents when they’re displacing them, but it’s rarely fulfilled. A 2004 study by the Urban Institute found that only 19 percent of families returned to neighborhoods they were displaced from, despite promises that they could. Developers often simply ignore their previous promise and rely on residents suing them to retain their right to return. But the costs of fighting a court case are so high that it’s as if residents aren’t allowed to return at all.

The National Housing Trust has offered the tenants the same promise to return, in addition to an offer to house them at other properties in the meantime. But the tenants are more willing to believe that NHT will honor this promise than Sanford, because NHT’s goal is to build more and better affordable housing for these residents, while Sanford’s goal is to profit.

*          *          *

The District of Columbia’s affordable housing crisis extends far beyond Congress Heights. There are roughly 1,500 families, including more than 2,700 children, who are homeless on a given night in the district. And while homelessness is declining nationally, it’s grown in D.C. by almost 75 percent in the past five years. Housing is so expensive in the district that a single parent working a minimum-wage job would have to work 119 hours per week to afford a 2-bedroom apartment at market rate.

The district’s flagship program to deal with the homelessness crisis is the rapid rehousing program, which provides temporary vouchers that families can use for rent. But most reputable landlords won’t accept the vouchers, and they’re too small and too temporary to end most families’ housing insecurity, so many voucher recipients get caught in a cycle of rapid rehousing, eviction, and homelessness. Will Merrifield, an attorney who represents the Congress Heights tenants, says this creates a “subprime market for slumlords to take advantage of people with subsidies.”

Because a large portion of voucher recipients end up in Sanford properties, they receive millions of taxpayer dollars annually to house low-income families in deplorable conditions. City officials have been hesitant to hold Sanford accountable for its negligence, lamenting that it’s “not always easy” to find other landlords who are willing to house renters with vouchers. But it’s worth noting that Sanford also has direct ties to the Bowser administration: Mayor Bowser has received donations from Geoffrey Griffis, the head of Sanford partner City Partners; Mary Strauss, the wife of Sanford co-founder Patrick Strauss; and Sanford Capital itself. The Sanford Capital donation was $1,000 more than the legal limit.

“These politicians keep acting like this affordable housing crisis fell out of the sky, like it’s a piano that fell out of a window,” says Merrifield. “They created this.”

The cycle of development and displacement is at work in almost every corner of the city. In Columbia Heights, H Street, Brookland Manor, and countless other neighborhoods, low-income, primarily black residents are being pushed out to make room for wealthy, primarily white Millennials. And the district often finances this displacement. They’ve given away hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of public land to private developers. In Congress Heights alone, they’ve allocated $103 million for a development project that will build a new practice facility for the Wizards—right across the street from residents who have to live with feces backing up into their bathtub.

At a town hall meeting in Congress Heights last week, Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White (D) admitted that the district has the resources to solve the affordable housing crisis. “It’s not that we don’t have the money,” he said. “It’s about leadership.”

The tenants view their request to Mayor Bowser as the perfect opportunity for her administration to demonstrate its commitment to affordable housing. “She’s going to continue to stand with the slumlords and developers, or she’s going to come over to the people’s side,” says Barnwell. “We believe that we can win. She’s coming up for re-election, you know.”

So far, the city government seems unmoved. Polly Donaldson, the director of the Department of Housing and Community Development, offered the following statement about the tenants’ request: “The plan for the vacant building is to put it out for competitive bid for solicitation once the litigation has cleared.”

In Florida, as officials rushed to open emergency shelters for those forced from their homes by Irma, some residents who had been homeless before the hurricane were forced to wear bright yellow bracelets to mark their status. In St. Augustine, previously homeless people reported that they were not only forced to wear wristbands, but that authorities warned newly homeless hurricane victims to stay away from people with the yellow bracelets because they were criminals, thieves, and drug users. One woman described her experience to a local service provider this way: “They treated me like I was non-human, insulted me and others … [They] separated us from other people.”

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In New Smyrna Beach, Florida, a community volunteer said that previously homeless people—including some in wheelchairs—were turned away from hurricane shelters and later directed to the Volusia County Fairgrounds, which served as a segregated shelter for pre-hurricane homeless people. A homeless man in Daytona Beach said, “[We] were treated like animals … like we got a disease or something.”

The unequal treatment of “pre-hurricane homeless” people versus “hurricane homeless” people was not unique to Florida. One Houston service provider told me, “There was definitely a treatment of people who had been homeless prior to the storm that was different … [they were] told that they needed to go to agencies that are part of the city homeless service system, rather than receive services within the [hurricane] shelter.”  They were then de-prioritized for assistance too, as a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency wrote in an email to Reuters: “If an individual was homeless pre-disaster, they may not be considered for Housing Assistance and Other Needs Assistance, which both require successful verification of pre-disaster occupancy.”

The reality is, none of the people who were homeless before the storms were living “pre-disaster” lives. Before the hurricanes struck, they had already fallen victim to more routine disasters: a lost job, eviction, health crisis, domestic violence, untreated addiction, or mental illness. Any of these can lead to homelessness because of the manmade disaster that is the biggest driving cause of homelessness today: the crisis in affordable housing.

After decades of cuts to federal housing programs—which shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 30 percent between 1996 and 2016—only 1 in 4 of those who are poor enough to qualify for housing assistance currently receive it. At the same time, as many cities experience luxury development booms, lower-income people are being displaced from the private housing market. As inequality deepens, poorer Americans must crash with families and friends, live in their cars, seek refuge in emergency shelters, or try to survive on the streets.

For those living in public, there is also the risk of being fined, arrested, and even jailed. Increasingly, cities across the country are passing and enforcing laws that make it a crime to sit, sleep, and even eat in public places. Over the past ten years, such laws have increased dramatically the throughout country—including in some of the same cities that rushed to the aid of hurricane victims.

In Houston, some 6,000 people were homeless pre-Harvey, and emergency shelters had long been full. But instead of helping homeless residents, the city passed a new law just before the storm making it a crime to sleep on the street—punishable by fine, arrest, and incarceration.

The slew of storms will now worsen the already tight housing market—the destruction of millions of properties will increase demand and drive rents higher. This will likely hit low-income people particularly hard, since they are more likely to live in flood-prone areas or in shoddy, unsafe housing, making their residences particularly vulnerable to ruin. Not surprisingly, these disasters disproportionately affect people of color, who are not only more likely to be poor, but also more likely to be homeless. Those unable to receive housing assistance will be left to fight for space in overflowing emergency shelters or to live on the streets.

People often come together with generosity in the face of natural disasters, as they can remind us that we are all vulnerable to nature. But as Harvey, Irma, Jose, and now Maria have shown, the reality is that some of us are both more vulnerable and more likely to be excluded from help and human decency.

A coalition of organizations is now advocating for new policies to ensure a fair and just recovery—and to prevent those who are most vulnerable from being stigmatized, excluded, and tagged with special bracelets during future natural disasters. Responses to natural disasters must be equitable, both during and after the crisis. They must recognize the needs—and humanity—of those made homeless by natural disasters and those made homeless by manmade disasters.

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

I pulled out of a four-book editing contract and moved in with her.  I learned from a social worker that I could receive 20 hours a week of help from home health aides, as well as SNAP benefits and cash assistance to help compensate for my decreased work income.  It was enough for us to get by.

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About a month after I moved in with her, we returned from grocery shopping to find a state trooper standing outside of our front door. He handed me a court summons:  My sister had sued me for custody of our mother.  She wanted to place her in a care facility.

The court denied my sister’s request and named me our mother’s legal guardian, but it appointed my sister as guardian of her property.  In 2009, when my mother passed away, my sister evicted me.

The day I was scheduled to move out, I stood in a convenience store, dazed, as I stared at microwaveable meals.  These would be my new staple when I moved into the motel room.

My phone rang—my sister.  She told me she needed me out of the house in a couple of hours—she was a real estate agent and a client wanted to see the house.

“No hard feelings,” she said.

*            *            *

I was homeless for less than six weeks, a relatively short time compared to most.

The reason I fared better than many suddenly homeless people is because I was already in the social services system in Ocean County, New Jersey due to my mother’s illness.  Social services simply reopened my case and quickly provided temporary emergency housing.

For most people, emergency housing is just a port in the storm, since it only gives you six weeks to find permanent housing. It’s not easy to find a home—most landlords don’t want to accept housing vouchers for rent—but I was fortunate.  The woman who ran my church’s homeless outreach program vouched for me, so I was able to move into an apartment before my placement at the motel expired.

After my housing was stabilized, the trauma of familial conflict, loss, and eviction pummeled me like a tsunami.

I was overcome with anxiety, convinced that things would never go right again.  Every time I heard a noise at night I would jump out of bed to check on my mother—worried that she was trying to get up and go to the bathroom by herself—before I remembered she was gone. In the mornings, depression made getting out of bed a struggle. Confused, I went to my local hospital where I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  For three months, I participated in an intensive outpatient treatment program: three days a week I received cognitive mental health counseling, medication, and group therapy.

I came to understand that being solely responsible for my mother’s care for two years, combined with fighting to prevent her worst nightmare—losing her home and being forced into an institution—had been too much for me.  My brain and nervous system had been denied adequate time to recover from prolonged, severe stress.

It took me a couple of years, but I finally recovered—or at least adjusted to living with PTSD.  And I wanted to use my experience to help others going through the same thing.

*            *            *

At first I thought I could teach people how to successfully navigate the social services system like I had. But I quickly learned that my experience wasn’t necessarily transferrable to them. The fact that I had already been in the social services system, and had a key relationship through my community, made all the difference for me.

For example, someone contacted me to see if I could help find housing for a young man who was living in the woods.  When we sought emergency shelter through county social services, they turned him down because he’d been homeless for too long. They prioritized people who had been homeless for less than two weeks, and he’d been homeless for four months. Then we applied for Emergency Housing Assistance, but he couldn’t get to the mandated weekly career or substance abuse counseling. Those offices were across town, and out of reach of public transportation. Plus, the county requires documentation proving you are not currently receiving unemployment benefits and a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that no relatives are claiming you as a dependent—complete with a mailing address.

That young man spent another year in the woods before he was taken to a county mental health facility. Turned out he was autistic, and therefore eligible for permanent housing in a facility for persons with disabilities.  The county didn’t seem to understand the urgency of getting people housed quickly so they could begin their recovery.  There were too many pre-conditions and not enough affordable housing units to get the job done.

*            *            *

Since people clearly needed much more than the current system could offer, I explored a different avenue: Advocating for a County Homeless Trust Fund that would secure the monies needed for a shelter and real-time emergency housing assistance.

Unfortunately, advocates’ conversations with elected officials weren’t productive. In one meeting, a political representative charged with overseeing social services simply ticked off a series of negative stereotypes: “The homeless have always been here no matter how much money we spend trying to solve the problem… Nothing seems to work… I think many of them prefer to live like that.”

Clearly, she didn’t know any homeless people. In my half-dozen years working with people without homes, I’ve met very few individuals who wouldn’t prefer having a roof over their head, security, privacy, heat, running water, a toilet.  Nevertheless, this mischaracterization of the homeless is common—I’ve heard it from social workers, religious leaders, and agency heads. If you repeat a lie enough times, it gains currency.

Advocating for the Trust Fund reinforced the same feeling I had when I tried to advocate for people navigating social services: Unless policymakers and government employees enlist the involvement of people who have experienced this kind of struggle, they will not understand, support, or implement the solutions we need.

*            *            *

In one sense, I’ve now come full circle.  I’m volunteering at the same homeless outreach center that first helped me when I was evicted. We provide people with necessities like clothing, blankets, tents, heaters, and food, as well as services such as haircuts and laundry.  The center also creates a sense of community where people can lean on each other as they try to recover from trauma and find stability in their lives.

Now I’m also trying to connect our outreach community with opportunities that will help people achieve financial and housing independence.  A couple weeks ago I took a few young men and women to a farm where I used to volunteer, so they can hopefully earn some money and pick up some skills in a growing industry—vertical farming.

It was a diverse group. One woman was living in the woods and “here and there.” Another guy has emergency housing assistance and tons of energy—he skateboards everywhere—but no job. The third guy has been living without housing for more than five years and was looking for work.

They were given a tour of the operation and invited to fill out an application for a 60-hour summer work and training program. The manager also gave them her cell phone number and said to call her anytime to check on job openings.

Before we left town, we stopped at a restaurant where one of them applied for a job.  Then I took them to the beach on the other side of town—none of them had ever been there before.  For a little while at least, they were simply young people enjoying a beach, free from the burden of being labeled “disaffected homeless youths.”

These moments of normalcy—in a culture that constantly treats us as flawed and abnormal—are part of how we find our way again.

*            *            *

My experiences since my mother’s death and my eviction have taught me what we need to do to end homelessness in America.  If we simply invested in affordable housing—and committed to getting people housed quickly so they can begin their recovery—we would immediately see dramatic reductions in homelessness and an increase in people contributing to our communities.  On top of it, we know that this approach would save our nation money.

But it doesn’t matter how many studies demonstrate that this is the direction we need to go.  What is lacking, still, is political will.  And that will only change when our elected representatives begin listening to—and taking seriously—those of us who have lived this struggle.

The majority of voters are still unlikely to face issues on Election Day, but the new burdens fall disproportionately on a select cohort of Americans. Here are the groups of people who will face some of the steepest battles to cast their vote.

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People of color

African-Americans had the highest voter turnout rates in 2012, but new obstacles could keep many black voters from the ballot box this year. Laws that require voters to present photo ID at the polls—which have cropped up in eight states since 2013, bringing the total to 34 states—disproportionately impact African-Americans. That’s because people of color are less likely than whites to have the specific forms of required photo ID, and because these laws are more common in  Southern states (where African-Americans are concentrated).

In addition to obstructive voter ID laws, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans are often plagued by language barriers. While the Voting Rights Act contains protections for language-minority voters, poll workers are not always aware of them (so they might not honor these voters’ rights, for example, to have someone assist them at the polls).

People of color often have to take more time and travel further distances in order to vote. In 2012, black and Latino voters waited nearly twice as long as white voters to cast their ballots, likely due in part to state decisions to restrict early voting. And this year, Native Americans in northern Nevada will have to travel nearly 100 miles round-trip to cast their ballot in November.

Homeless people

First, the good news: in recent years, court decisions and new laws at both the state and federal level have eliminated formal bans on voters who do not live in a “traditional dwelling.” As a result, homeless people are now formally able to register and vote in every state.

But homeless adults—of whom there are at least 400,000 nationally—still face a variety of informal barriers. Some states require voters to provide a mailing address when they register. Other states require voters to prove how long they have lived in a voting district, a task that is understandably difficult for homeless people. And again, stricter voter restriction laws—like photo ID requirements—fall particularly hard on the homeless community, who are less likely to have a driver’s license or other forms of acceptable identification.

People with criminal records

Americans with criminal records, especially those with felony convictions, face some of the steepest—and most convoluted—barriers to the ballot box. In fact, a new study found that a record 6.1 million people are barred from voting this year because of felony convictions.

Because voting for people with felony convictions has not been federally regulated, those seeking to register face a patchwork of state voting laws that range from no restrictions (in Maine and Vermont) to a lifetime of disenfranchisement (in 10 states). Ten states also restrict voting for people with misdemeanors. These restrictions disproportionately impact people of color. In Florida, felony disenfranchisement bars 23% of African Americans from voting, and four other states also suppress the votes of 1 in 5 black citizens.

Unfortunately, the confusion and misinformation around state laws can even discourage eligible Americans with criminal records from voting. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “Many people with past criminal records mistakenly believe they are ineligible to vote.” As a result, many end up staying home unnecessarily on Election Day.

Women

Even though women made up a majority of voters in 2012, voter ID laws are creating new obstacles for them, too. Thirty-four states require voters to present some kind of identification. Roughly 90% of women change their last names when they get married (and often change their names back following a divorce), and many may not realize their voter registration does not match the name on their ID until it comes time to vote. What’s more, women are also more likely to belong to other groups who face barriers at the polls—low-wage workers, seniors, students, and the poor.

Low-wage workers

More than 23 million people—disproportionately women and people of color—work in low-wage jobs. These workers are especially likely to have volatile and erratic schedules, which makes it hard for them to plan to get to the polls. Additionally, only 30 states require employers to give workers time off to vote—and even among states that do provide workers leave to vote, that time off is not always paid.

For workers who subsist on very low wages, the decision to take time off to cast a ballot can result in a difficult financial loss. That may explain the 30-point gap in voter participation along income lines: Less than half of people earning under $30,000 a year voted in the 2012 election, while over 80% of people earning over $150,000 voted. As a point of comparison, 99% of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans voted.

Transgender people

Transgender citizens have become a vocal voting bloc this election cycle, but stringent photo ID laws threaten their ability to cast a ballot. An estimated 27% of trans people lack identification that accurately reflects their gender, in large part because they face uphill legal and financial battles to update their ID documents. For example, in at least 15 states, trans people are required to show proof of a gender reassignment surgery—a task that is simply not possible for those who are unable or choose not to have the surgery.

People with disabilities

People with disabilities face a wide range of voting obstacles, but chief among them are transportation, lack of accommodations at the polls, and poll workers who are ill-equipped to offer help. A full 30% of people with disabilities are unable to drive, which makes it hard to get to the polls in the first place—particularly for those voters who live alone or in rural areas. Even if they manage to make it to their polling location, a lack of ramps or curb cuts and limited support for voters with vision impairments make it difficult for people with disabilities to vote—even though laws like the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the Americans with Disabilities Act were designed to improve ballot access. These barriers help explain why turnout rates among voters with disabilities—especially those with cognitive disabilities—tend to be lower than voters without disabilities. In fact, it can be difficult for people with disabilities to even register to vote, since most online voter registrations are not accessible for people with vision-related or cognitive disabilities. All told, these barriers to access could account for as many as 3 million votes.

None of these barriers are inevitable. Most are the consequences of policy decisions, some of which were made with the deliberate intent of disenfranchisement. Election Day gives Americans the opportunity to reverse these laws, and to elect policymakers who will work on behalf of those who don’t always have a voice.

My mother’s words suggested that our circumstances were our fault, as if we were being punished for sins of the past. I know now that we were just poor and doing the best we could to survive—and there were many other families in rural America like us, struggling to make ends meet.

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Substandard Housing

Before my family occupied a tent on a campsite, we lived in substandard housing in rural Magnolia, Illinois. The only house we could afford was in disrepair—the plumbing was a patchwork of burst pipes, some rooms did not have insulation, and all eight of us were crammed into three small bedrooms.

My parents were determined, so they persuaded the owner to allow us to live as rent-paying tenants while my father—a carpenter by trade—worked to make the house livable. My parents invested a lot of money, time, and care to make that house our home, rather than some unit of housing stock: they repaired a leaking toilet, brought running water to the bathroom sink, closed the porch to make a new bedroom, and added insulation. The only time the owner paid for maintenance was when the septic system collapsed and flooded our house with waste.

Though substandard housing is often described in terms of urban blight, suburban and rural families are actually twice as likely to face issues with things like “incomplete plumbing,” like my family did. What’s more, minority families in suburban and rural areas are twice as likely as their white, non-Hispanic counterparts to live in substandard housing—a statistical double whammy for my family.

Eviction

After about a year, my family was served with an eviction notice for “refusal to pay.” The landlord was actually refusing to take payment in order to force us out, but the deck was stacked against us—and against tenants in general—in court. Careful documentation of past rental payments and major investments in the property offered no protection from being evicted without cause. My mother recalls, “we went to court to fight [the eviction], but knew we wouldn’t win.” And we didn’t.

The court determined that we had 30 days to vacate the premises. My parents searched desperately for housing options, but the eviction itself tainted our rental applications. One landlord seemed willing to overlook the risks associated with renting to an evicted family with six children, but when he heard our Latino surname—Oquenda—he suddenly struggled to find available space for us. According to a 2012 HUD report on housing discrimination, that’s fairly common: Hispanic renters are both “told about” and “shown” 12.5 percent and 7.5 percent fewer available units, respectively, than equally qualified white, non-Hispanic renters.

That is how we ended up homeless, living at a campsite in Marseilles, Illinois.

Homelessness

During our time at Marseilles’ Glenwood campgrounds, there were daily torrents of rain that flooded our tent and damaged our belongings. At one point, the runoff was so strong that it carried away our food cooler (we didn’t have a refrigerator), spilling our food out over the campsite and destroying the bread and buns we used for peanut butter and jelly and hot dogs.

Eventually the mud seeped through the tent’s openings, covering our clothes and blankets, and the tent became infested with ants and other insects that were seeking cover from the weather. This was a low-point for my family.

Eventually the rain stopped, and we found another site:  Maple Leaf Park.  Some of my fondest memories took place there: learning to swim, living off the crawdads and fish in the ponds, and singing songs around the fire we built from wood we gathered. We had help from food stamps and the grounds had showers, but most importantly our family’s morale rebounded.

After two more weeks at the campsite, someone offered us help. A friend let us stay with his family. Since resources like shelters and food banks are few and far between in rural areas, many homeless families end up in crowded housing or “doubling-up” with extended family or friends. We lived with that family for a few weeks before we found another home in Henry, Illinois.

Though the house in Henry also was substandard—incomplete plumbing, lack of insulation, and faulty electricity—we made it our home. It certainly beat the rain.

What’s Next

My family’s experience isn’t unique. On any given night in 2015, 32,800 Americans in rural families experienced homelessness. What’s more, the practical challenges of counting homeless people in rural areas means we may be underestimating the true size of the rural homeless population.

Structural issues—such as higher poverty rates; inadequate transportation; and limited access to shelters and services like health, mental health, and child care—make people and families who live in rural areas particularly vulnerable. This helps explain why rural homeless families are disproportionately likely to go without shelter: in 2014, rural families accounted for 15.7 percent of all homeless families, but almost 27 percent of all unsheltered homeless families (families without access to service shelters who usually live in cars, in tents, or on the street).

The rural housing crisis is not intractable. Policymakers should start by improving data collection on rural homelessness, so that they have a complete picture of the issue. They should also increase efforts to document and reduce discrimination in renting, and improve access to affordable legal services so that families stand a fighting chance when they risk losing their homes. To support the families who become homeless, policymakers should improve accessibility to shelters and other services in rural areas. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should reinstate Section 515 grants to build more affordable rural rental housing, and increase the direct loan program funding under USDA Section 502 to provide more assistance for rural homeowners.

These reforms are only possible if we choose to accept housing as a meaningful right for all Americans. Then, campgrounds could remain mainstays of family vacations—not crisis centers for homeless families.

The fact is that people generally fail to understand homelessness because they don’t ask homeless people what happened to them—how it is that they ended up in the situation they are in and what their needs are.

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I saw the consequences of this failure recently in Ocean County, NJ, where I now live in subsidized housing.  The Jon Bon Jovi (JBJ) Soul Foundation announced it would open a JBJ Soul Kitchen in the county. They will provide quality meals at whatever price a person can afford, or people can do some volunteer work in the café if they can’t afford to pay. If people prove reliable as volunteers they can then enroll in a training program that will teach them skills in the culinary arts and other professions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of access to good meals when it comes to addressing food insecurity, or underestimate the value of good job training that provides marketable skills.   However, a person living in a tent in the woods—and we have more than 600 people in Ocean County living without permanent indoor shelter—does not even have access to a toilet, shower, or a place to wash clothes. What the chronically homeless in Ocean County need, most immediately and urgently, is secure housing.

The money raised to open the JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurant would have been better spent on building a safe, stable, and affordable housing facility for homeless persons in the community.  If the founders had spoken to community members who have experienced homelessness, we would have made that clear.

This communication gap is widespread.  As someone who has experienced homelessness, and spent more than a few nights in hospital emergency rooms because I didn’t know where else to go, I can tell you that when you try to explain to nurses and doctors that you are there because you fear that the continuous uncertainty and anxiety you are enduring might drive you mad, they generally react by giving you a sedative, letting you sleep, and then sending you on your way with breakfast and a few anti-anxiety pills.

I don’t recall anyone—and I mean anyone—ever asking me about my life, and what happened to me that brought me to this moment.

So I was delighted to see a sign of change recently when a professor at New Jersey State College asked me to speak to a graduating class of nursing students so that they could better understand the treatment needs of the increasing number of Americans experiencing homelessness.

I told the class that I originally started thinking about the importance of simply asking people what they are experiencing after reading Healing Neen by Tonier Cain.  Cain experienced severe and extensive abuse during her life: abandonment, rape, physical and emotional violence, and numerous incarcerations. At every turn she was treated in various behavioral modification programs with de rigueur psycho-active medications.  But according to Cain, she did not really begin to heal until someone—a trauma therapist—simply asked, “What happened to you, girl?”

So this is the point I tried to convey to the students: if a person comes to you who has experienced prolonged periods of time without housing, don’t treat their symptoms without asking what happened. Trauma gets resolved by confronting the events that caused it. That takes time and artfulness.

Whether we want to understand the crisis of homelessness in the Bay Area or Ocean County, or a healthcare professional needs to treat a vulnerable patient, it starts with a simple question: what happened?

In 2014, 46.7 million Americans—more than one in seven—lived in poverty, and nearly half of Americans will experience at least a year of poverty or near-poverty during their working years. Along with causing tremendous human hardship and suffering, poverty is enormously costly to the United States. It hampers educational attainment, reduces health, decreases workforce productivity, and damages the social cohesion of communities. Child poverty alone costs the United States an estimated $672 billion every year—nearly 4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

Poverty is not inevitable, particularly not in the richest nation on earth. Rather, its persistence is in large part a result of misplaced priorities and deliberate policy choices. Indeed, it has already been shown—in both past experience and extensive research—that policy choices can make a difference in the lives of low-income families, helping them reach and remain in the middle class. Recently, however, politicians and policymakers have lacked the political will to make many of these policies a priority.

Most good policies are not costless. But the price tags for many poverty-reducing programs pale in comparison with the billions of dollars the United States already spends on tax breaks that primarily benefit wealthy individuals and corporations—funds that could be used to provide adequate nutrition or access to high-quality child care, reduce homelessness, or invest in low-income children and workers. What’s more, the price tags of smart policies do not reflect the substantial public savings the nation experiences from investments that improve health, increase educational attainment, enhance workforce productivity, and boost the economy. To take just one example, every dollar spent on benefits in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, generates an estimated $1.70 in additional economic activity.

The United States can afford to dramatically reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity. Here are four ways in which the U.S. Congress could make an enormous dent in poverty and the opportunity gap—each costing significantly less than the tax breaks Congress currently gives to the wealthy.

Boost effective tax credits for low-income workers and families

The Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, is one of the nation’s most effective anti-poverty tools, encouraging work and boosting family income. In 2014, it helped more than 6.2 million Americans—including 3.2 million children—avoid poverty. However, low-income workers without qualifying children receive very little help from the EITC; indeed, these so-called childless workers are the only group whom the tax code taxes further into poverty. Lawmakers across the political spectrum—including Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan (R-WI)—have long called for improving the EITC for childless workers. President Barack Obama’s and Speaker Ryan’s similar proposals, which would double the maximum credit to more than $1,000 and lower the minimum age of eligibility from 25 to 21, would help nearly 13 million workers, lifting more than half a million people out of poverty.

The Child Tax Credit, or CTC, delivers a credit of up to $1,000 per child to families with children. The credit protected about 3 million people from poverty in 2015, including 1.6 million children. Because it is not fully refundable, however, the CTC misses the poorest children entirely, and only about 20 percent of the CTC’s benefits go to families who earn less than $30,000, compared with 60 percent of the EITC.

Expanding the CTC—as proposed by the Center for American Progress in a recent report—would ensure that the credit does not skip the families who need it most. The proposal would also create a supplemental credit—delivered monthly—for families with children younger than age 3. This would nearly double the number of children younger than age 17 who are lifted out of poverty by the CTC and would protect more than two-and-a-half times as many children younger than age 3 from poverty than does the current law.

Reduce hunger and food insecurity

Each year, SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, protect millions of struggling Americans from poverty, including children, individuals with disabilities, seniors, and low-wage working families. SNAP’s nutrition assistance also boosts health outcomes, educational attainment, and earnings over the long term. Currently, the value of SNAP benefits is based on the Thrifty Food Plan, the lowest-cost of the four food plans developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. At an average of just $1.41 per person for each meal, SNAP benefits—while critical—provide only the “bare bones” of nutritional adequacy. Many families are unable or barely able to stretch these modest benefits until the end of the month: Recipients use nearly 80 percent of SNAP benefits within the first half of each month. Switching to the Low-Cost Food Plan, the second lowest-cost of the USDA’s four plans—would increase SNAP benefits 30 percent. This would dramatically reduce hunger, food insecurity, and poverty, as well as boost long-run economic mobility for struggling families.

End homelessness

Homelessness and housing instability are leading causes—and consequences—of poverty. On any given night in 2015, more than 560,000 Americans faced homelessness, a problem primarily caused by a lack of affordable housing. The housing voucher program plays a crucial role in keeping at-risk households stably housed, yet 3 in 4 eligible families receive no housing assistance due to scant funding.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Housing Commission calls for reforming and expanding the Housing Choice Voucher program in order to end homelessness in the United States. Their proposal would provide rental assistance to all 3 million currently unassisted renting households that are extremely low income and cost burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing and utilities.

Allow all families to access high-quality child care for their children

Child care is an economic necessity for most families with children: 65 percent of children younger than age 6 have all of their available parents in the workforce. But its cost is prohibitive for many families and especially for low-income families. In 37 states and the District of Columbia, the annual cost of child care for an infant is more than half of what a full-time, minimum-wage worker in that state earns. Existing child care assistance reaches only a small portion of eligible families and is much lower than actual child care costs.

Unable to forego critical income from work, many parents have little choice but to seek out low-quality care, potentially putting their children’s health, safety, and development at risk. The Center for American Progress recently proposed a tax credit that would expand access to affordable high-quality child care, allowing more low-income parents to participate in the work force while promoting their children’s healthy development. High-quality child care is an investment in the nation’s human capital: It increases children’s school readiness and reduces the educational disparities—based on socioeconomic status—that can be predicted long before a child even starts kindergarten.

Conclusion

Radically reducing poverty in America may sound like a costly proposition. But compared with the billions of dollars that lawmakers give away to the wealthy each year, Congress could make a huge dent in poverty at a bargain price. What’s more, investments that reduce poverty today will provide enormous economic opportunity for generations to come. Prioritizing the nation’s struggling families is an investment Americans cannot afford not to make.

It is clear from the numbers alone that in communities across America—including where I live in Ocean County, New Jersey—federal, state, and local public housing assistance programs are not reaching nearly enough people.

I’ve experienced homelessness and I also volunteer at a homeless outreach center that provides clothing, blankets, tents, heaters, food, and other items that are essential to our local population of about thirty homeless individuals and couples. We also offer a hot meal and a safe place for people to gather and freely express themselves. Many of the people we serve refer to our center as their “safe house.”

At the end of a recent meeting at the center, a couple in their forties asked me for a ride home. They had blankets, coats, and foodstuffs—I suspected they didn’t want to traipse through the downtown business district and draw attention. I gave them a ride, and they directed me to the end of a large parking lot behind a supermarket. They unloaded their things from my car and then slowly disappeared into the woods.

It occurred to me that if they were stray animals, I could have brought them to a half dozen shelters where they would be taken in and cared for, no questions asked. But in my county, not only is there a shortage of affordable housing, there is not a single emergency shelter for homeless people. This is the reality in too many communities across America. It is not only painful to witness, it is also completely unnecessary.

One unutilized tool that could go a long way towards addressing the problem is the National Housing Trust Fund, established by President George W. Bush and Congress as part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The goal of the Trust Fund is to provide revenue to build, rehabilitate, and preserve affordable housing for the lowest-income families, including people experiencing homelessness. The Trust Fund is unique in its aim to increase and preserve the supply of affordable rental housing for the very low-income, as most of the fund’s money must go to people who make no more than 30 percent of area median income. The Fund also increases homeownership opportunities for these households. While Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently started devoting some of their earnings to the Fund, as the original legislation intended, Congress—perhaps not too shockingly—has complicated and threatened the necessary revenues for the fund.

According to ThinkProgress, a recent example occurred in April 2015, when a House appropriations subcommittee passed legislation that halted funding for the Trust Fund. The legislation instead robbed Peter to pay Paul, diverting monies from the trust fund to another HUD program, HOME, which targets people who make 60 or 50 percent of median family income. The appropriations bill that passed the House ultimately maintained this provision. With its focus on the lowest-income people, the National Housing Trust Fund is a critical resource for fighting homelessness, and these moves to slash its funding imperil people who are on the verge of losing their homes.

In contrast to the Congressional inaction, some states—including Nebraska, Washington State, and Georgia—have created Homeless Trust Funds that allow local civic groups to access monies for emergency shelters and affordable housing.

In 2009, for example, New Jersey passed a law called The County Homelessness Trust Fund Act that authorizes counties to impose a $3.00 surcharge for each document it records. These revenues, administered by a County Homelessness Trust Fund Task Force, are then used to fund housing and supportive services to individuals and families currently experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness.

More than one-third of New Jersey counties have implemented the legislation, raising more than a million dollars for efforts to increase permanent affordable housing; prevent the eviction of Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries, including through payment towards rent, mortgage, or utilities; and provide supportive services for chronically homeless individuals who receive housing vouchers.

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But despite bearing the brunt of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Ocean County has yet to implement such a trust fund. So what can a community like mine do to convince its local political leaders to take action?

Along with other activists and members of the community affected by homelessness—including health care professionals, trauma experts, police officers, clergy, teachers, local politicians, homeless advocates, and small business owners—I am working to get the backing of our community by framing homelessness as both a values and economic issue. The Ocean County Board Freeholders has the final say on whether or not the county enacts a Homeless Trust Fund. They have public meetings twice a month, and we’ve agreed that we won’t leave their next meeting until we get either an acceptance of our proposal or a counter proposal for eliminating homelessness. Our point is that homelessness in our county must end now, and that’s non-negotiable.

With Congress impervious to the reality and needs of its most vulnerable citizens, county trust funds are just one approach we can take towards ensuring that every person finds the stability and shelter they need to survive and thrive.

We need to take this action and many more—because nobody in America should be dropped off to disappear in the woods when we have the resources to end homelessness.

Author’s Note: For more information on how we can capitalize the National Housing Trust Fund, visit NATIONALHOMELESS.org. To see how other states have gone about initiating Homeless Trust Funds, visit the Center for Community Change. If there are members of your community who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, please make sure your local political and civic leaders are aware of these avenues for addressing this issue.

You’re angry with me, I can tell. Not because I did anything wrong, but because of the way I make you feel. I make you feel helpless. You know that there is nothing that you can do to make me not homeless. I make you feel afraid that this might be you someday. I make you feel disgusted that anyone could live this way, and none of that is your fault.

You’re angry with me. I can tell. Not because of what I’m doing, but because of what I’m not doing. You’re angry that I’m not trying to change. You’re angry that I’m sleeping on the streets; that I spend all day begging for change and not trying to change. You’re angry with me because now I have somehow made this your problem.

I’m sorry you see me sitting on the sidewalk counting change and looking up at the door to a McDonald’s. I’m sorry I’m dirty and I smell, and nothing about that is your fault. I’m sorry – not because I did anything wrong, but because of the way I make you feel. I’m sorry I make you feel helpless. I’m sorry that you know that there is nothing that you can do to make me not homeless. I’m sorry I make you feel afraid that this might be you someday. I’m sorry I make you feel disgusted that anyone could live this way, and none of that is your fault. I’m sorry that I’m sleeping on the streets, that I spend all day begging for change. I’m sorry that now I have somehow made this your problem.

I forgive you for being angry with me. Please forgive me for being homeless.

***

He’s not there again today. He has been there every day for years. You’re actually worried. Why? He is just a homeless guy. He’s not there again today. For months you passed him by without a thought. One day you figured, what the heck I’ll give him a buck. He smiles and says thank you and god bless you, and he means it. He’s not there again today.

You started carrying a couple of extra bucks just for him. A couple of times you even brought him coffee. Just a routine, barely a second thought. Doing something nice, giving back, helping out. He’s not there again today.

Do you ask around? Do you put up flyers? Do you call the hospitals or the police? Where did he go? Is he okay? He’s not there again today.

Does he know that you’re worried? Does he know that you care? Before he was gone you had no clue how much he meant to you. He’s no longer just some homeless guy. He’s not there again today.

You knew his face, his smile, his way. His dirty coat, old and frayed. You never even knew his name. Why is he not there? Why did he go away? All you know is, he’s not there again today…

***

We must stand together and speak as one. Let our message spread through the streets like a flood, so that every ear shall hear and every mouth shall speak: We will not be ignored any longer.

So, how did I end up homeless? I keep wondering where I went wrong.

In December 2011, I had my first seizure. On top of that, I was having marital problems and losing clients left and right due to the bad economy. Over the next few months, I averaged 2 to 3 seizures a week and was in and out of the hospital. My wife split somewhere around that time. My businesses fell apart while I wasn’t there to run them, and I spent all my savings trying to hang on instead of cutting my losses and saving what I could. By the time I got evicted, I couldn’t even afford a storage unit. I left my house with what I could fit in a red wagon and a suitcase.

I managed to get a job as a maintenance man at the Maui Sunset, a timeshare condo complex, but I was still having seizures. My doctor was convinced that they were caused by heavy metal toxicity (due to a bullet that has been in my leg for twenty years), and he put me through chelation therapy twice a week for three months. But due to the horrible side effects, I wasn’t able to maintain my job. Shortly after that, I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy (heart disease) and I was told that without a transplant I had two years.

Let’s face it – the chances for a homeless man with epilepsy getting on the donor list are pretty slim. My seizures are now followed by 12 hours of sight loss. And I had to wonder – is this what it comes down to? I die alone, on the streets? Nothing to leave behind? Very few people to grieve my passing?

In a weird moment of clarity that you get when you have nothing else to lose, I decided I wanted to take a bucket list tour of the United States with my little dog Savannah to see and do all of the things that I have always wanted to do.

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First off, I had heard of this place in Eugene, Oregon called Opportunity Village—tiny homes for the homeless. It was touted as the city’s unique approach to solving the homeless problem. Originally I thought that I would make that a stop on my trip, pick up the plans, and bring them back to Maui to start a village there. But when I got there my impression was that it was a group of homeless people that kept taking over city property until the city just let them stay. No plans, and nothing to bring back to Maui.

Savannah and I have been on the road for more than a year now. We left Maui on June 19, 2014. We have visited just about all of the things on my bucket list: Disneyland, the Smithsonian museums in D.C. (still missing the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and the National Postal Museum), and Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank, New Jersey. I’m also a huge fan of the show Comic Book Men, and I got to spend time with the stars.

Right now, we are in Washington D.C. We have been harassing Senate staffers in order to find a Senator who will sponsor legislation for a national Homeless Bill of Rights but it’s just really hard to do without an address. I now have cards from the offices of all one hundred Senators. I even put them in alphabetical order by state. Since Rhode Island was the first state to pass a Homeless Bill of Rights, I have been able to get some response from Senator Jack Reed’s staff.

As time passes, I look more and more like just another “crazy homeless guy,” and who knows, maybe I am just another crazy homeless guy. I feel like no one is listening or taking me seriously. I have no resources or backing of any kind, and these people deal with the powerful and wealthy all day long. I wish this were like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” But it feels more like Oliver Twist saying, “Please sir, may I have some rights?”

I became homeless in 2009 and out of necessity learned how to make the services administered through the Ocean County New Jersey Board of Social Services work for me. They included housing assistance provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), food assistance (SNAP) through the US Department of Agriculture, and cash assistance through the General Assistance program made available by the State of New Jersey.

I am now in permanent Federal Affordable Housing and no longer need social services myself. So I try to use my own experience to help people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless get the social services they need. Currently, Emergency Housing Assistance offered through the Ocean County Board of Social Services is not easy to qualify for. The bureaucratic process is difficult to comprehend, and negotiating through it when you are facing housing insecurity and are stressed out is exceedingly difficult.

For example, I was contacted by members of a local church in my community after they had encountered a young man who was homeless hanging out in a shopping mall. They had given him some new clothing, and now wanted to arrange for me to meet with him because I have experience in homeless outreach, particularly in Ocean County.

In meeting with the young man, it was immediately clear to me that he was in serious trouble, mentally and emotionally. He could not maintain eye contact, tell me what he did that day, or articulate any plans he had for getting out of his present situation. He was sleeping in the wooded areas at night where he couldn’t be seen, and then wandering around during the day trying not to be seen. In my experience, this isolation is a recipe for serious psychological and emotional damage.

I asked him if he wanted a room in a motel or shelter for the night. He enthusiastically said yes.

I called a 3-digit number for an Ocean County Board of Social Services’ special response unit that is set up to address emergency situations (although the County’s website says, “Funding is limited so assistance is not always available”) . They have teams available to quickly come and pick up people who are homeless, give them shelter, and take them to a social services office in their county the next day to see if they qualify for more permanent assistance.

I called them, but they wanted to talk with the young man, not me.

They ended up turning him down because he told them the truth: he’d been homeless for four months. Special Response “responded” by saying that they only take people who have been homeless for two weeks or less.

So I arranged to pick him up the next day where he was living in the woods and take him to the Ocean County Social Services office myself. There, he applied and qualified for SNAP and General Assistance, which then allowed him to apply for Emergency Housing Assistance.

In order to qualify for Emergency Housing Assistance, however, he was also required to appear once a week at the Ocean County One-Stop Career Center, located on another side of town and outside the reach of public transportation; and a substance abuse counselor who was also located far from the social services office.

I knew that he—and others like him who are chronically homeless—often can’t meet these requirements and therefore don’t receive the emergency housing they desperately need.

This is why we need Housing First.

Housing First uses a simple model that has been proven to work: it first provides people with housing, and then provides supportive wraparound services in mental and physical health, substance abuse, education, and employment. Housing First apartments are scattered throughout a community which helps formerly homeless reintegrate into their communities. Perhaps the most significant innovation is that Housing First doesn’t put preconditions on eligibility. Other approaches exclude people from receiving housing assistance because they suffer from mental illness, including addiction. Finally, Housing First saves taxpayer money over the long haul, reducing costs that are otherwise incurred by the public for stays at shelters, in jail cells, and in hospital emergency rooms.

After our visit to social services, I discussed the young man’s situation with others in my homeless outreach network. We agreed that the best available alternative for him was to enter a 10-day shelter provided by a local faith-based group. From there he would be able to transition into an in-patient behavioral rehabilitation center that would—upon successful completion of their program—hopefully guide him into permanent housing.

The question all of this begs is this: since only one in four low-income renter households receives federal rental assistance—and a lack of affordable housing is a leading cause of homelessness—shouldn’t we be devoting a larger share of our affordable housing dollars towards a nationwide, Housing First model?

It’s the right thing to do and it saves money. What the hell are we waiting for?

Despite these constant shifts, Brandy was able to stay in the same school because of a federal law, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which among other things paved the way for the hiring of two school “homeless liaisons.” These liaisons helped her travel to and from school, made sure she had something to eat during the day, clothes to wear, and encouraged her to aspire and thrive. This law and the support she received in school proved critical to Brandy’s success in high school and later in college.

As a civil legal aid attorney with Columbia Legal Services, I help homeless students and their families address barriers to their enrollment and participation in school. I use a variety of tools such as community education about McKinney-Vento, data and policy analysis, and individual and legislative advocacy.

McKinney-Vento recognizes and provides strong protections that promote education continuity. It gives homeless students the right to transportation to and from school; the right to enroll in school immediately (even without registration records); and the right to have a district-level homeless liaison that helps out with whatever a student may need for academic success. Those protections make McKinney-Vento one of the strongest education laws and, when enforced, it has done a great deal to assist students like Brandy. But far too few students are afforded these crucial legal rights. Take Brandy’s sister, Felicity. She did not receive the support of a homeless liaison. With each move, she lost credits, friends, and the opportunity to receive a basic education. She repeated the ninth grade four times.

Felicity’s story is unjust and all too common. In Washington State alone, we have 32,000 homeless students, which represents an 82 percent increase from the 2006-2007 school year. That’s enough to fill half of the seats in the Seattle Seahawks’ enormous football stadium. It’s particularly disturbing because children are estimated to lose four to six months in academic progress each time they move during the school year.

Children and youth who are of color, LGBT, who have limited English proficiency or disabilities are more likely to be homeless than their peers. We also know that homeless students struggle in school when compared to their housed peers; in fact, they are less than half as likely to be proficient in math, with similar gaps in other subjects. These disparities also hurt local communities and society generally, since these students are about half as likely to graduate as their housed peers and more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. It makes sense because imagine trying to focus in school when you have moved five times during the school year because your family could not find an affordable place to stay; or trying to study for an important math test in a crammed one-bedroom apartment where seven other people live.

This crisis of student homelessness comes fourteen years after the passage of McKinney-Vento. While the federal government provides grants to help schools fulfill their obligations under the legislation, these dollars are extremely limited. For example, in Washington, only 34 of 295 school districts received McKinney-Vento grants last year. That means most schools don’t have a homeless liaison, and when they do, they are juggling multiple job positions and can only devote a few hours a week to serving the needs of homeless students. As a result, students suffer and the spirit of the legislation is undermined.

The fact is that we need to increase funding for McKinney-Vento. But we can’t stop there. We must also provide housing subsidies to families experiencing homelessness. A recent study, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that families are more likely to maintain stable housing if provided with a permanent housing subsidy.

With this idea in mind, Columbia Legal Services is working to provide stable housing for homeless students and their families by engaging in state-level advocacy. In 2014, we helped pass the Homeless Children Education Act (HCEA) that required the state to provide comprehensive data on homeless student graduation rates. This data-driven approach is already helping advocacy groups and policy makers develop a better picture of how homeless students fare academically compared to their housed peers and which education reforms are needed to better support homeless students.

The McKinney-Vento Act alone cannot guarantee education continuity. The few schools that are able to hire full-time liaisons cannot fully address the biggest need of homeless students: safe and stable housing.  When the bell rings, kids should be concerned about homework, not working to find a home.

The Unites States Interagency Counsel on Homelessness provides funding to states for programs designed to create permanent housing situations for individuals and families in danger of becoming homeless. All of these programs are administered by local Boards of Social Services—often simply called “social services.” Where I live in Ocean County, New Jersey, the Board provides a motel room for emergency housing through a program called Special Response. Motel owners located on the Jersey Shore subsidize their incomes during the winter months by taking in clients of social services through this program.

So I was in a motel room in a seasonally deserted town I was unfamiliar with and told that I have three months to find permanent housing. I was given a W-9 tax form to present to potential landlords. The W-9 would allow the local housing agency to pay landlords as vendors of the state. However, I soon found out that most apartment owners wouldn’t take me in for three purported reasons: One, the owners claimed that if they took me in then they would be legally obligated to take in any other client that social services sent their way; two, they said that the local Housing Office at social services was unreliable and took forever to pay rents; and three, as I would soon learn myself, they said that the Housing Office was notorious for arbitrarily changing its policy regarding housing assistance.

Most people in a situation like I was in give up and return to whatever it is they were trying to get away from – abusive spouses, dysfunctional families, drug-and crime-infested neighborhoods. And then there are those – such as the survivors of natural disasters, and people who lost jobs and had homes foreclosed during the Great Recession, and veterans who were denied benefits – who have no place to return to and all too frequently end up wandering the streets during the day and setting up tents on public land at night. Because these people are no longer enrolled in any housing program, this is a statistical ‘success’ to local officials administering the program, even as the number of homeless people rises. This cynical manipulation of statistics is a betrayal of the public trust given to the local Board of Social Services to provide financial and housing assistance to members of their communities who need it.

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While I was still in my home and recovering from the loss of my mother, I became a member of a small nondenominational church that administered a community homeless outreach program. Local apartment owners utilized the outreach as a way of ‘screening’ prospective renters. They were willing to rent to people who had rent subsidies, but first they wanted to be assured that they are not opening their doors to former rent truants, violent criminals, drug users, or other problematic tenants.

That’s how I secured ‘permanent’ housing within three months. I’m not sure what I would have done without the involvement of this grassroots program that helped me navigate my local housing office’s byzantine process.

But then I received a letter last year informing me that the “permanent” housing program I was in was being terminated by The Board of Social Services in Ocean County. No explanation was given; no recourse offered. Trying to find alternatives before I became homeless, I applied to several federal affordable housing facilities. Miraculously, it seemed, just a few days after being told I no longer had an affordable, permanent place to live, I received a letter informing me that an affordable housing unit was available.

People assume that my local social services board coordinated this move. They didn’t. If you are fortunate enough to find a case worker who assists you with obtaining Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and other basic necessities, as I was, they are still powerless to influence the outcome of your ‘permanent’ housing situation. These types of practices are not only detrimental to the morale of the clients of social services, but to its workforce as well.

We need the people who administer social services at the state and local levels to do a better job of providing programs and policies that work in people’s lives.

When we hear from people who have experienced poverty, we get better policy. For example, no one who has lived in acute financial distress would have ever come up with a solution as inane as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Can you imagine? “Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll make the process of obtaining assistance more complicated and, in the end, provide fewer people with less assistance for a shorter period of time!” Sure, people flew off “the rolls” – and right into the woods, onto subway platforms and, penultimately, into hospital emergency rooms. So many have had their lives cut short as a result of homelessness.

Someone recently asked me what my first priority would be for policy reform, and this is it: lobby to get a member of the community who has experienced programs such as Emergency Housing Assistance, SNAP, or TANF, onto the Local and State Boards of Social Services. This, I feel, is the only way we can begin to get administrators to better understand the needs of their ‘clients’, and to be held more accountable for their policies and actions.

What we need is a movement that empowers individuals who have experienced acute financial distress with the political wherewithal they need to stand on their own. We’ve done this successfully with immigration and marriage equality, why not poverty?

Brian Carome: We are a street newspaper, which is a model that exists in a lot of different places. Street newspapers are print newspapers that report on homelessness and poverty in the communities that they serve. They employ men and women, who themselves are homeless, to sell the paper and earn income from doing that. In our case, about half the content of the paper is also written by men and women who either are currently [homeless] or have experienced homelessness. We’ve been around since the fall of 2003.

We call ourselves a no-barrier employment opportunity. We offer orientations twice a week—every Tuesday and Thursday—throughout the year. You don’t need an appointment; you don’t need a referral; you don’t have to fill out any application; and you don’t even need to know the name of someone you’re coming to see. You don’t have to have any capital to buy any first set of newspapers. We provide you the first set of papers free.

Alyssa: What is the role of Street Sense in breaking down the stereotypes that people would think usually about homeless people?

Brian Carome: When we’re at our best, we help folks see the common ground between their lives and the lives of folks who are homeless. It takes away that sort of other, or sense of alien about folks who are homeless. And we learn that they are people just like us. They may have had different opportunities and different experiences. But they came into the world with the same hopes and dreams as everyone else.

People experience Street Sense in a number of ways. It’s through the newspaper and now through the playwriting workshop. But it’s also through the one-on-one conversation that individuals have with their vendor as they’re purchasing the paper. We think those are very important conversations. And we think that they are conversations that wouldn’t happen were it not for our being here. The relationship goes both ways. It’s important for our vendors to also get to know the readers and their customers. It’s helpful for both people to find that common ground.

Alyssa: Vendors say that Street Sense is really empowering. How does Street Sense create this dynamic?

Brian Carome: I think employment really puts the finger on what we try to do. I spent a lot of my career working in shelters and housing programs. The dynamic between our vendors is so different than in a normal client-provider situation. Our vendors feel a genuine sense of ownership in the organization. They are our entire distribution network and they author half of the content of the publications. They participate in our other programs as well and demonstrate ownership.

There’s a sense of comradery. Most of the vendors who walk through the door seeking employment with us at this point are word of mouth referrals. They have been brought here by an existing vendor, folks who understand what the organization can offer to someone. They want to pass that along to someone else.

We believe in the transformational experience that our vendors have when they’re here. Again, it’s that ability to apply their talents; to use their personality to make money that really has a profound change on people and impact on people’s lives.

Alyssa: What kind of programs are run to help foster this sense of community among the vendors and are you looking to expand this programming?

Brian Carome: We have a weekly writer’s group. That’s a tight-knit group of folks who come together every week and argue with each other and brainstorm with each other. [They] debate each other about their different perspectives on issues in the world. We also have an illustration workshop for folks who want to do illustrations for the paper. There’s also a videography workshop now and a playwriting workshop where we have a partnership with two playwrights at George Washington University Department of Theatre and Dance. Our vendors both write original works and also perform them together as a small troupe.

We’re looking for ways of capturing new audiences; ways of broadening the impact of this story of homelessness and how it’s afflicting the community. The other thing we hope for in the future is to expand our geographical footprint. We’d like to open up bureaus in some of the surrounding suburbs and begin providing that vendor, self-employment opportunity to those communities as well. And also to do more public education on the issue of homelessness as it affects Arlington or Montgomery County.

Alyssa: Why do you think people who are formerly homeless continue to be involved in the paper?

Brian Carome: One is the sense of community.  In my experience working in shelters, one of the things that characterizes being homeless is a sense of aloneness and separateness. [Street Sense] helps put the blocks together to reconnect yourself to the community. And I think especially, again, for folks who are writing for the newspaper… it’s nice to see your name in print, and it’s nice to talk to people who appreciate what you’re writing.

The folks who are selling our papers are entrepreneurs; they are self-employed men and women. We give them that chance to be their own boss. I think that continues to be an attraction for folks.

Alyssa: Why is it so important that low-income people are at the forefront of the anti-poverty movement and that their voices are heard?

Brian Carome: They are not heard elsewhere. We wouldn’t exist if the Washington Post or the Washington Times was writing about homelessness every single day. So, we really feel like we fill a gap.  We want the content of the paper to have an impact on those who read it and experience it. [In the paper], you can get a first person account of what homelessness is like; how it affects someone. We think that goes a long way to bringing this community to the point that we find homelessness unacceptable.

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Alyssa: Advocates anticipated that there was going to be an increase in homelessness this winter. Do you think the city is equipped to handle this?

Brian Carome: Certainly, the family shelter system is woefully inadequate. I guess most importantly though, is that there are cities across the country that are understanding that it’s less expensive to house people than it is to respond to people once they’re homeless. And we’re not doing enough in this city to embrace that approach. There are way too many folks that live outside. There are way too many families entering the shelter system.

Alyssa: How could the city be doing more?

Brian Carome: D.C. is [among] the top two or three most expensive housing communities in the country. It certainly speaks to why we have such a homelessness problem. We are wasting [money] any time we are sheltering or allowing folks to live in the street rather than giving them a place to live, even if we have to pay 100% of the rent.

And, the longer you’re homeless, the longer you’re going to be homeless. The solution is really quite simple. It’s housing people. Whether that’s providing a small rental subsidy or a complete subsidy, it’s less expensive than the millions and millions of dollars we’re spending on the shelter system—especially for families. It’s just way too wasteful. And what it does to folks—especially to kids—is very devastating and long lasting. It would behoove the city to rethink the way we approach it—especially for family homelessness.

Oh, hi. I’m Lydia. I’ll be your tour guide to HOMELESSNESS today. If you could, please just take your shoes off at the door… socks, too… much appreciated. Oh, and you can leave your dignity there, too – you won’t be needing that. Oh, dear, you’re not really dressed for the occasion… But, that’s ok. I’ll help you. Don’t worry… Just take my hand… here, let’s go.

Ok, first—if you could fill out this form. Yeah—that one too… then, uhm… turn it over and put your name here… sign here… there, yeah—there too. Initial this…and sign that, good.

Now, flip the page—what did you say your name was? Actually, never mind. Let’s speed this up, it’s almost lunch… Okay, read this, sign that… Initial here, here and here…. Now, date it…. No, you don’t need a copy, it’s just for my files.

You have kids? You get child support? Do you know who their dads are? Do you know where their dads are? Hmm…You’re definitely gonna need to come up with some additional income before we can help you…. I don’t know how much…. You might have to come back tomorrow to complete the interview. Wait. Could you just wait here for a minute?

[20 minutes later]

Ok, just a few more questions… What did you say happened with your family? Really? When was that? Could you call them for help? Oh, and what did they say? Oh, huh…. Well, what about friends? Neighbors? Co-workers? Really… Well, do you have a contact number for them? Maybe if I called them, and told them you were about to be homeless, they might want to help you more? Well, uhmmm… I mean, we could give it a try…

So, otherwise—what’s your plan? Hmm…that hardly seems workable… Well, let me ask you this—what did you do with your tax refund? Don’t remember? We really need that information for our files… Car payment, okay, clothes… A mini vacation?!? Wow, maybe we should sign you up for budget counseling… Right. Okay, you know what else we need? Do you have your driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card, leases, utility bills, most recent bank statement…? Well, could you at least get your tax information for us? It’s just procedure, really, for our files… So, when do you think you could bring this information in? The sooner, the better…. Well, we can’t help you without it…. Sorry…. Yeah, I wish we could, but without a workable plan…. It’ll be hard to do…

Uh huh… I don’t know the answer to that, let me check on it later…. No, that’s not important. Just bring us the information we need, and maybe we can work something out from there… Meanwhile, why don’t you call your mom and dad…Oh, sorry to hear that—what about your dad? No? But maybe if you tell him your situation, and then… No, well… Uhh, I don’t know…. I don’t think so. Let me go check on that……

[25 minutes later]

Oh, hi—I almost forgot you were in here… Now, we can’t really do anything for you until you’ve exhausted all of your resources. Let me ask you this—when was the last time you smoked? drank? How often? I see, okay…. uhm, so… is this a problem for you? I mean…do you need counseling? Maybe I could give you a referral to the drug treatment program…. Right, okay… Oh, I almost forgot—could you read this and sign here? There, too. Uh-huh… That’s ok—I understand, it’s a lot to do—but we need this information for our files.

This? Oh, just a consent to talk to your counselor about the results of the drug tests you’re going to take this Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday… Have to be at work? Well, we aren’t allowed to place you until you complete this mandatory drug testing and counseling… Well, that depends. If you come up positive, we would need to have another meeting to discuss it… Yes, you have to go to every single one…. Yes, someone will be in the room with you while you pee… It’s just a process, don’t worry, everyone does it… Ok, so… did you have any other questions?

Sorry, I don’t know anything about that…. No, we won’t have an answer for at least another week or so…. Well, I don’t know, the shelters are full, and there’re no hotel or motel rooms available, so I guess you’ll just have to… make do—are you sure you don’t have anyone you can call? That’s really too bad…. Sorry we couldn’t do more for you…. Maybe if you come back next month, we might have an opening then.

We have to admit—this sounds great to us. You see, we’re both in DINK households—Dual Income, No Kids. Yuppies in comfortable, do-gooder D.C. jobs. One of us just bought a home, the other is considering it. It’s hard not to read this news and think: Ooh, is the credit retroactive? How can I get a piece of this pie?

But a growing number of D.C. families have a different question about housing: Where are we going to sleep tonight? And our housing policy isn’t helping to provide much of an answer.

Since 2008, the District’s homeless population has increased 73%. Nearly half are people living with families. Though six of America’s ten wealthiest counties are in the D.C. region, one-third of all four member households earn less than $70,000 a year.

At the same time, D.C. housing prices remain sky high. The median price for a D.C. home is half a million dollars. And though the city’s stock of luxury apartments has increased more than 70% since 2010, vacancy rates for older, more affordable apartments remain extremely low.

This combination — of stagnant incomes and high housing prices — means there’s no reason to expect the rise in D.C. homelessness to end anytime soon.

The Great Recession is of course a key driver of these trends. The bad economy and lingering unemployment rates continue to hurt millions of families across the country. But macroeconomic forces aren’t the only thing prolonging the District’s current homelessness crisis. The split between housing policy for the wealthy and housing policy for most families is making things worse.

What about that legislation offered by Councilmember Grosso? The first-time homebuyer taxes that the legislation would cut help fund the Housing Production Trust Fund—the main source of funding for affordable housing in the District. So it’s a boost for wealthy homebuyers who are doing just fine, and a cut for low- and moderate-income D.C. residents who are struggling.

Unfortunately, boosting homeownership tax programs for top earners while short-changing housing programs for everyone else is a common practice for policymakers. And no U.S. legislative body does it with such aplomb as the U.S. Congress.

One of the few resources to assist low-income households with unaffordable rents is the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program, or Section 8.  For four decades, this program has used private-sector solutions to make housing available to those in need.

This year, Congress scaled back rental assistance significantly, even though the housing market has become increasingly unaffordable for many Americans, particularly those with lower incomes. These cuts will result in 80,000 fewer households receiving help, deepening the 72,000 reduction caused by last year’s sequestration.

We know, we know. In this town of policy wonks and political spinners, these are just another set of numbers. It’s easy to gloss over them. But take a moment to imagine the human faces behind these numbers. Tens of thousands of fewer American households are receiving the help they need to sleep comfortably tonight. Fewer vouchers mean less stability for the elderly who scrape by on fixed income; for the adults who want to work; for the children who want to excel at school. It means scores more homeless on the street and in shelters. These are the human consequences of these numbers.

Some argue that the federal government can’t afford to spend any more to ensure that homeless families have a safe place to sleep. This is just ridiculous. Taxpayers are spending more to house the wealthiest among us than they are to house low-income families.

Wait a minute, can that be true?

In 2012, the Heritage Foundation put together a list of twelve low-income housing programs to highlight the size of government “welfare” spending. Those programs cost about $50 billion last year. This may seem like a large sum, but consider that the federal government also spent $211 billion last year on homeownership tax programs.  In fact, the top 10% of earners received about as much housing support from just two of these tax programs – the Mortgage Interest and Real Estate Tax Deductions – as the federal government spent on all of the housing “welfare programs” identified by Heritage. Simply put, the government spends some to help house low-income families, but it spends a lot more to help house high-income families.

There is one more key difference between high-income homeownership tax programs and low-income rental vouchers: the former are scheduled to grow 80% between 2011 and 2019. At the current rate, we’ll be spending $240 billion predominantly to help house the wealthy, while cutting thousands of vouchers for those who desperately need a safe place for their families. If this seems inefficient, inequitable, and callous, that’s because it is.

Congress has the power to change this. The lack of affordable housing is a crisis that our nation must address. In the District, we have families living in hotels, doubled-up with relatives or friends in overcrowded households, and even sleeping in cars. The same is true in communities across the country. We cannot allow this to continue.

We need policymakers to stop indulging the excesses of the wealthy at the expense of struggling families and individuals. We need policymakers to match the scale of the problem with real solutions to end homelessness in America.

How often do you find political leaders, particularly elected officials longing to stay elected, standing up for locally unpopular issues at the height of their controversy? This is the province of unique experience, strange curiosity and genuine oddity.

Yet at a time of dramatically increasing stigmatization of poor and especially homeless people, particularly in New York City’s Queens Borough where several new homeless shelters have or are scheduled to open, New Yorkers have been treated to an extraordinary show of bravery from political leaders speaking out for what is unpopular among their electorate seemingly just because it’s the right thing to do.

That’s about as quirky as the Big Apple itself.

In July, the City’s Department of Homeless Services opened a family homeless shelter in the defunct former Pan American Hotel in Queen’s Elmhurst neighborhood. It opened on an emergency basis, meaning without the normal requirements for review, public notice and community input.  The emergency occurred because the City is required to provide shelter by court order, but increasing homelessness – especially among families – resulted in there being no more room at bursting-at-the-seams city shelters.

The emergency allowed for speed in opening the new facility, which promptly filled and then overflowed with homeless people, but it most assuredly didn’t avoid the generally expected response of “Not-In-My-Backyard” protests. For weeks, residents and community groups in the heavily immigrant neighborhood held demonstrations regularly.  Sometimes it got ugly, including scenes on TV of locals screaming at shelter residents – including teenagers and younger children – name-calling, and alarmingly threatening crowds.

Then a remarkable thing happened.

Elmhurst’s City Council Member, came to the shelter  and publicly handed backpacks out to the kids as part of a back to school drive. A former school teacher, he talked about the children’s education and offered shelter residents encouragement. He did this in public, in his own district, where there was charged opposition to the shelter.

That’s a profile in courage.

Shortly thereafter, the City Council’s Majority Leader Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents an adjoining, mostly middle class Queens district, wrote an article in the Daily News about his own family’s experience with poverty and homelessness.  His was an all too common story—a lost job, his family wearing out its welcome in the homes of extended family, and then living at an “awful place”—a city shelter circa 1970. It was a story most people who knew or voted for the Councilman had never heard.

Van Bramer succeeded in putting a face on homelessness. He captured many readers, if only briefly, in the realization that the next homeless family might be very much like their neighbors, their relatives, or perhaps even their own family.

“As the city declares war on inequality and Mayor de Blasio rightly takes a humane and honest approach to ending homelessness, we must all be part of the solution,” Van Bramer wrote. “All human beings have a right to shelter. Some may say that’s feel-good liberalism run amok, but in the City of New York, it happens to be the law. We must house our homeless and that means finding places for families like mine to live and begin again.”

Telling his story, at that particular moment, is another profile in political courage.

In these times, when poverty and homelessness are so stigmatized, it’s inspirational to see these acts of courageous leadership. As Van Bramer writes, it’s not just about providing the resources to support these programs, it’s about providing “a little bit of hope.”

“Our affordable housing issues are directly related to our progress. We developed areas that weren’t developed—we’re attracting a lot of people. When there’s more demand, the prices go up. That’s why it’s important that the government does what it can do in that marketplace.”

–Muriel Bowser, D.C. Councilmember representing Ward 4

Progress is certainly subjective.

While Washington, D.C. has indeed succeeded in attracting a lot of young, affluent professionals, its elected leaders have also presided over the loss of half of the city’s low-cost rental units. This decline in the availability of affordable housing has contributed greatly to a large increase in homelessness. Moreover, as the city’s residents and elected officials grapple with the housing issue, the voices of the homeless aren’t being heard.

Take, for example, the increase in homelessness which undermined the integrity of the D.C. shelter system. In 2010, there were allegations that male shelter workers at D.C. General Hospital were having sex with female residents. Residents complained that they were exposed to mold and forced to sleep in hallways due to overcrowding. In order to prepare for an expected 10% increase in the need for shelter, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty proposed an alternative—he wanted to covert the vacant Hebrew Home for the Aged into a family shelter. The Hebrew Home had housed Jewish retirees from 1925 to 1969. It was then purchased by the city and used for medical services for the homeless until 2008.

The Department of Human Services identified the Hebrew Home as the “best facility” to provide this alternative housing. But residents of the neighborhood resisted the proposal, and so did their representative on the D.C. Council, Muriel Bowser.  Many residents claimed that it would negatively affect property values and public safety, and Bowser said that the neighborhood would have an “inordinate amount of group homes.”

Even though there was widespread knowledge about the troubles at D.C. General and the shortage of shelter space, the proposal to convert the Hebrew Home was defeated.  The situation at D.C. General has deteriorated even further, with more overcrowding, and culminated in the horrific murder of an eight-year-old girl.

We can only wonder what might have been if the Hebrew Home had housed homeless families instead of remaining vacant in a time of crisis.

**

Four years later, the city once again has an opportunity to create much needed affordable housing at the Hebrew Home site.

On Tuesday, D.C. residents attended a community meeting organized and moderated by Bowser and offered their views on the still vacant site as well as the adjacent Paul Robeson School. Progressive organizations such as Jews United for Justice and the Petworth Action Committee support turning the building into 100% affordable housing. In contrast, Councilmember Bowser indicated her preference that the building also include market-rent units.

The meeting was heavily attended by affordable housing advocates, and the majority of speakers supported a large number of affordable units. However, there also remains an unyielding group of residents who want majority market-rate housing. Playing on stereotypes and fears about low-income people and public housing, this group is falsely claiming that the D.C. government has already pledged to turn the building into “public housing.”

Unfortunately, the City’s official “consultation system” gives more weight to the opinions of this group than to those held by low-income people. To gauge the views of the neighborhood, the District’s Department of General Services (DGS) employed an online survey instrument—Survey Monkey—that is inaccessible to many low-income people and seniors. It also didn’t restrict the number of times a person could respond.  Although the government will also consider opinions expressed at community meetings, even those forums aren’t geared towards accessibility for all District citizens.

As Rob Wohl, a member of Jews United for Justice, told TalkPoverty:

“The way that the city does this consultation process is completely broken and easily hijacked. It’s a joke the extent to which the process privileges people who have access to whatever resources and free time. It’s rigged against low-income people, seniors, and people with families that can’t come. I’ve never been to a DC community meeting where there’s childcare.  If this is our consultative process, it’s outrageous that they made no accommodations for poor families whatsoever.”

Despite the lack of outreach to low-income people, support for affordable housing for seniors and D.C. employees was high in the survey results.  Kim, a resident who has lived in Petworth for over 45 years, commented:

“A lot of people aren’t concerned about the people who fought. Have you been over to the senior housing centers? They have a waiting list. What’s going to happen to the low-income people i.e. the seniors?”

Unfortunately—and likely due to the lack of input by low-income people—there was very little support for housing that would benefit homeless families and individuals. Even among the affordable housing advocates present, there was little discussion of the homeless, especially families living in D.C. General.

Repeatedly, the needs of the most vulnerable people among us have been minimized during the housing debate. To ensure that economic diversity is more than a talking point, city leaders must address the affordable housing crisis. The city should commit to more outreach to low-income individuals before any decisions are made regarding the Hebrew Home and the Robeson School.

Ultimately, the city should make sure that the public property it controls is used for affordable housing as opposed to simply selling properties to developers who are looking to profit off of predominantly market-rate housing. (Recent legislation, originally introduced by Councilmembers Bonds, Bowser, Graham, and McDuffie, would further this goal.) Despite concerns expressed at the meeting surrounding financing of the property, city officials and housing financing experts confirm that it is indeed possible to finance buildings comprised of 100% affordable units.

As one resident, Nina Marshall, put it:

“I hope we don’t blow this opportunity to build affordable housing in our community.”

]]> https://talkpoverty.org/2014/08/11/no-safe-place/ Mon, 11 Aug 2014 11:27:02 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=3445 Continued]]> Tonight, thousands of homeless people in the United States will face the possibility of arrest because they do not have a safe place to sleep. Thousands more could be arraigned for sitting or standing in the wrong place. While they must sleep rest their legs, homeless people live in cities where these and other life sustaining activities are against the law, even though shelters face a critical shortage of beds.

Criminalization laws can take many forms.  Most commonly, they outlaw sitting, sleeping in vehicles or outdoors, lying down, “hanging out,” sharing food, and camping. What makes them even more insidious is that they can be difficult to detect. Curfews on public parks are often explained by municipalities as a way to deter drug-related crimes.  In reality, they are frequently a way to ensure that homeless people don’t use park benches as beds. By not having enough safe sleeping spaces, cities are forcing their homeless persons to live on the streets with virtually no other options, and then arresting them for doing so. These laws represent a gross violation of human rights, and have received a large amount of criticism from civil rights advocates around the country and the world.

In March, criminalization laws led to a man’s death. 56-year-old Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran, was without shelter in New York City on a cold night. Searching for a safe place to sleep, he took refuge in an enclosed stairwell in a Harlem public housing building. He was discovered and arrested for trespassing. Since he didn’t have $2,500 to post bail, he was sent to Riker’s Island Prison, where he was placed in a hot cell and ignored for hours by prison staff. According to a city official, Murdough “basically baked to death” in the cell, and was found dead on the floor. His disturbing saga highlights the dangers of criminalization laws; instead of receiving needed assistance, Murdough was treated like a criminal, and ultimately lost his life by trying to protect it.

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The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty recently released a report entitled, No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities. The report details the alarming upward trend of these inhumane and ineffective statutes that criminalize homelessness—with specific examples from around the country—and highlights how the laws are both ineffective and also violations of human rights.

While Murdough’s death represents the most extreme effect of criminalization laws, countless other homeless people face situations every day that put their lives in danger. In No Safe Place, the Law Center recounts the story of Lawrence Lee Smith, a man in Boise, Idaho who became homeless after a degenerative joint disease made him unable to continue to work construction.

“He lived in a camper van for years until it was towed. He couldn’t afford to retrieve it, leaving him with nowhere to reside but in public places…due to frequent overcrowding of area homeless shelters. Mr. Smith was cited for illegal camping and was jailed for a total of 100 days. Due to the arrest, he lost his tent, his stove, and the fishing equipment he relied upon to live.”

In addition to a loss of property, many homeless people who are cited for sleeping in public also must pay fines that they can’t afford, which often results in jail time. A homeless woman, Sandy, tells her story in the report:

“I just basically wanted to get in a little bit safer situation so I hid . . . in this church. And they gave me a ticket and now I can’t pay for this ticket; it’s four-hundred bucks! You know, I can’t pay $80 dollars. I have no income whatsoever.”

In some cities, it is illegal to share food with homeless people. The report details the case of Birmingham, Alabama Pastor Rick Wood, who was ordered by police to stop serving hotdogs and bottled water to homeless people in a city park.

“‘This makes me so mad,’ Wood told a local news station. ‘These people are hungry, they’re starving. They need help from people. They can’t afford to buy something from a food truck.’”

Bans on food-sharing exist in 17 of the cities studied by the Law Center and are based on the wrong assumption that free food services will bring an influx of homeless persons to the area. In reality, the bans simply force people to search for food in less safe places like dumpsters and trash cans.

There has been a nationwide increase in criminalization laws since 2011, despite mounting evidence that criminalization is the most expensive and least effective way to deal with homelessness. As cities increasingly opt for these bad policies, there will eventually be no safe place left for homeless people. Instead, communities should focus on constructive alternatives to criminalization that actually work; policies like the “housing first” strategy that provides housing and supportive services to homeless people and is also much less costly than the price of jail stays and emergency room visits.

Could you survive if there were no place you were allowed to fall asleep, store your belongings, or stand still?  There are far better policy choices than criminalization and making it illegal for people to simply try to survive; policies that are better for homeless people, and better for the character of our nation.

The headline of an October 2007 press release read: ”Closure of D.C. Village Gives Way to Best Practices.”

D.C. Village, an emergency shelter for homeless families, had been widely criticized for “inhumane” conditions. In the press release, former Mayor Adrian Fenty said, ”One of our first major steps in changing the delivery of homeless services is the transformation of our family shelter system.”

The administrations of Mayor Fenty and his successor, Mayor Vincent Gray, both failed to live up to that promise. By 2010, flooded with more homeless families than the city has ever seen—in part due to a lack of affordable housing—District officials packed up to 200 families into the D.C. General emergency shelter which was designed to serve a maximum of 135 families.

History is now repeating itself. Residents have suffered insect bites that required hospitalization and have gone days without heat and hot water. In March, a D.C. General employee allegedly kidnapped eight-year-old Relisha Rudd from the shelter. She’s not been found.

This winter, a D.C. Superior Judge ordered the Gray Administration to stop housing homeless families on cots in the shelter on freezing nights. Dora Taylor, spokeswoman for Mayor Gray’s Department of Human Services (DHS) disagreed with the order. She said:

“Certainly we strive to provide the best possible environment for families as evidenced by the approximately 800 or more families that we have placed at our apartment style shelters, private rooms at the D.C. General Family Shelter and over 470 hotel rooms.”

Her reaction to the injunction reads more like a tourist’s travel review of the nation’s capital than an indictment of a system that humiliates and harms families with no other options.

B.B. Otero, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, offered this take on the need for change at D.C. General: “Reforming the system is the only thing that can help families achieve self-sufficiency and lift themselves out of poverty, but it is not the stuff of newspaper exposés.”

Which brings us back to 2007 and the closure of D.C. Village: we heard this “reform” language back then and poor families have little to show for it. Expecting parents to “lift themselves out of poverty” while managing the chaos of their circumstances as well as a broken system ought to be unacceptable to everyone that calls D.C. home.  Any parent forced to choose the crumbling shell of what once was D.C. General Hospital over the streets must wonder—are they being punished for falling on hard times?  Broken windows and no guarantee of running water or heat ought to shame us all.

Yes, of course the system must be changed, and that begins with an end to the constant game of keep away between DHS, The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, D.C. City Council and the Mayor of the day—all of them refusing to address the issue in a substantive way. While homeless families live in horrible conditions, these groups and political leaders point fingers and avoid accountability at all costs. This needs to end. Appropriate funding is a start but money alone will not solve the problem. The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness received $13 million dollars to run D.C. General on behalf of the city, and look at the results.

How many administrations will be elected before the discussion shifts from “reforming” the system to actually changing it?  A new mayor and a new Council are on the horizon, but it is already business as usual with the mayoral campaigns. None of the candidates are talking substantively about how they would change this system that is an affront to basic human dignity.  Sound bites do not magically transform into action.  Candidates court wealthy donors, the business community, and developers, but exclude low-income families.

Candidates for mayor should sit down with families at D.C. General and commit to more than simply closing the shelter’s doors. Tell those agencies and individuals responsible for these conditions that the status quo will no longer guarantee their employment. Include families that are currently receiving services as equal partners in the creation of a planned response to the housing crisis in D.C.

Winter will be here before we know it, and unless we change the way we are doing things—make no mistake—some of our city’s most vulnerable children will be left out in the cold.

Low- and moderate-income people across the country are facing a rental affordability crisis. TalkPoverty’s backyard in Washington, D.C. is no exception.

Over the past decade, low-income D.C. residents have been crushed under the burden of skyrocketing rents, stagnant incomes, and a loss of half of all low-cost rental units. The loss of affordable housing is counterproductive because preserving old units is less expensive than building new ones. Due to the lack of affordable housing, almost two-thirds of low-income households in D.C. pay 50% of their incomes toward rent, which is double the amount recommended by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Homelessness in D.C. is rising as a result of this crisis. The city’s total homeless population increased 13% since last year, and family homelessness has risen 50% since 2010. The rise of homelessness is expected to cost the District tens of millions of dollars—costs which could have been partially averted by a stronger commitment to preserving affordable housing.

But numbers alone can’t tell this story. They can’t illustrate the emotional harm homeless families have suffered while living in shelters with no privacy, few showers, and the lights on at night. They can’t show the frustration many employed homeless people feel when they work and work but still can’t afford the city’s high rents.

The rise in the homeless population was avoidable. D.C. already has an effective public financing tool at its disposal to preserve affordable units. The city’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) requires that the landlord give tenants the right to purchase the property before it is sold. This tool is supported by the unique D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development’s (DHCD) First Right Purchase Program, which provides low-income tenants with public financing so that they can exercise their TOPA rights and purchase their buildings. The program empowers low-income tenants because many cannot access private loans or afford private financing payments. While other communities may have tenant right to purchase laws, it is rare that tenants are provided public financing to exercise those rights.

When funded, the First Right Purchase Program is highly effective. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute found that the program—funded largely by Community Development Block Grants and a Housing Production Trust Fund—has helped preserve nearly 1,400 units of affordable housing over the past decade. However, due to cuts in these funding sources, preservation fell from 292 units in 2008, to only 35 units in 2012, and 28 units in 2013. It is hardly a coincidence that homelessness spiked at a time when the city and the federal government dedicated few resources to preserving affordable housing.

Low-income residents of Columbia Heights—one of D.C.’s most diverse neighborhoods—are experiencing the lack of affordable housing firsthand. However, through TOPA, many are fighting back, allying with community-based organizations and mobilizing to protect and expand affordable housing in the area.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing & Economic Development held a walking tour on “Keeping Columbia Heights Affordable.” The tour visited several sites in where affordable housing had been successfully preserved or built. Photo by Aimee Custis for Coalition for Smarter Growth.

At the St. Dennis Apartments, a management company tried to force out long-term residents so that the affordable units could be converted to lucrative luxury condos. The company bought out a number of long-term residents and intimidated others into moving out. However, one family of three refused to leave the building.  For a long time, the only sign of life in the St. Dennis building was the light in the family’s window.

A photo of the St. Dennis Apartments, which provides affordable housing for individuals living below 60% of the area median income. Residents successfully fended off efforts to convert the building into luxury condos.

In many other areas of the country, a low-income family would have few options to prevent the sale and conversion of their building. However, by working with the NHT Enterprise Preservation Corporation & National Housing Trust as well as the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, the family was able to form a tenant association, secure financing, and purchase the building the day before their TOPA rights expired. As a result, a valuable building was preserved as affordable housing.

Yesenia Rivera of the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) (left) and Ruth Chavez (right), who serves as Secretary of a tenant association for the 3115 Mt. Pleasant St. building, discuss their desire to use TOPA rights and the DC First Right Purchase Program to purchase and preserve the building as a cooperative for low-income residents. D.C. has a system where organizations like LEDC are contracted by the city to assist low-income tenants in organizing themselves. Photo by Aimee Custis for Coalition for Smarter Growth.

In D.C., we’ve seen that TOPA and an adequately funded First Right Purchase Program can effectively preserve affordable housing for low-income people. But due to Congressional gridlock, it is highly unlikely that there will be any additional federal funds for affordable housing programs. That makes it all the more critical that the D.C. government continue its recently strong commitment to funding its Housing Production Trust Fund.

The issue of a shortage in affordable housing is hardly limited to the nation’s capital.  Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan has said that, “We are in the midst of the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has known.” The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, supported by a well-funded First Right Purchase Program, provides a model for one way communities can respond to this crisis.

A few weeks ago they invited me to join them and other groups in Trenton, N.J. for a day of lobbying politicians regarding issues related to housing and jobs. Many voices, many issues.

I asked the director of the NJ Coalition to End Homelessness, Deb Eliis, if there was only one thing The Coalition could accomplish in the next year, what she would want it to be.

She answered: “A Homeless Shelter in Ocean County.”

Ocean County is where I live.  I know that there are seven facilities in Ocean County that house, care for, and try to find permanent living situations for stray animals, but not a single one that provides the same services for humans.  Toms River is the second largest township in Ocean County and one of its most affluent. I lived in Toms River until a month ago before I moved into permanent affordable housing in a nearby town. When I lived in Toms River I worked with the faith-based Homeless Outreach mission, so I also know that on any given night in Toms River there are between 30 and 40 people (that we know of) living scattered throughout its wooded areas. In case you have never been to a homeless encampment – and as someone who used to be homeless – I can tell you this: there is no way anyone – no matter your age – can live that way for very long without developing serious physical and mental ailments. These people will sooner or later end up in an Emergency Room, which is the least efficient and most expensive way of not dealing with this problem of homelessness.

My contribution to the meeting in Trenton was to get agreement on not calling it a “homeless shelter” and instead refer to it as an Emergency Housing Relief Center.  I feel strongly that words such as ‘shelters’ and ‘the projects’ should be dropped from our vocabularies when we are referring to people living in acute financial distress.

Why? Because words matter.

Check out this vintage 1976 ditty from a former B-list actor in California: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

The ‘she’ is the infamous ‘welfare queen’ who in fact didn’t exist, and the person making the lumpen remark, Ronald Reagan, goes on to become President of the United States in 1980.

The remark helped to turn back a decade of progress in eliminating chronic poverty in America, and marked a significant turning point in American attitudes toward their fellow citizens receiving financial aid and/or food assistance from the government.

Once again, we are back to where we were in the 1970s –defining poverty, rather than just tackling it head on.  But this time we have to be ever more vigilant about not letting it be defined by people who are prejudiced and use negative stereotypes.  We need a fresh working definition of poverty that reflects peoples’ real life experiences and portrays their personal and financial struggles with dignity and respect.

First of all, we should stop calling it “poverty”—in political campaigns or otherwise. It is people in “acute financial distress.” When we hear of people in distress we want to help them. When we hear that they are poor we ignore them because of all of the stigmas associated with being poor.  “Acute financial distress” is a more accurate term too—it connotes a temporary predicament shared by many in our “new economy.” Poverty, on the other hand, is misperceived as a permanent condition, even though people slip in and out of being poor.

Having experienced acute financial distress, including being homeless, I think this is the central issue and major roadblock to eliminating poverty—the stigma that goes along with “being poor.” Lately, I feel like a modern day James Brown telling people to shout, “I’m Poor & I’m Proud. Sing it loud, Y’all!”

No joke. When you experience acute financial distress our society looks at you and says, aloud or not, “What did you do wrong?” and/or “What’s wrong with you?”

In my case, I became homeless because I refused to allow my mother, who was terminally ill with Alzheimer’s, to be placed in a nursing home. In the end, I was completely wiped out— physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially. There are many stories like mine.  But people prefer the stereotypes to the real stories—it makes it easier to maintain bad policies.

Bad policies like TANF which Peter Edelman wrote about in a TalkPoverty blog last month. I didn’t know who Edelman was at the time. But I’ve come to learn that he resigned from the Clinton Administration in 1996 after the President signed welfare reform legislation.  I researched why he did that and found out that Edelman was spot on. That legislation had two devastating effects: one, it dramatically reduced the amount of cash assistance that was available (for two years, believe it or not, I lived on a monthly general assistance stipend of $140.00); and secondly, it gave states nearly autonomous control of how and whether they provide cash assistance.

Now, this is where the stigma and these reforms intersect. Many of the people who administer social services (not the people working in the field who know better) also resent “poor people.”  That’s part of the reason why programs are designed in a way that makes it almost impossible for you to get your life back on track after a financial or personal trauma. And it works.  Most people give up and return to whatever situation got them into acute financial distress in the first place.

Case in point: I have been living on housing assistance in New Jersey the last four years or so. The state provides that assistance while a person applies for federally subsidized affordable housing. The understanding is that if you diligently apply for every affordable housing opportunity, they will help fund your housing until you are lucky enough to get one of the few federally-subsidized units.

But when I went to see my case worker in April, I was told that all extensions for the Housing Assistance Program were being terminated June 30th. No explanation; no recourse.

I was fortunate, because four days after meeting with my case worker I got a letter telling me there was an affordable housing unit available for me. This was a coincidence. But I can tell you, honestly, during those three days when I didn’t know where I’d be living in another month—after being a long-term caregiver for my mother, and then losing her and becoming homeless—I  came seriously close to triggering the PTSD that I had worked so very hard for the last two years to deal with.  I know many others, not so fortunate, who right now are totally freaking out. For what? Why do this to people? The point is, without federal regulation and guidelines to oversee how states administer social services, they can pretty much do as they please.

Right now I have SSI, food stamps and subsidized housing. So I’m good, sort of.  My food stamp allowance comes to $6 a day. So I’ll be going to a Food Pantry later. I help them work it and they help me with food.

That’s the last thing I’ll say because I think most people don’t know it: there’s a lot of solidarity out here among people living in acute financial distress. That’s what’s working—in spite of social services that aren’t designed with those of us who are struggling in mind.

Though they were originally.  See Robert Beezat’s excellent article on the Forgotten Lesson of the War on Poverty.

The House has passed its 2015 Transportation-HUD appropriations bill and the Senate may vote on its bill soon.  While the need for affordable housing continues to rise — the number of poor renter households who pay more than half their monthly income for housing costs has risen 28 percent since 2007 — and homelessness remains unacceptably high, the House bill cuts HUD funding compared to 2014, reducing the number of people receiving rental assistance.  The Senate allocated over $1 billion more to HUD than the House and its bill makes important investments in a few areas, but it fails to serve any additional very poor or homeless households.

These inadequate bills come as the Housing Choice Voucher program, the biggest federal rental assistance program, continues to suffer from losses due to sequestration in 2013, which imposed the steepest funding cut in the program’s 40-year history.  Over 70,000 fewer low-income families had vouchers at the end of 2013 than a year earlier.  Congress provided enough funding in 2014 to restore fewer than half of these lost vouchers, but the 2015 Senate and House bills won’t even renew all of the vouchers restored in 2014, locking in large voucher losses for years to come.

Other HUD programs fare no better.  The Senate provided just enough funding for Homeless Assistance Grants (which provide emergency shelter, permanent supportive housing, and other assistance to people experiencing homelessness) to help the same number of people next year as this year (the House bill would force cuts in the number of people helped), while rejecting the President’s proposal to create more than 30,000 new units of permanent supportive housing to help end chronic homelessness by 2016.

Similarly, both bills rejected the President’s proposal to modestly expand supportive housing for the elderly and people with disabilities, providing only enough funding to serve the current number of recipients.

The Senate did reverse the House bill’s deep cuts in a number of areas by:

• raising the voucher program’s administrative funding by $205 million to help public housing agencies run the program effectively;
• boosting the Public Housing Capital Fund by $125 million to help repair public housing units, a critical addition given the $26 billion backlog of needed capital repairs in public housing developments; and
• expanding funding for the HOME Investment Partnerships program by $250 million to help develop and repair units that are affordable to homeowners and renters with incomes at about twice the poverty line.

These are important improvements over the House bill, and the Senate bill better maintains the current number of people receiving housing assistance, but it won’t enable more people to receive assistance next year.

Thus, neither chamber of Congress made the hard choices needed in this tough budgetary environment to prioritize HUD’s housing programs.  These programs serve 10 million people in about 5 million households, most of whom are elderly, disabled or working parents with incomes below the poverty line and would be homeless or lack stable housing without federal rental assistance.  Yet only 1 in 4 people eligible for rental assistance receives it due to limited funding, and the unmet need is enormous.

Over 1.1 million homeless children were enrolled in school during the 2011-2012 school year, for example, and more than 90,000 people are chronically homeless (meaning they have a disability and have been homeless for over a year or repeatedly over three years).  And more than 8 million low-income households receive no federal housing assistance yet pay more than half of their income for rent and utilities — well above what’s considered affordable.

Even maintaining the status quo, as the Senate bill largely does, won’t help homeless children, who fall farther behind in school the longer they lack a home; it won’t help homeless adults with disabilities obtain supportive housing; and it won’t help more low-income seniors age with dignity in their communities. These bills are not good enough for our most vulnerable neighbors, and they shouldn’t be good enough for Congress.

For the last several years, national efforts to end veteran homelessness have proceeded with unusual focus. During that time, the nation’s Department of Housing and Urban Development has been ably led by Secretary Shaun Donovan, an astute policy thinker with vast housing experience. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, General Eric Shinseki has provided similar leadership, repeatedly committing the country to finding homes for every homeless veteran by December of 2015. These two men have spearheaded an effort that has resulted in a 24 percent drop in veteran homelessness since 2010.  Today, there are fewer than 60,000 homeless veterans for the first time since the government began counting.

Last month, Secretary Shinseki resigned and President Obama announced that he would move Secretary Donovan to the Office of Management and Budget. Advocates for homeless veterans have been anxious ever since.

But leadership changes at HUD and VA need not slow national progress on ending veteran homelessness, because both Donovan and Shinseki have spent years laying a firm, data-driven foundation to help their successors continue the fight.

To end veteran homelessness, the incoming secretaries should continue the proven policy of Housing First, push Congress to expand the cost-saving HUD-VASH voucher program, and continue to drive increased collaboration at the community level.

For years, VA and other homeless service providers worked to offer medical and mental health care, addiction counseling, job training and countless other services to people living on the streets. Most homeless veterans were told they had to earn their way to permanent housing by checking these supplementary boxes.

While the intentions behind this approach were good, the unfortunate result was that chronically homeless veterans rarely escaped the streets. For most, it was simply too difficult to battle addiction, take care of serious physical and mental health conditions or find steady employment while simultaneously battling homelessness.

Since 2012, both HUD and VA have adopted a Housing First policy toward chronically homeless veterans. This policy is simple: help veterans secure safe, permanent housing right away, without imposing strict employment or treatment requirements, and then continue to work with them on their social and mental health goals afterwards. This evidence-based strategy has been proven effective over and over in published research, but it remains controversial to many Americans, who still believe that homeless veterans should have to prove themselves before being offered subsidized housing.

We disagree. When our veterans return home, our duty is to assist them, not make them prove that they are worthy of assistance.

The successful push to implement Housing First has relied heavily on the HUD-VASH voucher program, a joint initiative in which HUD provides chronically homeless veterans with a rental subsidy while the VA funds basic case management. This program has been transformative, helping tens of thousands of veterans spend more time in their own homes and less time in expensive, publicly funded hospitals. In fact, a recent VA report found that HUD-VASH, combined with a Housing First approach, resulted in 84 percent of participating veterans remaining stably housed after 12 months while reducing VA healthcare costs by 32 percent.

It is not often that a policy achieves such impressive outcomes for our veterans at such a dramatically reduced cost. The President has moved to expand the HUD-VASH program, and Congress should move to follow his lead.

Still, federal money means nothing if it cannot be administered effectively on the ground. In most communities, where multiple local agencies own different parts of the housing process, it still takes far too long to move a single homeless veteran off the street. Unfortunately, this problem cannot be solved with the stroke of a pen in Washington. It requires strong local leadership to pull multiple agencies and organizations together around measurable, achievable goals.

The White House provided powerful backing for this task last week when it launched the Mayor’s Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness, and HUD and the VA should continue their demonstrated commitment to streamlining federal rules and processes in response to community input. Both departments should also lean heavily on the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, a support agency that houses top notch policy thinkers who are charged with streamlining and coordinating federal efforts to end homelessness.

Veteran homelessness can be eliminated—and far sooner than most Americans think—but ensuring that every veteran has a permanent home by December 2015 will require unwavering leadership from the new HUD and VA secretaries.  If the President’s new choices to lead these departments preserve and build on the gains of their predecessors, they stand to preside over the end of veteran homelessness in America. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful legacy.