Homelessness In The USA
Page II

A true story about some friends of mine...

Report documents modern mass homelessness in New York City—Part 1

Report documents modern mass homelessness in New York City—Part 2

Five homeless people froze to death in US capital last winter

Court halts Japanese billionaire's U.S. evictions

           A true story about some friends of mine...

             http://www.wrybread.com/WrybreadWriting/notesfromroad/start3.shtml 

                   Part I

For a month or so I worked and pretty much lived with a group who called themselves an "anarchist kitchen", which is a bunch of people living outside capitalism and society in general (hence "anarchist"), serving a massive free meal to nearby homeless folk. They did the cooking in their big old 70s Winnebago, and travelled to a new city when they felt like it. I lived with them while they were docked in San Francisco.

They get their food by "panhandling" (as they put it) at the local farmer's markets. They go from vendor to vendor explaining that they are a free kitchen serving food to "homeless" people, and could they please spare any vegetables? Tony, who looks like a gutterpunk but is way too smart and motivated to sit on a sidewalk every day and "spange" (ask for spare change), approaches each vendor with a pitch honed from canvassing for Greenpeace and some PERG. He walks up to the monger with a serious look on his face (unusual for him), hands them a card which inexplicably reads "Certified Farmer's Market", and he meets their eyes and says, "I'm with the People's Kitchen. We cook food for the homeless people living in Golden Gate Park. I was wondering if we could work together on putting together a meal . . ." The mongers, who are mostly Asian, usually play their I-don't-speak-English card at this point. But all it takes are two or three vendors out of the thirty and we've got more vegetables than we can serve before they go bad. Five boxes overflowing. Eventually the problem isn't getting the vegetables, but finding boxes to put them in, as those are apparently more valuable. We get broccoli, baby eggplants, exotic peppers of all colors and shapes, a massive box full of juicing oranges, Russian kale, boxes of apples and persimmons, more grapes than I've ever seen, and so on.

Once, before they had my car and not wanting to use the Winnebago, they loaded a handtruck and seven boxes bursting and leaking vegetables on a public bus. Strategy: pay before loading anything on, so the driver can't refuse.

They do all this not in the spirit of charity, which they shun, but to show people that it's possible to work independently of the government and capitalism and still accomplish something. Which is to say that they do it to show that anarchism can work.

And Monday through Friday, each and every one of the five kitchen members are at work, cleaning, prepping, cooking, serving, and doing much miscellany. Work starts surprisingly sharply at 10am and finishes around 6 or 7 after every last bit of food is served and everything is clean. That's a 40+ hour week, for which they earn nary a cent. Trying to get the meal out by 4pm feels urgent as a newspaper deadline, with someone yelling every half hour or so, with a touch of panic in their voice, "Yo! What time is it?"

The meals themselves are unbelievably gourmet. There's no attitude of fuck 'em, they aren't paying for it. They make super tasty stews, maybe cornbread if they haven't scored any bagels lately, once making individually deep fried breaded eggplant slices. Usually they'll serve a soup, some sort of bread, and some fruit.

Their hygiene is a little on the lacking side: there's a water cooler full of bleach solution for "sterilizing" hands (a Rainbow Gathering trick), but it's mostly ornamental. Vegetables fall on the floor and are brushed off; at night the cutting boards serve as joint rolling tables, beer coasters and general party surfaces. When someone is sick they help cook anyway, albeit with a Jessie James bandanna over their mouth. They say they don't serve "dumpster food" on the grounds that "it's making the choice for a lot of people whether they want to eat from a dumpster." But I've seen them serve bread that I personally scored from a dumpster, not to mention tomatoes and lettuce.

My Own Parade

Serving the food is a blast. We roll the cauldrons of food to the serving spot in Golden Gate Park at Haight Street in shopping carts, set them in a sort of wagon train, and the gutterpunks and gutterhippies, who sit there all day every day (it's called "punker hill" -- elsewhere is "hippie hill") begin to stir when they see us coming. They exchange scowls which somehow communicate that dinner has arrived and one by one they stumble over to us and begrudgingly accept a meal. It feels like we're selling the food, actually yelling solicitations at people. "Hey, you want some soup?" (Please?) And when people take a bowl they act more like they're doing us a favor. One day the Needle Exchange was serving food about a hundred yards away and it really felt like we were in competition. They were giving out cans of soda, which just about put us out of business.

Standing there serving the food brings a parade of freaks right in front of me, single file and slow. Nearly every face is pierced and/or tattooed, and passing out the bagels I don't put a single one into a clean hand, and many of the hands are caked with dirt, shaking and have scabs on the knuckles, something all junkies get for some reason. Many eyes are yellowed, which I'm told is a symptom of hepatitis.

The sweatshirt hood seems to be the central fashion accessory, while some actually opt for full facial masks, and the general color scheme of their clothes subtly riffs on the theme of black and army green. Some still sport the original punk fashion of the plaid handkerchief safety pinned to the jacket above the ass for protection while sitting on things all day. They generally own no more clothing than what they're wearing; when you see someone in a different outfit it's as startling as if they radically changed their hairstyle.

They love to scratch themselves theatrically while talking to you, drawing attention to their body lice and what they imagine others will perceive as hardship. They're way caught up in the mythical archetype of the down on his luck American hitting the road to find greener pastures but at every turn finding only more of the same. They will not smile, so by way of thanking us they might tip their head and plate in our direction and snarl off in a cloud of nihilistic bliss. Some are obviously emotionally if not psychologically damaged either permanently or at least as long as the drugs last. Some are nodding out and trying to be charming as all junkies will, and we have to push them back so they don't drool on the food. And in and among the clusters of sprawling munching gutterpunks lots of little shouting matches flare up.

There was one little shouting outburst where someone starting yelling "Yo, don't give him no food, yo," pointing to someone we were serving, "He lives in a house, yo, and eats steak every night." The worst thing you could say about somebody.

Another interesting outburst came when one of the "kids" (as they call themselves) complained about the local "mall kids" who are "loopy. Just a bunch of acid mall rats and they ain't got no brains, talkin bout how they been homeless for a year. I'm like, oh yeah, where? And he says Eugene, Oregon, dude. I'm like, Eugene? Man, it's easy to be homeless in Eugene."

After the meal is served there's much satisfaction in getting another good product out the door. All go back to the camper and roll cigarettes, maybe smoke a bowl, crank up the music, and smile deep and serene.

True to the rule that the party always ends up in the kitchen, most nights someone will stop by the RV to "smoke us out". I'll usually scramble to put together enough change for a 40. From the perspective of one who's been living for a while on no money, that $1.75 seems like all you'd need in the world.

Generally not much happens at night. The sun will set, rendering the woody brown camper interior soft and mellow, and all will sit hardly talking, maybe listening to college or pirate radio. When darkness is complete someone will juice up the oil lantern. There are no electric lights.

Then one by one each person will find their sleeping bag and file out to their private sleeping spot on the beach or in the park. All are generally asleep by 10:30, exhausted from the workday. But it doesn't take much rain to send everyone scrambling back to the R.V. for shelter, where two people will sleep on the floor, two on the folded down table, one on the narrow counter and one on the couch-bed in the back. Which is to say things get crowded.

One endearing moment came when a kid named Beagle stopped by, sleeping bag in tow. If it's after dark, all gutterpunks carry their sleeping bags. He's all the way gutterpunk, with the multiple dirty layers topped by a jacket with the word "Neanderthal" scrawled across the bottom of the back, and he's got the up-to-the-moment nihilistic attitude. He sits in the Winnebago tuning the radio, paying attention to no one. He arrives at a station playing Led Zeppelin and says, "Man, this is the music I grew up to." Everyone says yeah me too but Beagle says no I grew up in the 80s. Beagle is now 17 (young even for a gutterpunk), which means he was 9 years old in 1989 when he describes himself as "growing up". In my opinion, you don't begin "growing up" until you're at least 15, which means Beagle is just starting to "grow up". But in his mind that all happened before he was ten. And this kid has some crazy stories, like how a "couple of years ago" he was hitchhiking around Louisiana and couldn't get a ride out and couldn't find any freight trains to hop and had to work doing "crazy jobs". Underneath his well worn dirty cap he's got this little head which clearly hasn't finished growing yet, and on his face he has the bad kid teenage mustache. And he talks about his "physical addiction to alcohol".

There's another character that comes by the R.V. from time to time and just sleeps on things. He sleeps the sleep of the chemically enhanced, going 18+ hours at a stretch, sometimes while sitting upright at the diner-style table. When he wakes and is asked how he's doing he'll answer something like "Dealing with being awake." He's one of the many many people in San Francisco and the west coast in general who for some reason enjoy crystal methadrine. The drug is everywhere out here: it can be synthesized in any kitchen and costs under $5 for a 24-hour high. The experience looks unpleasant -- a "tweaker" (as they're called) will wring their hands and jaws all day until the 12 hour mark at which point they'll have unpleasant hallucinations. But still, people actually manage to get addicted to this drug.

Here are the kitchen folks:

Floppy

If the bus has a leader, it's Floppy. He's aptly named (most of the Rainbow Gathering-type names are fitting), as his whole body seems to hang limp. He's skinny, with uncombed but otherwise straight blond hair just past his shoulders, and always wears a droopy-brimmed baseball cap. His voice is lazy and slow, but his eye contact is intense and constant. He's a natural leader, and when someone newly meets the group and is telling some anecdote to everyone, that person will usually end telling the story to just Floppy. Eyes just fall on him, even though he's not at all what you'd call charismatic, at least not in the surface sense. He has that inexplicable way. Also, when Floppy speaks, no matter how much conversation is going on, everyone will quiet down and listen. He has probably thirty Pink Floyd tapes, most of them of live shows, and introduced me to John Prine, who is a sort of blue-collar Loudon Wainright (a cross between Loudon and Harry Chapin). Floppy's about 30 years old, been working with "mobile kitchens" since 1992. He can say "lets blow this popsicle stand" and make it sound cool. When he drinks enough Jim Beam he plays air guitar to his Iron Maiden tapes and was heard to say "I been riff raff since I was 13."

Dina

Floppy's girlfriend. Looks just like him, with a generally limp demeanor, long hair topped by a baseball cap, and a lazy way of speaking. Awesomely capable woman, spends much time "wrenching" on the camper engine. Independent as hell. As with Floppy, when she speaks all conversation stops.

Shay

Floppy and Dina's dog. A "res dog", which means a dog originally from an Indian reservation. Evidently these dogs have it rough, and this one certainly has: she has a stub for a tail and all sorts of scars on her ass from being rear-ended by a car.

Tony

Tony's been spending no money for years. He's totally committed to the lifestyle, and is definitely an activist within it, trying to stir what he calls the "nihilists" back to the spirit of anarchism, which, he says, is helping yourself. He looks quite the gutterpunk, though he says most of the gutterpunks are just depressive drunks. He wants to start a pirate radio station out of the R.V. He's hugely intelligent, articulate, literate; I was intensely surprised to learn he stopped school at ninth grade.

It amazes me that although he's as passionate about the anarchist movement as he is, he still has so much of his own personality. When I lived among the squatters in New York it seemed like they took this opportunity given by not paying rent and did nothing but cogitate on it. All they'd talk about was squatting. I used to say of them that they'd traded their occupations for pre-occupations. But Tony hasn't at all: he's still a good all-around person.

One last fact about Tony: no one here takes showers more often than, say, once every two weeks, but Tony seems to be the one you'd most want to keep upwind of.

Jose

Upon meeting him you'd first be struck by the fact that he's 280+ pounds of surly, goateed Puerto Rican. But, you guessed it, he's the nicest guy. He's originally from Miami, and has a bit of that Miami Latino culture thing. He introduced me to Santaria music, which is extra abstract and tense rhythms with eerie and beautiful chanting. The chanting isn't in Spanish but "in tongues".

Whenever I give him a ride in my car he leaves behind a meaty stink wherever he was sitting, which gets worse if the car is left in the sun. He professes to be purely peaceful, but in a pinch will use his size to intimidate someone, as when some old house frau swatted his pitbull when it barked at her dogs. He got right in this 40ish woman's face and said "Don't you hit my dog, bitch, I'll slap you down." Also, when we were sleeping on the beach and someone approached us to bum a cigarette Jose sort of barked him away, laughing after visibly intimidating this poor guy on the nighttime deserted beach. He clearly has aggressive tendencies but they're pushed below the surface by the cultural demand that he be peaceful (if he ever hit anyone he'd be ostracized and he knows it). He's also not the sharpest tool in the shed, and gets brutally picked on by Tony and Floppy. Has the word "Love" tattooed on his finger-knuckles, and a butterfly between his thumb and forefinger.

Luna

Jose's dog. Another dumb-as-wood pitbull but one of the most timid dogs I've met, probably owing to Jose's constantly yelling at her trying to get her to obey him. She's shy, but when she gets around another dog (something Jose tries to prevent) or when you finally manage to get her to play, her inner-pitbull comes out and she barks and bites hard. She sleeps inside Jose's sleeping bag at his feet, and will climb inside any open sleeping bag.

Rich

Looks the typical Rainbow Gathering part with long blond dreadlocks and facial hair that always seems to configure itself to resemble a bird of prey. He's a classically trained pianist, sightreads Beethoven, but doesn't play much unless he can find an unguarded piano in a cafe or university. Quiet and independent, he's prone to suddenly disappearing and taking solo walks through the park, especially at night. Thought the internet was the "inner net". Great to talk to, but if his voice becomes a little pinched it means he's about to get into his conspiracy and/or metaphysical theories, in which case I've found it best to change the subject or end the conversation. Is semi-convinced that the HAARP project in Alaska is emitting thought-controlling radio waves, and believes he had a one-on-one confrontation with the devil. Other pet conspiracy theories involve the Philadelphia Project, the 12th Planet, the 6th and 7th Books of Moses, Motique Project, Telluric Currents, and the German Hypothesis. Manages to greet the most haggard of our soup kitchen customers with an amazingly warm smile.

Glenn

Like myself, he "plugged in" to the kitchen for a while. He's black, but doesn't have a trace of a blaccent. He and I worked as extras in a movie about hippies (a whole nother article) and, driving to the site with him navigating the map, I discovered he doesn't know his left from his right. Has dreams of uniting the whole Burning Man scene into what he calls a circus and being the one to profit from it. That defense mechanism that keeps each of us believing we're special is working just fine with him. Has a black foot fungus that no medication can cure. Lived in one of the larger homeless encampments in the park until he had to leave because of very convincing death threats. It's a good story, so here it is:

Glenn's Farewell

His encampment was in a patch of Golden Gate Park where there were no bushes, just grass worn to dirt, with mattresses scattered about, and a little area where the residents left their shopping carts. Through Glenn I met a few of the inhabitants, and they all seemed to be at least 35, and, as Glenn puts it, they liked to get high. But in keeping with the San Francisco version of the alchie/junkie, they were incredibly nice. Upon meeting, they would hug you if they sensed you wouldn't recoil.

But one of these very nice people -- and who in Glenn's words is especially nice, who "just liked to get drunk and climb in his bedroll, never even heard him raise his voice" -- was, while asleep and restrained by his own sleeping bag, beaten about the face and head with a golf club. Glenn describes the guy who did the beating as a "serious asshole", who would get his veteran's benefits at the beginning of the month, be on a crack binge and stay in welfare hotels until about the fifteenth when the money would run out, at which time he would return to the park ranting and crazy.

After he beat this guy up (if so mild a phrase describes it), some residents of the camp told him to leave, so, when no one was around, he tried to torch the camp. Unfortunately for all parties, Glenn and a large friend were just returning. They chased the guy, caught him, and Glenn's large friend punched the guy until his fists and arms were bloody from punching.

About four nights later I met a panic-eyed Glenn who took me aside and asked if I could give him a ride. It seems the guy got back from the hospital, returned to the park, first with his wife who chased Glenn with a bottle yelling "you gonna die tonite nigga" even in front of the cops, and then later with his nephew, who is a little gangster kid, saying how they were "gonna bust a cap in his ass".

So I stuffed frightened Glenn's bags, blankets and shopping cart in my car and drove him out of the neighborhood, dropped him off in the business district. We hugged, and there he went into the still San Francisco night, just another homeless black man pushing a shopping cart.

The Writing on the Winnebago Wall

The actual camper is a vintage 70's jalopy of an RV, about 30 feet long with an old white paint job and a faded brown stripe down the side. Bumpers and miscellany hang semi-loose everywhere, and the roof is busy with things tied down. The inside decor is a happy marriage of mobile-home retiree kitsch and squatter guerilla architecture. Some of the old faux wood paneling remains, while the rest has been overlaid with found lumber fastened by mismatched found screws.

In the rear they gutted whatever was once there and installed three sinks for rinsing, and a few five gallon carboys filled with water. This is where the decorative cooler of chlorine solution sits. A postcard with a portrait of Che Gueverra occupies the place of honor above the diner-style table, and all over the walls, scrawled in black magic marker in different hands are little slogans. Here they are:

"End the monopoly on life: share food . . . and fuck welfare!"

"The aim of existence is to offer resistance to the flow of time."

"All your private property is target for your enemy and your enemy is we." - Jefferson Airplane

Next to a picture of a big pugnacious cop: "If you don't awaken and see what this man is doing to us then it will be too late."

"They may have the gas ovens built and going before you realize that they're already hot." - Malcolm X

"Corporate Amerika has a gun to your head and you are pulling the trigger"

"In service each other we become free." - Camelot inscription on the Round Table

"Live free or die." - Misty and Brutus

"The thing to remember when traveling is the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too FAST and you miss all you are travelling for! Ride the dark trail." - Louis L'Amour

"Haste is a form of violence."

"He who bitches will be a bitch!"

Malt Liquor Monks and Their Sacrament

When I ask why they don't even put out a little jar for unsolicited donations they say "that's not what we're about." And this after having to buy $20 of spices and propane that the farmer's market couldn't provide. Money for this type of thing comes from working odd jobs. Someone will, for example, clean up pumpkins after Halloween for $5.25/hour for 8 hours and come back exhausted and put every cent into the "kitty". Their absolute willingness to do this -- to work all day and keep nothing -- smacks to me just a little of cult behavior.

There really is something religious about these folk, cult-like or not. They're ascetic to the bone, keep no material possessions or other worldly attachments, dedicate themselves to the service of others, have no private property except their clothes (and only then because nobody wants to wear each other's stink), covet nothing, preach and for the most part practice non-violence. And they're fully immersed in the buzz of it all -- they're feeling the benefit of that sort of behavior, not doing it because some dogma or a fear of punishment tells them to. It's Buddhism and Christianity in their purest forms, before all the metaphors and symbols become literal. Compare to Lord's Prayer

When I get a little money I suddenly feel outside the group, like I'm betraying it, committing blasphemy. I have to be broke and (involuntarily) ascetic before I can communicate with them.

A case could be made that the whole gutterpunk poverty thing, which is so often (understandably) dismissed as trust-funded homelessness, is an attempt at something like an independent and pure religious experience. Just because they don't wear monk's robes and just because they drink Old English might not disqualify them from being in their own way religious.

But I digress. Bear with me for one more digression:

The Philosophy of Anarchism

I've been hearing much about the D.I.Y. philosophy, which stands for Do It Yourself. Apparently the punk movement began as an attempt to be independent of corporate influences, to set up an independent self-sustaining subculture. I'm told that punk records are not copyrighted for this reason. Tony has a vision of a separate society that doesn't interact with "Babylon" at all -- it serves its own food, records its own music on its own record labels, and survives without money.

Even though most self-proclaimed "anarchists" spend their days crouched on sidewalks sipping 40 ouncers, the actual anarchism movement doesn't value that sort of thing: it values work and accomplishment just like mainstream society, only they don't measure it with money. They're trying to live without The System inside society. They're trying to create a little choice, an alternative to the mainstream.

The philosophy of the whole anarchist scene/ movement can be encapsulated as follows: European feudalism became modern capitalism and didn't change much. Through the continued enforcement of private property laws, the non-rich are forced to rent property from the rich. To do so they have to come up with lots of money each month, which means they have to work. Which wouldn't be so bad if it ended there, but it doesn't. The system is designed to get everyone caught up in the whole consumerism thing, making sure everyone covets this or that, or else paying off debts -- credit card, college loans, mortgage, car payments -- in a modern version of the Company Store. Where once supply met demand, now supply creates its own demand through advertising and generally fucking with people's heads. As Noam Chomsky put it, today's producers are more "engineers of consent" than useful suppliers.

Sure, it's technically possible to save money and live within the system without getting hooked, but for the last 30 or so years the rate at which Americans save their money never fluctuates from 3% of what they earn (I read that somewhere. Try to keep bearing with me. This part is almost over.) Most people, of course, save nothing; all their labor goes towards supporting their consumption. Furthermore, there's this whole cultural pressure mechanism where we're taught that only Money is good, and that work and people that don't produce Money are near useless. And, most repugnant of all to the anarchist philosophy, built into capitalism are little institutionalized hierarchies where one individual is routinely forced to bow before another.

The People's Kitchen folk are pretty unforgiving with this philosophy; any manifestation of government-connected society is dismissed out of hand. For instance, when we drove to a town called Bolinas, which is just north of San Francisco and clearly a place where hippies and post-hippies dominate, with dogs unleashed everywhere, all sorts of bikes, a surreal proportion of VW busses, and lots of people with that long-term vegetarian look. The crunchies weren't a contingent, not even just a majority, but the totality. I imagine even the sheriff patrols in a VW bus. But still the place was deemed infested with "yuppie hippies" and "sell outs".

Another example: if we see a fire at the beach, and someone asks what kind of people they are to see if we'd want to join them, anyone other than gutterpunks is dismissed as "just a bunch of yuppies." And they're right, as compared to themselves most people have upwardly mobile ambitions. As they've divorced themselves from society, they obviously have no ambition within it. Their ambitions are more along the lines of starting other anarchist kitchens or planting the seed for the much-discussed "anarchist community center."

The result of this Us vs. Them philosophy is that they feel endlessly pursued. When the camper broke down on the hiway, conversation stopped each time a car drove by until we could be sure it wasn't a cop. And this even though none of them have warrants, they don't keep drugs on board (they bury them in Golden Gate Park), and the camper is totally legal. I think it's just the result of living for so many years as an outsider. It's understandable, as this living outside the money system is tough. Cops start to seem like the jackbooted, brainwashed and armed enforcers of the ruling class, and anywhere you park they can and often do come knocking in the night to inspect the "suspicious vehicle," and they sometimes throw their cop weight around. It starts to feel like you're given a choice between participating in the economy -- on however menial a level, as the world still needs people to clean up pumpkins -- or being hunted down.

Okay, we're done with the religion/philosophy thing. Promise.

One For Dante

D.I.Y. or not, there's plenty of outside help available to one living this lifestyle. I take showers and receive mail at a place right off Haight Street called "Youth Outreach", which will also take phone messages and post them on a bulletin board, and from time to time they will walk down Haight Street passing out little street life helpers like toothbrushes, band aides, cookies, socks, etc. They're an "anarchist organization", which means they don't get any funding, so I wonder how they afford rent, paid staffing (two people), and what must be quite a water bill.

In a pinch, I'll take a shower at the Drop-In Center, which claims to be open all day every day. But the place scares me. Just as there's a difference between tourists and travelers, there's a difference between being homeless and apartmentless, and the people who hang around this place are all-the-way homeless. Here's what to expect if you go: you'll know you're getting close because the neighborhood abruptly becomes seedy, with three or four people trying to catch your eye to see if you're "looking for something". You tunnelvision for the door, which for some reason is beat up, and open it quickly. Just inside is a computer-made sign which reads "No Sitting On Floor", and right underneath is someone lying down and wrapped in blankety sweaters. Everywhere are black people in various states of damage, some visibly strung out, others limping, others muttering, others sort of chewing on their faces. Some look at you with sober eyes that know what you're thinking.

There is a desk with a sign "Wait here so the attendant may help you" but no attendant is there. Tethered to the desk are rolls of toilet paper -- take as many sheets as you anticipate needing. The place is huge, whiffing of large amounts of government money inefficiently spent. In the main room, which is big as six classrooms, are long tables and at each spot is a black man with his head resting hard in front of him, dead asleep.

The shower is in a little room to the side of the bathroom. The door disconcertingly doesn't lock or even close all the way. I guess where there are junkies you cannot have locking doors. You get nekkid and suddenly feel 8 or 9 times more vulnerable. There aren't separate hot and cold water controls, just one pushbutton that starts the water at a mono-temperature for about 15 seconds, reststop style. And there is no shower head, just a blunt stream of water spilling from the end of the pipe. But the water is awesomely hot. Your body forgets its environment for a moment in the surprise of the sensation and you press that water button many, many times.

When you're reluctantly done with the shower, you enter the men's bathroom to use the sink for a shave but standing in front of the mirror is a visibly speeding transvestite/transsexual working his(?) hair with curlers and hitting his(?) face hard and fast with a barrage of makeup. You leave the bathroom, leave the place. People outside try to catch your eye.

No Penny Opera

The non-governmental charity services are way more accommodating than the Drop-In Center. There's a Methodist church that puts on all sorts of free events, among them a dinner every Friday called the "No Penny Opera". The experience is so good you couldn't buy it. It's held below the actual church, in a large room that looks like a potential restaurant space. The ambiance is candle light, and in the corner someone lazily plays an accordion. The tables are long, German beer hall-style, and covered with nice psychedelic patterned tapestries. You are seated by the host. The patrons range from old-time homeless types to anarchists to nondescript adventurers, and, owing to the table arrangement (and this being San Francisco), everyone talks to one another. A waiter brings a plate of food, one dish suits all, which is a vegan plate of salad, wild rice, steamed greens and fresh bread. It's good. When you're done they bring tea, vegan chocolate cake and grapes. My policy when I don't give money for something is to help out a bit, so I do some dishes, but most people just leave and accept the take-home bag of fruit and vegetables.

One of the sponsors of this event is Food Not Bombs, another "anarchist kitchen". They're national. Predictably, there's some animosity toward them by the People's Kitchen folk. I've heard "Bombers" dismissed as "a bunch of elitist anarchists" and "white-collar anarchists" who "come in, serve the food and are gone. They're not of the people." They have also been described as "Food Not Flavor," which I suppose is a comment on their cooking. But no one complains about the No Penny Opera.

Center of the Bomb Blast

At some point, the San Francisco Chronicle, the most influential of the local papers, ran an Op-Ed piece lambasting mayor Willie Brown for allowing the "homeless problem" in Golden Gate Park to get so far out of hand. It was a disgrace, the article ranted, that "the crown jewel of the city's park system should become overrun with criminals and druggies." Soon the other papers were following suit, and before long it was headline news every day in every paper. Headlines ran: "Illegal Campers Descend on Golden Gate Park", __________, ______________. And then, in a blatant attempt by the media to influence municipal policy, the headlines became more editorial: "Calls to Willie Come In Loud And Clear" "Call to Green Up Golden Gate Park", _____________, ____________. The power of the pen was proven again, as soon thereafter the cop raids began. In the early stages, they would gently wake anyone they would find sleeping in the park and give them a warning. Then they started issuing tickets, but their hearts weren't in it and they would go so far as to explain that the ticket was pretty much meaningless. Each morning the park would be littered with crumpled tickets. And the cops only patrolled the open areas of the park, leaving the out-of-sight encampments, such as the one Glenn called home, alone.

But soon enough the camera crews and smoothie reporters were on the scene for what they hoped would be a more sensational raid. So these little encampments of gutterpunks, camped among their overflowing shopping carts and damp sleeping bags, were descended upon by halogen-spotlight wielding reporters and the hapless cops who were left no choice but to do their job extra well. Which is when they found a needle exchange stash of over 700 hypodermic needles . . .

It didn't matter that those needles were clearly from a needle exchange program, which was obvious by the way the "spikes" were broken off and stored in the "barrel". The press ran the story: "Druggies and Criminals Infest Park", ___________. Soon yellow journalism accounts of kids finding syringes in sandboxes were in every paper, and the media increased the pressure.

The word in the park until this point was that this would all blow over. People who'd been living there for twenty years dismissed this as nothing more than another periodical sweep of the park, which would "blow over like it always does" in two or three weeks. Even the cops were saying this. One encampment in the bushes outside where The Kitchen regularly parked -- about six to eight people on a bed of tarps and blankets -- were even approached by two of the mayor's assistants who "extended a personal invitation to leave the park." Both were fully suited and dapper, driving the Lincoln right up to the camp, and one chatted on his cellphone the whole time. But still everyone laughed it off. Then one morning everyone was gone. Which was when the fun began.

Not only did the mayor personally give the police instructions to clean up the park, but he actually requested a helicopter with infra-red detection equipment to find the encampments buried "deep in the bush." (No shit, he used that phrase.) He set up a hotline that a citizen could call to report an encampment, with a guarantee that it would be gone within 24 hours.

He went one farther than the media and targeted people sleeping on the beach at the foot of the park, as well as people sleeping in vehicles. Suddenly a person sleeping in a camper or van or even car (such as yours truly) would get a violent cop knock in the night and be given a ticket with the eerie small town warning "Mayor Willie Brown doesn't want people sleeping in vehicles anymore." Obvious live-in vehicles, such as the full-size converted yellow school bus which housed a family with three kids, would be left a flier reading: "WARNING: This vehicle is parked illegally. If not moved in 72 hours it will be towed . . ." In the morning people would announce with something like a touch of pride "I got the flier!"

The sweeps on the beach were conducted by park police, and they'd simply walk down the beach at first light and roust everyone sleeping there. Sometimes they'd issue citations, other times just warnings. They told Floppy and Dina, "You can't sleep in Uncle Sam's park," and then they let them be.

One cold morning I was fully wrapped in my mummy sleeping bag and I heard the sound of plodding feet approaching in the sand. Louder and louder they stepped until they reached my feet. "Hey . . ." I pulled my sleeping bag off my head. Silhouetted against the early morning sky was a cop with ticket book in hand. In my recollection he had an angry look on his face, ready for battle, but when he saw how dazed and sleepy I was he became a person again and asked if I slept there overnight, offering me a chance to lie my way out of it by saying "no". I though about it a second and decided to say "yes" anyway, and he stood there a moment and then walked away saying I had to leave. I didn't, and that was that.

It would seem my biggest danger while sleeping on the beach is myself, as one night I awoke from sleepwalking carrying one boot, my knapsack and my sleeping bag, standing on surf-wet sand. It's pretty startling coming to consciousness standing up with violent waves breaking 15 feet away in the darkness.

The gutterpunks would still descend upon the park in the mornings and strew their belongs all around them in a manner that could be called an encampment. But it being daytime, before the 10pm park curfew, they were technically legal. No matter. The cops rode through on their off-road motorcycles and singled people out for full searches. They wouldn't find much, as it is common gutterpunk practice to bury their opiates and crystal methadone.

The next step was to fence off the whole area, with Willie Brown narrating the whole affair with Clinton-esque rederik: "We're going to make the park a place for goodness." And so on.

Through all this the cops were mostly civil. They were aware of the political motivations of the whole thing, and didn't take it that seriously. As I mentioned, when they'd issue a summons they would pretty much tell you to ignore it. When they fenced off the main congregation area ("punker hill"), they even handed out little plastic bags labeled "Personal Belongings Bag" for everyone to haul away their stuff. But there were exceptions to this rule of courtesy. Two cops who work the night shift with the ready-for-TV names of Gulf & Martinez are known to wake people with a kick to the head, and one night someone was arrested and badly beaten while handcuffed.

As yellow journalism always needs a controversy, the press changed their general stance on the issue and came out in favor of the homeless, indignantly criticizing the mayor for heartlessly evicting these poor homeless people. The new headlines in the same papers were more like: "Where Will They All Sleep?" They ran stories on the shortage of shelters. Public sentiment turned against what was dubbed "Operation Shopping Cart". It only got worse as the people expelled from he park caused much irritation by sleeping in doorways and generally branching out into other neighborhoods. But it was too late, there was too much momentum, and the raids continued.

The Rally

When the police presence started to get inconvenient, Food Not Bombs was on the scene. They mostly missed the point, calling for an end to police brutality (of which there was very little) and holding up banners reading things like "The Real Criminals In The Park Wear Blue". At one "sleep-in vigil" they brought a puppet of Willie Brown fifteen feet high. It caricatured the mayor in borderline race-stereotype form, with the 20's black gangster zootsuit and the menacingly cocked hat. In his hand he held a bag covered with dollar signs. Manipulating the puppet were four or five Bombers with scarves wrapped around their faces in high Zapatista fashion. Behind the puppet was a banner reading simply "Food Not Bombs" which, of course, figured most prominently in the morning papers. It's the underground anarchist parallel to Marlboro putting their logo in baseball stadiums to get air time.

Other than the face masks, the bombers dress in what could be called their Sunday worst: regular clothes with maybe paint splattered on them or just in a high state of unwash. They are clearly "housed." Funny how when you live this lifestyle you start to look down on anyone living "behind a legal door".

The Bombers wrote the phone number of their attorney on everybody's arm, so if we all got arrested they couldn't take away the phone number. We were all poised for confrontation. Someone whose brother was killed by the police gave a bellicose speech replete with call and response; we shouted at every passing squad car; we chanted in unison.

But nothing happened. The cops one-upped the protesters by using tactics of non-violent resistance. There wasn't a trace of that tinderbox atmosphere from the New York squatter's riots, where both sides did full bloody frontal battle. None of the Bombers brought a sleeping bag, so they went home.

The People's Kitchen will be leaving San Francisco shortly, owing both to police pressure in the form of nighttime ticketing of everyone sleeping in the R.V., and also to avoid the just starting rainy season. Such are the joys of being migratory. For travelling expenses, they'll each get jobs for a week or so, pool their money, maybe apply for "G.A." (General Assistance). As Floppy put it, the camper is "quite a gasser".

Personally, I've been so emerged in this whole culture that I can't even see it anymore. I can no longer decipher what's interesting or relevant about it; it all just seems normal to me now. At this point, malleable me is practically an anarchist, if only by immersion. It would be more interesting to write about so-called normal lifestyles, as they seem stranger.

I know inevitably my perspective will shift back to something like it was: that I'll once again value clean clothes, that I'll consider it necessary to wear something different every day of the week, that I'll once again find a little body odor unnatural, that soon I'll be making money and therefore spending it with nervous compulsion, and that someday culture and custom won't seem arbitrary but will seem right and fixed. Until then .....

The end.

Five homeless people froze to death in US capital last winter

By Paul Scherrer
9 June 2001

Five homeless adults died this past winter on the streets of Washington DC. All of these people succumbed to hypothermia.

One man froze to death after being ejected from a homeless shelter earlier that night. Jesus Blanco, a 43-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, was found dead December 23 about 50 yards from the entrance to the La Casa shelter where he sometimes stayed. Blanco froze to death on a night when temperatures fell below 26 degrees.

La Casa is the primary homeless shelter for Hispanic men in the city. According to other men staying at the shelter the night Blanco died, he became upset when one man was using the bathroom for a long time and then got in a fight with two other men.

Blanco and 17 other men were being housed in the trailer of an old truck that is equipped with 18 beds, stacked three high, and one bathroom. The shelter consists of five of these trailers. The night supervisor on duty did not speak Spanish, and was unable to mediate the dispute between the men.

Another homeless man who died last winter in DC was Russell T. Gould. The 65-year-old homeless man was found dead January 4 in the garage of a person who had let him use it to store his tools and other belongings. Gould would earn money performing odd jobs for people in the neighborhood. The garage is unattached and unheated and temperatures fell to 23 degrees that night.

The conditions for homeless in the nation's capital are deplorable. Four hundred of the shelter beds available are in the backs of old trucks, like the La Casa shelter. There is only one homeless shelter in Washington DC set up to treat hypothermia and that facility has no shower or hot water. A city office building that had been used as an emergency shelter when temperatures fell to below freezing was closed last year.

The five deaths were the first documented deaths of the homeless in DC since 1996. The situation underscores the growth of homelessness in the nation's capital and the unwillingness of government officials to provide the resources necessary to deal with it.

“They treat us like cattle,” said Raymond, a homeless man sleeping on a subway vent grate only a few blocks away from the White House. “I try and stay out of the shelters as much as possible. You can see how dirty I am and all they do at the shelters is make you feel worse. All they say is: find a job. I lost my job three years ago and I was not able to keep things together. Who is going to hire me now in the state I am in?”

Washington DC has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country. On any given day, there are approximately 12,850 homeless people in DC and the surrounding counties; 7,000 in the district and nearly 6,000 in the suburbs. The spread of homelessness to the suburbs has accelerated during the past decade. While in the 1990s only one quarter of the area's homeless lived outside of DC, today it is nearly half.

Over the course of a year, more than 30,000 people in the area experience homelessness at some point. More than a quarter of all the homeless are children. Families, mostly women with children, make up 36 percent of the homeless. As throughout the country, homelessness in DC has grown as a result of a combination of federal cuts in social services, skyrocketing housing costs, and growth of low-paying jobs.

“The two fastest groups among the homeless are women with children and the working poor,” said Michael Stoope of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “The five-year time limit on welfare is approaching and we are fearful of the number of families who will be thrown out onto the streets.

“The second fastest growing group of the homeless is the working poor. We have all heard of a minimum wage job, but there is no such thing as minimum rent. More and more people are working but can't afford a place to live.”

Nationally, more than quarter of the homeless are employed and nearly half have work at least part-time. The economic boom of the 1990s saw housing prices and rents soar, making it impossible for a growing number of working people to afford housing. In DC, a person earning the minimum wage of $6.15 an hour would have to work 108 hours a week in order to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.

Over the next year and a half, cuts in federal programs will exacerbate the problem. The contracts on 10,000 federally subsidized rental properties are due to expire and landlords may opt out of the Section 8 program to take advantage of the higher rents. In addition, 5,200 families are due to lose all cash assistance as federal time limits on welfare benefits kick in.

The homeless situation in DC also exposes the inability of private organizations to solve the homeless problem. The granting of federal, state and local funds to local service providers has become a major factor in the administrating of social services. The Bush administration seeks to expand the use of private service providers to include religious organizations.

Washington homeless shelters, services and programs have been run by the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness since 1994. The coalition of homeless advocates and service providers took over the running of homeless services for the city when the district was near bankruptcy. Despite the commitment of many involved in these private organizations, the deaths on the streets of DC this past winter make tragically clear that the problem of homelessness can only be resolved if vast resources are committed to end poverty and inequality, which are its root causes.

From the World Socialist Web Site

"Housing a Growing City"

Report documents modern mass homelessness in New York City

Part 1

By Fred Mazelis
9 September 2000

The Coalition for the Homeless has issued a detailed report, “Housing a Growing City,” dealing with housing conditions in New York City and trends that have developed over the past quarter-century. The study is based largely on data from the Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS), which is conducted every three years by the US Census Bureau.

The Coalition for the Homeless is an advocacy organization that has been active on behalf of the homeless for several decades. Its latest report documents an enormous housing crisis in the financial and cultural center of the US, a crisis which is worsening even as the Wall Street boom continues. The study is appropriately subtitled “New York's Bust in Boom Times.”

This, the first of two articles, will summarize and explain much of the data contained in the report on the symptoms and the causes of the shortage of decent and affordable housing in New York. The second article, to be posted Monday, September 11, will deal with the consequences of the crisis, particularly the phenomenon of modern mass homelessness. It will also examine some of the proposals advanced by the Coalition for the Homeless for dealing with this crisis.

There are several major factors contributing to the current housing crisis in New York. The last 30 years have seen the growth of poverty alongside enormous wealth. The city's housing stock has deteriorated steadily, while older buildings have been replaced by housing priced increasingly beyond the reach of even better-paid sections of the working class. At the same time, there have been drastic cuts in all forms of government housing assistance.

All of this has produced a large and widening gap in affordable housing, usually defined, for rental apartments, as rents that amount to no more than 30 percent of a family's income. In 1970 there were 272,000 more low-cost rental housing units (defined as apartments renting for under $350 a month in 1995 dollars) than the number of “extremely-low-income renter households” (earning less than 30 percent of the median income). By 1976 this relationship was already reversed, with 163,000 more poor households than low-cost apartments for them to live in. By 1995 this affordable housing gap had reached 405,925, affecting more than a million people.

The report identifies five major features of New York's housing crisis: rising population, declining housing production, the widening affordable housing gap, reduced government housing assistance, and persistent mass homelessness. Each of these features is explained and illustrated in revealing detail.

The city's population was estimated at 7,428,000 in 1999, a 1.7 percent increase since the beginning of the 1990s, as immigration and natural increase more than offset the continuing migration to the suburbs. Population had also increased by 3.5 percent in the 1980s, after a steep decline in the previous decade. The Census Bureau also acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of city residents, particularly in poor and immigrant neighborhoods, were not counted in 1990, so the actual population of New York may be close to 8 million.

New York City was the destination for nearly one of every six immigrants admitted to the US in the past two decades. From 1980 to 1996 there were 1,650,381 legal immigrants admitted to New York, 16.2 percent of all legal immigrants to the US. During this same period, an estimated 5 million undocumented immigrants also settled in the country. If the proportion of the undocumented who settled in New York is similar to that for legal immigration, this would represent another 800,000 people.

Despite the obvious signs of wealth, the city is poorer as a whole than it was 20 years ago. The median household income for families who rent their homes has finally, in the boom of the last few years, come back to the level of 25 years ago. It is still below the 1969 level in real terms.

Above all the city is more socially polarized. Hundreds of thousands of working class and middle class families have left for the suburbs, not because they have become wealthy, but, among other reasons, because they can no longer afford the cost of housing. Sections of upper middle class professionals and financially well-off retirees have moved into the city, but the major part of the population increase has consisted of poorer families, including many of the new immigrants.

Little or no provision has been made to house this population, however. While the number of city residents has been growing for the past two decades, housing production has slowed sharply and steadily for the last 30 years. During the decade of the 1960s, the average new housing units completed annually was 36,896, reaching a peak of 60,000 in 1963. This fell to an annual average of 17,006 in the 1970s, 10,437 in the 1980s and 7,861 for the years 1990-95.

Much of this decline stems from the cutbacks in government housing programs. In the first two decades after the Second World War, much low-rent public housing was constructed. There was also the Mitchell-Lama program, which was initiated in 1955 and provided low-interest mortgage loans and property tax exemptions for housing construction in exchange for limitations on profits. This program created 125,000 apartments for working class and middle class families over the next two decades, including the mammoth Co-op City project in the Bronx.

Today there is almost no public housing being built, and the programs which encouraged middle-income housing have also been drastically cut. While new housing construction has declined sharply, an increase in building demolitions has also taken place. Residential building demolitions totaled 839 buildings in 1998, the most demolitions since an epidemic of building abandonment 20 years earlier.

These trends have combined to produce an absolute loss of rental housing in New York in the past decade. The number of rental units fell from 2,028,303 in 1991 to 2,017,701 in 1999, a loss of more than 10,000 apartments during a period when the city's population grew, by official (and therefore conservative) estimates, by 125,000, or more than 40,000 households.

Even if there had not been an absolute loss of rental housing, the problem of affordability would remain as the major symptom of the housing crisis. Most apartments that existed 30 years ago still exist, but most are no longer within the means of the working class. Hundreds of thousands have been converted into cooperatives or condominiums, far beyond the reach of most workers. The average price of a condo or co-op in Manhattan in the area south of Harlem and the upper part of the borough has reached $700,000. The remaining rental units have also skyrocketed in price.

New York remains unique among large US cities in being a city of tenants and not homeowners. Nearly two-thirds of US households own their own homes, but in New York, as of 1999, 68.1 percent of households were renters.

Rental housing in the city falls into several somewhat complicated categories. Rent control, which began over 50 years ago, now affects only 2.7 percent of occupied rental units. It has largely been supplanted by rent stabilization, a much looser form of regulation; 52.2 percent of all rental units in the city are rent-stabilized, and the rents on these apartments have been allowed to increase steadily.

In addition to rent controlled and rent-stabilized apartments, public housing, with 169,000 dwellings housing some 600,000 people, comprises 8.7 percent of rental apartments. 130,000 households are on the waiting list for these apartments, which are in most cases the only affordable housing available, especially for minority workers. Mitchell-Lama apartments make up another 3.4 percent. About 30 percent of apartments, including most built in the last 30 years, are unregulated. In rem housing, apartments owned by the city itself as a result of an owner's failure to pay property taxes, represent another 1 percent. The in rem dwellings, administered by the city itself, are often among the most dilapidated slums.

The report discusses five aspects of the crisis of housing affordability: overcrowding, the quality of housing, changes in rents and in the incomes of renter households, and the resulting changes in rent burdens as a share of family income.

Housing is considered crowded if there is more than one person per room, and seriously crowded if there are more than 1.5 per room. These two measures have soared in the past 20 years. In 1978, 6.5 percent of all rental units were considered crowded by the above standard, and 1.5 percent were seriously crowded. By 1999 these figures had increased to 11.0 percent and 3.9 percent respectively.

Overcrowding is directly related to housing affordability, as their inability to pay for apartments of a decent size forces families of five or more to live in three rooms, or to “double up” with friends or relatives.

Dilapidated housing and apartments with five or more major maintenance problems are also indications of the disappearance of affordable housing. In 1996, 6.1 percent of all occupied rental units in the city had five or more maintenance problems, compared to only 2.0 percent in 1987. Another 1.3 percent fell into the category of dilapidated units, defined as failing to provide safe and adequate shelter.

Between 1981 and 1999, the median gross rent (including utilities) rose 35.4 percent in real terms in New York City, from $517 to $700 per month in 1999 dollars. Housing costs were far above the general inflation rate for these two decades. Furthermore, the poorest households experienced the greatest percentage increase in rents.

The number of low-cost apartments shrank by half in less than a decade during the 1990s. Units with gross rents below $500 represented 47.6 percent of apartments in 1991, but only 21.3 percent in 1999.

Meanwhile the income of working class households has at best stagnated in the past quarter-century, even allowing for the growth in two-income families. Real incomes fell at a drastic pace during the 1970s, recovering slowly during the 1980s before falling again in the recession of the 1990s, and then slowly recovering in the last half of the decade. For most New Yorkers the long Wall Street bull market has meant at best the opportunity to keep working and attempt to stay even with rising costs of housing, education and medical care. Many have fallen behind.

The median rent burden—the share of household income devoted to rent and utilities—was about 20 percent in the 1960s and early 1970s. It increased to more than 25 percent after 1975, and for most of the 1990s it has been near 30 percent, the “affordability” threshold.

Another way of looking at this is to examine the number of households paying more than half of their incomes to put a roof over their heads. Twenty-one percent of renters paid more than half of their incomes for rent in 1981. This has grown steadily over the last two decades. In 1999 more than 500,000 households in New York, 27 percent of renters, paid more than 50 percent of their income in rent. Another 20 percent paid more than 30 percent but less than 50 percent.

The report also shows how the housing crisis disproportionately affects the black and Hispanic minorities, which together account for about 50 percent of the city's population. With lower average incomes and often forced to live in substandard housing in the city's poorest and racially segregated neighborhoods, these sections of the population pay on average a larger percentage of their incomes for rent.

Government policies over the past 20 years have worsened the housing crisis. The New York State rent regulation laws have been undermined, most recently in 1997 after the passage of the Rent Regulation Reform Act. The Coalition for the Homeless report explains that this law—proclaimed a victory for tenants at the time of its enactment—in fact makes huge concessions to the real estate industry. The law created a vacancy bonus, for instance, for all rent-stabilized apartments, which amounts to a rent increase of between 18 and 20 percent upon each vacancy. It also provides for a special vacancy allowance for low-rent apartments, ensuring that these apartments get more than a 20 percent hike upon vacancy. Units renting under $300 a month, for instance, receive a $100 increase in addition to other vacancy allowances.

These and other provisions have led to affordable apartments being virtually eliminated in the last few years. Apartments renting for less than $500 dropped from 32.7 percent of the total to 25.9 percent between 1996 and 1999, after the new rent regulation legislation. Apartments renting for less than $300 fell from 12.2 percent to 10.4 percent. Of course the vast majority of these apartments are not available, and families seeking housing have nowhere to turn if they are not prepared to spend as much as $1,000 a month or more.

While the changes in rent regulation have hammered tenants from one direction, the federal, state and city governments have hit them from another. There have been huge cutbacks in the development of subsidized rental housing. In the late 1970s, the federal government provided housing assistance, either in the form of subsidized housing or through direct subsidy to poor tenants, to more than 360,000 households each year. This figure fell to less than 70,000 in the 1990s.

New York City has historically committed funds for the construction of low-income housing, but in the current economic boom capital funds for housing have been continuously cut. Average annual capital funds for housing from both city as well as federal and state sources fell, in 1999 dollars, from $1.028 billion in the late 1980s, to $565.0 million in the early 1990s, and $316.9 million during the administrations of current Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Tenant-based housing assistance, including federal rent subsidies and welfare housing allowances, have also been cut back during the past two decades. The Section 8 voucher program, a federal Housing and Urban Development program administered in New York through the city's Housing Authority, provides certificates and vouchers to assist eligible households with rent subsidies. Families use the vouchers to pay higher rents than they could otherwise, with their own contribution generally falling within the 30 percent-of-income measure of affordability. There are currently 76,000 households receiving this type of assistance in New York, but the number of new Section 8 vouchers issued annually has fallen by 42 percent in New York over the past 20 years, just when they have become needed more than ever. In the past decade an average of only 2,536 vouchers have been issued annually to families desperate for a place to live. 215,000 people are on the list for Section 8 vouchers, which would mean a wait at current rates of more than 80 years!

Welfare housing allowances have suffered as much or more during this period. Between 1975 and 1999 they lost 52 percent of their real value in New York City, while median rents increased 33 percent in real terms. Despite the much-publicized decline in the welfare rolls in recent years, public assistance recipients still represent about 8.7 percent of the city's population, and about 85 percent of these households utilize the welfare housing allowance. This shelter allowance is $286 for a family of three in current dollars. The median gross rent for an apartment for a family of three in New York is currently $700. The gap between rent and the shelter allowance, which was $227 (in 1999 dollars) in 1987, has now grown to $414.

A summary of the data thus reveals that millions are affected by overcrowding, the decline in housing quality, soaring rents and stagnating incomes. All of these statistics document the city's housing crisis, which is only part of a decline in living standards and living conditions for the majority of workers in New York City over the past generation. The statistics reveal the one-sidedness of the official claim of growing prosperity.

From the World Socialist Web Site

"Housing a Growing City"

Report documents modern mass homelessness in New York City

Part 2

By Fred Mazelis
11 September 2000

The Coalition for the Homeless has issued a detailed report, “Housing a Growing City,” dealing with housing conditions in New York City and trends that have developed over the past quarter-century. The study is based largely on data from the Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS), which is conducted every three years by the US Census Bureau.

The Coalition for the Homeless is an advocacy organization that has been active on behalf of the homeless for several decades. Its latest report documents an enormous housing crisis in the financial and cultural center of the US, a crisis which is worsening even as the Wall Street boom continues. The study is appropriately subtitled “New York's Bust in Boom Times.”

The first of two articles on this report, posted September 9, summarized much of the data contained in the report on the symptoms and the causes of the shortage of decent and affordable housing in New York. This second and concluding part will deal with the consequences of the crisis, particularly the phenomenon of modern mass homelessness. It will also examine some of the proposals advanced by the Coalition for the Homeless for dealing with this crisis.

The “affordable housing gap,” discussed in detail by the report of New York City's Coalition for the Homeless, has had a significant impact on the lives of millions. Those who can't afford the current rents don't simply disappear. They are forced to make painful choices. Many have had no choices, and have faced homelessness as a result.

One consequence of the extreme shortage of low-cost apartments has been the growth of illegal conversions of existing units. While there are no comprehensive statistics on this phenomenon, there is plenty of evidence that apartments have been illegally divided up to house immigrant families and others in appalling conditions. The Coalition report cites an unpublished report dealing with illegal single-room occupancy (SRO) units, the most common form of illegal conversions, including basement rooms and rooms in one- or two-family houses, mostly in the outer boroughs of the city outside of Manhattan. There are also cubicles, distinguished from rooms in that they lack windows. Dormitories providing bed space and nothing more have also been set up in some sections of the city.

While illegal housing has become the only option for as many as 100,000 or more, there have also been more than 200,000 doubled-up households during the 1990s. Among renters, the Census Bureau survey reported 151,810 doubled-up households, 7.8 percent of all renters.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of households which have to pay more than 50 percent of income for rent. 501,850 households were in this position as of 1999.

Where none of the above options have been available, homelessness has often resulted. Official city data show that, between 1987 and 1995, 333,482 different men, women and children used the city's municipal shelter system.

This is a figure that should be carefully analyzed. It represents 4.6 percent of the city's 1990 population, nearly one out of twenty, who spent some time in a homeless shelter during this nine-year period. Fifty-seven percent of this total were members of families with children, and 35 percent were under 18 years old. And the total number does not include the many thousands more who slept in private shelters, abandoned buildings, outdoors, or in the subways and rail terminals, when they were not rousted by the police.

These statistics on what the report terms “modern mass homelessness” thoroughly demolish the reactionary stereotypes which depict the problem of homelessness as resulting only from the individual behavior of a small minority of outcasts. Of course drug addiction and mental illness are themselves social pathologies, and the homeless mentally ill and substance abusers also deserve a decent place to live. But the stereotype of the homeless consisting of none but the mentally ill or addicted has been used to dupe working people into thinking that they have nothing to do with this social problem and can afford to ignore it.

Homelessness in its present form in New York has profound social causes and touches the lives of far more people than is usually assumed. The homeless emerged in large numbers about 20 years ago. For decades the city had provided an average of about 1,000 vouchers daily to homeless men, many of whom used the former Municipal Shelter in Lower Manhattan. During the 1970s, however, following the collapse of the postwar boom, poverty and its social consequences began to be more and more visible on the streets.

The landmark Callahan v. Carey lawsuit, filed in 1979 and settled with a consent decree in 1981, obligated the city and state to guarantee emergency shelter to homeless men. This was later extended to women and children, and the numbers of homeless in the city's shelter system soared through that decade. This was a direct result of the loss of decent-paying unskilled jobs, alongside the demographic changes in the city and, of course, rising rental costs.

Mass homelessness became a permanent fact of New York City life during the 1980s. The average daily census of homeless single adults in the city's shelter system has fluctuated between 5,000 and 10,000 for most of the last two decades. After some improvement in the early 1990s as the result of the construction of several thousand housing units, including SROs and housing with on-site support services for the mentally ill, the average census in the shelters rose again in the latter part of the decade. It averaged 6,778 per night by 1999.

The number of homeless families in the shelter system grew even more rapidly than the number of single adults. It jumped from 2,137 families in 1983 to more than 5,000 in 1988. This was the first time that the problem of homeless families had emerged in the city in the twentieth century. The average daily census of children and adults in families in city shelters has fluctuated around 15,000. It dropped during the mid-1990s, as the Giuliani administration took steps to discourage applicants for shelter. In the recent period it has risen again, from 13,900 in January 1998 to 16,050 in December 1999, an increase of 15.5 percent in less than two years. In June of this year the number of homeless people in shelters, single adults as well as families with children, exceeded 24,000 for the first time since 1996.

An analysis of the patterns of shelter utilization by homeless single adults shows that the great majority, more than 80 percent, fell into the category of “transitional” shelter users, as distinct from “episodic” users, who had frequent, although brief, stays; and “chronic” users, who had extremely long shelter stays. The transitional user had infrequent, usually one-time, stays. These were individuals who had the lowest percentage of mental health and addiction problems. They demonstrated, in their own way, that there is no sharp line between the homeless and those who have apartments for themselves or their families; it is a continuum. There were many others who, given a sudden change in their own job or family situation, could find themselves in the same position.

At the heart of the crisis of homelessness is the social polarization which has taken place. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s the top 20 percent income group saw its income rise by 21 percent, while the lowest fifth in terms of income saw a real drop of 33 percent.

The obvious relationship between poverty and homelessness is also reflected in the figures for the racial breakdown of the homeless. Here the legacy of racism, continuing discrimination, housing segregation and poverty all come together to devastate black and Hispanic families. These sections of the working class are not simply disproportionately affected by homelessness; the homeless are overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic.

In the 1988-92 period, for example, 60.9 percent of the children who passed through the homeless shelters were black, and another 31.4 percent were Hispanic, for a total of 92.3 percent for these sections of the population.

From 1988-92, nearly 8 percent of the black population experienced homelessness, compared to less than 0.5 percent for whites. For the population as a whole the average was 3.3 percent (a similar rate to the study cited above for the nine-year period from 1987 to 1995, which found 4.6 percent experiencing homelessness at some point during these years).

The single biggest factor in the racial disparity is poverty. The income for African-American as well as for Hispanic families is one-third lower than the average income for white families. The racial minorities are far more heavily working class in social composition, and far more likely to be poor—17.3 percent of the poor experienced homelessness during the 1988-92 period.

After documenting these conditions, the Coalition for the Homeless report ends with proposals for action. It calls for a federal and city commitment, including an annual capital spending target of $750 million, to close the affordable housing gap of more than 400,000 units. Among the reforms and measures it calls for are the reversal of the decline in the welfare housing allowance, substantial increases in Section 8 vouchers, the repeal of provisions of the 1997 rent regulation legislation which have allowed rents to soar, and supportive housing for the homeless mentally ill.

These are minimally necessary measures, and they are very modest. Even the $750 million capital spending goal would do little to arrest the trend of rising rents which affects millions. It is safe to assume that close to half of the population would still be spending 40, if not 50 percent, on the cost of housing.

The report is an attempt to publicize what growing numbers of people realize is a scandalous fact of life in New York City in the twenty-first century. Millions can see that there is something fraudulent about the claims of prosperity and plenty in New York, alongside the reality of substandard or high-rent housing and homelessness.

Despite the creditable work of the Coalition of the Homeless in exposing these conditions, it fails to show how they can actually be changed. The Coalition seeks to pressure the ruling elite and its political parties. Implicit in its proposals is an appeal to the conscience of big business and Wall Street. It suggests that the most we can hope for is to bring New York in line with the rest of the country, where the housing situation is sometimes difficult but not such a complete disaster.

The big business media use this to try to approach the housing crisis as some kind of anomaly, a peculiar problem in an otherwise flourishing city, a problem perhaps caused by the fact that people have become so rich so fast. A recent article in the New York Times proclaimed, along these lines, “More than ever, it seems, this thriving city is a great place to live—if only you could live here.”

New York is not unique, although the problem of homelessness is more severe in this city than elsewhere. The rapid pace of the polarization and the city's attraction for the upper middle class has led to millions being pushed out of the housing market. Similar problems, however, are evident elsewhere. Just as homelessness itself is part of a continuum related to growing poverty, so across the country New York City is part of a continuum, the most extreme example of the growing social polarization and its consequences, and not a “special case.”

As another recent report documented, the median worker in the US (earning more than half of the workforce and less than the other half) earned significantly less in 1998 than 25 years earlier. For the male worker in the 25-34 age group, the earnings were 13 percent less. For the worker in the 35-44 age group, the drop was 9 percent. By comparison, during the 1950s and 60s real earnings rose between 50 and 100 percent!

An image of wealth is projected by upscale shopping, pervasive advertising, continuous media portrayal of the top 10 percent of the population and its lifestyle. In addition, there are consumer goods available at very affordable prices—items such as VCRs, microwave ovens, Walkmans and portable CD players, personal computers. Tens of millions of workers participate in this “consumer revolution,” often by piling up thousands of dollars in debt. At the same time, however, and most significantly, the most important daily needs of working class families—housing, education, medical care and public transit—have all risen sharply in cost while individual earnings have fallen and family income has stagnated.

The housing crisis in New York City is one of the most extreme expressions of this trend of declining living standards that has taken place in the last 25 years. This cannot be reversed by appealing to the conscience of the ruling elite, or by harking back to a period of social reform which the ruling class has discarded.

There is no section of big business which favors the reforms called for by the Coalition for the Homeless, and the current presidential campaign is the best proof of that. And in the preparations for the mayoral election in New York in 2001, to choose a successor to Rudolph Giuliani, none of the Democratic liberals are speaking of these issues or presenting a program to deal with them.

No family should have to pay more than 25 percent of its income for shelter. Millions of new apartments must be built to meet existing and future needs. But this will not be possible without finding the constituency which will politically fight for decent and affordable housing, for housing as a basic right. The working class must be unified, based on the understanding that homelessness is an attack on every section of working people, and that all workers have been targeted by the policies which have created homelessness for a small but significant minority.

Any struggle for decent housing must immediately raise a challenge to the system that is geared to profits and not to human needs. It will raise the need for a socialist program, and a democratically controlled and planned economy based on public ownership.

From the World Socialist Web Site

http://www.japantoday.com/ 

Court halts Japanese billionaire's U.S. evictions

Wednesday, February 27, 2002 at 17:00 JST

SACRAMENTO, California A U.S. court on Tuesday blocked a Japanese billionaire from evicting 420 families from their northern California homes, a move which threatened to empty entire suburban neighborhoods and sparked Gov. Gray Davis to seek Japanese government intervention.

Housing rights advocates said Sacramento Superior Court Judge Loren McMaster stayed the threatened evictions until March 20, when he is scheduled to rule on a request for an injunction stopping Genshiro Kawamoto from tossing his tenants out and selling the Sacramentoarea properties immediately.

Lawyers for the ACORN, the housing rights group championing the plight of the Kawamoto tenants, said the Japanese landlord's attorneys had agreed to the delay in a possible sign that the case might be on track for settlement.

"We are very hopeful that this case will be settled soon," said Brian Kennedy, ACORN's managing attorney of legal services in northern California.

Kawamoto's lawyers were not immediately available for comment.

Kawamoto, a billionaire developer who established a real estate empire in Honolulu and Northern California after making his fortune in the kimono business, sent eviction notices to tenants this month saying he needed to sell fast in order to seize "tremendous investment opportunities" in both the United States and Japan.

The quit notices gave tenants only 30 days to vacate their homes leading to a sudden housing crisis in the Sacramento area bedroom communities of Citrus Heights, Orangevale, Antelope and Rocklin as well as the nearby city of Santa Rosa. Other eviction notices were sent to tenants in some 60 units Kawamoto owns in Hawaii.

Judge McMaster's ruling Tuesday applied only to some 420 Kawamotoowned units in the Sacramento area, although housing advocates said they hoped lawyers could use it to win a similar reprieve for Kawamoto's 160 Santa Rosa tenants.

The threatened evictions prompted anguished protests from Kawamoto's tenants, many of whom said the 30day notice period left them without sufficient time to find alternate accommodation in northern California's notoriously tight housing market.

ACORN attorney Kennedy said he was confident that even if Kawamoto does not settle the case, the tenants would still win at least a 120day reprieve on their evictions from the courts as well as possibly the right to be first in line to buy the properties.

(Reuters News)

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