“We have a mindset in this country that homelessness is a problem that can wait,” comments Jeremy Weir Alderson, founder of the Homelessness Marathon, “but it’s a dire emergency for the people who are homeless, a drain on our economy, and a stain on our national honor.  We ought to solve this problem, and we could if we would only turn our attention to it.”

The Homelessness Marathon will address the problem of homelessness by speaking directly with homeless people, who will give their first-hand testimony on how they became homeless and the obstacles they face before they can be housed again.

Hundreds of homeless people will be brought by bus (in rotating shifts) so that they can participate in this event and speak directly to the nation.  They will be brought by shelters, advocacy groups, and grass roots organizations formed by homeless people themselves.

The broadcast will feature, as well, such speakers as Senator Carl Levin; Ron Gettlefinger, president of the United Auto Workers; and two of America’s most outstanding anti-poverty advocates, Cheri Honkala, director of the Poor Peoples’ Economic Human Rights Campaign and Paul Boden, director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project.

Prominent advocates from Detroit will participate, including Rev. Faith Fowler, director of Cass Community Social Services and Maureen Taylor, the state chairperson of Michigan Welfare Rights Organization.

Experts from elsewhere in the country will also participate, including Kathleen Johnson, director of Katrina Relief in Mississippi and Mike Rhodes, editor of the Community Alliance newspaper in Fresno, California, arguably, the cruelest city in America towards its homeless citizens.

The broadcast will originate from 12025 Woodrow Wilson St., a “green gym” recently opened by Cass Community Social Services for the use of its homeless clients.  Detroit area radio stations participating in the broadcast will include, WHFR in Dearborn, the broadcast’s host station; WHPR in Highland Park and CJAM in Windsor, Ontario.

The Homelessness Marathon is a consciousness-raising not a fund-raising broadcast.  There will be no on-air solicitations.

More information about the broadcast can be found here.

Acclaim for the broadcast can be found here.

To donate to the Homelessness Marathon click here.

By Email, By Flyer, By Word….We need to fill the room - WALL TO WALL - on February 23rd.
Let them catch a glimpse of the 7,000 the county will hurt if they do not STOP THE GA CUTS.
GET YOUR PEOPLE MOBILIZED NOW.

ATTEND & BRING YOUR PEERS & CONSTITUENTS

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
The Alameda County Board of Supervisors Meeting
1221 Oak Street, Oakland, CA (Meet in the Plaza)

Breakfast 8:30 AM
Rally 9:00 AM
BOSS Meeting 10:00 AM
Be prepared to speak at the meeting and/or to stand in solidarity.

“HOMES NOT STREETS”

Who Depends On General Assistance?  Disadvantaged men and women, disabled persons, veterans, seniors, victims of domestic violence, transition age youth. Before November, 2009 the GA grant  was at most $336.

ALREADY, Alameda County has slashed the GA grant:

· as much as $84 if a recipient lives with a roommate and
· $40 unless the person receives Medi-Cal.
· as much as $231 if the recipient’s rent is over the GA grant.

COUNTDOWN TO APRIL 1ST, 2010

GA recipients can only receive aid 3 months out of 12 months if Social Service deems the recipient employable. As many as 7000 PEOPLE will be affected by this cut. The cuts will increase hunger, increase violence due to desperation and hopelessness, and decrease people’s ability to find jobs and stay housed due to lack of money. The system that they have to identify people who are employable is faulty. Many people have not been assessed yet. And it’s a loan not a grant,  recipients MUST AND DO pay it back.
It is critical that the Board of Supervisors hear from YOU.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency - boona cheema 510 649-1930 x 225
East Bay Community Law Center - Luan Huynh  (510) 548-4040 ext. 371
Homeless Action Center - Patricia Wall (510) 540-0878 x 301

COALITION TO STOP THE GA CUTS

Berkeley Food and Housing Project, Berkeley Community Coalition, Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, East Bay Community Law Center, Homeless Action Center, La Familia Counseling Service,  Public Interest Law Project, St. Mary’s Center, Western Regional Advocacy Project

This means building a broad base of individual and community supporters.

If you believe that housing is a human right and that WRAP is critical in making this noble principle a reality, then we ask you to help us build the resources necessary to do so!!!

Click here and take a stand for social justice and economic human rights!

Also, if you haven’t signed the Homelessness Ends With A Home petition, you can do it here.

Thank you!

A Change Is Gonna Come

On January 20th, WRAP members and our allies from Portland, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Fresno, San Jose, Eureka, Philadelphia, and all over the Bay Area came together in San Francisco to weave together the freedom dreams of our diverse communities fighting for survival.

The weather forecast was “continued heavy rain and gale force winds.” We knew this would impact the size of the crowd for our first public event, but it didn’t matter. The stormy weather seemed fitting for the tumultuous times we’re in. It was a sharp reminder that people live and die in these conditions all winter long. This doubled our resolve.

Around ten in the morning the rain mellowed and by the time the rally began the clouds had parted to reveal bits of blue sky that had been hidden for over a week. The plaza crowded with people and banners, energy and anticipation filled the air. There were a lot of smiles going around. Eyes shone with determination and recognition that this was the time to take the next step together in this nascent West Coast movement.

We took it directly to the streets because public space is increasingly being privatized and policed for the benefit of the few. Change came, we were the change.

It Was More Than A March

The demonstration’s significance was that poor people took a stand with our own voice, feet and power.  It took a lot of get up and go for the people who were here to be here. People crossed mountain passes, high desert, long valleys and economic and social barriers to get here.

They slept on floors and broke bread with strangers that in short time became kin. They carried purpose and commitment with them from their communities. This set the tone for everything that happened. There was only one thing on everybody’s mind: making housing a human right!

Rally speakers focused on the need for unity and building a movement to make this dream happen. A movement that gave meaning to the words “justice for all.” We amplified our message beyond local outrage about the injustices happening in each of our communities to a national call from the West Coast for an urgent, systemic response to the “violence of poverty.”

Becoming A Priority

The march snaked through the financial district to the driving Second Line sound of the Brass Liberation Orchestra. We took the axiom that “power concedes nothing without a demand” to the federal building. There we presented our list of affordable housing and civil rights demands to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s staff.

Well aware that there’s a “credibility gap” in DC and that we’re sick and tired of the policy runaround, we let them know that we’re watching what they’re doing on these issues and that we’re building the power to hold them accountable. They committed to working on a Congressional briefing when we finish our civil rights report like they did when we released Without Housing.

“Either We Go Up Together Or We Go Down Together”

When we come together and look at the challenges that face us today through the lens of social justice, our solutions focus on what is right, what is just, and what respects the humanity of ALL people. This road requires discipline, creativity, and perseverance.

When we get caught up in the divisiveness of a homeless program versus a welfare program, a housing subsidy versus a mortgage write-off, or a living wage versus an anti-panhandling campaign, we fall victim to the calculus of “us versus us.”

But when we gather and march under the banner of building a social justice movement, everything we discuss, all the solutions we identify and all the strategies for building and spreading our movement across the country are based on a universal core foundation: the well being of each and every one of us.

Everybody connecting to this movement comes from the one place that matters the most when we talk about our community. We come from the heart. Our heart, our spirit, and our guts tell us whether something is right and just or whether it is wrong and needs to be changed. Our brains then strategize which tactic to take to create that change, but it will be through our hearts that we find our common humanity. It was with powerful hearts that we marched in the rain on January 20th!!!

Action Organizers

Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency
Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco
Los Angeles Community Action Network
Sisters Of The Road
Street Roots
Street Spirit

Action Endorsers

National

Code Pink
National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
National Health Care for the Homeless Council
National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty
National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness
Network of Spiritual Progressives
Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign
Tikkun Magazine

California

Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County
American Friends Service Committee Pacific Mountain
Berkeley Community Coalition
Berkeley Food and Housing Project
Caduceus Outreach Services
California Network of Mental Health Clients
CALPIRG
Central City Hospitality House
CHAM Deliverance Ministry
Circle K International, UC Berkeley Club
Community Housing Partnership
Community United Against Violence
Complete Chiropractic Healthcare
Council of Community Housing Organizations
Dolores Street Community Services
East Bay Community Recovery Project
East Bay Food Not Bombs
Esperanza Community Housing Corporation
EveryOne Home
Grassroots Democratic Club
Just Cause Oakland
Homeless Health Care Los Angeles
Homeless Leadership Project
Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco
Inner City Law Center
Mission Neighborhood Resource Center
National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Chapter
People Organized To Win Employment Rights
People Project
Peoples’ Action for Rights and Community
Planning for Elders HealthCare Action Team
Poor Magazine/Poor News Network
Saint Mary’s Center
San Francisco Homeless Service Providers’ Network
San Francisco Labor Council
San Francisco Living Wage Coalition
San Francisco Network Ministries
San Francisco Tenants Union
Senior Action Network
SHOC/Safe Ground Sacramento
Socially Responsible Network
Tenants Together
The Suitcase Clinic
Union de Vecinos
Youth Spirit Artworks

Oregon and Washington

American Friends Service Committee Pacific Northwest
Coalition for a Liveable Future
Community Alliance of Tenants
Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House
Downtown Chapel Roman Catholic Parish
Jobs with Justice
Mental Health Association of Portland
National Lawyers Guild Portland Chapter
Northwest Pilot Project
Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence
PeaceVoice
Portland State University Progressive Student Union
Rose Community Development
Social Welfare Action Alliance
Tenant Rights Project
Transit Riders’ Union
Whitefeather Peace House

Now housing advocates want Congress to boost the program’s $1.5 billion funding as the vast need for more assistance becomes evident nationwide.

The Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program is expected to help 600,000 people by moving some from homeless shelters into their own apartments and by providing rent payments to prevent others from being evicted.

Because the assistance is temporary — usually for three months to 18 months — the program tries to target people who are most in need and can who can return to self-sufficiency within a few months.

Experts say the initiative breaks new ground in federal housing policy by focusing more resources on preventing homelessness and getting people back on their feet, rather than just feeding and warehousing the destitute.

“When you think about it, it really makes sense to focus on getting people back into housing faster,” said Nan Roman, executive director of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Instead of long stays in some homeless facility with a lot of service delivery, wouldn’t little bit of money help people stay where they are and not end up in the system at all?

On top of the estimated 672,000 who are already homeless on any given night in the U.S., the alliance expects the recession to push 1.5 million more people into the streets.

Those predictions appear to be accurate because ever since the HPRP funds became available in the fall, local social service agencies that provide the cash have been overwhelmed by requests for help.

At least 60 percent of the program funds must be spent within two years and all within three years, but officials in many areas say their funding won’t last that long because of the staggering number of people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads amid rising unemployment, job losses and financial hardship stemming from the current recession.

In Miami, the Dade County Homeless Trust expected the program to fund rental assistance for 1,500 needy households over the next two years after its program began in September.

When more than 1,200 applications poured in within 45 days, however, “we put a moratorium on (applications) in mid-October until we figured out how much money we’d be spending if we assisted everyone,” said David Raymond, the executive director of the trust. “We had an idea that the need had increased drastically, but we were surprised by the number of folks that came in within that short a period of time.”

In Salt Lake County, Utah, the program was supposed to house 70 families continuously for its 30-month funding life.

Overcrowding in the two local homeless shelters for families, however, forced the HPRP program to immediately find apartments for 130 families. “Without the HPRP program, we would have had to open a third family shelter . . . But we will have to slow down our rate of placing families in the program to make our money last,” said Michelle Flynn, associate executive director of The Road Home, an agency that helps run the county’s program.

The Women’s Center of Wake County in Raleigh, N.C., has already spent two-thirds of its first-year funding in the first three months of the program, providing rent, utility and other housing-related assistance to 37 households.

The Coastal Community Action Program in Aberdeen, Wash., has nearly exhausted its projected two-year allocation of $110,000 in just four months. In Lewis County, Wash., which has the state’s highest unemployment rate — 14.1 percent — Reliable Enterprises has gone through nearly 70 percent of its $120,000 first-year budget in just four months.

Amy Prokopowicz, a homelessness prevention counselor at the women’s center in Raleigh, said the desperation of people who need the money often spills out during emotional office visits — especially for those with children.

“They’re upset. They’re hysterical. They’re at their last straw,” Prokopowicz said. “If you’ve got kids and you don’t know if you’re going to get this money, that’s very stressful. There are children that sleep in cars in Wake County.”

To better meet the unprecedented need, advocates want Congress to include an extra $1 billion in HPRP funds in the new jobs bill being drawn up by congressional Democrats. The extra money would help an additional 200,000 families and create about 2,000 new jobs at community agencies. Roman said advocates have received no firm commitments on their request.

The additional funding is the right amount to balance the unmet need and the ability of local agencies to spend the money effectively, said Douglas Rice, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He said the short-term need for the assistance far outweighs any long-term budget concerns that more funding might raise.

In addition to rent and relocation services, the program pays other housing-related costs such as security deposits, utility payments and moving and storage costs.

“It’s good money to spend. Much better than bailing out Goldman Sachs and the big banks,” said Elaine de Coligny, the executive director of EveryOne Home, a housing agency that helps run the HPRP program in Alameda County, Calif.

Her agency hoped to use $10 million in federal HPRP funds to help move 1,200 families out of local homeless shelters during the next three years.

Within two weeks of the program launch in November, however, the agency received 2,000 requests for assistance and had to stop taking applications at four housing centers until its staff could work through the backlog. Ninety percent of the applicants met initial program guidelines for income and need.

While they won’t all pass the more rigorous personal screening, de Coligny said, “It’s clear there are far more people qualified to receive this assistance than the funding allowed.”

Joseph Wright was one of the lucky ones. When a summer job fell through, the 44-year-old substitute math and science teacher fell two months behind on his $850 monthly rent. Unable to borrow the money or move in with a friend, Wright, a refugee from Nigeria, put his furniture in storage and checked into a Berkeley, Calif., homeless shelter in November.

He worked while staying at the shelter until he received his first paycheck in early January. Working with a local agency, the HPRP program paid half of Wright’s rent for the first two months on a new apartment in Richmond, Calif., where he now teaches.

His moving expenses, storage fees and other related costs were also paid, which allowed Wright to put his paycheck toward other expenses. He just moved into his new place last week. Without the assistance, he’d still be in the shelter.

“Without the program I would be in a desperate situation. I’d have no stability. And without stability you can’t make progress,” he said, adding that the program helped restore his faith.

“It made me more hopeful. I’m more hopeful in how to deal with the future because I know that I’m not entirely alone,” Wright said. “I’m not the only person on the planet by myself.”

Susan Gregory of Raleigh felt the same kind of isolation when she faced eviction earlier this year. Gregory, 55, works as a nurse’s aide. When two of her elderly patients died in early 2009, her hours were cut and her income fell from $2,000 a month to $700 a month. Before long, she’d fallen behind on her bills and exhausted her savings.

By October, she owed $2,100 in back rent and faced eviction from her apartment of eight years. After being homeless 10 years ago, Gregory dreaded having to relive the experience.

“Knowing what that was like and thinking about having to do that again, I was getting really, really depressed,” she said.

The women’s center threw Gregory a lifeline. Through the HPRP program and other charities, the group agreed to help her pay her back rent, 75 percent of next month’s rent, half of the following month’s rent and a declining share going forward until she could save enough money to pay her own way.

“I knew if I stayed positive that positive things would happen,” Gregory said. “But honestly, I was slipping. Mentally, I was slipping.”

By Tony Pugh
Source: The Miami Herald, January 13, 2010

One year into Obama’s presidency, Sisters of the Road, Street Roots, Community Alliance of Tenants and hundreds of housing activists from about a dozen other Portland organizations plan to highlight what they say has been the president’s broken promise.

Timed to the Jan. 20 anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, they’re planning to travel in vans for a mega-protest planned in San Francisco at the federal building. Members and organizers of Sisters of the Road are funding the travel both from their own pockets and donations from supporters.

Demonstrators say their patience is wearing thin with what they call Obama’s failure to make alleviating homelessness a priority.

“We have held onto Hope for a year and are way past ready for the Change that was promised us,” reads one flier recently distributed by the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the San-Francisco-based activist group responsible for organizing the protest.

“Homeless and housing advocacy groups have been acting in a vacuum locally,” says Street Roots executive director Israel Bayer. “This gives us an opportunity to act in unison to give a message to the Obama administration that housing is a human right.”

Protesters want the federal government to invest more money into building affordable housing units. And they want existing units protected with the enactment of a moratorium on the demolition of any public housing that isn’t guaranteed to be replaced.

Last year, Obama proudly announced his decision to award $1.6 billion in grants to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for thousands of local housing and service programs nationwide.

Oregon got $22 million of that money, but local housing advocates weren’t impressed. They say most of that money simply replaced funds that had already been cut from a tight state budget. And they believe that $1.6 billion figure nationwide needs to be renewed annually instead of being just a one-time commitment for this year.

Portland housing activists plan to leave Monday morning, Jan. 18, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, after a send-off party from 5 to 9 pm Saturday night at Sisters of the Road Cafe in Old Town. The group also plans to hold a panel discussion in Ashland on ending homelessness before continuing on to San Francisco.

Asked what he hoped to achieve with a protest 3,000 miles from Washington, D.C., Sisters of the Road community organizer Brendan Phillips is optimistic the group’s message will be heard in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

“This is how movements start,” Phillips says. “We need to get to the grassroots. We’re bringing them [the local homeless] to San Francisco because it’s their stories that are going to change people’s minds.”

By Leah Dimatteo
Source: Willamette Week On-line, January 13, 2010

Now, as she papers the county with résumés and girds herself for rejection, she is supporting two daughters on an income that inspires a double take: zero dollars in monthly cash and a few hundred dollars in food stamps.

With food-stamp use at a record high and surging by the day, Ms. Bermudez belongs to an overlooked subgroup that is growing especially fast: recipients with no cash income.

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.

Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.

“It’s the one thing I can count on every month — I know the children are going to have food,” Ms. Bermudez, 42, said with the forced good cheer she mastered selling rows of new stucco homes.

Members of this straitened group range from displaced strivers like Ms. Bermudez to weathered men who sleep in shelters and barter cigarettes. Some draw on savings or sporadic under-the-table jobs. Some move in with relatives. Some get noncash help, like subsidized apartments. While some go without cash incomes only briefly before securing jobs or aid, others rely on food stamps alone for many months.

The surge in this precarious way of life has been so swift that few policy makers have noticed. But it attests to the growing role of food stamps within the safety net. One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children.

Here in Florida, the number of people with no income beyond food stamps has doubled in two years and has more than tripled along once-thriving parts of the southwest coast. The building frenzy that lured Ms. Bermudez to Fort Myers and neighboring Cape Coral has left a wasteland of foreclosed homes and written new tales of descent into star-crossed indigence.

A skinny fellow in saggy clothes who spent his childhood in foster care, Rex Britton, 22, hopped a bus from Syracuse two years ago for a job painting parking lots. Now, with unemployment at nearly 14 percent and paving work scarce, he receives $200 a month in food stamps and stays with a girlfriend who survives on a rent subsidy and a government check to help her care for her disabled toddler.

“Without food stamps we’d probably be starving,” Mr. Britton said.

A strapping man who once made a living throwing fastballs, William Trapani, 53, left his dreams on the minor league mound and his front teeth in prison, where he spent nine years for selling cocaine. Now he sleeps at a rescue mission, repairs bicycles for small change, and counts $200 in food stamps as his only secure support.

“I’ve been out looking for work every day — there’s absolutely nothing,” he said.

A grandmother whose voice mail message urges callers to “have a blessed good day,” Wanda Debnam, 53, once drove 18-wheelers and dreamed of selling real estate. But she lost her job at Starbucks this year and moved in with her son in nearby Lehigh Acres. Now she sleeps with her 8-year-old granddaughter under a poster of the Jonas Brothers and uses her food stamps to avoid her daughter-in-law’s cooking.

“I’m climbing the walls,” Ms. Debnam said.

Florida officials have done a better job than most in monitoring the rise of people with no cash income. They say the access to food stamps shows the safety net is working.

“The program is doing what it was designed to do: help very needy people get through a very difficult time,” said Don Winstead, deputy secretary for the Department of Children and Families. “But for this program they would be in even more dire straits.”

But others say the lack of cash support shows the safety net is torn. The main cash welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, has scarcely expanded during the recession; the rolls are still down about 75 percent from their 1990s peak. A different program, unemployment insurance, has rapidly grown, but still omits nearly half the unemployed. Food stamps, easier to get, have become the safety net of last resort.

“The food-stamp program is being asked to do too much,” said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group. “People need income support.”

Food stamps, officially the called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have taken on a greater role in the safety net for several reasons. Since the benefit buys only food, it draws less suspicion of abuse than cash aid and more political support. And the federal government pays for the whole benefit, giving states reason to maximize enrollment. States typically share in other programs’ costs.

The Times collected income data on food-stamp recipients in 31 states, which account for about 60 percent of the national caseload. On average, 18 percent listed cash income of zero in their most recent monthly filings. Projected over the entire caseload, that suggests six million people in households with no income. About 1.2 million are children.

The numbers have nearly tripled in Nevada over the past two years, doubled in Florida and New York, and grown nearly 90 percent in Minnesota and Utah. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, one of every 25 residents reports an income of only food stamps. In Yakima County, Wash., the figure is about one of every 17.

Experts caution that these numbers are estimates. Recipients typically report a small rise in earnings just once every six months, so some people listed as jobless may have recently found some work. New York officials say their numbers include some households with earnings from illegal immigrants, who cannot get food stamps but sometimes live with relatives who do.

Still, there is little doubt that millions of people are relying on incomes of food stamps alone, and their numbers are rapidly growing. “This is a reflection of the hardship that a lot of people in our state are facing; I think that is without question,” said Mr. Winstead, the Florida official.

With their condition mostly overlooked, there is little data on how long these households go without cash incomes or what other resources they have. But they appear an eclectic lot. Florida data shows the population about evenly split between families with children and households with just adults, with the latter group growing fastest during the recession. They are racially mixed as well — about 42 percent white, 32 percent black, and 22 percent Latino — with the growth fastest among whites during the recession.

The expansion of the food-stamp program, which will spend more than $60 billion this year, has so far enjoyed bipartisan support. But it does have conservative critics who worry about the costs and the rise in dependency.

“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

With nearly 15,000 people in Lee County, Fla., reporting no income but food stamps, the Fort Myers area is a laboratory of inventive survival. When Rhonda Navarro, a cancer patient with a young son, lost running water, she ran a hose from an outdoor spigot that was still working into the shower stall. Mr. Britton, the jobless parking lot painter, sold his blood.

Kevin Zirulo and Diane Marshall, brother and sister, have more unlikely stories than a reality television show. With a third sibling paying their rent, they are living on a food-stamp benefit of $300 a month. A gun collector covered in patriotic tattoos, Mr. Zirulo, 31, has sold off two semiautomatic rifles and a revolver. Ms. Marshall, who has a 7-year-old daughter, scavenges discarded furniture to sell on the Internet.

They said they dropped out of community college and diverted student aid to household expenses. They received $150 from the Nielsen Company, which monitors their television. They grew so desperate this month, they put the breeding services of the family Chihuahua up for bid on Craigslist.

“We look at each other all the time and say we don’t know how we get through,” Ms. Marshall said.

Ms. Bermudez, by contrast, tells what until the recession seemed a storybook tale. Raised in the Bronx by a drug-addicted mother, she landed a clerical job at a Manhattan real estate firm and heard that Fort Myers was booming. On a quick scouting trip in 2002, she got a mortgage on easy terms for a $120,000 home with three bedrooms and a two-car garage. The developer called the floor plan Camelot.

“I screamed, I cried,” she said. “I took so much pride in that house.”

Jobs were as plentiful as credit. Working for two large builders, she quickly moved from clerical jobs to sales and bought an investment home. Her income soared to $180,000, and she kept the pay stubs to prove it. By the time the glut set in and she lost her job, the teaser rates on her mortgages had expired and her monthly payments soared.

She landed a few short-lived jobs as the industry imploded, exhausted her unemployment insurance and spent all her savings. But without steady work in nearly three years, she could not stay afloat. In January, the bank foreclosed on Camelot.

One morning as the eviction deadline approached, Ms. Bermudez woke up without enough food to get through the day. She got emergency supplies at a food pantry for her daughters, Tiffany, now 17, and Ashley, 4, and signed up for food stamps. “My mother lived off the government,” she said. “It wasn’t something as a proud working woman I wanted to do.”

For most of the year, she did have a $600 government check to help her care for Ashley, who has a developmental disability. But she lost it after she was hospitalized and missed an appointment to verify the child’s continued eligibility. While she is trying to get it restored, her sole income now is $320 in food stamps.

Ms. Bermudez recently answered the door in her best business clothes and handed a reporter her résumé, which she distributes by the ream. It notes she was once a “million-dollar producer” and “deals well with the unexpected.”

“I went from making $180,000 to relying on food stamps,” she said. “Without that government program, I wouldn’t be able to feed my children.”

By JASON DEPARLE and ROBERT M. GEBELOFF
Photo by Stephen Crowley
Matthew Ericson contributed research.
Source: The New York Times, January 3, 2010

Mr. Ruano, 38, who had drawn his living from 69th Street and Broadway for six years, has been on the streets since. He and other hard-luck day laborers have slept wherever they can: in the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center, in unfinished buildings abandoned by bankrupt developers and under bridges along the freight railroad tracks that slice through western Queens, where dirty mattresses and work boots lay on the rocky ground one recent morning.

“The only reason we don’t go hungry is because there are people who offer us food,” Mr. Ruano said on a snowy Saturday as he clutched a cup of soup from a group of Pentecostals feeding day laborers at a park on Woodside Avenue.

With their isolation and day-to-day existence, the laborers are perhaps the most invisible and hardest-to-reach victims of the recession, advocates and city officials say.

No one knows for sure how many have become homeless since the downturn brought construction projects to a virtual standstill and sapped them of jobs that once paid as much as $200 a day. Most of them are illegal immigrants who may be on the streets one day and off the next, depending on their work.

The rules of the shelter system do not suit them, they said. They might be placed too far from the job pickup site or miss curfew if a job runs too late or is too far from the shelter.

Afraid that their immigration status might be exposed — outreach workers might ask for identification, though the shelters are open to everyone — they say they would rather sleep outside.

“We’re still learning about this population, about their needs,” said Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services.

To the day laborers clustered on and around 69th Street from Broadway to Queens Boulevard, the downturn came on suddenly: There was work one week, and then there was not.

And for what little work there is, they have more competition — from men who used to be steady hands on roofing, painting and other construction crews and men who lost their full-time jobs in restaurants, at landscaping companies and in garages.

With more people at the corners, day laborers said, contractors will hire whoever agrees to work for the lowest pay.

“We’ve all learned the meaning of the law of supply and demand the hard way,” said Roberto Meneses, 48, a day laborer from Mexico who has been trying to organize his peers under a fledgling group called United Day Laborers of Woodside.

They have had to adapt just as fast as they had learned to install drywall and unclog pipes. One man said he spent 20 days picking apples at a farm near Buffalo in November to earn some cash. Others started to make do with one meal a day. Many are no longer able to send money home.

Ignacio Sanchez, 50, who has a wife and three children in Mexico, said a week before Christmas that he had worked once since the beginning of the month. Rodrigo Saldaña, 41, who has a wife and five children in Ecuador, said he had not worked at all last month. Both said they had spent nights sleeping on the train or by the railroad tracks.

“Do you want to know what the worst part is?” Mr. Saldaña said. “My wife says I’m lying when I tell her there’s no more work in New York.”

Early last month, homeless-outreach workers from the city met with organizations that serve immigrant communities to hear about their work and to ask questions: Where could they go for free immigration advice? Can an illegal immigrant who has no ID get a new one at a consulate?

“There are a lot of practical issues that are very unique to the undocumented, to day laborers,” said Valeria Treves, executive director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the groups that attended the meeting. “But these guys also have incredible emotional needs.”

Sipping coffee at a Colombian bakery on Roosevelt Avenue, Mr. Saldaña, Mr. Sanchez and Carlos Orellana, an Ecuadorean who has worked for 14 years as a day laborer, told of the sadness of being far from their children, whom they have watched grow in pictures that come with the occasional letter from home.

At least there was a sense of empowerment while they were able to provide for them, they said. “We were the men of the family,” said Mr. Orellana, 40. But now that they have no money, all they are left with is disappointment and shame, he said.

By the railroad tracks, the ground was sprinkled with the instruments of coping: empty beer bottles, a tattered Bible, a crumpled picture of a young boy. A toy skull hovered over a mattress, dangling from a string tied to the tip of a rod, in a sight at once funny and macabre.

During the day, the place was empty. The only noise came from the hum of passing cars on the streets above and the rumble of the 7 train, visible in the distance.

“That’s how we live,” Mr. Orellana said.

His eyes cast on the tracks beneath his feet, Mr. Sanchez interjected, “This is no life.”

By Fernanda Santos

Photo by Fred R. Conrad

Source: The New York Times, January 2, 2010

Hobos to Street People is an historical survey. It contrasts the period of the Great Depression with the era of modern homelessness, which began in the early 1980s. There are many parallels between the two periods. If one looks at the homeless encampments along the American River in Sacramento, and in Fresno today one can only be struck by the incredible similarities to the photos of Dorothea Lange. And in the agricultural fields today the workers live in conditions very similar to the Depression era images. But of course there are differences. The people in Dorothea Lange’s photos were primarily economic migrants from the Midwest. Today the agricultural workers are economic migrants from the global south.

The art in this show was created by the artists to make homelessness visible. And they often used their art in different ways to get their message out. The art was used as posters, in magazines, street papers, gallery shows, in books, and in Dorothea Lange’s case as Congressional testimony. And this year several pieces in this show were used as testimony to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Housing who was recently in the US.

Let me give you a few facts to put this in context. During the Depression six thousand Dust Bowl migrants arrived in California each month. In 1933 there were more than one million Americans homeless. Unemployment in 1929 stood at 3% and by 1933, 25% of all workers were unemployed. Those are pretty alarming numbers and today’s numbers aren’t great either.

This year the US Department of Education estimates nearly 1 million children will be homeless. Forty million Americans are living in poverty. This year has shown a 9 to 12% increase in people in shelters. Unemployment is above 10% nationwide. Although the real unemployment figure is closer to 16%. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are moving at faster rates into homelessness than ever before according to the VA. And of course foreclosures are up everywhere. So what has the Federal Governments response been? Over the last four years it has cut all forms of spending on low income housing by two billion dollars, while increasing spending on homeless assistance by 157 million dollars. The message in other words is that it isn’t a system wide failure but simply a failure of individuals. And that is the message driven home again and again. That the problem of homelessness, is a problem of broken individuals.

During the Depression there was a different idea. Artists during the Depression had a sense of the innate nobility of people. They wanted to show that poor people who had lost everything still retained their dignity. So you see again and again, the proud stoic mother in Dorothea Lange’s photos or the determined family in Rockwell Kent’s prints. And the government responded too. The New Deal created programs that assisted artists and gave them opportunities to make this art. But the government also created jobs programs, it addressed the dislocation of farmers from the Midwest and it created agencies to build housing – laying the groundwork for the first federal response to homelessness in US history.

At this time of year charity is on a lot of people’s minds. And charity from individuals is a beautiful thing. But when governments respond to social disasters with charity…when the federal government is giving blankets instead of addressing the problems of inadequate housing, or of homeless children and the needs of returning veterans, then charity is merely a mask and a sham to hide inaction.

This exhibition is evidence of how artists from the Depression era as well as today have used their art to provoke action and to assist in movements towards social justice.

By Art Hazelwood

Bakersfield Museum of Art is located at:
1930 R Street
Bakersfield, CA 93301
http://www.bmoa.org/