End Homelessness

When police got to David Mould, a 52-year-old homeless man living in Fredricksburg, VA earlier this year, he was suffering from severe burns on his whole left arm and on close to 30 percent of his body. He had been sleeping under a bridge when he was attacked and set on fire by someone he couldn't see. And he was one of the lucky ones.

Mould survived his initial attack. He was hospitalized in critical but stable condition, another of thousands of homeless victims attacked, killed or targeted for the "crime" of being homeless. Chances are no one will ever be arrested, let alone convicted, in Mould's attack.

When Michael Knockett, also 52, was run over by a Virginia Beach city dump truck in June, authorities said he was sleeping on a low-lying area of the beach and couldn't easily be seen. Yet a photo taken minutes before the accident by a tourist shows a much different scene. Knockett is sitting in sight on a level beach, clearly in plain view.

If he had been a college student, a mother, a tourist it's likely there would have been far more of an outcry. But Knockett was homeless, a drinker and no big loss to anyone — at least that's the impression one gets from Virginia Beach authorities who were either willing to lie about the circumstances surrounding Knockett's death, or didn't care enough to check it out for themselves.

A few days after Knockett was killed, a Virginia Beach commonwealth's attorney announced that no charges would be filed in the case. Apparently everyone involved — except for the tourist who took the photo — believes that "the driver simply did not see the man because she was looking at trash cans and her two-man crew walking alongside the truck."

Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian is a heart surgeon in India. His specialty? Pediatrics. His patients? Children whose hearts are so bad they will die if he doesn't operate, and so fragile that sometimes they die even when he does. But before the children there were other patients, like a homeless drug addict the police picked up on the streets of Mumbai, India at 2 a.m.

As a young surgeon Dr. Mani extracted "maggots from the festering leg ulcer" of this man and contemplated an all-important question that seemed to constantly haunt him: "Does everyone really matter?"

As he plucked the maggots from the leg of the homeless man he struggled with the randomness of it all — who lives, who dies, who matters. And then, he told me, he got through those moments in an unusual way:

"I told myself stories. Like this one: A rich man's little four-year-old daughter is walking along Marine Drive when she hears a tinkling sound. Her prized ring had slipped off her finger, and rolled onto the highway.

Unthinking, she turns to run after it, not seeing the Mercedes speeding at 80 mph down that lane.

At that very moment, the unshaven, dirty old man, bombed out of his mind with the latest shot of whatever he was injecting himself with, restlessly rolls over in his dazed slumber and knocks over a trash can beside him. Crash!

The rattling sound distracts the little girl, who stops and turns to see what the noise was ... and the speeding vehicle zips past. A few seconds later, the little girl runs onto the street, picks up her ring and steps back on the platform.

Neither the girl nor the drug-addict are aware of how close she had come to being run down by the car. Yet, he had saved her life!

And by cleaning up his wound at that ungodly hour, and putting him back on the streets, maybe I was helping him save another.

Elaborate, I know. Even fantastic. Today, I have other reasons to believe that everyone matters, that everyone is equally important. But in the wide, unlimited spectrum of the universe, we see and experience a tiny fragment, yet presume to 'understand' and 'know' causality and consequence. (We don't.)"

You may remember the story: First Lady Michelle Obama spends a day serving food in a soup kitchen in the capital. An excited guest snaps a picture of her with a camera phone. The right wing media goes nuts asking, "How can a homeless guy have a cell phone?!," not realizing that cell phones are an affordable lifeline for many homeless individuals. A Department of Labor employee includes a photo of the man taking a photo in a disparaging email. Homeless advocates use that gaffe to forge a relationship with the Department. What do we want? Jobs! When do we want them? Now!

That saga that began with a homeless man photographing Michelle Obama and led to homeless advocates working with the Labor Department and D.C.'s Department of Human Services to create a job-training program for the homeless continues.

In May, the advocacy organization STREATS and DHS filed paperwork with DOL in order to get funding for the "Exit Strategy," a program that would train higher-functioning homeless people to do jobs that pay a living wage so that they wouldn't need to depend on the government for anything — not food stamps, help with rent or any other federal assistance. However, the paperwork was filed too close to the end of DOL's budgetary funding cycle, which means that now we must wait until the next fiscal year to be funded by DOL.

STREATS recently met with Human Services director Clarence Carter to discuss the development of this program and other funding options including the distinct possibility of funding from DHS. However, one of the basic rules of funding is that a program must be designed according to the preferences of those providing the funding. On the one hand, if the Exit Strategy were funded by the federal government, STREATS would have to do what is known in the homeless advocacy community as "creaming" — helping those who are easiest to help, who have the fewest issues and who are most likely to succeed (i.e. leave homelessness). This would mean that the program wouldn't help anyone with mental illness, physical impairments or chemical dependency. On the other hand, if the Exit Strategy were funded by DHS, we would have to do some "silting" — helping those who are hardest to help.

This new video comes from Mark's InvisiblePeople.tv 30-city, 11,000-mile, 75-day road trip, going on now. Mark has been producing videos faster than we can post them, so we're devoting the blog to InvisiblePeople.tv all day today.

Mama D lost her apartment in San Antonio, Texas a few months ago. She has cancer and is out in the streets. But now the city only has one homeless services center so she'd rather sleep outside then be in "prison."

She's referring to the recently opened mega-shelter called Haven For Hope. I only spent a little time there. Although the facility is impressive their solution seems more like institutionalizing homelessness.

Please note that I never asked anyone to speak about this shelter, yet in every interview in San Antonio that was the topic. Street talk about services is not always honest, but in this situation, and from my own tour of Haven of Hope, I have to agree that this is not a way to treat people. Even for my interview they only allowed me to talk to the head secretary. My concern is that homeless people in San Antonio are no longer given the freedom of choice.

After you watch Mama D, see another of San Antonio's homeless, David, talk about how the mega-shelter has hurt rather than helped him.

I got this email from a reader today. She needs to remain anonymous, but wants to tell her story of being a homeless mother.

It isn't easy, living as I do. I am a single mother with two kids living out of our vehicle. I have to be careful with what I say to co-workers, friends and family. They don't fully understand or know why I don't invite people over or why my kids don't have sleepovers. I've learned to get by on naps because I can't afford to get a full night's sleep. Although I work two jobs often, most of what I make is spent on gas. This is how it's been for the last seven years and I have no idea when things will change.

My kids go to school and have clean clothes and food to eat. Occasionally we go to sleep hungry. Welfare isn't an option as the state wants us to sell our vehicle, our only safe place to sleep, in order to grant us a measly $400 a month. So for now, we just get basic health care and food stamps. Child support stopped seven years ago and that's how I lost my apartment, that and lack of affordable childcare. Without childcare, I could not go to my job and I couldn't make my oldest daughter stay home from school to watch her baby sister. When my tax refund came around, I used it to by a 1981 Minnie Winnebago that was in excellent condition. My plan was to work nights while the kids slept in it. By the time my youngest was able to go to school, I found a day job that paid more than the part-time night job but the night job had a private parking lot that I could see from where I was working. The kids slept while I helped put out the next issue of the local paper. I made sure no one knew the kids were outside and my oldest knew that she had to keep her little sister quiet at all times.

I cannot understand the logic behind the state's willingness to pay a stranger to take care of my kids but not lift a finger to help parents take care of their own kids. Foster care seems to be a strange system in my opinion. How do you know these foster parents aren't just opening their homes for the money? I read an article about how these kids were dumped into the street once the money ran out. I am determined to keep us all together but don't need any hassles from the state poking its nose in where it's not wanted. I still recall the moment a social worker looked me in the eye and said that she was sorry but the state couldn't do anything to prevent homelessness but here's your EBT card. I laughed in a social worker's face when she suggested applying for Section 8 for housing help. I replied, "You mean apply for a program that's closed in this state and awarded like the lottery? No thanks, I needed help yesterday, not the faint possibility at some unknown future date."

Sunday was the five-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It's hard to believe so many years have gone by since that horrible storm rocked the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. What makes it most unbelievable to us is that five years later there are still thousands of people that lost their homes in the flooding who are still homeless.

Last year we attended a national conference on Social Work in New Orleans and spent a long weekend there. This was our first time visiting, and we fell in love with the city. In a blog post last year, Rich remarked how he "was struck by the similarities of New Orleans to New York in one aspect — survival and renewal. Katrina was their 9/11. The Ninth Ward is their Ground Zero." Just as nearly nine years after 9/11 there is very little progress in rebuilding the World Trade Center, the poor in New Orleans similarly wait for a home. This is after a second devastating disaster, the BP oil spill.

President Obama visited New Orleans on Sunday and pledged the federal government's commitment to rebuilding the city. We greatly appreciate the President visiting New Orleans and issuing this commitment. Yet this is just more rhetoric around big plans to revive the city. New Orleans needs more than words. New Orleans needs funding for affordable housing. Not in a few more months or years. Now! Join us in signing the petition to let President Obama know that it is time for action.

Photo credit: Rich Lombino

A journalist in Toronto was intrigued, as many of us were, by the recent story (and sensationalistic coverage) of a New York City ad exec who handed her credit card over to a homeless man and got it back after he purchased water, deodorant and cigarettes. Many, like the New York Post, were surprised. An honest homeless person — egads!

Anyway, this journalist in Toronto, Jim Rankin at the Toronto Star, decided to see for himself how trustworthy his city's panhandlers are, as well as find out what they intend to do with the money they collect from strangers. His conclusions are fascinating.

He bought prepaid Visa and Mastercard gift cards, worth $50 and $75, and waited to be asked for cash. After he handed out the cards he either waited while the person shopped or agreed to return on another day after the panhandler had the chance to make his or her purchases. Not everyone accepted a card and not everyone who did returned it.

The first recipient was Jason, a 28-year-old with an orange mohawk. "Can I trust you with this?" the reporter asked. Turns out he could. Jason spent $8.69 at McDonald's and promptly brought the card back. After he ate, he was happy to share his story, which includes an alcoholic mother and time on the streets starting at age 14.

Another young man who was selling street papers turned down a $75 card because, as he said, "I have a roof over my head."

Yet another, a man named Mark in his early 30s, said he wanted to get a restaurant meal. He did that ($21.64) but never returned the card to the reporter waiting in a coffee shop. The next day, according to transaction records, he spent $15.50 at a liquor store.