Grace Ross: Redefining “Homelessness” Won’t Solve the Problem

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

It’s budget season. That is, it’s the time of year when the state legislature and our cities and towns are working feverishly to balance their economic house. A number of the politicians that I think still are trying to fulfill a true leadership role in government often point out that a budget is not just (or even primarily) a financial document; that a government’s budget is a moral document.

The last time we were in really bad economic straits as a country, a famous leader said “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” That was President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a time like ours, when the accumulation of wealth and income in the hands of a very few had continued, and the numbers of those with too little was increasing.

How is our state budget measuring up so far? Well, let’s say we don’t even reach for the bar from FDR’s moral stand during the Great Depression. What if we simply require financial policies that rebuild our economy and are transparent enough so that voters can participate as informed members of our government?

Instead, these days we are given government policy by rewriting definitions. That is we have unemployment rates nationally at about 22-23%, if we’re to believe the official data collectors who then are not allowed to put out the real unemployment rate. Instead, they put out the “official unemployment” rate that says unemployment is going down when primarily the “rate” is decreasing because of working age people dropping out of the workforce.

Our state government is fast moving toward having shelter for the “homeless” not apply to the vast majority of folks who are actually homeless. Apparently, those who are going to be considered “homeless” and have a right to shelter are not those who are just homeless. In addition to being homeless, they must have gotten there: (1) not because their prior housing was unaffordable, (2) not because they don’t have an income for more than a year, (3) not because the bread winner in the family has abandoned them.

In fact, if you’ve only been homeless because you are staying with friends but they can’t let you stay any longer (few of our friends can really afford to house us for free for very long!) that doesn’t make you homeless either. Nor does it matter if their current living situation is criminally unsafe. Nor does it matter if the reason they’re homeless is because they fled a domestic violence situation previously. And apparently even sleeping in your car doesn’t qualify as sufficiently homeless to get into a shelter.

Shelter would be limited to nine months. Given that most of the empty buildings around us (emptied out because of foreclosure) can’t even find a new purchaser in less than 2 or 3 years, it’s amazing that they expect there to be all sorts of housing freed up after nine months of being in shelter. The other forms of assistance for the homeless are also being cut back or could be denied to those not “officially” homeless families.

The barely one-year-old supposed “cure all” Homebased program within months has already proven to be clearly insufficient money to bridge housing for the larger numbers in need than had been projected. Now, they want to cut it back to only $4,000 per year for an eligible family and the reality is that housing subsidies aren’t even going to be available for the vast majority of families leaving shelter.

These decisions are being considered in a housing market that is still being dominated by the impacts –the constant pounding – of an ongoing foreclosure crisis. In Massachusetts, that crisis has the notoriety of creating a vacancy rate that has increased by 72% in 10 years. That means between 2000 and 2010 the non-seasonal (not vacation homes) vacancy rate in Massachusetts has increased by 72.2%.

Unlike all previous time periods when property values were dropping, our rents are actually increasing. There’s nothing overly surprising because post foreclosure, when banks buy back property (which these days may take two or three years to re-sell), they do their best to empty the units – adding another family to the rental market and taking another unit out of it! So far, instead of doing what would cost absolutely zero to our state budget, the legislators are stalling on refusing to let the banks continue to lose money by emptying out foreclosed properties instead of letting people stay and pay rent. This would save our housing stock, our neighborhoods, our property values, tax base and our neighbors!

Instead, our legislature is trying to save money by trying to dam the river of people after they’ve made homeless – ignoring the cause for increasingly insufficient housing in the housing market, increasing cost to what housing there is and draining our economy so people don’t’ have enough jobs to make ends meet. I’m all for not continuing to throw money down a bottomless pit of homelessness, but that means that we need to have legislators who are actually making smart budget decisions based on real economic factors and stemming the tide upriver.

There is perfectly good legislation waiting to be passed in our legislature that would make it so that occupants post-foreclosure – not just former tenants, but former homeowners and others who may have been in the housing willing to pay rent – be allowed to stay and pay rent until the housing is repurchased by a private owner of some kind.

Instead, policies are in place that allow banks to actually lose money by not letting people rent, allows the property values to continue to drop and the wellbeing of neighborhoods continuing to be destroyed by the vacating of homes and undermine the tax base for our cities and towns.

Why not choose a proactive strategy that would actually stop the tide of homelessness instead of just rewriting the government’s definition of the need for shelter? The new definition is guaranteed to exacerbate the situation because the vast majority of folks who are made homeless through foreclosure generally have already had their credit ruined and regular rental situations, which check credit rating, are not available easily to them.

If those evicted former homeowners follow the path of what folks have done over the last five years, they will be denied shelter because of ending up crashing on someone’s couch or finding an interim solution before they end up actually homeless. That means that the vast tide of folks who are coming down the river without a place to live are going to find themselves cut out of the opportunity for shelter by the very change in definition that is presently being passed.

I find it hard to believe – perhaps I should be more jaded – that our political leaders really think the answer to homelessness is to change the definition and hope that nobody notices. I refuse to loosen my hold of the possibility of re-establishing a government by and for the people. I can only hope that our elected leaders pull their noses out of the down-river numbers enough to notice that they have the power to stop the problems upstream.

They have to stop allowing those who continue to make money off of folks who were taken advantage of, at a time when almost everybody is struggling, to not pay their fair share in taxes and also not requiring perfectly good properties to be available to rent on the other.