webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

HOMELESS 2

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HOMELESS 2 519 also bak primary 1 24 also sadly target

see also hunger and debt

SEE ALSO SOCIAL HOUSING VIENNA

merri ok

TRUMP? CLEAN THEM OUT?

cudgel to beat up Dems // urban = black violent crime

see financialization horseman, see gt recession predatory loans

see eviction

see also prison ind complex, but do i need a sep category for fines extraction from poor/ppl of color?

yep, cash bail

SEE FOX WATTERS FOX HYPE VIOLENT RHET ELIM BUT SELF DEFENSE // RETALIATIONHE ENJOY CRUEL PAIN

Republican Jim Crow Homeless Bill Brings Back Convict Leasing

Republican Jim Crow Homeless Bill Brings Back Convict Leasing - YouTube

Brittany Page discusses Louisiana's HB 211, a new bill on its way to the Senate after passing the House, that criminalizes homelessness, creates internment camps, and authorizes mandated treatment that homeless individuals can pay for through unpaid forced labor. Brittany details how the Trump Administration and the Republican Party at large have been pushing bills like this across the country in an effort to criminalize poverty and homelessness, and what we can do collectively to fight the injustice.

HARD LABOR 1- 2 YRS

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AN 4 26

Vets revolt after 'the most anti-veteran president in history' kills popular program - Alternet.org

10K LOSE HSE

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SEE CRUEL? STRICT FR? ~ SOC SAFETY NET

MMA

Right-wing media’s heinous rhetoric against people experiencing homelessness

From calling for homeless people to be sent to “internment camps” to fantasizing about making them “fight like gladiators,” right-wing media’s crusade against people without housing continues

Written by Sage Hodil

Published 04/03/26

Right-wing media have a long history of attacking homeless people, and so far 2026 has seen a continuation of that trend. Pundits have called for sending homeless people to different countries, “internment camps,” and institutions. Right-wing media figures have also pushed dehumanizing rhetoric by referring to homeless people as “bums,” “blighty,” “junkies,” “mentally deranged,” and even joking about their deaths.

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  1. ### Jesse Watters’ decade-long hate campaign against homeless people

07/17/23

  1. ### Fox News zeroes in on a new target: the homeless

06/04/19

  1. ### NY Post's Latest Attack On Homeless Demonstrates Real-World Consequences Of Poor-Shaming

03/10/16

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mma

  1. On Fox News, billionaire CEO John Catsimatidis suggests that homeless should “live in Uganda”

03/19/26

March 19, 2026, edition of Fox News' America Reports

SANDRA SMITH (ANCHOR): They want more money for this homeless population. They are now saying in the city, you just heard it, more per homeless person than the average person makes in the year.

JOHN CATSIMATIDIS (GUEST): Why should we pay that $81,000 I saw on the screen, for a homeless person where they can leave for— live in Uganda for $8.13 a day. We'll give them the check for $8.13 a day, let them live some place else.

SMITH: It would be one thing if proving that spending all this money would be helping the homeless population get off the streets and get back into work but there's no sign of that. In fact, the homeless population is only growing.

Per Forbes, John Castimatidis is the owner of a New York City supermarket chain and an oil refinery, and has an estimated net worth of $4.8B.

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MMA

  1. ### Newsmax host Michael Savage proposes “internment camps” for “homeless bums”

03/17/26

  1. ### After declaring that “we kind of just won the war,” Newsmax's Greg Kelly says that Americans can “handle” higher gas prices

03/17/26

  1. ### Newsmax host on Iran: Trump “has to tie this up in the next two to three weeks of these oil prices being high before it's actually like a serious political problem”

03/17/26

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PUZZLE HOW HE GETS AWAY W FUCKING OVER VETS

AN 3 26

President Donald Trump’s new proposal for addressing widespread veteran homelessness involves forcibly institutionalizing hundreds or even thousands of them — and this is raising concerns about civil liberties.

“Our new partnership with the Justice Department reflects our ongoing commitment to ensuring that every veteran receives timely, appropriate care,” explained Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) Doug Collins in a public statement. The VA says that they will initiate legal guardianships for veterans who are either homeless or “at risk of homelessness,” thereby empowering the federal government to involuntarily commit them to care facilities.

"Critics say the policy shift raises significant civil liberties concerns, noting that in earlier generations, people with severe mental illness were routinely stripped of their legal rights and confined to state hospitals,” reported The New York Times.

Representative Mark Takano, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said that “the Trump-Vance administration is pursuing policies that would push hundreds, if not thousands, of veterans into institutions and court-ordered guardianships.”

Takano added, “Guardianship should always be a last resort, after all less restrictive options have been exhausted, to ensure veterans’ rights are respected.”

By contrast, Michael Figlioli, the director of the National Veterans Service for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said “that some of our nation’s most vulnerable veterans must be approached through a public health and social services framework” and argued that if the program is carried out thoughtfully, guardianships could offer more “structured support” for vulnerable veterans. At the same time, he said that there would need to be due diligence taken to account for “veterans’ privacy, potential implementation gaps and the need for sufficient resources.”

As the Times reported, “There are about 33,000 homeless veterans in the United States, about 14,000 of whom live on the streets. Veterans make up around 5 percent of the unsheltered homeless population.”

Prior to this policy change, Trump has often disappointed veterans. He reneged earlier in March on a promise to establish a National Center for Warrior Independence, and his sweeping cuts to the federal workforce led to 62,000 veterans losing their jobs.

“The Trump Administration has radically slashed the federal civilian workforce, sidestepping Congress and causing disruptions, slowdowns, and fragility in a range of critical public services that people and communities depend on,” wrote the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities earlier in March. “Veterans have been affected by these cuts both as members of the federal workforce and as recipients of federal health care and other benefits available to them based on their service.”

Trump has also been accused of showing disrespect toward veterans, such as earlier in March when he ignored protocol and left his hat on while greeting the remains of six soldiers killed in his Iran war.

“This fool has ABSOLUTELY no sense of dignity or appreciation for the moment,” Michael Steele, Republican National Committee chair from 2009 to 2011, wrote on X. “It is called the Dignified Transfer for a reason. Take your damn hat off!!”

Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said that there is a partisan double standard.

“I know what Republicans would have said if Obama had done this — I would have written the statement,” Heye posted on X. “Shameful.”

A number of administration sources, including Trump’s former chief of staff and retired Marine Corps. General John F. Kelly, have said that Trump privately referred to soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” because he could not understand them fighting for things other than self-interest.

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mma

note no evidence just free mkt capl bs

January 8, 2026, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to find some policy win with regard to affordability.

According to Politico, the White House is now drafting an executive order broadly targeted at addressing Americans' frustration with the cost of living, including a push to allow people to dip into their retirement and college savings account to afford down payments on homes. The document, according to two people familiar with the drafting, is expected to include an action previewed by President Trump on Wednesday that would move toward banning large investors from acquiring single-family homes.

Well, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said Senate Democrats tried to do this last year and Republicans blocked it. Well, I mean, that's true. It also happens not to be particularly good policy.

The attempt to stop corporations, major corporations, from buying up single-family homes, it sounds fun and it sounds good, and it will have literally zero impact on the cost of housing.

How do we know this? Well, because we actually have evidence as to how many single-family homes are owned by gigantic corporations. Some of it is rental stock, by the way. So, you know, when you're asking, you know, a corporation buys a house and then flips it and then sells it again, that's a different question from a corporation buys a home and then rents it.

If a corporation buys a home or creates a home and then rents it, that actually lowers the rents because it's increasing the supply of rental units. As far as corporations buying houses and then reselling those same houses, typically, this is done in areas with low regulation, and it's typically done in areas where the price is already going up. And it actually lowers the price because they then build new inventory.

So, this is just bad policy. The reality is that large institutional investors own about 2% of all single-family rental stock. That's rental stock. And, again, when a giant corporation buys up a block of houses and converts them to rents, that just opened up a bunch of rental units, which lowers the price because you increase the supply.

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INK 12 25

This afternoon, we talked live with homeless advocate, former deputy executive director for advocacy at the Coalition for the Homeless, and author Patrick Markee, who has a brand-new book out this week, Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, which draws on his long experience to tell the story of America’s crisis of homelessness as part of the bigger crisis of neoliberalism. We talked about.

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Right-wing media embrace Trump policies that experts say increase housing costs

Conservative media join Vice President JD Vance in scapegoating immigrants for high housing costs

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 11/20/25

Right-wing media have continued to assist the Trump administration pivot to affordability after a slate of Democrats successfully ran on the issue, now focusing on high housing costs, which have risen in many markets during President Donald Trump’s second term. But many of the policies embraced by Trump’s media allies — including tariffs, 50-year mortgages, and mass deportations — will likely contribute to even higher housing costs.

Conservative media have also joined Vice President JD Vance in scapegoating immigrants for housing affordability issues, even as reporting and research suggest that immigration is not the primary source of high housing costs.

Much like the hoax Vance propagated ahead of the 2024 election that immigrants were eating pets, the idea that immigrants are responsible for housing woes has fascist and Nazi roots.

Many economists say immigration is not driving high housing prices

MMA //

  1. ### This Fox segment demonstrates the network’s struggle to craft a coherent affordability message for Trump

11/18/25 3:59 PM EST

  1. ### Fox & Friends praises Trump for “quick fix” on affordability by lowering his tariffs — which Fox used to celebrate

11/14/25 12:02 PM EST

  1. ### It took big Democratic wins for right-wing media to admit that the affordability crisis is getting worse

11/06/25

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see tariff cda lumber tax 7 25 mass deport labor

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an 7 25

A proposal from the Trump administration would impose a strict two‑year limit on Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) flagship rental assistance programs, including Section 8 vouchers and public housing. If enacted, the change could leave 1.4 million of the nation’s lowest-income households without housing support, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

A New York University analysis of HUD data concludes that the two-year cap would force 1.4 million households — predominantly working families with children—out of subsidized housing, leading to widespread evictions and upheaval, per the report.

The report spotlighted Havalah Hopkins, a 23-year-old working mother of an autistic son, who fears such a limit would render them homeless, as neither wages nor local affordable housing currently offer a viable safety net.

READ MORE: 'Who in the world would be stupid enough to believe that?' Morning Joe torches Trump

“A two‑year time limit is ridiculous,” she told AP. “It’s so disrespectful. I think it’s dehumanizing—the whole system.”

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She further said, “It’s a cycle of feeling defeated and depleted, no matter how much energy and effort and tenacity you have towards surviving."

Since hearing about Trump’s proposal, Hopkins says she's been consumed by the fear of loading her life into a van with her son, unraveling the sense of safety she’s worked so hard to build.

The report noted that both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that imposing time limits could reduce HUD's notoriously long waitlists.

READ MORE: 'Sad Sunday': Christian power couple smacks down evangelical conservatives in rare public statement

Some hard‑liners believe that the looming threat of losing housing will prompt recipients to become self‑sufficient; others argue that limits — if paired with support services and job-training incentives — could encourage tenants to make positive life changes.

Meanwhile, it remains uncertain whether Congress will support Trump’s HUD agenda.

This week, the House appropriations committee is evaluating HUD’s fiscal year 2026 budget — but so far, no time-limit provisions are included, per AP.

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement to AP that the Senate has not yet released its budget blueprint for the agency and emphasized the administration’s intent to press forward with implementing time limits.

READ MORE:MAGA is mad about more than a broken promise

:{:{“HUD will continue to engage with colleagues on the hill to ensure a seamless transition and enforcement of any new time limit,” she said.}:

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an no lnx}:

It's official: The American Dream is dead — and Trump's billionaires are to blame

(L-R) Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, businessman Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and businessman Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend Donald Trump's inauguration as the next President of the United States.

Thom Hartmann March 12, 2025

Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. He then cut millions of dollars in federal support to house poor people.

He didn’t make any suggestions about solving homelessness, mind you; he simply wants the problem moved out of sight. It’s a classic Republican strategy, and will work about as well as putting a Band-Aid over cancer.

It wasn’t always this way in America.

Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.

The cop, a young guy with an oversize mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”

Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.

The explosion in housing costs — driven in large part by Republican policies — have triggered our crisis of homelessness.

The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2 percent goal.

Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

Forty-four years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from an occasional, local problem to a nationwide crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is causing it.

Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.

And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

Again, it wasn’t always this way in America.

Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a union job in a tool-and-die shop.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks communities like the grim reaper.

We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.

And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new government-subsidized low-income housing.

But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.

As the Zillow-funded study noted:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

So, if it wasn’t always this way in America, how did we get here?

It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America.

Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.

As Marketwatch noted in an article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:

“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”

But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.

It is, in other words, real estate speculators like Trump and his billionaire buddies.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, the GOP’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.

At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.

Their study found:

— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.

— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.

— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.

— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.

— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”

These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.

The Zillow study found similarly damning data:

— “Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.

— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.

— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”

The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceed 32 percent of median household income, homeless exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through home ownership: over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable.

This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market” that Trump and Musk call “big government.”

— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.

— New Zealand similarly passed their no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.

— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.

— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.

:{:{— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.}:

— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.

This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.

Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.

Tragically, there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, and the problem is made worse every day by the growing inequality resulting from Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax and deregulation policies.

It wasn’t always this way in America, and it doesn’t have to continue.

Trump’s tough-guy snarl at Washington DC’s Mayor Bowser last week reminds us that homelessness isn’t just something that spontaneously occurs: it’s the direct result of government policies.

Policies promoted by Trump and Republicans over the past four decades.

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:{:{May 13, 2024 rww}:

Just as they prophesied Trump’s victory and collaborated in the 2020 attempted coup, the Trump wing of the New Apostolic Reformation is on the offensive once again, waging a campaign in counties they think will swing the 2024 presidential election.

True the Vote is enlisting private citizens to help it overwhelm under-staffed and under-resourced election offices with voter roll challenges ahead of election day.

Rep. David Zimmerman’s bill is the latest carefully spun attempt to inject a right-wing brand of Christianity into schools in hopes of bringing more children to Jesus. It has already happened in Texas and Florida.

The freshman member from Georgia doesn’t have much of a legislative record, but he sure can stir up trouble online.

Johnny McEntee, the former White House Trump aide closely linked to plans for radical federal government reform should Donald Trump win re-election, stoked outrage with a TikTok video in which he claimed to give unhoused people fake money, thereby to ensure their arrest.

As Donald Trump remarks on “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” perhaps the former president ought to just give up on pop culture references altogether.

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an 5 24 axios

alternet-no lnx

'All-cash home purchases' are exploding — here's why

Alex HendersonMay 13, 2024

In the United States, home ownership has long been viewed as a symbol of financial health and upward mobility. But in recent years, being able to afford the down payment needed to obtain a mortgage has become increasingly difficult —especially in pricy urban areas such as New York City, Seattle, San Franciso, Los Angeles and Boston.

According to Axios reporter Brianna Crane, "all-cash home purchases" are "on the rise" in the U.S. — an environment that clearly favors the rich when it comes to home ownership.

Drawing on recent data from Redfin, Crane explains, "Rich people can adapt to this pricey market more easily than typical buyers needing a loan…. Those winning in this economy treat homes like savings accounts, Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather says."

READ MORE:Economist Paul Krugman busts Ron DeSantis' newest 'intellectually bankrupt' battle

Crane adds, "It's a relatively safe place to store your cash, and you can always borrow against the home if need to tap into it."

According to Fairweather, sellers appreciate all-cash offers — while those wealthy enough to afford to home without a mortgage like to avoid having to pay interest.

Jeff Clay, a North Carolina-based real estate agent, told Axios, "You have to be a high-income earner/dual household" to purchase a home in his area.

"Mortgaged home sales are down year over year, per (Refin)," Crane reports. "Lack of affordability has pushed would-be first-time buyers to the sidelines."

READ MORE: 'Oxymoron': Nobel Prize economist dismantles 'neoliberal theorists' and 'unrestrained capitalism'

Read Axios' full report at this link.

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VIENNA

.... What about in California?

Lists of top single-family rental markets vary, but Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida regularly come out on top. California does not appear to be a destination of choice for the nation’s largest investors. Less than 2% of single-family homes are owned by investors with 10 properties or more, statewide, according to the California Research Bureau.

What institutional investor-friendly markets have in common: Rapidly growing populations and relatively low real estate prices compared to rents.

“That does not describe California at all,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute.

When big investors do show up in California it’s disproportionately in the state’s quickly growing, still relatively affordable regions: the Inland Empire, the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento suburbs. The county with the highest share of single-family homes owned by big investors is Fresno at 5.9%, according to the California Research Bureau.

Fresno is a bit of an unusual case, in that the largest single owner there, JD Home Rentals, is a local outfit whose portfolio of some 2,000 homes are clustered in that region.

Statewide, the largest single corporate owner is also the country’s biggest. Invitation Homes kicked off the corporate single-family rental rental trend when it started buying up distressed houses, rehabbing them and putting them on the rental market in 2012. Originally funded by theprivate equity giant Blackstone, the company has since become its own publicly traded company. The company owns 84,567 homes, of which 11,862 are in California, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

5. Do corporate landlords cause rents to go up?

There are plenty of anecdotes of big investors sweeping into a neighborhood, only for rent hikes to follow. Do big investors cause rents to rise or do rising rents attract big landlords? When researchers have tried to disentangle those two trends, they’ve produced mixed results.

One national overview found that rising rents in a city reliably preceded an increase in single-family investor activity three months later. But they didn’t find that the reverse was true, implying that investors chase after rising rents, but don’t cause them.

“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market.”

DARYL FAIRWEATHER, ECONOMIST, REDFIN

But another study found that single-family areas with higher concentrations of corporate ownership did, in fact, see modestly higher rents than comparable neighborhoods. These companies were able to exploit their relative control over a neighborhood’s housing stock to extract higher than fair-market rent from tenants, the researchers found. But the researchers also found a second explanation behind the rental run-up: By beefing up security across a slew of properties in the same area, they were able to lower crime rates and “enhance neighborhood quality.”

Many larger landlords also use rent-setting algorithms designed to squeeze the highest rent possible from new tenants. Defenders of the industry say those programs simply allow landlords to find an area’s market rent, though renters, prosecutors and federal regulators have argued that, at least in the apartment rental industry, it has amounted to illegal price-fixing.

6. Do big buyers take homeownership opportunities away from first-time buyers?

Every house that’s bought by a major investor and converted into a rental is one fewer opportunity for a would-be first-time buyer. That zero-sum trade off is particularly acute in places where few new homes are being built. A study out of Atlanta found that an influx of institutional investment in a neighborhood predicted a decline in the area’s homeownership rate. Likewise, a study in the Netherlands found that the reverse was true: When cities banned investors from converting homes into rentals, the number of first-time buyers shot up.

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chemin de pierre abbe

Abbé Road - Le Chemin de pierre (version pop)

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Fox News' Jesse Watters says the unhoused should live in caves: “Out of sight, out of mind” | Media Matters for America

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outrage spread Friday after the story about a pastor in Ohio who was arrested and charged for opening his church to homeless people when extreme cold weather struck his town gained national attention.

Chris Avell, the pastor of an evangelical church called Dad's Place in Bryan, Ohio, pleaded not guilty last Thursday to charges that he broke 18 restrictions in zoning code when he gave shelter to people who might otherwise have frozen to death.

Avell garnered the attention of the Bryan City Zoning Commission last winter, when he invited unhoused people to stay in his church to avoid the cold and snow.

In November, officials told him Dad's Place could no longer house the homeless because it lacks bedrooms. The building is zoned as a central business, and Ohio law prohibits residential use, including sleeping and eating, in first-floor buildings within business districts.

According to James Causey, a columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Avell ignored the commission's orders and again opened Dad's Place to the homeless earlier this winter, until police arrived at the church during a New Year's Eve service and issued the violations.

"Many of these people have been rejected by their families and cast aside by their communities. So, if the church isn't willing to lay down its life for them, then who will? This is what we're called to do," Avell toldFox News.

Dad's Place is located next to a homeless shelter, but overcrowding at the facility led Avell to begin offering space to unhoused people. "We have put in things people can use, like a shower and a small ability to do laundry," the pastor toldThe Village Reporterin Bryan. "Some who found this to be a home for them have stuck around."

Ashton Pittman, editor of the Mississippi Free Press, said Avell's story was a rare example in the U.S. of "actual religious persecution of a Christian by the state."

Avell's attorney, Jeremy Dys, called the city's prosecution of the pastor "unconscionable."

"The city would rather kick these folks to the curb in the cold outdoor months of December and early January than allow the church to remain open 24/7 to those who need it the most," Dys told the Journal Sentinel.

Avell's story garnered national attention as bitterly cold weather was expected across much of the country, including Ohio.

Causey noted that Avell was charged days before Milwaukee officials began investigating at least three homeless people's possible deaths from hypothermia, when the area was experiencing extreme cold.

"Homeless shelters fill up this time of the year as people seek refuge from the bitter cold. While shelters do their best to ensure no one ends up in the cold, people often get frustrated and tough it out on the street," wrote Causey. "Avell saw a problem. He addressed the issue by helping 100 people and is now facing criminal charges. Does this sound right to anyone?"

The nation's homeless population grew sharply by 12% in 2023, with nearly 654,000 without housing.

"A combination of the cold, growing unhoused population, and lack of housing shelters is the reason why charges against Avell must be dropped," Causey wrote.

Avell has said he plans to continue housing the homeless population in his church this winter. Two days after his arraignment, as more cold weather was expected, Dad's Place posted on its Facebook page a notice inviting "Anyone who could use a warm place" to "walk right in and enjoy hot coffee, cocoa, soup in our heated building."

"Stop in to warm up or stay as long as you/they need," read the post.

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‘I am just waiting to die’: Social Security clawbacks drive some into homelessness - Alternet.org

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mma 1123

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In the years since the Great Recession, when housing prices dramatically fell, Wall Street investors have been buying large numbers of single-family homes to use as rentals. As of 2022, big investment firms owned nearly 600,000 such properties nationwide.

Critics say this practice drives up home prices and worsens the housing shortage, making it harder for families to afford to buy. Industry advocates dismiss such charges, arguing that large investment firms own a tiny fraction of single-family rental housing across the U.S. – less than 4% of the total.

As a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, I wanted to understand how this trend was affecting my neighbors. So I analyzed more than 1 million property sales in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 2007 to 2016. Since the study period included the mortgage crisis, I excluded bulk sales, such as the packages of foreclosed homes, that aren’t available to typical homebuyers. I examined only arm’s-length transactions of single-family detached homes, where buyers and sellers act independently.

I found that global investment firms buying up local properties are indeed hurting Atlanta families – specifically, Black ones.

Neighborhood transformations

In the period I studied, homeownership declined across the Atlanta metro area by more than 5 percentage points, similar to a nationwide trend. For an average neighborhood, home purchasing by large corporate investors explained one-quarter of that decline.

But when I broke the analysis down by race, I found that Black families were hit much harder: Large investment firms buying up local properties explained fully three-quarters of the decline in African American homeownership. In contrast, non-Hispanic whites were largely unaffected.

It turns out that while Wall Street firms control just a sliver of the single-family rental market nationally, they can have much more influence at the local level. In the Atlanta metro area, these firms own nearly one-third of all single-family rental properties. They’re even more concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where more than 10 houses in a row can be owned by the same corporation.

In my study, I found that large investors tend to snap up housing in majority-nonwhite, lower-income suburban neighborhoods. This makes homebuying even more challenging for middle-class families of color, as they get pushed out of the bidding market by global investors.

Home is where the financial security is

Homeownership has long been one of the main pathways for the American middle class to accumulate wealth. Despite this, the national homeownership rate declined by 5.5 percentage points between 2007 and 2016, reaching a five-decade low of 62.9%. Although homeownership has rebounded somewhat since 2016, it remains below pre-2008 levels.

And who owns these homes is starkly divided by race. Between 2015 and 2019, more than 70% of white families owned a home, compared with just 41% of Black families, according to an analysis by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

To be sure, policies like racial covenants, discriminatory mortgage lending practices and redlining fueled low homeownership rates for Black Americans long before the Great Recession. But global investors’ growing control of single-family homes only widens existing racial gaps in homeownership and wealth.

Directions for new research

While my study focused on Atlanta, it’s not the only place where residents are competing with global investors for housing. Investment firms’ single-family rental portfolios are largely concentrated in Sun Belt metro areas, including Phoenix, Charlotte and Jacksonville. It wouldn’t be surprising to see similar conflicts playing out in those cities.

Since my analysis stopped in 2016, I can’t be sure that Black Atlanta residents are still affected by Wall Street firms buying up housing. Many investment firms have recently been switching from a buy-to-rent business model to a build-to-rent model, which could complicate matters.

In the meantime, while residents and policymakers have claimed that large corporations don’t invest in local communities, researchers lack robust evidence this is the case. Academics should study whether properties owned by institutional landlords are more likely to be poorly maintained or have code violations, as anecdotal evidence suggests.

It’s also worth investigating whether big investment firms undermine local revenue collection by serially filing property tax appeals.

An open-source tool for housing policy research

It’s been hard for researchers to identify corporate-owned, single-family homes, since it requires proprietary real-estate data and labor-intensive number crunching. In a separate project, my colleagues and I have developed a simple, user-friendly methodology that gets around such challenges with the use of open-source software and public tax parcel data.

Local governments and nonprofits can use our methodology to unveil all the corporate-owned residential properties in any neighborhood and link them to outcomes such as code violations. Using data-driven approaches like this is an important step toward developing policy solutions.

Brian Y. An, Director of Master of Science in Public Policy Program & Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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debt hostage

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right-wing Republican members of the United States House of Representatives have drummed up an extensive list of excuses about why they oppose the deal struck by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling.

The latest example came from Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-Wisconsin) late Tuesday afternoon when Grothman groused that the bill is too lenient toward economically disadvantaged Americans.

"They left low-income housing untouched. I think as far as discouraging work and discouraging marriage, I think low-income housing is even a more dangerous program than, uh, than the food stamps," Grothman asserted.

READ MORE: Republican whining it’s 'almost 'impossible' for 'white guys' to get Biden appointments has bigoted past

"So I'm including low-income housing in the mix of having work requirements. The amendment is drafted, just includes Section Eight housing, which is an error on my part cuz there are other low-income housings as well. But that's what we have before us," Grothman continued. "I would appreciate if you'd let that to the floor because I don't think our team fought on the low-income housing front at all."

Watch Grothman's remarks below or at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/america-third-world/

thom no lnx

Have you noticed America is looking like a third world nation?

SEATTLE, WA - NOVEMBER 3: A homeless encampment known as Nickelsville, located on steep, muddy hillside next to Interstate 5 and 90, is viewed on November 3, 2015, in Seattle, Washington. Seattle, located in King County, is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, and is experiencing an economic boom as a result of its European and Asian global business connections. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann and Raw Story March 15, 2023

Louise and I got home Saturday from a week with extended family in Central America. On the drive from our rented vacation condo by the Pacific Ocean back to the airport, we passed miles of slums or barrio bajos. Some homes were made from scavenged cinderblock and brick, but most were scrap wood and cardboard with tarps as roofs. Along the rudimentary streets ran ditches filled with raw sewage, and electricity was hijacked from streetlights.

Back in the 1980s, when I was doing international relief work for the German-based Salem organization, I spent months in such places in Uganda, Peru, Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, southern Sudan, Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and several other “Third World” countries. At that time, four decades ago, the “slums” in America looked like high-quality housing compared to those countries, with most having electricity, running water, and reliable sewer systems.

But no longer: America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities,” along with their more upscale neighbors: roadsides lined with old RVs and cars in which desperate or hopeless people live.

Instead of referring to their denizens as slum-dwellers, we call them the “homeless,” and their numbers have grown so large in the past decade of our neoliberal experiment that they signal an undeniable national housing crisis.

America, in other words, is more and more resembling a Third World nation.

But why?

Homelessness and slums like these aren’t an accident or act of G-d; they’re the result of intentional policy decisions made by politicians. They reflect the confluence of multiple choices we’ve made as a nation over the past four decades, choices that were sold to us by the morbidly rich with the promise that their increases in wealth would “trickle down” to the rest of us even as they cut services and raised the retirement age to 67.

Historically, the wealth or poverty of a nation has first reflected its natural resource base. Countries with lots of stuff under or growing above the ground that can be exported or used as energy end up with lots of money and, broadly, a healthy society.

A nation sitting on billions of barrels of oil will generally have a wealthier populace (Saudi Arabia, UAE) than one living on scrub brush and desert (South Sudan).

The exception to this is the application of human labor and ingenuity to whatever natural resources may be available. Japan, for example, is a relatively resource-poor nation but has maximized arable land through terraced rice farming and used manufacturing — importing raw materials and exporting finished goods — to create wealth that’s turned it into a First World nation.

America is both resource rich (from arable land to minerals and fuels) and was once the manufacturing floor of the world, producing extraordinary wealth across the land. By the 1950s we were the first large nation in the world to have a middle class made up of more than half its population, largely because of our manufacturing base, supplemented by our resource sectors.

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But then Reagan brought America some new ideas, rejecting classical economics — from Adam Smith in 1776 to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s — and embraced a new system called neoliberalism by its founders, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

The theory was that if we just abandoned government regulation and taxation of large companies and the morbidly rich, it would free them up to turbocharge our national prosperity. The newly created wealth, Reagan Republicans told us, would be shared by all.

Of course, that’s not how it worked out.

Instead, neoliberalism has reduced our middle class from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to fewer than 45 percent of us today; thrown two generations into massive student and healthcare debt; produced a handful of morbidly rich individuals and families; and created a housing crises that rivals the Hoovervilles of the Republican Great Depression.

Reagan promised American workers if they’d go along with his war on organized labor that wages and benefits would go up because companies would no longer be “burdened” with having to work things out with “union bosses.” This new “right to work for less” would, he said, make us all richer.

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Instead, cutting union membership from a third of our workers down to around 6 percent of the private workforce has caused wages to stagnate so badly that the standard of living a single full-time worker could provide his family in 1980 now requires at least two full-time workers. While “household income” (the number Republicans love to cite) has risen slightly in the past 42 years, individual income relative to living expenses has collapsed.

Reagan promised us that if we’d stop enforcing anti-trust laws (as he did in 1983) and let giant companies become ever bigger, the increased efficiencies and economies of scale would translate into a widespread prosperity.

Instead, giant monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations have used their increased efficiency to run small- and medium-sized competitors out of business, reducing our urban downtowns and rural cities to ghost towns. The pharaonic wealth produced by these giant corporations is tightly held by their largest investors and senior executives.

Reagan promised us that if we’d just cut the “tax burden” on the wealthiest Americans and our largest and most profitable corporations it would provoke morbidly rich “job creators” to use that extra cash to hire millions more Americans and give everybody a raise.

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Instead, billionaires are buying half-billion-dollar super-yachts, private jets, and shooting themselves and their rich buddies into outer space while paying an average 3 percent income tax.

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Reagan promised us if we’d just follow Milton Friedman’s advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.

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Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up America’s housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and the tent cities I mentioned at the start of this article.

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Reagan promised us if we’d just end the “oppressive regulations” designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms the “magic of the free market” would instead provide all those things in spades.

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Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.

Reagan promised us if we’d just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.

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Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with this American republic.

Reagan promised us, as he and George HW Bush were negotiating the GATT/WTO and NAFTA, that if we’d just abandon 191 years of protectionist tariffs and trade policy so American companies could move their manufacturing overseas, we’d see an eruption of high-paying white-collar jobs in technology without having to get grease under our fingernails.

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Instead, over 60,000 factories left this nation, moving at least 16 million good-paying and previously unionized manufacturing jobs to mostly China. When I lived and studied in Beijing in late 1986, the country was impoverished. Today, China’s manufacturing sector — built over the past 30+ years by American “free trade” policy with American inventions and technology — is double the manufacturing capacity of the US.

Reagan promised us if we’d just deregulate our mediaand abandon local ownership requirements for newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets that we’d end up with a flourishing, diverse, and edifying media sector. He kicked it off by ending enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton carried it forward with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Instead, a small handful of billionaires and rightwing companies own virtually every consequential radio and TV station in the country; most of our local newspapers are bankrupt; more than half of the ones left are owned by a couple of New York-based hedge funds; and hate, lies, and disinformation have proven more effective at driving profits than honest information or concern for the public good so they’ve become an unscrupulous business model on the right.

Reagan promised us if we’d stop blindly trusting our government to do the right thing, a healthy skepticism would make our country’s bureaucracies more efficient. After all, he claimed, there are no truly competent people working in government because, if they were really talented, they’d be out making more money in private industry.

Instead of getting a more efficient government we ended up with an entire political party made up of fascist-tolerant hacks, sellouts, and opportunists anxious to dance to the tune of any billionaire willing to fund their way of life. They now populate the majority of the Supreme Court, the federal court system, control the House of Representatives, and run about half of our states.

Reagan promised us if we’d just drop all those silly regulations on gun ownership and throw the doors open to weapons of war in civilian hands, the result would be “an armed society is a polite society.”

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Instead, bullets are the number one killer of our children and the GOP’s answer to “the crisis of our youth” is to ban drag shows.

Reagan promised us if we’d just kill off the “welfare” programs of the New Deal and Great Society, then Americans would no longer be infuriated when a “strapping young buck” was using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

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Instead, as the social safety net collapsed, poverty became more deeply entrenched andhunger among America’s children has increased since the 1980s.

Years ago, I was up late one night in an Asian city watching financial news on a hotel TV. A young American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”

“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the young man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. Like the Patriotic Millionaires group, they embrace an opportunity to help our country, often via Democratic politicians.

But the billionaires who fund the Republican Party and own right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the moral and political guts out of their own nation, condemn its future to severe weather, and turn its people against each other if it helps them fill their money bins.

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They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox “News” and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC.

They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial, anti-abortion, and pro-death penalty legislation to get enough political power toincrease their own profits through buying deregulation.

And, increasingly, Americans of all stripes are realizing this truth.

I’ve lived seven decades in this country, and have literally traveled pretty much everywhere, from hitchhiking from Michigan to San Francisco and back in 1967 to raising a family and living in five different states, to traveling for business to almost every other state.

But it wasn’t until America got seriously whacked, the endpoint of 40 years of austerity politics and Reaganomics combined with the stress of the century’s worst pandemic, that it became absolutely unavoidable.

I’ve never in all that time — and I’ll bet this is true of you, too, regardless of how old you are — seen tent cities growing across our land like the last five years.

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Homelessness that can be directly and scientifically tracked back to one primary cause, which was one of the programs of the Reagan Revolution. That was the explosion in the cost of housing driven by parasitic speculators and Wall Street billionaires following widespread Republican deregulation of housing, particularly at state and local levels.

Reagan’s housing policies, which opened the door to slumlords like Jared Kushner, got the interest and involvement of the speculators from the beginning. They really jumped into the real estate market, though, at its bottom in 2008, and now in some parts of the country as many as half of all houses that are offered for sale get sold to speculators or foreign buyers.

As they drive up home prices and raise their rental rates, cities see eruptions of homelessness.

The Reagan Revolution, as we are confronted with daily,broke our nation.

It set the stage for a cynical George W. Bush to tell his biographer in 1999 that if he was elected president in 2000 he’d start a war in Iraq that would last long enough to get him re-elected in 2004, unlike his father, whose war with Iraq didn’t last long enough. Bush Jr. was our first president to act like a Third World politician, right down to the torture, wiretapping, and secret prisons.

America is now haunted by the daily dozens of suicides among veterans of those two unnecessary, expensive, and illegal wars Bush lied us into.

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The Reagan Revolution also set the stage for the Trump administration.

Like Reagan, who tried to destroy the EPA by putting Anne Gorsuch in charge of it (she eventually had to resign in disgrace; her revenge is that her son now sits on the Supreme Court) Trumpgot rid of more than half its scientific staff.

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He then tried to take over the military, the courts, and the Department of Justice including the FBI. Just like a classic Third World strongman dictator.

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And that, of course, was just the beginning of Trump’s corruption of our government, his infiltration of fascists and white supremacists into our systems who, in far too many cases, are still in place and sabotaging things.

Trump’s holdovers appear to have dissuaded the FBI and DOJ from investigating and prosecuting Trump and the insider senior officials around him for more than two years, until shamed into a quick handoff to Jack Smith by a Congressional committee.

Even Mike Pence went along with the coup until the last minute, when he finally realized it couldn’t work and then pretended he was outraged. Sort of. Years later. Without giving testimony under oath. Like a Third World political opportunist.

The Reagan Revolution and the corruption it brought to Washington, DC and state capitols across the land — think Kari Lake, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Scott Walker, or Kristi Noem — changed the very nature of America.

The question for today is whether, how, and at what cost we can right our nation and repair Reagan’s, Bush’s and Trump’s damage.

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Fox News host on the homeless: “It was more civilized when we banished them to asylums and put them in strait jackets”

09/22/22

Fox News host calls the homeless “an invasive species”

09/22/22

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mta 6 22 conf

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Frontline Strategies for Housing Justice

"You only get what you're organized to take!"

Crystal Sanchez

Crystal is Western Regional Director for the National Union of the Homeless, President of the Sacramento Homeless Union, and President of Sac SOUP 501c3, as well as serving on many boards and commissions locally and Nationally.  As a community organizer, she knows and understands another world is possible and it is our mission to create it.

Savina June Martin

Social Justice Housing Activist, Artist, Minister, Writer

Savina, native of Roxbury, Massachusetts serves as a member of the National Union of the Homeless Clergy Council and is one of two National Senior Advisors. She is a US Army Veteran and worked in Southern California as an unhoused advocate to combat homeless veterans in Point Loma CA., 2014. Over the decades she has worked in, organized with and mobilized on both local, statewide and national levels on systemic issues and policies governing Poverty, Racism, Ecological Devastation/Denial of Healthcare and Religious Nationalism. She currently serves as statewide tri-chair with theMassachusetts Poor People’s Campaign. She holds a Master’s Degree in Human Services, in 2015 a Doctorate in Humane Letters 2019 and in Fall, 2022 will join the School of Theological Studies at Boston University.

Shanti Singh  [Photo Coming]

Shanti is with Tenants Together California and San Francisco Community Land Trust.

Shelly Williams(Moderator)

Shelly is a National Co-Director of Move to Amend, a local Sacramento community organizer doing homeless street outreach, advocacy, sweep defense, and a proud member of Sacramento Tenants Union. She holds a Bachelors in Social Work from Indiana University, and is a parent to an amazing 6-year-old kiddo.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/architecture-and-anarchy-what-we-can-learn-from-desert-hippies-squatters-and-climate-activists-to-build-back-better/

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Fact-checking Fox News’ narrative on “America’s Crime Crisis”

01/28/22

fox News kicked off 2022 by incessantly reporting on what the network called “America’s Crime Crisis.” Fox hosts and figures told their viewers the country is in the midst of a growing crime spike, which they declared was predominantly occurring in “liberal-run” cities. The network chose to blame the entire “crisis” narrative on efforts to reform policing, a “subculture of homeless” people, and prosecutorial decisions made by district attorneys who were allegedly funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

Fox’s solution is to bring back “broken windows” policing, a theory that the physical appearance of a community -- including broken windows, graffiti, and loitering -- has an effect on crime rate, therefore law enforcement should aggressively police low-level crimes. But the coverage pushing this discredited policy ignores evidence that it hasn’t increased safety and has caused disproportionate policing of Black and Latinx people.

But the so-called “crime crisis” is much more complicated than Fox makes it seem. And while it may very well be years before the country understands exactly what has caused the increase in violent crime -- as was the case with the 1990s crime-rate increase -- there is no evidence that it’s related only to prosecutorial discretion or judicial system reforms.

Myth: The country is in the middle of a “crime wave”

Fact: Fox is oversimplifying the narrative, and though violent crime increased, the rate of nonviolent crime such as burglary and larceny dropped

Myth: This “crime wave” is happening mainly in “liberal-run” cities

Fact: While full data is not in yet for 2021, past trends show the homicide rate has increased nationwide

Myth: The “crime wave” is a result of “progressive policies”

Fact: Policies including bail reform and not prosecuting petty crime improve public safety, and a larger police force does not mean less crime

Myth: “Soros-funded” district attorneys are eroding public safety

Fact: This narrative that Soros is controlling DAs is an antisemitic conspiracy theory with no basis in reality

Myth: The U.S. needs to bring back “broken windows” policing

Fact: Broken windows has had no effect on crime, but has resulted in disproportionate policing of people of color

Myth: Homeless people are causing a crime wave and pose a threat to society

Fact: Unhoused people are more likely to be the victims of crime

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https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-host-youll-probably-end-jail-if-you-shoot-homeless-person-even-though

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/elizabeth-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-mounting-housing-crisis-and-the-profiteers-who-will-take-advantage/

During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a lot to say about the United States’ housing crisis — and after suspending her campaign and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden (now the presumptive Democratic nominee), the Massachusetts senator continued to address the subject. Warren, in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post with Carroll Fife (director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), stresses that the coronavirus pandemic has made a brutal housing crisis even worse. And private equity firms, according to Warren and Fife, are hoping to cash in on the misery by gobbling up “distressed real estate.”

“The nation is facing an acceleratinghousing crisis,” Warren and Fife warn. “Too many people had no stable housing before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 has made the problem even worse. Renters who were already facing an affordable housing shortage — with many spending more than half of their income on rent — now have no federal rental assistance or federal protection from eviction. Homeowners have less than a month left of foreclosure protection. And more than 30 million people receiving unemployment insurance just saw their benefits cut by $600 a week, raising the threat of a wave of defaults that could trigger a double-dip recession.”

But while “families” see as a “looming catastrophe,” they add, “private equity firms just see dollar signs.” And Warren and Fife cite a Wall Street Journal report that investors are hoping to buy “distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices.”

According to Warren and Fife, such “profiteering” is “straight out of private equity’s playbook during the 2008 financial crisis."

"Following the 2008 crash,” they explain, “corporations that grabbed up properties on the cheap, converted those homes into rentals and turned into the worst kind of slumlords — jacking up rents, neglecting maintenance requests and health and safety concerns, and eagerly assessing fines, fees and eviction notices. Other corporate-owned homes were left vacant in a hoarding of housing stock. We cannot stand by while this history repeats itself.”

Warren and Fife’s recommendations range from “strong federal legislation to guard against the coming wave of evictions and foreclosures, including emergency rental assistance” to preventing “predatory companies from further destabilizing neighborhoods and profiting off the displacement of families.”

“If we fail to prevent another private equity real estate grab,” Warren and Fife warn, “we risk allowing another massive upheaval in the housing market that could wreak more havoc on low-income Americans — especially black and brown families still recovering from losing their homes a decade ago. Against a decades-long backdrop of racist federal policies that have impeded black homeownership, lawmakers’ refusal to proactively address this problem would be an indefensible oversight that would again give Wall Street carte blanche to use a national crisis to enact a massive, generational transfer of wealth from vulnerable Americans to corporations."

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dn 720

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an 720

eviction and foreclosure crisis is looming

Bob Hennelly / SalonJuly 19, 2020

Come autumn 2020, the convergence of disease, death and economic misery across our wounded nation will likely be without living precedent. And the damage that’s being done and will be…

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trump gop targeting homeless as a way to beat up on CA:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/devin-nunes-warns-of-zombie-apocalypse-from-homeless-people-in-his-state-we-let-our-criminals-out/

no lnx

Devin Nunes warns of ‘zombie apocalypse’ from homeless people in his state: ‘We let our criminals out’

Written by David Edwards / Raw Story April 5, 2020

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) suggested on Sunday that homeless people are the “zombie apocalypse” even though they have not seen large numbers of infections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The situation out here in California with the homeless population is quite dire and that was before the coronavirus,” Nunes explained to Fox News. “It’s almost like zombie apocalypse. You’ve seen the pictures.”

“I’ve got several thousand just in my district,” he continued. “It’s largely due because we let our criminals out. We pass laws that let multiple convicted drug abusers out. Now unfortunately, a lot of these people —I call it zombie apocalypse because a lot of these people have done drugs for a long period of time. You know, they’re just not well.”

According to Nunes, “one of the advantages” of the homeless population is that they live outside where it’s more difficult to become infected by COVID-19.

“One of the positive things in all this is if you’re outside in the outdoors, you’re social distancing, we haven’t seen it run through homeless population,” he explained. “At least, that we know of yet.”

Watch the video below from Fox News.

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NB aha: fire/banks have been hosing up foreclosures (recall that house appreciation only real source of wealth/battery/buffer since wages flat 30 yrs, AA ppl predatory/redlined) MNUCHIN, 500k homeless, often medical bills?  CDS on debt again?

https://www.salon.com/2015/03/22/vulture_capitalists_are_picking_us_dry_why_consumer_debt_buyers_are_on_the_rise_partner/

no lnx

Vulture capitalists are picking us dry: Why consumer debt buyers are on the rise

The great recession laid waste to the U.S. economy. Now debt collectors are feasting on the carrion

JIM HIGHTOWER

MARCH 22,2015...

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2/5/20 DN 1.5m kids homeless fla up 32% over 2 yrs? nj 27, up 15% US, ca 7,   total 263K

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The January Annual Membership Meeting of Affordable Housing Network will be held at 5:30 pm on WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15 at 370 B South King Road.

The Annual Membership Meeting will consider our plans for 2020, nominate and elect our Board of Directors and officers for 2020, and consider amendments to our bylaws that will allow us to be more flexible in how we operate.

All members should consider running for election to be on our Board of Directors. Please join us!

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NO TRUMP INTERNMENT CAMPS FOR SAN JOSE’S HOMELESS

About 40 homeless and formerly homeless residents and advocates gathered at San Jose City Hall on December 20 to protest the proposed Trump plan to drop the Housing First policy and address homelessness with police action and internment camps. Housing First is a fine best practice for ending homelessness. The only problem with it is that it cannot work when the government refuses to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing, as has happened increasingly over the past forty years.

We cannot stand by while the government arrests homeless people the same way the Germans rounded up Jews during World War Two. A recent City Lab article specifically names San Jose on the list of twenty cities where Trump intends to put homeless people in internment camps. Apparently the plan is to deny HUD housing funds to any jurisdiction that fails to cooperate.

Now is the time to demand that our City and County leaders stand with us against the Trump plan to make our homeless brothers and sisters disappear from our community. We need them to declare sanctuary for our poor and homeless the same way they have done for our immigrants. So far we have not heard a word from a single City or County officials in opposition to this fascist plan. They need to speak up now.

This rally was co-sponsored by Second Street Voices, Housing for All Alliance, CHAM Deliverance Ministry, Affordable Housing Network, Sacred Heart Community Service, SV Debug, Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County Union of the Homeless, Wage Theft Coalition, San Jose Catholic Worker, Never Again.

SAN JOSE ALREADY CRIMINALIZES HOMELESS PEOPLE

When it comes to criminalization and persecution of homeless people, the City of San Jose already lies like Donald Trump.

“Cruel and unusual punishment is a question of criminal enforcement, and there is none of that in San Jose,” said City Attorney Rick Doyle in a December 30 article by San Jose Spotlight on the recent Boise court decision. This is an outright falsehood. Every single sweep carried out by the City is posted with a notice signed by the City of San Jose that says, and we quote, "You are TRESPASSING and will be subject to CRIMINAL PROSECUTION if you remain.” According to the City's own “encampment abatement” procedures, homeless residents are forcibly removed from the area by San Jose Police at the beginning of every sweep.

Rick Doyle and the City’s Housing Department also lie when they claim that they offer to help people swept by police to find temporary housing and services to help them get back on their feet. The temporary housing and services do not exist. When advocates argued for the City to stop sweeps unless it could offer meaningful shelter, the City refused because it said it did not have the resources. What the City actually offers during a sweep is access to a shelter bed for one or two nights – after which it dumps people back out on the street with nothing.

With cruel policies like these in place it is no wonder that a record 161 people died homeless in Santa Clara County this past year. An interfaith gathering of some 100 people memorialized the homeless deaths in a service on the City Hall Plaza on December 21.

MOMS 4 HOUSING OCCUPY VACANT OAKLAND HOME

By Marisa Endicott. Reprinted from Mother Jones December 23, 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/bay-area-moms-homeless-squatters/

By the time Dominique Walker started squatting in an Oakland home with her five-year-old daughter and one-year-old son, she’d exhausted all other options. Walker, who had fled domestic violence in Mississippi, knew it would be hard to find a place, amidst the housing crisis, in the city where she’d grown up. But she wasn’t prepared for what she encountered: Thousands of people, predominantly black and brown, forced to sleep on the street, in shelters, or on couches, despite the fact that many had a job—or two or three….

So, back in Oakland, when she found her family in a tough spot, Walker started looking into the causes of homelessness in her community. And that’s when she began to notice the “for rent” signs, vacant lots, and new, unoccupied high rises everywhere. Then she came across an empty house on a quiet block on Magnolia street in West Oakland (the “only eyesore on the block,” she says). She did some research and found out it was owned by Wedgewood Property Management, which labels itself as a “leading acquirer of distressed residential real estate.” The house had sat empty for about two years, and some neighbors, who Walker talked to, worried it would decay or become a trap house for drugs or other illegal activities. In November, Walker, another mother, and their kids moved into the vacant home.

Instead of trying to fly under the radar, Walker started Moms 4 Housing, using the previously empty house as a platform to draw attention to lots and homes that sit vacant while the city struggles with rampant homelessness. There are about 4,000 vacant parcels in Oakland, roughly the same as the reported number of homeless people in the city. (While less than 25 percent of Oakland residents are Black, they account for almost 70 percent of the homeless population.) And even when those properties are eventually put on the market, odds are many won’t be able to afford them. The median rent for a one-bedroom is now $2,470, and it’s $2,990 for a two-bedroom, a 5 percent increase from last year.

Moms 4 Housing considers Wedgewood a “displacement machine”—buying up properties in areas on the cusp of gentrification and sitting on them until their values surge. The moms want Wedgewood to turn the house over to them under the principle that housing is a human right, and argue that other investor-owned properties should be given back to communities who have been displaced by soaring rents. The group’s bold organizing tactics—they send text message alerts to rally supporters around press conferences, canvassing, and phone zaps—have also put City Hall on notice, demanding Mayor Libby Schaaf take more aggressive action. They’ve called her out for the city’s failure to collect fees from housing developers who don’t build affordable units as required by an Oakland mandate.

“It was an answer to a desperate need,” Walker says of their decision to occupy the Magnolia Street house. “It should be illegal to have vacant houses and have people sleeping on the streets. I feel like there’s a moral crisis. There’s a profiteering crisis…I think that’s where the crime lies.”

“We feel like we have a right to this space and this home,” Walker says. “This home belongs back in the hands of the community from which it was taken.”

…. Despite the complicated nature and conflicting opinions on vacancies, in a city like Oakland, where tent encampments fill underpasses and the homeless population jumped by almost 50 percent in two years, empty lots and houses stand as a symbol of deep injustice. Because of that, Moms 4 Housing has seen a groundswell of support. Community members and local organizations have shown up at the home on Magnolia Street to show solidarity. Neighbors have invited them to their houses and joined the text alert system, Walker says. An online petition calling on Wedgewood to turn over the house has garnered over 5,400 signatures, and some groups are calling for the property to be turned into a community land trust. On Monday, dozens accompanied Moms 4 Housing to the courthouse to file a right for possession claim on the house, pointing out the “home has been vacant for over two years during the worst housing crisis in California history.” Any tenant—legal or not—can challenge an eviction, and in the meantime they can stay, so the mothers bought themselves at least a little more time in the house ….

OPPOSE SB 50

Virtually all tenant-led organizations in California oppose Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 50, a real estate deregulation bill that is returning to the legislature for reconsideration after being shelved in 2019.

Tenants Together, a statewide network of tenant organizations with which Affordable Housing Network is affiliated, took an OPPOSE position on the bill when it came up for a vote last year.

“Tenants Together’s deep concern is that SB 50, however well-intentioned, will have negative consequences on displacement in marginalized communities with few tenant protections,” wrote Executive Director Lupe Arreola on April 17. “Tenants Together is a coalition of 50 local tenant organizations across California working to connect and unite tenant groups statewide, support emerging local tenant organizations, and enact statewide policies that protect and advance the rights of California’s 17 million renters. Tenants Together’s member organizations unanimously voted to oppose Senate Bill 50….

“Our objections are rooted in the concern that SB 50 would enact untested policies upon California’s most vulnerable residents: specifically, communities of color and low/moderate income neighborhoods near transit, who are at higher risk for gentrification, displacement, and rising income inequality. The price communities will pay as a result of SB 50 is too high to risk moving forward with SB 50 as it stands.

We stand in solidarity with the more than 50 organizations who signed on to a letter articulating their concerns and proposing constructive amendments, and with our members who oppose SB 50.”

The San Francisco Housing Rights Committee spelled out further concerns with SB 50:

·         It will deregulate local residential zoning control throughout California, creating value potentials that will exacerbate real estate speculation.

·         It will inflate property values, which will, in turn inflate surrounding rents leading to more displacement

·         It has no enforceable tenant protections in the bill since cities like San Francisco have no way to track rental histories.

·         Its temporary “sensitive communities” exclusion doesn’t adequately protect communities vulnerable to displacement

The Affordable Housing Network agrees with the need to tear down exclusionary zoning barriers in historically segregated wealthy communities, but SB 50’s targeting of neighborhoods near transit corridors puts at risk many of the poorest working class communities in the state. A much better approach is Assemblymember Richard Bloom’s AB 1279.

An information sheet put out by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Public Advocates, and the Western Center on Law and Poverty explains the benefits of AB 1279:

“Using data and mapping with input from academic experts, this bill would identify high-resource areas where housing development is predominantly low-density and screen out places that already demonstrate racial and economic diversity and places that are at high risk for gentrification and displacement. The remaining areas—areas where there are strong indicators of exclusionary patterns—would be subject to zoning overrides to encourage the production of both small-scale market-rate housing projects and larger-scale mixed-income and affordable projects. For example, the bill would allow:

• Projects of 2-4 units and up to 2 stories for moderate-income households in areas

currently limited to single-family development.

• Projects of up to 40 units and 3 stories on lots over ¼ acre on arterial roads and in downtown areas, with required inclusion of affordable units for projects over 10 units.

• Projects of up to 100 units and 5 stories on lots over ½ acre, including sites zoned for both residential and commercial use, on arterial roads or in downtown areas, if the project is 100% affordable to lower-income households or is mixed-income with a set-aside for very low and extremely low-income households.

“To incentivize development without displacement, the bill would:

• Provide for by-right development for housing projects that meet certain conditions in high-resource areas.

• Allow for waivers of development standards, such as setback and parking requirements, that can make dense projects infeasible.

• Provide for consistency with state Density Bonus Law.

• Require projects under 10 units and market-rate projects to pay an affordable housing fee.

• Protect existing local policies that require greater levels of affordability and/or that have higher labor standards.

• Prohibit the bill’s incentives from being used on sites that have been occupied by tenants in the last 10 years.”

AB 1279 meets the test of development with zero displacement that Affordable Housing Network has been using as a guideline for determining bills, policies, and projects that it will support. SB 50 falls far short. The rapidly increasing vacancy rates in new luxury housing developments, and the rise of unbridled speculation and out-and-out money laundering in real estate, cause us to question whether the private real estate industry is even capable of addressing the housing needs of the population as a whole. At this stage of the housing crisis, only a massive investment of government funding to build some ten million units of social and/or low-income housing can adequately address the scale of the problem.

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-housing-rights/global-investors-wreaking-havoc-on-low-income-renters-u-n-says-idUSKCN1R71L5

3/19

(Thomson Reuters Foundation) -Large investment firms are worsening global housing shortages by forcing vulnerable out of low-income homes and upgrading them for higher rents, said United Nations human rights experts, who appealed to countries to tighten up regulation.

These firms had become the world’s biggest landlords, and “converted homes into financial instruments and investments”, said Leilani Farha, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, in a statement released Tuesday.

“Landlords have become faceless corporations wreaking havoc with tenants’ right to security and contributing to the global housing crisis,” she said.

Farha and Surya Deva, chairman of the U.N. Working Group on business and human rights, wrote to Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, and authorities in Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Czech Republic.[have laws that req action; US not sign treaties/agreement int'l]

Preferential tax laws and weak tenant protections in these countries have left vulnerable communities at risk of eviction and homelessness, they said.

“We remind all States, that while gold is a commodity, housing is not, it’s a human right,” they said.

Authorities must “regulate investment in residential real estate so that it supports the right to adequate housing and in no way undermines it. This cannot be left to the private sector to undertake on a voluntary basis,” they said.

In response, Blackstone - which owns the biggest U.S. home rental company - told the U.N. in a letter on March 25 that it had contributed to the availability of “well managed rental housing”.

“The injection of private capital is part of the solution to addressing the chronic undersupply of housing in major metropolitan centers around the world,” said Ken Caplan and Kathleen McCarthy, global co-heads of Blackstone Real Estate.

Globally, at least 150 million people, or about 2 percent of the population, are homeless, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N agency for urban development and human settlements.

More than a fifth of the world lacks adequate housing.

In their letter to the Czech Republic, Farha and Deva pointed to the increased vulnerability of the minority Roma community to evictions.

While in Ireland, the number of families on the social housing waiting list had doubled between 2005 and 2017 due to severe shortages, they said.

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Global investors 'wreaking havoc' on low-income renters, U.N. ...

https://www.reuters.com › article › us-global-housing-rights › global-inves...

1.

Mar 26, 2019 - Global investors 'wreaking havoc' on low-income renters, U.N. says ... said Leilani Farha, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, in a ... have left vulnerable communities at risk of eviction and homelessness, they said. ... In response, Blackstone - which owns the biggest U.S. home rental ...

U.N. blasts Blackstone Group for worsening the U.S. housing ...

https://www.cbsnews.com › MoneyWatch › Trending

1.

Mar 26, 2019 - A top U.N. official for housing sent a letter to giant private equity firm Blackstone blasting its practices in renting single-family homes ... and Blackstone Group, Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate ...

Missing: homeless ‎| Must include:homeless

UN Observer Calls For 'Moratorium' On Criminalizing ... - KPBS

https://www.kpbs.org › news › aug › un-observer-calls-moratorium-crimin...

1.

Aug 15, 2019 - ... Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, ... Above: Police officers remove a tent left by the homeless during efforts ... like the Blackstone Group, private equity groups, moving into the rental ...

How private equity eroded the right to housing | New ...

https://newint.org › 2019/06/19 › unitednations-leilanifarha-housing

1.

Aug 9, 2019 - UN expert Leilani Farha speaks to Dinyar Godrej about the ... advocate Leilani Farha is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. ... and asset management firms like Blackstone have become the biggest .... classified as 'generation rent', obscene amounts of homelessness in ...

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Colorado Judge Orders Denver to Stop Enforcing Ban Against Camping

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Supreme Court Lets Stand Ruling Protecting Homeless People

1219 dn

Supreme Court has upheld protections for people who sleep or camp outdoors, after refusing to hear a case over whether cities could criminalize homelessness. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case leaves in place an appeals court ruling that says the Constitution does not allow cities to prosecute people for sleeping or camping outside unless the city provides shelter for every single unhoused person in their jurisdiction. The legal decision comes as soaring rents and deepening economic inequality have led homelessness rates to soar in some U.S. cities. Click here to see our full report on the homelessness crisis in San Francisco, California.

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California's housing bubble is spilling over into poor and exurban neighborhoods, creating waves of crises

California has such a huge undersupply of housing -- and oversupply of housing speculators -- that affluent homebuyers have effectively rendered the state's major cities unaffordable for all but the very wealthy, even pushing into neighborhoods that were historically undesirable due to poverty, poor housing stock and crime. Read the rest

BUILD HOUSING / CALEXIT / CALIFORNIA / HOMELESSNESS / RENT CONTROL / THE RENT'S TOO DAMNED HIGH / WEAPONIZED SHELTER

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extensive interviews on Oaktown homeless

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-18-2019/

Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action and Oakland Community Land Trust (OakCLT).

clt spox says more (esp lux) condos does not drive down cost of housing [SF East]  b/c it's not asset but commodity, thus simple supply & demand does not apply

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/san_francisco_homelessness_crackdown_special_report

mayor says tents down 30% but they are targeted, taken as evidence fro break camp law?

street medic: injury b/c stress and scramble to grab stuff 430 am

RR threw ll off SS and made ppl reapply, mental ill fialed to navigate; cain walks away fron HUD role

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Sinclair's national programming is fearmongering about homeless people, and using them to push for Republican policies.

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-threatens-to-punish-california-over-homelessness-after-denying-funds-to-fight-homelessness/

no lnx

Trump threatens to punish California over homelessness — after denying funds to house people

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon September 19, 2019

President Trump threatened to use the Environmental Protection Agency to punish San Francisco over its homelessness crisis — on the same day that his administration denied California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for housing vouchers to help fight homelessness.

“There’s tremendous pollution being put into the ocean … there are needles, there are other things,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Wednesday while returning from a two-day fundraising trip in California. “We’re going to be giving San Francisco — they’re in total violation — we’re going to be giving them the notice very soon. The EPA is going to be putting out a notice and you know they’re in serious violation and this is environmental, very environmental.

[THE JUNGLE!]

“And they have to clean it up,” he added. “We can’t have our cities going to hell.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed called Trump’s comments “ridiculous assertions” and explained that the city’s sewer system “ensures that all debris that flow into storm drains are filtered out at the city’s wastewater treatment plants.”

“If the president wants to talk about homelessness, we are committed to working with our state and federal partners on actual solutions,” she said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Trump’s newfound concern for the environment came just days after his administration stripped California of the power to set auto emissions standards in a bid to reduce air pollution and overturned clean water regulations nationwide.

Trump’s threat to sic the EPA on San Francisco came on the same day that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson denied a request from Newsom for help fighting homelessness.

Newsom and the mayors of California’s 13 largest cities asked the Trump administration to expand programs like housing vouchers to help get people off the street.

“In California, state and local governments have ramped up action to lift families out of poverty by investing in behavioral health, affordable housing, and other homeless programs,” the lawmakers wrote. “In contrast, your Administration has proposed significant cuts to public housing and programs like the Community Development Block Grant.”

Carson rejected the request in a letter, which he said he wrote at Trump’s request.

“Your letter seeks federal dollars for California from hardworking American taxpayers but fails to admit that your State and local policies have played a major role in the current crisis,” Carson wrote, blaming lawmakers for creating an “over-regulated housing market” and “policies that have weakened law enforcement.”[sanct cities?]

Carson also accused California lawmakers of undercutting the ability of police to tear down homeless camps and creating sanctuary policies, arguing that undocumented immigrants have caused housing prices to spike while “draining resources.”

Courts have limited California’s ability to remove homeless people from the streets. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to support a motion to challenge a federal court decision barring police from arresting people for sleeping on sidewalks when there are not enough shelter beds, NBC News reported.

Trump has increasingly focused on homelessness in California ever since he assured Fox News host Tucker Carlson in July that he may “do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.”

During his California fundraising trip, Trump assured foreign real estate investors that he would protect them from California’s homeless population.

“We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings … where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,” he complained, according to CNN.

Trump administration officials have considered using federal resources to tear down homeless camps in the state and relocate homeless people en masse to abandoned federal facilities, The Washington Post reported last week.

Trump’s California trip came after his Council of Economic Advisers released a report alleging that the homelessness problem was caused by overregulation of housing. The administration report offered a deregulation fix, calling for changing zoning restrictions and slashing environmental regulations that restrict where homes can be built.

Democratic state Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, who represents the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles, and has already authored a bill to limit environmental laws that block the building of housing and shelters, told The Los Angeles Times that it was difficult to take Trump seriously when the administration has called for cutting housing funding and proposed a ban on housing aid to any household where even one resident is living in the country illegally.

“I think it’s politics at its worst where he is going to pick on a vulnerable community — no different than when he picked on immigrants,” he told the Times. “I think it’s a little cynical for someone who has done everything in their right mind to make it worse on the working poor.”

Tom Phillipson, the acting head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters on Monday that “policing may be an important tool to help them get off the street” as well.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said that criminalizing homelessness was the exact wrong approach to the issue.

“The White House report on homelessness treats this crisis like fodder for a cable news debate,” Garcetti told The Los Angeles Times. “We don’t have time for that. If the president really cares about solving this crisis, he wouldn’t be talking about criminalization over housing. He’d be making dramatic increases in funding for this country’s housing safety net.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/internment-camps-for-the-homeless-housing-advocates-horrified-by-trumps-push-for-a-crackdown-on-california-homelessness/

no lnx

‘Internment camps for the homeless’: Housing advocates horrified by Trump’s push for a ‘crackdown’ on California homelessness

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 11, 2019

Following reports that President Donald Trump is pushing for a “major crackdown” on homelessness in California that could include destroying existing encampments and moving homeless people into government-backed facilities, state lawmakers and progressive housing advocates said the administration’s proposed steps are cruel, politically motivated, andwould do nothing to address the very real crisis Trump has exacerbated.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump ordered White House officials to begin work on a “sweeping effort” to address the homelessness crisis in California. As part of the new initiative, Trump administration officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Justice Department visited California this week for meetings and tours.

“Among the ideas under consideration are razing existing tent camps for the homeless, creating new temporary facilities, and refurbishing existing government facilities,” the Post reported, citing officials familiar with the effort.

“Housing experts say homelessness in California has risen alongside housing and rental prices,” the Post noted. “That problem has been exacerbated by cuts to federal support for housing programs.”

Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said the early stages of Trump’s effort, as well as his past policy moves, demonstrate that the White House is “clearly not acting in good faith to end homelessness.”

“They’ve proposed drastically shrinking or eliminating federal programs that keep the lowest-income people affordably housed; tripling rents for the lowest-income subsidized residents and raising rents for all others; evicting 100,000 people, including 55,000 American children, from subsidized housing; and allowing homeless shelters to discriminate and refuse shelter to transgender and other LGBTQ people,” said Yentel.

“The solution to homelessness is affordable homes,” Yentel added, “not further criminalization, punishing poor people for their poverty, sweeping people experiencing homelessness into increasingly unsafe areas, or warehousing people in untenable and unsustainable conditions.”

Further efforts to criminalize or otherwise harm people experiencing homelessness are unconscionable. The solution to homelessness is affordable homes – not, as Trump is considering, criminalization, homeless sweeps into increasingly unsafe areas…1/ https://t.co/Ophe9oWIyx

— Diane Yentel (@dianeyentel) September 10, 2019

Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, told USA Today that Trump’s plan would effectively create “internment camps for people experiencing homelessness,” a fear that was echoed on social media.

Adam H. Johnson

?

@adamjohnsonNYC

so... internment camps for the homeless. (via @rachelcbrody) https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/10/trump-pushing-major-crackdown-homeless-camps-california-with-aides-discussing-moving-residents-government-backed-facilities/ …

Trump pushing for major crackdown on homeless camps in California, with aides discussing moving...

Administration officials have discussed using the federal government to get homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles and other areas and into new government-backed facilities.

washingtonpost.com

Mike Bonin

@mikebonin

This is chilling. @realDonaldTrump  wants to "crackdown" on homelessness and put people into "government facilities." We've buried refugee children held hostage in his damn facilities. What inhumane treatment will he sanction for the unhoused? https://wapo.st/2m7Y7pH

Trump pushing for major crackdown on homeless camps in California, with aides discussing moving...

Administration officials have discussed using the federal government to get homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles and other areas and into new government-backed facilities.

washingtonpost.com

California Democrats joined the chorus condemning Trump’s proposed “crackdown,” accusing the president of feigning concern for homelessness for political purposes while failing to put forth solutions that would mitigate the crisis.

“The president has no interest in hearing from actual policy experts. He’s just playing to his base,” tweeted Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “We need to increase Section 8 vouchers + the Housing Tax Credit to expand access to affordable housing.”

California State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco said “rounding up homeless people into federal facilities won’t solve the problem.”

“We need to get people the help they need,” said Wiener, “including shelter, housing, and other services.”

Nathan Click, spokesman for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said the state is “ready to talk” if Trump is “willing to put serious solutions, with real investment, on the table.”

“He could start by ending his plans to cut food stamps, gut healthcare for low-income people, and scare immigrant families from accessing government services,” said Click.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-seizes-on-homelessness-for-divide-and-conquer-tactics-led-by-fox-news/

no lnx

Trump seizes on homelessness for divide-and-conquer tactics — led by Fox News

Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos September 11, 2019

Donald Trump is apparently so pleased with the reception his migrant detention centers are getting that he’s looking into forcing homeless people into federal hands, too. Trump is specifically targeting homelessness in California, because Fox News has been harping on it and because portraying a heavily Democratic state as hopelessly dirty and in need of federal intervention is likely to appeal to his base.

“Administration officials have discussed using the federal government to get homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles and other cities and into new government-backed facilities, according to two officials briefed on the planning,” The Washington Post reports, adding that “it is unclear how they could accomplish this and what legal authority they would use.”

It’s the Trump administration. Lack of legal authority has never been an issue for them—and Trump’s pet Supreme Court justices would doubtless discover sweeping new federal powers to imprison people should he demand it. But it’s likely that the goal here is less to accomplish anything than to spread the message that liberals are dirty. As a White House spokesman put it, “Like many Americans, the president has taken notice of the homelessness crisis, particularly in cities and states where the liberal policies are combining to dramatically increase poverty andpublic health risks.”

Most of the states with the highest poverty rates are red, but you don’t hear Trump aides talking about what Mississippi and Louisiana are doing to “dramatically increase poverty.” And California ranks just outside the top 10 on public health measures. Details, details. There’s a blue state to be smeared through association with homelessness.

So no, Donald Trump is unlikely to succeed at forcing California’s homeless population into federal camps anytime soon. But the fact that he’s talking about it shows where his 2020 campaign is going to take the nation.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-contributor-calls-homeless-people-los-angeles-zombies

mma 819

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The homeless crisis is growing in America's second largest city: Los Angeles, California.

LISA BOOTHE (GUEST CO-HOST): Well, Fox News contributor Emily Compagno recently visited the appalling conditions on the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Wow, look at that.

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): How can that be allowed? She joins us right now with part two of her investigation. Why does it look like that out there?

BOOTHE: I mean, that is just crazy.

EMILY COMPAGNO (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): It is. Thank you so much for having me this morning. We're about to find out, as we saw in part one of our series, homelessness, mental illness, drug abuse, and rat infestation have brought the Skid Row area of Los Angeles to a crisis point.

...

DOOCY: "They come there to die."

COMPAGNO: I know. How sad is that? No one throws away people like Los Angeles. What was so striking to me about being down there is that it's not just squalor. It's not just poverty. It is so much worse than that. And it's not people sitting there lucid and asking for help with signs. These are zombies. These are absolute drug addicts with mental illnesses. And in talking to the law enforcement consultancy on Joseph, I was struck by how hamstringed they are. How much these policies have crippled and made the entire situation worse.

KILMEADE: Because these people are also dangerous to civilians who are just trying to go about their lives, to families. Because look where they're set up. And the law enforcement, it's no longer a misdemeanor to do a lot of these things. So law enforcement says I really can't do anything. So I'm not even going to go there anymore.

---

==

guy hit by a car couple weeks back?!

‘Heartbreaking’ scene in Boston as police destroy wheelchairs belonging to homeless residents

Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams

---

not actually fix window but remove undesirable ppl eg homeless

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-july-16-2019/

Tony Sparks on whether broken-windows policing tactics used against homeless people reduce perceived disorder or, in fact, foster it.

see cobra ranch unintended conseq

==

==

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/11/san-francisco-navigation-center-shelter-lawsuit

guk no lnx

San Francisco: wealthy opponents of new shelter claim homeless are bad for environment

The effort to block construction of a new shelter comes as city’s homeless population surges to more than 8,000

Vivian Ho in San Francisco

Thu 11 Jul 2019 22.09 BST Last modified on Thu 11 Jul 2019 23.58 BST

More than 1,400 wait for temporary shelter spots to open up in San Francisco each night, and the city has promised to increase the number of shelter beds by 1,000.

The wealthy San Francisco residents who launched a crowdfunding campaign to block construction of a new homeless shelter in their waterfront neighborhood are employing a new tactic: arguing that homeless people are bad for the environment.

In a lawsuit filed against the city of San Francisco and the California State Lands Commission, the residents called for the project to undergo an environmental review before breaking ground.

“This project will have a significant effect on the environment due to these unusual circumstances, including by attracting additional homeless persons, open drug and alcohol use, crime, daily emergency calls, public urination and defecation, and other nuisances,” the lawsuit states.

Opponents of infrastructure and affordable housing projects often call upon the California Environmental Quality Act as a stalling ploy to delay construction. The law requires developers to explore any environmental effects a project might have, and take steps to reduce them.

Attorneys for the residents, paid for by the more than $102,000 raised through the GoFundMe campaign, argued in the lawsuit that the project did not undergo a full environmental review process.

San Francisco approves homeless shelter despite backlash from wealthy residents

Read more

The city has argued that the project – a 200-bed temporary homeless shelter – is exempt was from such reviews.

“I question if this a legitimate concern or a last-ditch attempt to block the shelter by any means necessary,” said Kelley Cutler, the human rights organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness. “Methane emissions are bad for the environment, and this smells like bullshit.”

The residents’ fight against this homeless shelter comes as San Francisco’s homeless population surged, with city officials tallying more than 8,000 during the last homeless count. More than 1,400 wait for temporary shelter spots to open up each night, and the city has promised to increase the number of shelter beds by 1,000. Homelessness in San Francisco has reached the level of a humanitarian crisis, fueled in part by the tech boom supercharging the housing market.

Opponents of the shelter have long said that their ultimate concern is public safety, a point that homeless rights advocates have argued was bigoted and dehumanizing. In addition to the environmental concerns, the lawsuit states that the project is “likely to decrease the fair market value” for any future projects in that location.

The city is reviewing the lawsuit, said John Coté, a spokesman for the city attorney Dennis Herrera, but the project has already undergone all required environmental review and the Board of Supervisors has denied several appeals under the California Environmental Quality Act.

“San Francisco has a homeless crisis on its hands,” Coté said. “The city is ready to put roofs over people’s heads and get them indoors. Others are filing baseless lawsuits to keep people out in the cold. Rather than trying to shift the problem to someone else’s backyard, everyone needs to do their part.”

==

6/30/19

On The Media

The Scarlet E, Part IV: Solutions

We have an eviction crisis, which is really just one part of a broader housing affordability crisis. Incomes are too low for rents. Rents are too high for incomes. The barriers to home-buying are growing, especially for younger Americans. The wealth gap between black and white Americans is spreading, driven largely by inequalities in housing. The shockwaves from the foreclosure crisis continue. And in some cities, gentrification drives up costs and drives away low-income families. Luckily enough, there are solutions — quite a few of them, in fact. In this fourth and final episode of The Scarlet E: Unmasking America’s Eviction Crisis, On The Media evaluate the proposals, which range from subtle to significant.

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prop 13 root of problem; rich ppl house need signal

ucla prof michael storper sp rise and fall of urban economies (LA and SF)

replay/glitch

70/ 30% 2 do not insteresect

housing but does big macroeconomy/hist post wwii

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-25-2019/

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==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/a-new-trump-administration-rule-could-force-tens-of-thousands-of-kids-into-homelessness-report/

Trump Administration has proposed a rule designed to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing. But according to analysis from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the rule could have the effect of displacing more than 55,000 children who are all legal citizens or residents of the United States.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson has described the proposed rule, which is beingaggressively pushed by White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller,as a way to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it.” However, HUD’s analysis indicates that about half of the people in households that are facing possible eviction or homelessness are children who are legally qualified for help.

In the U.S., current rules forbid undocumented immigrants from directly receiving federal housing assistance. But families that have mixed immigration status are eligible.

An undocumented single man or single woman is not eligible for housing assistance under current rules, but a family is eligible if at least one person in that household is eligible. For example, a man who is undocumented would not be eligible by himself, but his family could apply if his wife is a U.S. citizen or if he has a child who was born in the U.S. (that U.S.-born child enjoys birthright citizenship). And the benefits the family is entitled to receive are prorated accordingly.

But the new rule would require everyone in that household to have “eligible immigration status,” the Washington Post reports. According to HUD, roughly 25,000 households in the U.S. representing about 108,000 people presently living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member—and about 70% of these households with mixed immigration status (around 76,000 people) legally qualify for benefits. About 55,000 are children.

According to its analysis, “HUD expects that fear of the family being separated would lead to prompt evacuation by most mixed households. Temporary homelessness could arise for a household if they are unable to find alternative housing."

Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, is highly critical of the proposed rule, and the Washington Post quotes her as saying, “Tens of thousands of deeply poor kids, mostly U.S. citizens, could be evicted and made homeless because of this rule. And  by HUD’s own admission, there would be no benefit to families on the waiting list.”

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==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/trump-continues-his-attack-on-working-people-by-moving-to-redefine-poverty-and-slash-social-programs-for-millions

Julia Conley / Common Dreams May 8, 2019

The Trump administration on Monday moved to change the definition of “poverty” in the United States in a proposal which combines the president’s attempts to portray the U.S. economy as…

The Trump administration on Monday moved to change the definition of “poverty” in the United States in a proposal which combines the president’s attempts to portray the U.S. economy as strong with his repeated attacks on the working poor and their access to government services.

In a regulatory filing, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) wrote that it may change how inflation is calculated in order to reduce the number of Americans who are living below the federally-recognized poverty line and are therefore eligible for certain government support services and social programs.

As Melissa Boteach, who oversees income security programs at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), wrote on Twitter, the change “seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people.”

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

Replying to @mboteach

Remember last year when the Trump admin declared that “our War on Poverty is largely over and a success”?  https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Expanding-Work-Requirements-in-Non-Cash-Welfare-Programs.pdf ….

Now he’s acting on this bogus notion, trying to slowly define people out of poverty by decree. 2/

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

Seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people. In short, Trump wants to weaken how our poverty definition keeps pace with cost of living. So each year, as costs go up, many working people w/low pay would gradually be stripped of WIC, Medicaid & other basics 3/

15

5:27 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Melissa Boteach's other Tweets

Under the administration’s proposal, which was first reported by Bloomberg News, the government would shift to a system known as “Chained CPI,” which assumes consumers will change what they buy as items grow more expensive through inflation, suggesting that they are not struggling to afford necessities.

The definitional change would result in a slower inflation rate, which is used to determine how many Americans are eligible for programs like Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and other federal assistance.

As of 2018, a family of four making $25,900 per year was considered to be living in poverty, based on the necessities they could afford with the current inflation rate.

Under the new system, OMB officials wrote in the proposal, “changes to the poverty thresholds, including how they are updated for inflation over time, may affect eligibility for programs that use the poverty guidelines.”

Boteach wrote that the proposal demonstrates “how out of touch Trump is with lives of working-class people,” noting that even the current poverty line does little to reflect the amount of money an American family actually needs to live comfortably in the wealthiest country on the planet.

In fact, wrote Boteach, the new standards will make the government’s understanding of poverty and inequality even less accurate.

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

Replying to @mboteach

Seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people. In short, Trump wants to weaken how our poverty definition keeps pace with cost of living. So each year, as costs go up, many working people w/low pay would gradually be stripped of WIC, Medicaid & other basics 3/

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

This proposal shows how out of touch Trump is with lives of working-class ppl. “Americans on average  report that it would take more than $55,000 in annual income to be considered out of poverty.” That’s more than TWICE our current threshold https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2014/01/07/81702/50-years-after-lbjs-war-on-poverty/ …

4/

12

5:29 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC

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50 Years After LBJ’s War on Poverty - Center for American Progress

A major new study of public attitudes about poverty, work, and economic opportunity reveals that many Americans remain in economic hardship and desire new efforts to provide low-income families with...

americanprogress.org

15 people are talking about this

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

Replying to @mboteach

Sadly, even w/low unemployment, poverty & hardship are still a mainstay in American life. And guess what? Unilaterally redefining it doesn’t do a damn thing to help someone secure a better job, put food on the table, or pay critical health care bills.6/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2018/03/07/447412/ensuring-basic-living-standards/ …

View image on Twitter

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

This is a cynical attempt to squeeze working-class people. Their incomes will STILL be too low to make ends meet, but Trump’s decree would make it harder for them to qualify for help. 7/

9

5:40 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC

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Some critics on social media denounced the proposal as Trump’s latest “cruel” measure aimed at weakening the systems meant to support the poorest Americans and struggling working class families.

David Roberts

?

@drvox

Trump is going to change how poverty is measured, with the intent of rendering a bunch of people ineligible for social assistance. His base will support this arbitrary cruelty b/c even though it hurts them, it also hurts brown people. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …

133

12:15 PM - May 6, 2019

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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls

The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.

bloomberg.com

79 people are talking about this

Democratic Coalition

?

@TheDemCoalition

This appears to be the latest cruel and incompetent effort by the Trump administration to make it harder to access welfare programs.#ShitholePresidenthttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …

243

12:53 PM - May 6, 2019

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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls

The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.

bloomberg.com

358 people are talking about this

Paul Krugman

?

@paulkrugman

For the moment, Republicans have mostly stopped pretending to care about deficits. But they're still eager to cut aid to the poor 1/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …

1,691

5:32 AM - May 7, 2019

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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls

The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.

bloomberg.com

862 people are talking about this

The OMB’s proposal follows multiple attacks on social welfare programs by the Trump administration as it attempts to keep families from accessing SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, and Medicaid. The administration and the Republican Party have pushed in 2018 to require people who use food stamps to work at least 20 hours per week, a move which would push at least one million Americans out of the program.

The federal budget proposal unveiled in March also included more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, threatening the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans.

The administration has spent much of the last two years insisting that the American economy is thriving—frequently pointing to the GDP, the stock market, and low unemployment rates as evidence.

But studies have shown that low unemployment numbers offer a misleading picture of how American families are actually coping in the economy, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count “600,000 ‘discouraged workers’ who say they are no longer looking because they don’t think they can find a job,” according to Quartz.

Critics have pointed out that 40 percent of families are unable to save enough money to pay for a $400 emergency; 137 million American households struggle to pay healthcare costs; and nearly 80 percent of workers live paycheck-to-paycheck—regardless of the GDP or the stock market.

The OMB’s proposal, wrote Georgetown University and public policy researcher Joan Alker, is “a novel way to take healthcare, etc., away from people AND make it look like there are fewer poor people.”...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/many-people-are-too-broke-for-bankruptcy-heres-what-congress-and-bankruptcy-organizations-could-do-to-help/

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robt reich

RR: In addition to being a massive drain on the economy, these fees don’t even help cash-strapped cities. Uncollected court debt for traffic and criminal offenses totaled $12.3 billion in 2016 in California alone. A lotof the fee revenue that does come in goes to collection services, that are private and for profit. Which means very little of the money that is collected winds up going to roads, bridges, schools, and other good things we all need.

WKB: That’s why we need to stop the criminalization of poverty. Have you heard of win-win? Well, this is lose-lose, non-win. It sucks. It’s bad for EVERYBODY.

RR: Bad for poor people, bad for the social fabric, and doesn’t even help the bottom line for government.

WKB: Our home state of California is helping to lead the charge to stop the criminalization of poverty.  Go to CAdebtjustice.orgfor more information. Go. Don’t just watch the video. Go.

===

trump trying to kill aca in ct w/ team red, also

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/a-federal-judge-just-struck-a-blow-to-the-trump-administrations-cruel-plot-to-gut-medicaid/

On Wednesday, a federal judge dealt a massive blow to one of the Trump administration’s pet projects.

Washington, D.C. District Court judge James Boasberg struck down work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas, ruling that the waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar were not valid because work requirements do not further the Medicaid Act’s mission of improving public health.

The rules differ in some ways, but both broadly require certain Medicaid recipients to complete a minimum number of work or community service hours each month and provide proof to the state.

Kentucky’s work requirement, known as Kentucky HEALTH, was the first to be approved by the Trump administration but was struck down last year by the same judge, and the newly revised rules were scheduled to take effect on April 1. Arkansas has already implemented its work requirement system, known as Arkansas Works, with disastrous consequences — over 18,000 people in the state have lost Medicaid coverage, many of whom actually were working but couldn’t figure out how to meet the state’s confusing reporting requirements, especially those in rural areas who don’t have easy access to the internet.

Boasberg criticized Arkansas for doing virtually nothing to help Medicaid recipients understand and comply with the new work requirement, saying “the State’s outreach efforts may well be falling severely short.” He further criticized Kentucky, which argued that their work requirement does further the mission of expanding health coverage because Gov. Matt Bevin intended to cancel Medicaid expansion entirely if he didn’t get his way: “The Court cannot concur that … states are so armed to refashion the program Congress designed in any way they choose.”

Several other Republican-controlled states are currently seeking approval for similar work requirement programs.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program — both Congress and the states provide funding, and the states are in charge of administering the program within their borders. The Medicaid Act sets strict guidelines about how the program can be run, but the Department of Health and Human Services can approve what are called “Section 1115” waivers if a state has a custom-designed plan that would promote health and coverage beyond what traditional Medicaid does. The Trump administration is trying to flip this on its head, encouraging states to apply for waivers that will lead to fewer people being covered.

Boasberg’s ruling holds that states cannot use Section 1115 waivers in this manner. “That provision of the Act does not turn the comprehensive Medicaid program into a buffet for states,” he wrote.

Medicaid work requirements are a particular passion of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. She has claimed that denying low-income people health coverage is actually good for them, insisting that “it is not compassionate to trap people on government programs or create greater dependency on public assistance.” She has also claimed that work requirements do further the mission of Medicaid, pointing to studies that show people with jobs tend to be healthier (when in reality the correlation is probably the other way around.)

Arkansas and Kentucky were early adopters of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which made the program available to people up to 138 percent of the poverty line. The Affordable Care Act originally required states to expand Medicaid, but a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to decide whether they wanted to or not. Republicans in these states are now intent on chipping away at this progress, and work requirements are one way the Trump administration is encouraging them to do it.

For now, that effort has hit a roadblock.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/republicans-are-claiming-that-poverty-no-longer-exists-heres-why-thats-ridiculous/

chapman

For the longest time, one of the big talking points from Republicans was that government anti-poverty programs failed at their primary goal, merely trapping people in dependence on the government. “The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won,” said President Ronald Reagan in an address to Congress. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) took it as fact, telling a constituent in 2017, “Our poverty rates are about the same as when we started this war on poverty.”

It’s a compelling talking point — it’s just completely wrong. In the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson enacted the broad package of programs referred to as the “war on poverty,” including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal housing programs, the poverty rate stood at 19 percent. In 2017, when Ryan had that exchange, the poverty rate stood at 13.5 percent, and it has never gone above 15.2 percent at any time since Johnson’s reforms. That might even be understating things a little, because the supplemental poverty rate — a more accurate calculation of poverty that accounts for transfer payments and the cost of living — has fallen from 26 percent to 14.3 percent during the 60s, meaning we’ve cut the poverty rate almost in half.

Now, however, Republicans in the Trump White House seem to be taking the exact opposite argument as Reagan and Ryan. In their reasoning, we should cut government assistance programs because poverty has already been solved!

“President Johnson’s War on Poverty, based on 1963 standards of material hardship, is largely over and has been a success,” said this year’s report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “However, victory was not achieved by making people self-sufficient, as President Johnson envisioned, but rather through increased government transfers.” The answer, says the report, is to scale back social programs by adding increasingly restrictive work requirements to weed out people who aren’t sufficiently deserving of federal and state aid.

First of all, the claim that poverty has been eliminated is itself incredibly dubious. The Council of Economic Advisers uses something called the Full-Income Poverty Measure, which measures consumption as well as income, to show that the “real” poverty rate has actually declined from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 2.3 percent in 2017. The problem with this measure is that an ever-increasing number of households finance consumption through debt, and most people who go into debt would not consider themselves out of poverty no matter how much they are consuming. Indeed, by the White House’s measure, poverty was lower during the financial crisis and recession of 2008 than they did during the 1990s tech boom, because people consumed more!

A recent economic study at the University of Michigan found that the “consumption poverty” rate does not correlate as well with the percent of households struggling to afford food, housing, or medical care, as the traditional poverty rate does.

Second of all, the Trump administration’s conclusion doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. If anti-poverty programs have all but eliminated poverty, why would scaling back these programs benefit anyone? It is similar to the logic that parents shouldn’t have to vaccinate their kids because we have eliminated childhood epidemics.

Moreover, study after study has shown that the sort of “work requirements” Trump’s advisers are pushing do not work — some programs have seen their enrollment decline slightly after adding work requirements, but the rules don’t make people more self-sufficient and barely affect employment or household income. Part of the reason is that many people on welfare already work, they just aren’t paid enough to feed their families.

The notion that poverty has already been solved, much like the notion that racism has already been solved, makes for a great justification to allow Republicans to attack the safety net. But it isn’t true, and telling poor people they aren’t really in poverty is not a substitute for addressing social problems.

==

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/democrats-newest-proposal-could-slash-child-poverty-by-a-third-heres-how/

On Wednesday, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) introduced a bold proposal known as the American Family Act. And while it hasn’t yet attracted much attention, this bill is likely to become a fixture of Democratic economic policy in the coming years.

This bill, an earlier version of which was introduced in 2017, would effectively expand the child tax credit into a “child allowance”, much like what other countries including Canada and the United Kingdom currently have. Under the law, families would receive $300 per month for children under 5, and $250 a month for children ages 6-16. According to researchers, this plan would cut child poverty by a third, taking it from 14.8 percent to 9.5 percent — an estimated 4 million children.

The current child tax credit, which was expanded slightly in 2017 as part of the GOP tax bill, is severely flawed — higher-income households are eligible for up to $2,000 in tax credits a year, but lower-income families that actually need the money get almost nothing.

As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains, Democrats are in a position to unify behind this proposal, and even if the odds of passage in the current Republican Senate are remote, there will be key opportunities down the road to make a serious push for it:

[I]n its latest incarnation, the bill has the support of the majority of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, including the No. 2 Democrats in the House and Senate (Steny Hoyer and Dick Durbin, respectively); just about every possible Democratic 2020 contender currently in Congress from Tim Ryan in the House to Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate; and leaders of both the moderate (Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Chris Coons) and left (Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) wings of the party. Thirty-five Democratic senators (out of 48 Democrats total) and 168 Democratic House Reps (out of 235) are sponsors or co-sponsors.

Given that the bill could easily be passed through budget reconciliation — which requires only a bare majority in the Senate — it has a strong shot at being enacted the next time Democrats have a governing trifecta in the House, Senate, and presidency, whether that’s in 2021, 2025, or later. What’s more, the expiration of the Trump tax bill in 2025 will force a reconsideration of the US tax code, giving Democrats an opportunity to push for the inclusion of a child poverty-slashing provision in whatever deal comes out of that deadline.

Over the decades, Democrats have delivered massive reforms for the working and middle classes, from Social Security to Medicare to the Affordable Care Act. The American Family Act would be a similarly large disruption to the status quo, that would combat some of the ugliest, most life-destroying poverty in the United States, and provide for those who need it.

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Trump’s HUD wants to expand flawed program that is ‘privatizing public housing’

It leaves vulnerable residents at the mercy of developers.

DANIELLE MCLEAN

FEB 27, 2019

https://thinkprogress.org/a-flawed-public-housing-program-leaves-vulnerable-residents-at-the-mercy-of-developers-66a0ee5b2321/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/an-expert-in-geography-and-sustainable-development-explains-the-surprisingly-dark-side-of-the-tiny-house-movement/

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-has-plan-even-further-demonize-food-stamps

In an attempt to find new ways to make life worse for people receiving any government benefits, the Trump administration is seeking to lump together all government benefit programs into a renamed and reorganized Department of Health and Human Services. And you can be sure that the word “welfare” will be emphasized in any new organization.

According to a story that ran first in Politico, the White House Office of Management and Budget soon will release a new report outlining a plan to move all safety-net programs into HHS and to give the federal department a new name, emphasizing the “welfare” moniker that used to be part of the department’s name. A big reason for this recommendation is to lump the $70 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps, in with Medicare and Medicaid. SNAP would move out of the Department of Agriculture, where it is now housed.

The reasoning is likely that once these benefits are combined under one departmental roof, it will be easier to cut them all.

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"owned" doc levittown

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-13-2018/

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http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/affordable-housing/colonialism-and-the-lost-indigenous-housing-designs-20180528

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/those-new-employment-numbers-trump-bragging-about-look-great-because-they-dont

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ben-carsons-war-poor-people-bad-news-republicans

no lnx

Trump's choice for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson, delivered on the president's command to move people "out of poverty" by proposing to raise the rent on some of America's most vulnerable communities.

On Wednesday Carson released legislative text that would raise rent for tenants in government-subsidized housing to equal 35 percent of gross income (based on the assumption that they work 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage).  This amounts to an increase of 5 percentage points from the current policy, which established a cap on the rate of rent at 30 percent of adjusted income. This means that the cap on rent for America's poorest families would rise to $150 per month instead of $50 per month.

Carson titled his proposed bill the “Making Affordable Housing Work  Act,” in one of his most distinctly Trumpian moves since assuming office. And officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development claimed this would only affect about half of the 4.7 million families currently receiving housing benefits. But not all policy experts agree with that estimate.

"More than 4 million households will see their rents rise," Will Fischer, Senior Policy Analyst at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Salon. He also emphasized that the effect of Carson's new policy on poor families would be devastating.

"These proposals will raise rents for working poor families, the elderly and people with disabilities and force them to divert money from other basic needs like clothing or food or medicine," Fischer told Salon. "In some cases it's gonna push them to the brink and put them at risk of eviction or homelessness. The HUD says that these are reforms but they don't pursue any particular policy goal other than squeezing rent out of these families."

Fischer also cast doubt on the idea that Carson's underlying goal is to reform the system and help poor families.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/cairo-thebes-in-small-town-america-the-public-housing-crisis-nobody-is-talking-about

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-states-most-rapid-increases-homelessness

Homelessness increased in the U.S. in 2017 for the first time since 2010, and advocates for homeless people are alarmed. Ten city and county governments have declared states of emergency since 2015 in response; meanwhile, Department of Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson shows ongoing disinterest in supporting local governments’ efforts. While cities like Los Angeles are facing a well-publicized crisis as they struggle to find long-term solutions, California is surprisingly not even one of the states with the five fastest increases in homelessness, according to a new survey compiled by Credit Loan.

Measuring homelessness in any city is a challenge. For one, most major cities count more homeless people in residing shelters than unsheltered people living on the street or in encampments (Los Angeles is a major exception). This survey includes both sheltered and unsheltered, but notes the frightening rise in unsheltered homeless (nationwide, about a third of the homeless lack shelter).

“Unsheltered homelessness is on the rise, and major cities are feeling it most,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “As cities bear the burden of increasing unsheltered counts, it is essential that they address the affordable housing crisis, increase investments in proven housing interventions, and ensure that they have appropriate emergency shelter capacity.”

Beyond the division of sheltered versus unsheltered, experts disagree on the best methods of measuring rates of homelessness. The Credit Loan survey uses a point-in-time (PIT) count from HUD data that communities collect from physical outreach to determine how many individuals are literally homeless on a designated day. This data is pulled from PIT count numbers from 2007-2016. Other groups like the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness prefer to rely on the numbers generated through statewide data systems to measure homelessness in their states.

According to the Credit Loan survey, these are the states that saw the most significant increases and decreases in homelessness over the past 10 years:

Credit: Credit Loan

The states vary significantly in geography and cost-of-living expenses (South Dakota, for example, is one of the least expensive states to live in, yet the same factors drive that state’s homelessness as in New York), but there is a surprisingly strong common thread explaining why so many people go without homes. In any city or state, the homeless crisis is directly tied to lack of available low-income housing.

A number of diverse factors make the situation in South Dakota unique. The state has seen the largest increase in homelessness in the past 10 years. Native American homeless rates are rising as it becomes more difficult to find affordable housing on reservations, where isolation and lack of abundant infrastructure make construction difficult. Elsewhere in the state, homeless advocates have noticed the homeless population getting younger.

Traci Jensen, homeless liaison for the Sioux Falls School District, told KSFY in December, "We do see the number of youth over the last couple years has increased." Though a different estimate at the end of 2017 claims the homeless rate had dropped 12% in the past year in South Dakota, three shelters say that number doesn’t tell the full story. "The demand that we see for homeless services certainly hasn't decreased," Brett Johnson with the Sioux Empire Homeless Coalition, said. Many of the area's homeless are living in cars or with friends, Johnson added. Local representatives are pushing for more inexpensive housing options. Rep. Kristi Noem recently wrote, “Despite South Dakota’s relatively low cost of living, finding affordable housing can still be a challenge for low- and middle-income families. That makes it no surprise that there are 120 families on the waiting list for Habitat Homes.”

In densely populated metro areas like D.C. and New York, homeless advocates are unanimous in blaming the problem on sky-high rents. “The one single thing that really has changed is the lack of affordable housing,” Michael Ferrell, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told the New York Times. “The housing that’s being created today in the District is not for working-class people,” he said. Gradually widening inequality is to blame: in D.C., as in many other American cities, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. In New York City, the Coalition for the Homeless similarly reports that lack of affordable housing is the main cause for the city with the highest number of homeless people. Homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

There is some good news in the struggle to house the homeless. Though Michigan is hurting from the nationwide lack of affordable housing, the state managed to decrease its homelessness rate by 67% over the past 10 years, according to the survey. “We saw the incidence of homelessness spike during the recession and it’s been trending downward each year since in Michigan,” Eric C. Hufnagel, executive director of Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness, told AlterNet. “That’s due in part to a short-term funding infusion, an improved economy and policies which have strengthened the homeless service delivery system in Michigan. Additional funding remains a key need, but there are many other barriers to ending homelessness, including the affordable housing crisis.”

These are some of the cities with the most homeless:

...

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Report: Cash Bail System Hurts Poor and Communities of Color in L.A.

“Many people don’t even have $100 in the bank, so paying 10 percent to a bond agent means that money won’t be going toward rent or food.”

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/cash-bail-system-hurts-poor-and-communities-color

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?436568-1/after-words-peter-edelman

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

Professor Peter Edelmantalked about his book Not a Crime to Be Poor, in which he argues that courts are exploiting the poor by charging excessive fines and fees for minor crimes. He was interviewed by Representative Hank Johnson(D-GA).

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AH 12/17

djt dick-ensian:

hat same attitude is driving social policy in the United States today.  Only now that the tax overhaul is all but a done deal have we begun to read about why our Republican House and Senate and President seem so little worried about tax cuts that, simple arithmetic tells us, we cannot afford. All month we have been reading about the size of the tax cuts and the plutocrats who will benefit, but there has been very little honest reckoning about what will be the most serious human consequences.

Now, however, are we learning the reason. The real goal is eliminating dependency by punishing the poor for being poor.

In a short update, Chye-Ching Huang of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us: “The congressional budget resolution that Congress approved in October, which created the process and set the parameters for the tax bill, also calls for $5.8 trillion in budget cuts over the coming decade, including deep cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and other health care programs; basic assistance including food assistance through SNAP (formerly known as food stamps); and non-defense discretionary funding, the part of the budget that funds education and training, transportation and other infrastructure, medical research, child and elder care, and other important priorities.”

From the *Washington Post*‘s Caitlin Dewey we learn that Trump-appointed officials in the Department of Agriculture are considering major limitations within the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): “SNAP is America’s largest anti-hunger program, providing an average benefit of $125 per person each month to 42 million Americans.  The majority of SNAP recipients are children or seniors, though participation rose sharply across all demographic groups during and after the recession, peaking in 2013 at 47.6 million.”  Officials are considering “new restrictions on purchases of soda and candy,” but also considering more significant cuts: “The agency is also considering a proposal to allow states to reduce payments to some groups of people, including undocumented immigrants’ citizen children…  The secretaries’ proposals would allow states to significantly change how they offer nutrition assistance.  Through the use of the waivers, the USDA could unilaterally enact the proposals on a state-by-state basis without further congressional action….”

Why are these proposed changes so utterly devastating?  Here is Harvard University ethnographer Kathryn Edin—from her (2015) book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America—reporting on the collapse of welfare programs after passage in 1996 of the welfare reform law and the subsequent shift of responsibility for welfare programs from the federal government to the states, which have provided very unevenly for poor families: “Starting in 2001, more and more families with children who were receiving SNAP began to report that they had no other source of cash income to live on—not from work, not from public assistance.  By 2006, the number of such families had grown 143 percent from a decade before. By 2012, 1.2 million families on SNAP told eligibility workers they had no other income.” (pp. 30-31)

Earlier this week *POLITICO* published a scathing indictment of planning that has been going on in federal departments to reduce federal servicesonce tax reform has been enacted: “The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are hoping to make the most sweeping changes to federal safety net programs in a generation, using legislation and executive actions to target recipients of food stamps Medicaid and housing benefits.  The White House is quietly preparing a sweeping executive order that would mandate a top-to-bottom review of the federal programs on which millions of poor Americans rely. And GOP lawmakers are in the early stages of crafting legislation that could make it more difficult to qualify for these programs… Federal health officials are encouraging states to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults on Medicaid—a major philosophical shift that would treat the program as welfare, rather than health insurance. The Agriculture Department said last week that it would soon give states greater control over the food stamp program, potentially opening the door to drug testing or stricter work requirements on recipients of the $70 billion program long targeted by fiscal conservatives… The president is expected to sign the welfare executive order as soon as January, according to multiple administration officials, with an eye toward making changes to health care, food stamps, housing and veterans programs, not just traditional welfare payments… Although the effort to reshape the country’s welfare system is all but guaranteed to produce powerful political backlash, it appears to have broad backing from conservative congressional Republicans, who are already coordinating with the White House on a legislative agenda to complement expected executive actions.”

Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who, for years, has proposed his own miserly federal budget plans, is quoted by POLITICO: “We have a welfare system that’s basically trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work, and we’ve got to work on that.” Not considered in all this planning is whether jobs are available and whether people using programs like SNAP are able to work.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and regular columnist for the *NY Times,* is one writer who has highlighted what all this will mean for our society and our children. As an economist, Krugman believes cuts in programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and welfare programs like SNAP—programs that, incidentally, help children be able to thrive at school—are economically foolish. He also deplores what such cuts to social programs say about the decline in our society’s ethic of social responsibility: “Children who get adequate care are more likely to be healthier and more productive when they become adults, which means that they’ll earn more and pay more in taxes. They’re also less likely to become disabled and need government support… By the way, broadly similar results have been found for the food stamp program: Ensuring adequate nutrition for the young means healthier, more productive adults, so that in the long run this aid costs taxpayers little or nothing. But such results, while interesting and important, aren’t the main reason we should be providing children with health care and enough to eat. Simple decency should be reason enough. And despite everything we’ve seen in U.S. politics, it’s still hard to believe that a whole political party would balk at doing the decent thing for millions of kids while rushing to further enrich a few thousand wealthy heirs.  That is, however, exactly what’s happening.”

If you wonder what all this commentary about planned cuts to social service and health and nutrition programs is doing in a public education blog, consider these previous posts—about sociologist Sean Reardon, writing about the impact of poverty on education—about Harvard’s Daniel Koretz examining how poverty affects test scores—about author Jack Schneider reflecting on poverty and public education.

Jan Resseger is a writer and public education advocate in Ohio. She formerly chaired the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Ed

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no link

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/horrifying-step-backwards-sessions-retracts-guidance-designed-end-abuse-poor-courts

Civil rights advocates accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions of "turning back the clock" on criminal justice reforms after the Department of Justice rescinded Obama-era guidance that protected low-income defendants from being forced to pay gratuitous fees to local courts.

"Profit-minded court policies targeting the most economically vulnerable Americans have resulted in a resurgence of unconstitutional but widespread practices penalizing the poor and people of color," said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law. "Attorney General Jeff Session's decision to retract guidance from the Justice Department rooting out practices resulting in a perpetual cycle of fines, debt and jail of America's poor is a horrifying step backwards in ongoing efforts to reform the criminal justice system."

Under President Barack Obama, the DOJ issued a warning to local courts in May 2016 regarding the common practice of handing fines to poor defendants in order to boost their own revenues.

"Individuals may confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their jobs; and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape," wrote Vanita Gupta, the head of the DOJ's civil rights division at the time, and former Office for Access to Justice director Lisa Foster. "Furthermore, in addition to being unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local governments and their constituents."

The "Dear Colleague" letter of guidance sent by Gupta and Foster, which was not legally binding, cited examples of unfair demands for payment made by municipal courts, including drivers who could be ordered to pay a penalty of $300 for a driving citation and told that a court date could only be scheduled after the payment was made.

Such requirements "can have the effect of denying access to justice to the poor," they wrote.

Sessions said Friday that he was reversing the guidance to combat "the long-standing abuse of issuing rules by simply publishing a letter or posting a web page" and to prevent "confusing the public with improper and wrong advice."

Gupta told the Washington Post that Sessions's decision "seems like an abdication of the Justice Department's responsibility" to guide municipal courts.

"I think it just takes the pressure off of some jurisdictions that may have been more reluctant to engage in reform," she said.

On social media, other critics denounced Sessions's decision.

Radley Balko

@radleybalko

Sessions pulls mostly symbolic Obama era DOJ memo advising judges not to fill city coffers by imposing huge fines on poor people for petty infractions.

Merry Christmas everybody! https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-rescinds-justice-dept-letter-asking-courts-to-be-wary-of-stiff-fines-and-fees-for-poor-defendants/2017/12/21/46e37316-e690-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.84f6cb14eb64 …

4:19 PM - Dec 21, 2017

Sessions rescinds Justice Dept. letter asking courts to be wary of stiff fines and fees for poor...

The move is the latest in the attorney general’s effort to reshape the Justice Department.

washingtonpost.com

13 13 Replies   214 214 Retweets   182 182 likes

Radley Balko

@radleybalko

Sessions pulls mostly symbolic Obama era DOJ memo advising judges not to fill city coffers by imposing huge fines on poor people for petty infractions.

Merry Christmas everybody! https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-rescinds-justice-dept-letter-asking-courts-to-be-wary-of-stiff-fines-and-fees-for-poor-defendants/2017/12/21/46e37316-e690-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.84f6cb14eb64 …

4:19 PM - Dec 21, 2017

Sessions rescinds Justice Dept. letter asking courts to be wary of stiff fines and fees for poor...

The move is the latest in the attorney general’s effort to reshape the Justice Department.

washingtonpost.com

13 13 Replies   214 214 Retweets   182 182 likes

justin kanew

?

@Kanew

To avoid confusion, Sessions rescinds a DOJ letter asking courts not to fine poor people just to fill their coffers.

Yes, wouldn't want anyone mistakenly thinking he actually cares about that.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-rescinds-justice-dept-letter-asking-courts-to-be-wary-of-stiff-fines-and-fees-for-poor-defendants/2017/12/21/46e37316-e690-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.e60dd9316f2a …

4:49 AM - Dec 22, 2017

Replies   7 7 Retweets   9 9 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/civil-rights-group-reaches-agreement-mississippi-reinstate-over-100000-drivers

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http://www.alternet.org/books/gig-economy-permanent-low-wage-nomads-nomadland

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/6-cruel-moves-made-local-governments-against-poor

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http://www.alternet.org/recycling-declines-and-centers-close-homeless-are-really-screwed

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http://www.alternet.org/video/how-bail-system-really-screws-you-if-you-are-poor

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HUD cut The proposed reductions are in line with Trump’s recent claim that he will pay for a $54 billion increase to the war budget in large part by cutting domestic programs.

But long before Trump made this assertion, HUD Secretary Ben Carson—who has no prior experience in housing policy—has been open about his desire to dismantle key public housing initiatives. In 2014, he opposed an agreement between the city of Dubuque and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address the city’s housing policies that discriminate against black residents, suggesting it was proof America was "becoming communist." In 2015, he vocalized his opposition to a HUD fair housing rule that is aimed, in part, at reducing segregation, calling it a “failed socialist experiment.”

...

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While the latest figures from the office of Department of Housing and Urban Development show that homelessness has declined by three percent in the U.S. overall, it has also increased in 15 states, especially those in the West.

California had the dubious honor of hosting America's largest homeless population—its count (118,142 people) was up 2 percent from 2015 to 2016. Washington, DC, saw the highest year-to-year increase (more than 14 percent), and was followed closely by Idaho. Of the 15 states that saw increases in homelessness, eight were in the West: Washington state gained more than 7 percent and Colorado 6 percent. Hawaii had a 4 percent increase.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that with this report, the U.S. has seen homelessness drop again for the seventh year.

The new figures, released Thursday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in its annual report to Congress, mark the seventh consecutive year that homelessness has declined nationally. Sixty-eight percent of the affected people were staying in transitional housing and emergency shelters. The number experiencing chronic homelessness, defined as people with a disability who have been consistently homeless for at least a year, dropped 7 percent from 2015 to 2016—and 35 percent since 2007.

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t gotten around to discussing his cabinet pick for HUD, but the current secretary is hopingthe policies that have cut away at the problem will continue.

[HUD secretary Julian] Castro told reporters he hoped the incoming administration would retain, or expand, current programs. He pointed to a 47 percent decline in homelessness among veterans since 2010—that's when President Barack Obama launched the Opening Doorsinitiative, an effort to wipe out veteran, chronic, and family homelessness.

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/low-income-families-evicted-silicon-valley-apartments-so-building-can-rebrand-facebook

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/heres-how-three-cities-aim-to-beat-youth-homelessness-this-year/

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pediatirians now collect malnutrition #

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http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-subtle-design-features-that-make-cities-feel-more-hostile

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/shocking-unacceptable-levels-hunger-and-homelessness-american-cities

12/15

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Are We in Ferguson -- or Kabul?

What surprises me most, however, isn’t the corruption at the top, but the ways in which lives at the bottom are affected by it. Reading Thieves of Stateset me thinking about how regularly money in this country now flows from the bottom up that pyramid. If you head down, you no longer find yourself on Main Street, U.S.A., but in a place that seems uncomfortably like Kabul; in other words, a Ponzi-scheme world of the first order.

Consider, for instance, the Justice Department’s 2015 report [45] on the police in Ferguson, Missouri, about whom we’ve learned so much since Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot [46] to death on August 9, 2014.  As it happens, the dangers for Ferguson’s residents hardly ended with police misconduct. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” Justice Department investigators found:

“This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.”

The report then recounted in excruciating detail the extent to which the police were a plague on the city’s largely black population. Ferguson was -- make no mistake about it -- distinctly Kabul, U.S.A.  The police, for instance, regularly accosted residents for what might be termed “sitting in a car while Black,” and then charged them with bogus “crimes” like failing to wear a seat belt in a parked car or “making a false declaration” that, say, one’s name was “Mike,” not “Michael.” While these arrests didn’t make money directly for the police force, officers interested in promotion were told to keep in mind that their tally of “self-initiated activities” (tickets and traffic stops) would have a significant effect on their future success on the force. Meanwhile, those charged often lost their jobs and livelihoods amid a welter of court appearances.

Ferguson’s municipal court played its own grim role in this ugly scheme. As Justice Department investigators discovered, it did not “act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct.”  Instead, it used its judicial authority “as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance[d] the city’s financial interests.”

By issuing repeated arrest warrants when people missed court appearances or were unable to pay fines, it managed to regularly pile one fine on top of another and then often refused to accept partial payments for the sums owed. Under Missouri state law, moving traffic violations, for instance, automatically required the temporary suspension of a driver’s license. Ferguson residents couldn’t get their licenses back until -- you guessed it -- they paid their fines in full, often for charges that were manufactured in the first place.

As if in Kabul, people then had to weigh the risk of driving license-less (and getting arrested) against losing their jobs or -- without a car -- not making it to court. With no community service option available, many found themselves spending time in jail.  From the police to the courts to city hall, what had been organized was, in short, an everyday money-raising racket of the first order.

And all of this was linked to the police department, which actually ran the municipal court.  As the Justice Department report put it, that court “operates as part of the police department... is supervised by the Ferguson chief of police, is considered part of the police department for city organizational purposes, and is physically located within the police station. Court staff report directly to the chief of police.” He, in turn, ran the show, doing everything from collecting fines to determining bail amounts.

The Harvard Law Review reported [11] that, in 2013, Ferguson had a population of 22,000.  That same year, “its municipal court issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses,” or almost one-and-a-half arrests per inhabitant. The report continued:

“In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail.”

Whether in Kabul or Ferguson, this kind of daily oppression wears people down. It’s no surprise that long before the police shot Michael Brown, the citizens of Ferguson had little trust or respect for them.

Privatizing Official Corruption

But might Ferguson not have been an outlier, a unique Kabul-in-America case of a rogue city government bent on extracting every penny from its poorest residents? Consider, then, the town of Pagedale [47], Missouri, which came up with a hardly less kleptocratic way of squeezing money out of its citizens. Instead of focusing on driving and parking, Pagedale routinely hit [47] homeowners with fines for “offenses” like failing to have blinds and “matching curtains” on their windows or “unsightly lawns.”  Pagedale is a small town, with 3,300 residents. In 2013, the city’s general revenues totaled $2 million, 17% percent from such fines and fees.

Might such kleptocratic local revenue-extraction systems, however, be limited to just one Midwestern state? Consider then the cozy relationship that Augusta, capital of Georgia, has with Sentinel Offender Services, LLC [48].  That company makes electronic monitoring equipment used by state and local government agencies, ranging from the Los Angeles County Probation Department to the Massachusetts Office of the Commissioner of Probation. Its website touts the benefits to municipalities of what it calls “offender-funded programs” in which the person on probation pays the company directly for his or her own monitoring, saving the courts the cost of administering a probation system. In return, the company sets its own fees at whatever level it chooses. “By individually assessing each participant a fee based on income,” says Sentinel, “our sliding-fee scale approach has shifted the financial burden to the participant, allowing program growth and size to be a function of correctional need rather than budget availability.”

“Profiting from Probation,” a 2014 Human Rights Watch report [49], offers a typical tale of an Augusta resident named Michael Barrett. Arrested for shoplifting a can of beer, he entered a local court system that was focused on revenue extraction via a kind of official extortion, which is the definition of corruption. Even to step into a courtroom to deal with his “case,” he had to hand over an $80 fee for a court-appointed defense lawyer. Then, convicted, he would be sentenced to a $200 fine and probation. Because the charge was “alcohol-related,” the court required Barrett to wear an electronic bracelet that would monitor his alcohol consumption, even though his sentence placed no restrictions on his drinking. For that Sentinel bracelet, there was a $50 startup fee, a $39 monthly “service” charge, and a $12 “daily usage” fee.  In total, he was forced to pay about $400 a month to monitor something he was legally allowed to do. Since Barrett couldn’t even pay the startup fee, he was promptly thrown in jail for a month until a friend lent him the money.

Such systems of privatized “justice” that bleed the poor are now spreading across the U.S., a country officially without debtor’s prisons. According to the Harvard Law Reviewarticle, some cities charge a “fee” to everyone they arrest, whether or not they’re ever convicted of an offense. In Washington, D.C., on the other hand, for “certain traffic [50] and a number of lower level criminal offenses,” you can simply pay your arresting officer “to end a case on the spot,” avoiding lengthy and expensive court costs.  Other jurisdictions charge people who are arrested for the costs of police investigations, prosecution, public defender services, a jury trial (“sometimes with different fees depending on how many jurors a defendant requests”), and incarceration.

Watch Your Ass(ets)

Even Machiavelli, who counseled princes seizing new territory to commit all their crimes at once because human beings have such short memories, warned that people will accept pretty much any kind of oppression unless “you prey on the possessions or the women of your subjects.” So many centuries later, while we women now tend to believe we belong to ourselves, civil asset forfeiture [51] is still a part of American life. Unlike criminal asset forfeiture, which permits the government to seize a person’s assets after conviction of a crime, civil forfeiture allows local, state, or federal law enforcement to seize and keep someone’s money or other property even if he or she is never charged. If, say, you are suspected of involvement with drugs or terrorism, the police can seize all the money you have on you on thespot, even if they don’t arrest you -- and you have to go to court to get it back.

Federal asset forfeiture collections have risen from around $800 million in 2002 to almost $4.5 billion in 2014, according [51] to the Institute for Justice (IJ). Governments defend the practice as a means of preventing suspected criminals -- especially high-level drug dealers -- from using their money to commit more crimes. But all too often, it’s poor people whose money is “forfeited,” even when they've committed no crime. The Pennsylvania ACLU reported [52] that police take around a million dollars from Philadelphians each year in 6,000 separate cases -- and not from drug lords either. More than half the cases involve seizures of less than $192, and in a city that’s only 43% black, 71% of those seizures from people charged with no crimes come from African Americans. If your property is seized, you can try to go to court to get it back but, says the ACLU [53], you should expect to make an average of four court appearances. Most people just give up.

Reading Thieves of Statereminded me that we’re not living in the country many of us imagine, but in something like an American klepto-state. Corruption, it turns out, doesn’t just devour the lives of people in far-off nations. Right now, it’s busy shoving what’s left of our own democracy down our throats.

Chayes documents how such corruption can lead to violent explosions in other countries. Indeed, it was a final kleptocratic insult -- a police woman’s slap in the face after he refused to pay a bribe to retrieve his confiscated vegetable cart -- that led Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi [54] to burn himself to death and touch off the Arab Spring. As Machiavelli wrote so long ago, people will put up with a lot -- torture [55], mass surveillance [56], even a car full of clowns [57] masquerading as candidates for president -- but they don’t like being robbed by their own government. Sooner or later, they will rebel. Let’s hope, when that happens, that we don’t end up under the rule of our own American Taliban [58] or some billionaire reality TV star.

Rebecca Gordon is the author ofMainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States [59]. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Fran

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/housing-crisis-insane-6-cities-where-homelessness-out-control

ny sf portland, HI LA

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http://www.alternet.org/15-million-american-families-live-2-day-these-authors-spent-years-finding-out-why

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history AA latino urban  renewal

http://www.alternet.org/economy/4-most-shocking-times-rich-people-displaced-poor-people-profit-america

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Della Curry is now the former kitchen manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado. Last week she was fired for giving out school lunches to elementary school kids who did not have money.

“I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn’t have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her lunch,” Curry said.

In the district, students who fail to qualify for the free lunch or reduced lunch program receive one slice of cheese on a hamburger bun, and a small milk.

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http://www.propublica.org/article/pets-killed-over-unpaid-fines-and-more-in-muckreads-weekly

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/pf/pet-fines/?sr=twmoney0411dogskilled11aINT

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The Kansas legislature has sent a bill to Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) desk that limits welfare recipients to withdrawing just $25 a day from their benefits and enacts a range of other restrictions.

If Brownback signs the law, recipients of the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program would only be able to withdraw $25 a day with their benefits cards from ATMs, which act like debt cards. No other states or the federal government currently limit withdrawals.

While one of the backers of the bill asserted that recipients could take out more at a bank counter, the cards can’t be used at counters and many poor people lack access to bank accounts given the need to maintain balances and pay fees. Seventeen million Americans are unbanked, going without formal financial products. Meanwhile, during debate over the bill state Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau (D) pointed out that many recipients need to withdraw hundreds of dollars some days in order to be able to pay rent.