Homeless 18 yr old girl -- any ideas?

Just got off the phone with an 18 year old girl who is homeless.  She called Worthington St. Shelter for Women, where she has stayed before, but was told there were no beds available.  Now, this is interesting, because the official policy of Friends of the Homeless, who administers both the men's and the women's shelter, is to never turn anyone away.  So I called Worthington St., and sure enough, it's true she was denied because the shelter is full.  The very nice woman I spoke with, when I mentioned that I thought there was a no turn-away policy, said that that policy needs to change.


"We're seeing the same kind of numbers," she said, "that we usually see in the winter."  We commiserated with each other a bit.  I chose to wait to insist they shelter this girl until I tried some other options.


I have a call into the homeless coordinator at the Springfield School Department, because the girl is still in high school.  I also have a call into Sr. Sanga, who runs Annie's House, although she never has an opening.  Last time I talked to her, she told me that the women just weren't turning over, because they couldn't fuind housing they could afford.


I called my girl back to tell her what I was trying, and to ask her a little more about how she became homeless.


"I've been in a foster home since I was 14, and when I was 18, I was stubborn and signed myself out of DCF custody," she said.  "Then I stayed at the Worthington Shelter for six weeks.  Then I went to stay with a friend in Worcester, but it wasn't safe-- the people in his house do drugs and I don't, it was pretty crazy there."


I suggested she try to sign herself back into DCF-- not easy, but not impossible.


Anyone have other ideas?


With what we know is happening to homeless families, all I can do is echo my girl and say, It's pretty crazy out there.


UPDATE: REALLY, REALLY BAD NEWS!  Friends of the Homeless has a NEW policy-- if you've been staying at one of their shelters and leave for what is considered to be a "housed" situation, you are not eligible for shelter for a year!   My girl is technically in that situation, but I spoke to the director, Bill Miller, who is going to call her and who might be willing to make an exception.


But more bad news: Bill says that those in the overnight shelter are going to have to come up with a housing plan, and if the "guests" are considered to be "noncompliant"(a pretty subjective term),  they will have to leave.  He says there are no time limits on shelter-- yet.


You would think the provider world would be more aware of what happens when you put people in a corner and give them no way out.

Just two of the painful and bizarre incidents in Springfield this week

When will homeless people get a break? When will children stop being afraid of the police?

This morning the Springfield Republican reported that Bill Miller, Executive Director of the Friends of the Homeless Shelter on Worthington St., has had a sexual harassment charge filed against him by a social worker who had also been employed at the shelter. President of the board Bob Carroll is defending Miller, but the social worker, Holly Bell, has a letter from Bob Carroll that states, "The Board determined that many of your allegations were substantiated and that the Executive Director made comments to you that were inappropriate. The Board of Directors has taken appropriate discipline against the Executive Director."

So Carroll can deny Miller's culpability now, but he admitted it in print in a letter.

Part of what makes me sick to my stomach is how many people must have known about this, who just hoped it would go away, who found it more important to cover Miller's (and the Friends of the Homeless) ass than make the tough decisions. It reminds me of the Springfield Housing Authority in the Ray Asselin days, when it was common knowledge that maintenance men would attempt to solicit sexual favors in return for apartment repairs, with threats of evictions if tenants didn't comply.

I suppose I can feel sorry for Miller, put him in the same category as the numerous politicians who have seemingly lost their minds over a woman, betrayed their wives, and put their careers in the toilet. But Bell didn't want a relationship with Miller, she told him to stop, and she took it to the board of directors.

The last permanent director of the Friends of the Homeless shelter before Miller was Frank Keough, who has recently finished serving three years in prison for stealing from the shelter and putting his friends in no-show jobs, among other things. Rumors of sexual misbehavior on his and other staffs' part were common. Arise fought for years to get rid of Keough, but it took a Justice Department investigation, the same one that swept the Asselin family, the Ardolino brothers, and so many more, to accomplish the change.

Don't the homeless people who live at the Worthington St. Shelter deserve a director who pays attention to running the shelter?
---------------------------------------------------

Thursday night, 15 year old Delano Walker ran from police into the street and was immediately hit and killed by a car.

Delano and two friends, all on bikes, were observed by the police just emerging from the car lot at Balise Hyundi on Columbus Ave. The police, who were part of an anti-car theft detail, went to stop them for questioning. Delano jumped off his bike and ran. Apparently, and I am only going on news reports so far, he had a knife and likely knew he'd be in trouble if searched. (Obviously, the kids hadn't just stolen a car.)

The police were doing their job, and Delano reacted with fear. We'll hear a lot more about the roots of that fear over the next few days. Delano had a knife. Did he also have a record? Or was he just one of those kids on bikes who get stopped and searched by the police because they are in a place deemed inappropriate by the police?

I think of a young African-American friend of mine who was stopped and searched cutting through a Mass Mutual parking lot who had some pot on him and got busted. (This was before the shift from felony to misdemeanor.)

I think of the small business owner not far from Arise's office who was questioned and frisked recently by several police officers in broad daylight outside of his store. Apparently he'd been observed by the officer on traffic detail across the streethanding some money to another man. I talked to the guy later; he was humiliated and embarrassed. Apparently a former teacher of his was walking by on his way to the drugstore and they stopped to talk. The teacher realized he'd left home without his wallet and asked if he could borrow $4. It was this transaction that brought him under suspicion. I mean, come on, why would a business owner be handling money?

I called Community Policing later that day to ask if there was a policy to determine when a conversation goes to the next level and becomes a search. Yes, indeed, there is such a document-- it's called the Use of Force Procedure. I asked if I could have a copy and the officer said she would email it to me. A few weeks later I called again to remind her. I'm sure such requests are not high on the priority list, given how busy the police are, but I would like to know, and right now I'm still waiting.

It's very difficult for people who are not poor and not of color to understand the relationship between the inner-city community and the police. I could write a book about it, but I won't. What I will say is that on both sides, suspicion and fear continue to damage our community.

I'm sorry for everyone involved in what happened Thursday night: the officers and driver who helped lift the car off Delano, his friends who had to watch him be killed, the Walker family, and most especially, Delano.

Photo of Bill Miller from Friends of the Homeless.

13 Below & no safety net for Springfield's homeless

In Boston, MA, homeless shelters are staying open 24 hours instead of the usual overnight hours until the worst of the cold spell passes.

In Buffalo, NY, the city has opened two warming shelters to handle the overflow of those seeking to get in out of the cold.

In Connecticut, Gov. Rell has ordered the National Guard to open the armories to the homeless.

But in Springfield, MA, the director of the city's largest shelter won't promise no one will be kicked out of the shelter for bad behavior, and won't promise that those who have already been banned will be allowed back in during below zero weather.

"We go on a case by case basis," says Bill Miller, director of the Friends of the Homeless Shelter, one of two shelters for men in the city and the only shelter for women.

One of any shelter's responsibilities to its residents is to keep them safe, and many (but not all) bannings at the Friends of the Homeless Shelter come about because of violent behavior. Fear of violence can keep other homeless people away, so obviously the common good must be preserved. Yet violence in a setting where there is no privacy is almost unavoidable. On Monday, one man told an advocate from the poor people's rights organization Arise for Social Justice that he was sleeping in his cot when someone punched him in the face. Another man told of being asked for a dollar by four other homeless men, and when he said he didn't have a dollar, they attacked him.

Punching a man in the face, however, is not a capital offense, and anyone sent out into the cold is at risk of dying. Men can try to get into the Taylor St. Shelter, which has a limited number of beds and only operates from Monday through Friday. Women who are banned, whether because of theft, violence or possession of drugs, are completely out of luck.

So what's the solution? That's what advocates and some service providers have been asking at the city-sponsored "Homes Within Reach" meetings, which for the past two years have been working on a "Housing First" model to get people out of the shelters and into housing.

Prior to 2004, homelessness was not even on the city's radar screen, but when homeless people organized a tent city with the help of Arise, Springfield officials started to pay attention. The tent city lasted six months, closing only when the Warming Place shelter, operated by Open Pantry Community Services, was able to re-open. But in 2007, facing state cutbacks and with a marked lack of support from the city, OPCS once again was forced to close the Warming Place-- this time, permanently. Nearly ninety people were left scrambling for space in the other shelters. Many just seemed to disappear; some left town; others started camping in hidden places.

One of the city's strategies-- and for a while, it worked-- was to limit the number of homeless in Springfield by limiting the number of shelter beds, and to move the "chronically homeless" into housing. But progress in Springfield-- and indeed, across the country-- is slowing to a crawl as more people become homeless while state and federal resources are being cut.

Recent Homes Within Reach meetings have attempted to organize resources to assist homeless people out on the street, including helping the Springfield Police Department come up with a set of procedures for when it is appropriate to forcibly place a homeless person into protective custody.

But so far, the city and the Friends of the Homeless Shelter have been unable to figure out what to do to preserve the wellbeing of those who have been banned.

The following email from Kevin Noonan, director of the Open Pantry Community Services to the Homes Within Reach committee members, gives an inside look at the politics of homelessness and points out the limitations of the city's approach-- limitations that may cost someone his life.

Four years ago Larry Dunham died on the steps of Springfield's Symphony Hall. After Mr. Dunham died, the then mayor of the city of Springfield, whose office window overlooked the Symphony Hall steps, told us all in january 2004, this was indeed a tragedy and adequate shelter space would be developed as soon as possible!

Since then we have witnessed the number of shelter beds, available in the city, deliberately reduced and we have repeatedly heard this touted as a celebrated accomplishment. There have even been glossy brochures boasting wonderful successes which include a depiction of people who are homeless, who managed to peacefully shelter and care for themselves on our postage stamp of a parking lot in an encampment known as Sanctuary City (which demonstrated more racial harmony than the city as a whole) as an example of one of the low points of "where we have been" and "how much better we can do than that".

A snapshot / a point in time count in 2008, which calculated 39% fewer people than a previous point in time count one year before it (visible on the streets), became an urban myth, repeated in the local and national media and again in the glossy promotional brochure, that street homelessness in Springfield, MA has been reduced by 39% thanks to a new housing first strategy. Yet over two years into a housing first strategy, which was used to justify the reduction of shelter beds, approximately 70 housing first vouchers which were issued to Springfield by HUD remain unused and people who are without homes still languish on the waiting list and in many cases, on the streets of Springfield.

Since the closure of the Warming Place in June 2007, over a dozen people who once resided there, are now dead, though clearly not all of them died from hypothermia or hyperthermia. While we wholeheartedly agree with a "housing first" strategy and we have personally participated in the development of permanent affordable housing over the last twenty years, it is a strategy that cannot sink its anchor into the bodies of people who once trusted us to hold onto the safety net below them.

At the last solstice, we got together to mourn those who died in 2008. the length of the list and the ages of the people who had died was deeply disturbing.

After more than two decades of obfuscation, amid repeated assertions that no one is turned away, there is still no public acknowledgment or accountability regarding people who are banned from the only government funded shelter for individuals in Springfield, and it is difficult to accurately ascertain why they are banned or for how long.

The city, as a conduit for federal government funds to the agency which operates the only government funded shelter for individuals within its boundaries is probably best suited to set up a system for monitoring who is banned, why and for how long etc. this could be done with signed releases of information and without compromising confidentiality. City officials might even be in a position to take proactive steps to guarantee the safety of individuals they know in advance are banned, or they might be able to broker the re-entry to the shelter of some of these individuals, or perhaps even function as a point of appeal.

Instead, the repeated e-mail messages or calls over the last two years, sent by me or by Open Door Director Theresa O'connor, and Loaves & Fishes director, outlining specific problems or complaints alleged by guests have been met with a startling silence which only seems to continue to put lives at risk and leave all parties feeling very frustrated.

The procedures outlined in the earlier e-mail from Ms. McCafferty (director of Homeless and Special Needs Housing) are indeed confusing. We are now instructed to first contact the shelter to see if a person is indeed banned before we move onto the next step: i.e. determining if they were appropriately discharged from the last place they resided. As I understand it, only then should we contact Rev. Greg Dyson, and preferably via e-mail. He then may be able to help provide a room in a motel (for one night - maybe more?) or may be able to help us work out some other solution? all this while not revealing to people who are homeless that this remedy is even a possibility!

Last night at about 6:30 p.m. I was called by Marion Hohn of Western Mass Legal Services, who had encountered a woman sitting in one of the doorways of a downtown restaurant. despite a warm restaurant teeming with patrons chatting, sipping drinks and enjoying themselves this woman (K) sat just outside one of the doors, slowly freezing. She was intoxicated, wearing a light jacket and an oversize pair of overalls with broken clips. She was unable to keep her overalls up without exposing her bare hands to the bitter cold and when she couldn't bear the stinging cold on her hands and chose to warm them next to her body her pants would fall to her knees, revealing she not only lacked thermal underwear, but that she had none at all. Thanks to the Red Cross' People's Center, she was at least wearing a hat. Although she described the hat as ugly it may well have helped to save her life.

K was alternately agitated and despondent. Her body temperature, in my opinion, was beginning to descend into a state of hypothermia. We convinced her to walk with us down to the Crown Chicken pizza shop to try to help her warm up and to give her something to eat and drink. K would not agree to let us contact an ambulance and she claimed she was afraid to go to the Friends of the Homeless shelter (although she said she had not been banned from the facility) because she feared for her safety from other residents.

I absolutely appreciate Rev. Dyson's willingness to help out with resources and I suspect, more often than not, those resources come from his own pocket and they are given selflessly, from the heart, with love and compassion. I also appreciate the resources that have regularly been made available by Rev. Jack Desroches and his associates, most likely also from their own pockets, and ditto from Rev. Jim Munroe and members of his congregation, or from the folks who go out on the streets each week to search for people who are homeless, and many other folks, including members of the mobile outreach team or the police department, other agencies and our own staff who are committed to saving lives. I deeply admire and respect each of them for their willingness to do whatever it takes.

That said, I absolutely believe it is not a viable city policy to simply acknowledge the good will and support of these committed and loving individuals and tell us to seek them out whenever we encounter people on the streets, after we have called a shelter to determine if they "really are banned" and after we have determined if they were "appropriately discharged from the last place they stayed" and presumably we should not contact Rev. Dyson -- or any of these other kind people, if there has been, in someones estimation, an inappropriate discharge?

It was way too cold to do all that yesterday evening (and then send an e-mail and hope for a reply) while standing on the street with a woman in crisis. In these temperatures we also can not engage in what I believe was termed by Ms. McCafferty in our last meeting as "push back" or wait to hear what Rev. Dyson referred to in his last e-mail as being sent "back to the drawing board" if someone thinks the last place to accommodate this individual engaged in "inappropriate discharge planning". Btw: is banning someone and sending them out into the bitter winter cold of New England considered an "appropriate discharge"?

One of the reasons for not making public the list of people who are banned is presumably confidentiality, or that the list, according to Mr. Miller, is "an internal document". If this is the case, why then are we now told that on an ad hoc basis, when we encounter someone half naked and freezing to death on the streets of Springfield, we can dial into the shelter (if we have a cell phone with us) and expect to be granted an update on a person's confidential status on the shelter's "internal document" also known as the "banned list". It was stated in our last meeting that there is at least one name (perhaps more I can't recall) on that list for an individual(s) who is permanently banned.

If any of the clergy or people in our community can help or are available, of course we will attempt to contact them to see what can be done. We have done this in the past and will continue to do so. yet their kindness and goodwill should not and cannot be the official response on the part of the city of Springfield. certainly not four years after finding Larry Dunham's frozen corpse at the portal of music and culture for the city of homes and definitely not thirty five+ years after the onset of this epidemic in Springfield which has witnessed people languishing on the streets year after year.

We should be ashamed of our collective failure to not have a more responsive policy. Icannot possibly believe that taking advantage of the love and compassion of these well meaning and hardworking clergy and others is the only appropriate city wide response in 2009! We acknowledge the right of the only government funded shelter for individuals who are homeless to exclude people on occasion for various behavioral reasons but what we cannot and will not accept is that the appropriate consequence of that exclusion is: "see if you can survive on the streets tonight" or "tomorrow night" or "until we say so" or "for a longer period of time if you choose to argue with us about the matter" as some have alleged.

There absolutely needs to be a clear and unambiguous policy and preferably an easily accessible place for people (who are at risk of dying on the streets) to seek refuge if further fatalities are to be avoided. Although we and others did our best to secure a safe place for K to stay last night who knows where she will be tonight, which of us will encounter her and what her body temperature will be when meet her. We really don't need additional names for the memorial list.

Peace, Kevin

PS - For those who wish to attend: there will be a memorial service for Bill Conners, on Friday afternoon at 1:00 p.m. at Christ Church Cathedral, 35 Chestnut St. Bill, who was a very nice man, collapsed and died of a massive heart attack in December.

Set up at the Control Board

Angry and disgusted. Furious and cynical. Bitter and determined. Not surprised and yet somehow still blown away at the machinations of city government.

I went to the Springfield Finance Control Board meeting this morning to show support for the Open Pantry in its current struggle to feed the poor people of this city, along with Behzad, Ellen, Liz and Doug with Arise.. The Open Pantry was there to ask for some short-term financial help from the city I saw Bill Miller, Director of Friends of the Homeless, Paul Bailey, Director of Springfield Partners for Community Action and Gerry McCafferty, deputy director of Springfield's Homeless and Special Needs Housing across the room.

Chairman Chris Gabrieli phoned in to say he was stuck on the turnpike in a rainstorm, so the meeting, which was supposed to start at 10:30, didn't get going until after 11 am. By then I was close to having to leave for another meeting, so OP Director Kevin Noonan gave his spot to me and he took my spot later on. Finally the public speak-out began.

Most of the people who eat at Loaves and Fishes and get food from the Food Pantry are not homeless, I said in part of my three minutes, just too poor to avoid hunger on their own-- nothing very profound, just the truth-- and that we as a society are judged by how we provide for those who have the least. Then Liz and I had to leave, though I wanted to stay.

As I was pulling out on the parking garage onto Columbus Ave. to the first red light., Bill Miller pulled up beside me in his car.

"Did Chris Gabrieli ever show up?" he said. So I knew he had left even before the speak-out.

"Yeah, he got there," I said. "Says he'll have to start staying overnight in Springfield." Then the light changed.

My sister gave me a look.

"Somehow, in spite of everything, I've managed to keep a civil relationship with Bill Miller," I said.

The rest of this story I've reconstructed from people who stayed at the Control Board meeting,

Kevin presented to the Control Board (in the speak-out, even though he'd asked to be on the agenda) about who the Open Pantry serves and what kind of help the agency needs to keep going.

Then James Morton called on Gerry McCafferty, who said that if the Open Pantry was no longer able to serve, that other agencies would step up and provide the services. She said that Friends of the Homeless serves 300 people on Sunday (?) and would be able to handle the Soup Kitchen. She said that Springfield Partners for Community Action would be able to take over the Food Pantry. (SPCA currently rents space to the Open Pantry for the Pantry) and Paul Bailey confirmed that. then she said that of course, if FOH and SPCA were to do so, they would need to get money. Gabrieli agreed and said the city would have to put out a Request for Proposals.

So let me get this straight: They won't give the money to the Open Pantry but they will give the money to FOH and SPCA to provide the same service.

If this doesn't completely indicate the malice of the city toward the Open Pantry, I don't know what does. And agencies, which once upon a time stood in solidarity with each other, stab each other in the back.

Of course the city would be more than thrilled to have the Soup Kitchen out of Christ Church Cathedral and as hidden away as possible. (Carol Costa, who lives at the Classical Condos right across the street from the Cathedral, was also there, chatting away with Gerry McCafferty.)

FOH's eating space is quite small and its kitchen underequipped. Will people eat in shifts? Will a queue stretch down the stairs and into the parking lot? Will the people who eat there have enough time to chat with each other, or be rushed right along? How many people won't be able to get there at all, given that FOH is less central? And, let's face it, will families with children be comfortable going to a setting dominated by homeless adult males?

I see James Morton quoted on Channel 3 tonight saying the city can't give the money to the Open Pantry, because of an "Anti-AID" amendment that supposedly prohibits the city from giving money to non-profit agencies. How will the city then get the money to whichever agencies apply to the Request for Proposals? Is there not even one non-profit which has received city money in the past? I doubt it.

I won't write more now. There's a lot to think about.

Green shelter? New jobs?

The NYTimes recently reported on a new shelter for the homeless in Oakland California which is Green from the bottom up.

It's the only kind of new construction that makes sense anymore

ED Bill Miller from Friends of the Homeless says the new shelter planned there has some Green elements and will be designed with much natural light.

Meanwhile:

• In this morning's Republican, Buxton Leather announced it will be off more than half of its employees.
• Rock-Tenn Corp in Chicopee is laying off all of its 100 employees.
• Hasbro Games in East Longmeadow is permanently laying off 200 people.

Everyone laid off could be put to work making Springfield, Chicopee, East Longmeadow and other surrounding towns Green communities. But it takes a vision that so far, our elected officials have failed to actualize.

Green is not just about the environment, it's about living, thriving, healthy communities.

Photo from EcoGeek.

Homeless man loses bid for injunction to keep shelter open

Well-- a straight-sounding headline-- but I hardly feel objective about what happened in Housing Court today.

Ali Mohammed, a guest at the Warming Place shelter for the last few months, did his best to speak up for homeless people and explain to Judge Fein why it was important to them that the Warming Place stay open.

He was there to request an injunction prohibiting the city from closing the Warming Place. Sue Venne, another Warming Place guest, was added last minute as a plaintiff, but really every one of the twenty homeless people in the courtroom was a plaintiff.

I didn't expect him to prevail. The Open Pantry, which runs the Warming Place, lost a similar attempt last Thursday. This time, however, the shelter was a defendant along with the city, and I'm sure Kevin Noonan, OP director, had a few odd feelings in the city's company.

Everybody was there-- Gerry McCafferty, head of the Homeless and Special Needs Housing, two attorneys for the city, the head of the building department, Bill Miller, director of the Friends of the Homeless, one of the two shelters remaining in the city, the president of F.O.H.'s board of Directors, Bob Carroll-- some others I don't remember-- all on one side-- the city's.

On the other side were twenty Warming Place residents, Warming Place staff and a few advocates.

Ali told a simple story, with three main points: the Friends of the Homeless shelter was unsafe and would be overcrowded, some people had been banned from the Friends previously and had nowhere to go, and the Warming Place residents and staff were like a family and needed more time to transition to the other shelters.

Four other WP guests testified, all telling similar stories. One man got a bit emotional when talking about his friend who had recently been found dead on a park bench.

Coincidentally, the Friends' shelter's basement had flooded the night before in a heavy rain, and their shelter's guests had had to be moved upstairs. Leaks at the shelter are old news and a problem that's never been successfully resolved, although I'm sure the shelter is working on it.

That flood was not enough, however, to convince the judge. She asked the people who testified how long it had been since they'd stayed at the Friends' shelter, and felt no one had recent enough experience to judge the shelter now.

The city defended itself, saying all the right things, all very credible.

The judge excused herself for deliberation.

Then came that moment when people started to believe, as improbable as it was, that the truth might speake louder than the evidence and that justice would prevail.

But that was not to be.

Sometime just before the judge came back to deliver her decision, I looked around and saw that the security guards in the courtroom had increased from two to five. I was not the only one who noticed, either. I thought it was an insult to the homeless people who were present, who had come to court clean and well-dressed and who had behaved with complete appropriateness.

Judge Fein came back and denied the injunction. I saw shoulders fall throughout the room. The judge suggested that the Warming Place folks meet with Gerry McCafferty to find out about availability of housing subsidies, and offered her courtroom for the remainder of the afternoon. The Bailiff said "All rise" and we all rose. The judge left the bench and it was over.

Gerry called out that people could come and talk to her, but as far as I could tell, no one did. It was the wrong moment. People needed the dignity of their defeat.

The homeless people who spoke up today were very brave. Many of them know they will wind up having to stay at the very shelter they criticized. I could see some people's thoughts turning to where they were going to stay that night.

I continue to be saddened by how people with power silence the voices of the homeless and devalue and dismiss homeless people's loyalty to each other. Yeah, sometimes they'll stab each other in the back but they're more likely to be watching each other's back, as best as they can. And that's what I felt today.

I want to close this by remembering that no matter how sad I am, no matter how bad I feel, tonight I get to be at home, typing these words.

Still Waiting

I haven’t been on a public bus in over a year, but today I was having the radiator in my car replaced so after a homelessness meeting downtown, I walked over to Court Square to catch a bus and guess what? No bus stop anymore. I assume it’s part of the city’s effort to keep the homeless and other poor people out of downtown.

The park benches were removed from Court Square almost two years ago as part of a park renovations project. The project was finished but somehow the benches were never returned. I remember the park commissioner insisting the benches’ removal had nothing to with the homeless.

But the benches are still gone. I didn’t see any homeless people in the park. I didn’t even see any pigeons.

Our public transportation system (Pioneer Valley Transit Authority) is truly pathetic. When I was a kid, the Belmont bus ran every ten minutes till quarter of one in the morning. By the time I was dependent on a bus to get back and forth to work, busses ran less frequently and, of course, cost more. How well I remember standing in the rain, shivering in the snow, burning up in the summer heat, waiting for the bus, watching my eight hour work day turn into ten or eleven hours away from home. Pace around a bit. Watch other people. Count cars. Light a cigarette to make the bus come faster. If you haven’t had to do it, day after day, just to make a living, you just don’t know.

Today’s city-sponsored meeting was to come up with a plan to deal with the May 30^th closing of the Rescue Mission’s shelter on Taylor St. and the planned demolition of the York St. jail, which now houses the Warming Place. That’s about 130 people out on the street. Gerry McCafferty, the city’s homelessness and special needs housing coordinator, said today that the city’s plan to place 140 homeless people into housing is very far behind—can’t find landlords to participate.

We brainstormed possible solutions. Ron Willoughby, Director of the Springfield Rescue Mission, won’t take any state funding (don’t blame him) but would stay open if he could find the funding—about $500 a day to shelter 40 men. Kevin Noonan from the Open Pantry may have identified a possible site to relocate, but it’s still up in the air. We talked about vacant buildings, basements in city-owned property, other possibilities of increasing unlikelihood, so I had to add the possibility the city could sponsor—or at least look the other way—at another tent city. Of course nobody liked that idea, including me, because it was a lot of hard work for those of us who provided material and spiritual support—Arise chiefly, but also the Catholic Workers, Nehemiah House, the Open Pantry and many others. I want better than that for homeless people this year. But, if Arise had to do it again, we would.

On the other hand, “better than” is certainly relative in warm weather. At least homeless people had some control over their own environment in Sanctuary City, and some folks who’d been camping on the riverbank chose to come and be part of a community.

Bill Miller, Executive Director of Friends of the Homeless was at the meeting. I liked Bill when I first met him and now I find myself in my perpetual struggle to separate my feelings for a person from the positions he/she takes when I believe those positions are hurtful to poor people. I suppose that’s part of my spiritual work in this world and, boy, am I imperfect. I remind myself of my striving in this regard, but often it is after the fact.

Bill is not alone in his belief that if he and other homeless providers actually had the power to turn away non-city residents (which they don’t, not if they take state funding, anyway,) that it would force other communities to take responsibility for their own residents who become homeless. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But for sure it would mean that many people would be left to the riverbanks and abandoned buildings, pawns in a political game that’s “all for their own good.”

After I got home tonight, I got a call from a fellow who’d like to involve me in a new group about housing that he and a few others are forming—I think he called it the Metropolitan Civic Association, said they’d be getting up a website, had done a presentation at a local church, etc.

He’d mentioned to me in an earlier phone call that the group was concerned about the resegregation of Springfield, so in tonight’s call I asked him to explain a little more about what he meant.

It turns out that his group means housing developments that were built to be mixed-income but which are now entirely subsidized and entirely occupied by poor people.

Now, in theory, mixed-income developments and neighborhoods are certainly more stable and better places to live for poor people. (I’m not sure the residents of East Forest Park, however, with the highest median income in the city, would be likely to see the benefits of living with poor and working class folks.)

So I explored a little more.

“What would you do about it if you could?—to end this resegregation?”

“Well, we could change the rules so that developments had to be mixed-income and not entirely subsidized.”

“Seeing as we have not developed any new subsidized housing in this city in years, where would the people who are displaced now go?”

No direct answer.

“We need working people in these developments also,” he said.

“Well, you know, you can be working and be eligible for a subsidy.”

“Yes, I guess so, if you don’t make very much.”

“Well, lots of people don’t. Let me put it this way: one-quarter of Springfield’s residents are officially poor. That’s one out of four residents. Then there are the people just above that line who are struggling—now we’re up to one out of three. In a subsidized apartment they are paying 30 to 40% of their income for rent. In the private market, they’ll pay 50 to 90%. What will happen to them if they are pushed out of these developments?”

We ended our conversation by my saying that I felt I just wasn’t in basic sympathy with their mission. In theory, I agreed there was relevance to their issue. In practice, they would change the policy at the expense of the people—just like Friends of the Homeless. All for their own good.

I ask myself: Where are the people to go? What are the people to do?

It’s now midnight, time to end. A bit of Buddhist wisdom and my own more conflicted view:

Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two, my life flows.

if you ask me to act out of love
then I feel I’m betraying my class
love is not what has helped me survive
and each day must be shackled afresh
is the hunger that's always alive
that slips from the cell to the street
to apportion itself to the poor
in the name of the one who won't speak

Losing the war?

I didn’t write yesterday because 1) I was too upset and 2) I was too busy

On Tuesday, an apartment house fire in Springfield left 43 people homeless. I was wondering how many of them would wind up in shelters. Most poor and working people don’t have enough money saved to handle a disaster like this, and family members and friends, who tend also to be poor, don’t usually have a spare room. I checked into Springfield’s forum on MassLive later in the day and was immediately sorry I did—the first poster to mention the fire wondered why so many Hispanics were “victims” of fires…quotation marks courtesy of the poster…followed by posts about how 43 people could possibly live in 9 apartments (that’s actually less than five people in a household) and if only these Hispanics would stop breeding, then there would be fewer to be displaced…..I kid you not, this is the level of dialogue most common on MassLive.

Tuesday night about 11 pm. my sister called me with an urgent message: “Quick, turn to Channel 22.” I saw the tail end of an interview with Bill Miller, Executive Director of Friends of the Homeless, saying that the shelters were no longer going to be taking referrals from agencies outside the city. I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was—I’d seen Bill at a City Council meeting a month ago and had actually called him on an interview he’d given to a reporter a few days before, where he had seemed to imply that it was wrong for people who come from outside Springfield to stay in “our” shelters. He said he’d been taken out of context and that he’d been talking about sex offenders….a whole other story…

I won’t bore you with the round of calls I made the next day to figure out what was really going on. At some point I talked to Gerry McCafferty, the city's deputy director of homeless and special needs housing, who stressed the need for “a regional approach” to solving homelessness, stating that the Friends of the Homeless approach would at least pressure other communities to start dealing with their own homeless problem. She said that other communities either need to take care of their own, or pay Springfield for taking care of them.

All this sounds good…but Holyoke, Westfield and Northampton actually have shelters, and I could make a case that seeing as Friends of the Homeless receives much of its funding from the state, people in the communities Gerry mentioned—Chicopee, Ludlow, West Springfield and Longmeadow— actually do pay—their state taxes, which are then redistributed, and some of which wind up at F.O.H.

What continues to astound me is the absolute shallowness of analysis that pervades this city about the causes of homelessness and poverty. Without that analysis, we find ourselves in a situation similar to the Iraq war. Military and political analysts are saying that it doesn’t matter how effective our tactics in Iraqare , if we lack strategic goals, our tactics can actually work against us.

The Springfield business community seems convinced that homeless and poor people are responsible for the lack of economic development in Springfield. Of course there is a relationship, but it is not so simple as Cause and Effect.

I know that if every homeless person magically disappeared from our city today, it would have little or no impact on our prospects for revitalizing our city. The underlying problems would remain.

F.O. H. has to raise money from the business community in order to build its new, city-sanctioned shelter, so this pronouncement is a good move on their part.

I looked up the definition of pander in the dictionary—to cater to or profit from the weaknesses, vices or prejudices of others.

I was watching Jericho on TV last night, a show about a town utterly cut off from communication after a nuclear war. The mayor had decided to drive out 50 refugees because the town didn’t feel it had enough food to share. One refugee is talking to a woman from the town, asking why the refugees had had to stay in a shelter when there were so many empty houses. The woman said, “But those are the houses of our neighbors, who just weren’t in town when the bombs fell.” The man replied, “Well, whatever towns they are in now, I hope they are finding warmth and shelter.”