The Woman Who Had Me Arrested

Kathleen Lingenberg, director of the city’s Housing and Neighborhood Development, is leaving her job after eleven years because she’s moving out of Springfield and won’t meet the city’s residency’s requirement.

I couldn’t begin (not objectively) to sum up her contributions to Springfield, so let me just say what is true for me:

First, I guess, I will have to remember her as the woman who got me arrested—at least I’m pretty sure she was the one who decided, seeing as she was running the public auction of city-owned property where I stood up and spoke out of turn.

We ( me, Arise, homeless people) had been asking the city for months to give some tax-title property to homeless people to fix up. I and other Arise members and homeless people politely crashed the auction. We weren’t supposed to be there, because we didn’t have the thousand bucks entry fee, but we got by the doorkeepers, passed out flyers, and just stayed. At some point I noticed that a half dozen police officers were situated around the room.

When 25 St. James Ave. came up on the auction block, a building that would have made a perfect boarding house, and that we’d asked for, I stood up and spoke and got hauled away by the cops. The rest is another story.

Second, I know Kathleen did not use all of the power at her disposal to shut Springfield's Sanctuary down. If she and other department heads had used their full weight against us, we would probably not have been able to survive. But she didn’t. The following spring she and Health and Human Services Director met with some of us from Arise to talk about possibly cooperating on a new tent city should that become necessary. Mayor Ryan wound up squelching that idea, and in any case the Warming Place shelter stayed open, but I never doubted her sincerity in trying to come up with a mutual solution.

Next, Kathleen is one of the bluntest people I know. She will never tell you something just because she thinks that’s what you want to hear. Seeing as I am like that to quite a degree myself, we tended to have good, if infrequent, exchanges.

Finally, Kathleen represented and promoted a housing policy designed for the city that we want to have, not for the city we are. That means a focus on home ownership and the discouragement proposals for new, affordable rental housing. For the 25% “officially poor” people in Springfield, probably for the 40% of the residents who struggle to meet their basic needs, it’s a policy that leaves them, sometimes literally, out in the cold.

I don’t expect any magic policy changes when Kathleen steps down and someone else takes her place. Mayor Ryan, his competition Domenic Sarno, the vast majority of other city officials and the remaining middle and upper classes in this city feel the same way she does.

I wish her luck. Springfield, however, will need more than luck if we are ever to figure out how all the residents in this city can meet their need for decent, affordable housing.

Making 100+ people disappear

REJECTED: I found out today that the City of Springfield has rejected a proposal from a board that I’m a member of (32 Byers, Inc.) to turn the long-empty Spruce Manor Nursing Home on Central St.(which the city now owns) into 40 one and two-bedroom apartments for people who want to get out of homelessness.

Instead, the nursing home will be torn down and HAP will build two or three houses as part of its home ownership push. Very nice, very nice. Too bad most of the people I know don’t own and will never be able to own a home.

I did talk to HAP Executive Director Peter Gagliardi a few months ago, and asked him (quite nervy of me, I suppose) to withdraw his proposal so that ours had a better chance of succeeding. After all, HAP has done 70 one and two-bedroom homes in the recent past, and Spruce Manor Nursing Home is the only property in the city’s portfolio large enough to be rehabbed into more than eight units. Except for one eight-unit apartment building, everything else is lots or houses. In other words, plenty of room for HAP almost anywhere else. But NO room anywhere else for a project like ours.

Peter listened politely and said he’d let me know and a few weeks later when he called saying HAP was going to go ahead, I wasn’t surprised.

Arise has a little history with Spruce Manor. It’s only a few blocks from our office on Rifle St. In late 2003 we had been collecting signatures asking the Mayor to give homeless people a building to fix up as a place to live. Spruce Manor looked good, and we thought a clean-up would help to show that we really were willing to work hard to make our dream come true. Six weeks before Sanctuary City was born—before we even knew there was going to be a Sanctuary City— Arise, homeless people, and students did a clean-up at the building. We trimmed brush, picked up trash, and spraypainted over graffiti. We talked to a lot of neighbors. Most wanted to see Spruce Manor be converted to housing.

We gave the mayor a couple of thousand signatures, but nothing came of it—Kathleen Lingenberg, Director of Housing, told me the building was structurally unsound and would be torn down. And before we knew it, the Warming Place ran out of money and shut its doors; 60 people were unsheltered, and the need for Sanctuary City was upon us. We thought briefly about occupying the building, but we thought the city would be pretty merciless about evicting and arresting, and the building was full of mold. We didn’t want to put people’s health at risk.

Jump ahead three years. The city is now in the first stages of its ten year planning process to end homelessness. The first quantifiable target is to place 140 “chronically homeless” into subsidized apartments with case management. Of course this is all existing housing—tightening up the market for people who need affordable housing, and who very well may be homeless without it.

Under these circumstances, doesn’t it just make too much sense to create 40 affordable apartments as opposed to two or three single family homes?

The city seems to think that there is a finite and static number of “chronically homeless” people, and if only those people could be “placed into housing,” we could pretty much end—or at least control—our homeless population. I have yet to hear, at any of the many meetings on homelessness I’ve been in, any serious effort to look at underlying causes of homelessness—poverty, lack of health care, lack of housing, to name the big ones. There’s a fair amount of recognition of the special needs of “chronically homeless” people, and some good tactics for dealing with people one on one. But unless the city starts connecting the dots, people will continue to fall into homelessness.

For a good critique of the Chronic Homeless Initiative, see a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Meanwhile, the Warming Place shelter, run by Open Pantry Community Services, is reporting about 100 men and women stay over each night. The WP is housed in the old Hampden County jail on York St. The city has given the shelter a June 30^th eviction date. The jail will be torn down to make way for riverfront development.

Is it magical thinking on the city’s part that they can place 140 people by June 30^th and thereby (at least in the city’s way of thinking) making the Warming Place unnecessary? The city’s plan is already behind schedule.

Is the city going to make another Sanctuary City inevitable?