An incredulous gasp is my only response when a presidential candidate, worth a quarter of a billion dollars, publicly states on national television that this country has a “very ample safety net” for poor Americans.

Sure, our country provides Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers to help Americans fight poverty. But these resources are not enough.

Just walk in our waiting room every weekday and the numbers of people you see clamoring for help will dispel the myth of an ample safety net.

Or, talk with America’s physicians regarding what they see. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently commissioned a national survey of primary care providers and pediatricians that resulted in an unusual conclusion by America’s doctors.

If they could, they would write a prescription to help Americans’ social needs – food, housing, fitness, and transportation assistance.

In fact, four out of five physicians felt that meeting the social needs of a person is just as important as meeting their medical conditions. Of those care providers in low-income communities, nine out of ten felt the same.

The link between meeting social needs and good health is so strong that three of four doctors believe that the health care system in this country should pay to help patients meet their social needs.

Imagine the HMO’s of this country paying to support homeless agencies, food banks, and affordable housing developers. Ironically, in these medical care organizations, their physicians whose primary goals are to help patients get healthy promote such an endeavor.

It just makes sense. Antibiotics and drug treatment are not the only avenues on the road back to health. Sometimes our doctors simply tell us to stay home and rest in the comfort of our beds, and to drink plenty of fluids and a healthy bowl of chicken soup.

But for more and more Americans the access to a secure home and nutritious food is just a fleeting hope.

Last week, I received a telephone call from a friend who I’ve known for years as a hardworking single mother of three children. She told me that she lost her job and was recently evicted from an apartment building that had been foreclosed. She and her children were now living in a motel, and her savings was dwindling rapidly.

Her predicament is contrary to a presidential candidate’s wrongfully perceived assessment of a sufficient social safety net. Her fear now is how to keep her children fed and housed. And she desperately hopes they will stay healthy.

In these difficult economic times, the chicken soup for this country’s soul is a safety net that meets social needs and healthcare conditions.

Photo credit: Terry Pritchard

Sounds pretty serious. So how big of a problem is this?

Apparently, it’s not a big problem at all. In California, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger enforced an executive order prohibiting casinos from accepting welfare benefits as payment. His order was in response to this LA Times expose on the unintended use of benefits.

According to the Politico piece, in California “The amount accessed at casinos was about four-tenths of 1 percent of all welfare funds, while funds accessed at adult-entertainment venues were one one-thousandth of 1 percent, according to the state.”

The low utilization of this apparent legal loophole underscores the rationality of the poor. Left on their own, the poor spend far less than the general public on these illicit types of purchases.

I don’t have a problem with this law per se, clearly welfare benefits were not meant for casino and strip club purchases. But not surprisingly, welfare recipients themselves by and large agree.

The big take away here is that we should not assume that the poor are irrational. While maybe casinos and strip clubs should not be able to cash out welfare payments, assuming that welfare recipients are people who choose to spend their limited funds on frivolous purchases is not supported by the data.

This is a lesson that is not only important for policy makers, but anyone who designs interventions in aid of the poor. Too often the organizations I work with base their interventions on a presumption of irrationality amongst the poor. People by and large tend to be rational people who try as best they can to maximize their utility.

Given a choice between eating or gambling, rational people choose eating. This is true, by and large, across the income spectrum. Policies or social interventions that presume the poor are somehow less rational than the non-poor start from a dishonest place that is not supported by the documented, aggregate actions of the poor themselves.

Photo credit: Roadsidepictures

Big headline is that homelessness decreased between 2009 and 2011 — not only the overall rate, but the rates for people in families, veterans and the chronically homeless, i.e., individuals with disabilities, including mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders, who’ve been homeless for a long time or recurrently.

As I noted last year, NAEH relies, for want of an alternative, on the point-in-time counts conducted by communities that receive homelessness grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Its raw figures, therefore, understate the extent of homelessness. Gross changes, however, probably mean something, since the PIT flaws are relatively constant from year to year.

The greater limit in the headlined news is that the nationwide trends mask wide variations among states.

Figures for the District of Columbia are a good case in point. All but one buck the nationwide trends NAEH reports. This is moderately good news in one case. Bad in the rest.

Overall homelessness. In 2011, as compared to 2009, the overall nationwide homeless rate decreased 1.1%. But in the District, it increased 5.11%. Nearly half the states also experienced increases.

Homelessness among people in families. Homelessness in this population, i.e., adults and children who were together when counted, decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 17.8%. There were also increases in 20 states.

Chronic homelessness. The chronic homelessness rate decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 8.84%. Rates also went up in 18 states.

Veterans homelessness. By far and away the biggest progress here — undoubtedly due to the big push at the federal level. Nationwide, the veterans homelessness rate decreased 10.73%. Rates also decreased in 35 states.

Here the District follows the national trend, with a drop of 19.78%. But no state wound up in 2011 with nearly as high a percentage of homeless veterans in its population.

Unsheltered homelessness. Nationwide, the unsheltered homelessness rate, i.e., the percent of homeless people found on the streets or “in other places not meant for human habitation,” rose 1.64%.

But it was 4.98% lower in the District. Rates were also lower in 22 states. As with the District, however, the percentages generally reflect very small numerical changes.

So what do we make of all of this?

For NAEH, the big message is that the temporary Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program created by the Recovery Act worked.

Though nationwide homelessness rates didn’t decline much, they would surely have risen, it says, without the funds communities got for a variety of short-shot types of assistance, e.g., payment of overdue rent or a utilities bill, funds for a security deposit and/or first month’s rent.

So now that communities have exhausted their HPRP funds — or soon will — Congress should put more money into the regular homelessness grants program.

No argument from me about that.

But the state of homelessness in the District — and elsewhere — suggests that funds targeted to people who’ve lost their housing or soon will won’t be enough to end homelessness in our lifetime.

The NAEH report, in fact, indicates as much in two very interesting chapters on risk factors for future homelessness.

Too interesting to cram into this post. So I’ll leave them for another.

But without giving the plot away, I’ll say here that the risk factors point to the need for a range of investments, including funds for lots more affordable housing.

Photo credit: SamPac

One, two, three…

In the darkness of early morning, the counting can be monotonous, an exercise that almost puts you to sleep. I have written before about the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) mandated homeless counts that occur throughout this country during the month of January.

Municipalities have to count their homeless population at least every other year, or they will lose their HUD funding. Some cities count every year.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

Counting how many people are languishing on our streets, however, is good. How can we address a sad human tragedy without knowing the extent of the problem? How can we know if we are successfully reducing the number of people on our streets without regularly assessing our work through counts?

Counting makes those who spend taxpayers’ money accountable. When our country spends a couple of billion dollars per year on addressing homelessness, we should expect to know if this investment is working.

Thirty two, thirty three…

But I know by experience that counting sleeping heads in the cold chill of darkness, with their bodies covered by ragged blankets or hidden in tents, is not an exact science. It is more like counting sheep. Hidden sheep. In fact, counting calories is a much easier task then counting the thousands of people hidden in the crevices of this country’s landscape.

Was that a body bundled into a blanket under that bridge, or just some tossed away old clothing? Are there three people sleeping in that van, or just one? Inexperienced volunteers are not asked to wake people up, just to count bodies.

Eighty four, eighty five…

We really need to be counting stories, not heads. If our community is going to mobilize hundreds of good-hearted volunteers to wake up at four in the morning to count our homeless neighbors, we really should count how many heart-wrenching stories are on the streets.

Excuse me, but can I ask you a few questions that could help us provide you housing… How long have you been living on the streets? Do you have any health issues? Are you a former armed services member? How old are you? Where is your family? How did you end up on the streets?

One-hundred one, one-hundred two…

Imagine if successful entry into a hospital was based on how well a person can navigate difficult entry procedures. Those people who are healthiest– perhaps they just have flu symptoms or have enough money to hire someone to help – would access healthcare first. A very sick person with cancer and no money would never be able to get in.

Sometimes, the homeless service world is the same way. We help those who can access our services, or who can be easily housed, first. With counting homeless persons, and the pressure of reducing the number of people on our streets, we are tempted to find easy success, those homeless persons who can navigate the difficult procedures of being housed.

One-hundred twenty three, one-hundred twenty four…

But as soon as we start discovering people’s stories, as soon as we ask questions that reveal personal, heart-wrenching struggles, the temptation of finding easy success disappears, because we want to help the most hurting.

The most sick. It is just our compassionate tendency to first help the person who is injured the most.

It is just natural to help the most vulnerable people on the streets. We really should be counting stories, not just counting heads.

One-hundred sixty five, one-hundred sixty six…

Actually, we really should be counting the number of people we are housing.

Just imagine if rather than waking up at four in the morning to count sleeping sheep on our streets, we are waking them up to listen to their stories. So that we can prioritize the most hurting people on the streets and give them an apartment that is waiting for them.

Wait a minute. That imaginative activity is already happening. Cities and communities around the country are part of a movement to house 100,000 of America’s most vulnerable homeless neighbors. Volunteers are waking up early to create a vulnerability index that prioritizes who will be housed first.

Now, that is the kind of count that really counts. In a way, they are counting backwards, until the day there are zero Americans sleeping on our streets.

Three, two, one, zero…

Photo credit: Carbon Arc

Editor’s note:

District Attorney Rackauckas:

I am a rehabilitation psychologist. My areas of specialty are psychiatric disabilities and brain injuries. I interned on the Psychology Service at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Syracuse, New York and I work with chronically homeless people.

Ocampo’s arrest highlights two serious societal issues: 1) Many returning combat veterans suffer from mental health disorders. The Veterans Administration is in the best position to – and should – provide treatment. 2) Victim John Berry, reported to be a Viet Nam veteran, should have been able to benefit from the same medical and psychological treatment and he should also have been provided with safe housing by the Veterans Administration.

It has been reported that Ocampo was hearing voices; if so, this is a symptom of a major psychiatric disorder and I expect that your office will seriously consider his mental state as you prosecute him for these heinous killings.

Ocampo’s highly vulnerable homeless targets highlight pervasive homelessness issues that are present all across our country, particularly among our nation’s military veterans. I urge you to support as many homeless initiatives in Orange County as you are able.

Respectfully yours,

Mary M. McLaughlin, PhD

Photo credit: Dave Conner

You would think the guy in the car was some young, angry teenage male wanting to harm homeless Americans just for the thrill of it, a sad trend in this country.

But, no.

Six months ago, the man in the Range Rover who used a tire iron as a violent weapon was the co-founder of Pinkberry yogurt company. A few enraged words at a Los Angeles freeway off-ramp, and the Pinkberry founder imparted his own savage injustice with an iron rod.

This furious act of wrath doesn’t make sense. Could you imagine the CEO of Starbucks, or Nike, jumping out of their Range Rovers to brutally beat a homeless person?

How could the founder of Pinkberry leap to such rage? Did he down a cup of frozen yogurt, and plan to plead guilty by reason of “brain freeze”? Or perhaps he will use the “Twinkie Defense” because excessive sugar made him violent?

In a society that promotes sick entertainment like “Bum Fights”, that pits homeless persons against other homeless persons, no wonder violence against the homeless is tolerated.

The 2006 grainy video images of young men swinging baseball bats against homeless men sprawled on the ground still haunt this country’s sense of compassion. Five years later, hurting people on our streets still endure violence, to the point of death. Stabbings in Orange County, and a tire iron beating in Los Angeles.

The Pinkberry beating is such a stark contrast with the product they market. That soft and sweet frozen concoction makes you feel good inside, especially during those warm days. The pink and green, almost retro-looking interiors of their stores transport you to a time when hanging out with the family on a weekend summer evening to share a cup of ice cream was the norm.

I wish the founder of Pinkberry embraced the same soft and sweet feeling in his own life, especially in his perspective on homelessness. Instead, a few angry words turned into a soured, hardened act of vigilante violence.

The only commonality between Pinkberry’s product and its founder is that they are both cold. One is a delightfully frozen dessert, and the other contains a cold heart.

The founder of one of America’s favorite summer-time desserts may be a creatively successful businessman, but to me he is just a punk, like the other sick men wielding baseball bats against hurting homeless Americans.

Photo credit: Robyn Lee

Huffington Post

This is an important, timely post because it reminds us of how poor people lived — and died — before the creation of today’s safety net.

Here in the District of Columbia, Morgan found “people living in basement apartments with dirt floors. Many were hungry, cold and short of coal for stoves. Some children were staying home because they had no shoes.”

Found a penniless woman with no coat to brave the cold weather for a trip to the social service agency. A blind man who made the trip, but was living with his nine children in an unheated place because the agency wouldn’t — or couldn’t — help him buy fuel.

In California, Morgan met a family that had lost three babies to dehydration while picking cotton there in 1936.

Still dreadful conditions 20 years later, he writes, when Michael Harrington chronicled farm worker poverty in that agriculture-rich state.

Morgan cites some evidence that safety net programs have lifted Americans out of poverty.

For example, the official poverty rate for seniors dropped from 28.5% in 1966 to 9% in 2010, at least partly because the federal government started indexing Social Security retirement benefits to cost-of-living increases.

Two other examples based on the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure. You can see them in this nice infographic from the Half in Ten campaign.

But Morgan’s main point is that safety net programs have changed thequality of poverty.

In other words, poor people, by and large, don’t suffer the same acute, life-threatening deprivations as they did before we began building the network of programs that make up today’s safety net.

Morgan focuses on what may be our biggest success — federal nutrition assistance programs.

“Clinical malnutrition,” he writes, “has given way to what government and private agencies call ‘food insecurity.’”

“Poor nutrition, not malnutrition is the biggest problem” now, says anti-hunger expert and advocate Joel Berg.

And indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2010 figures, children in only 1% of American households sometimes didn’t get enough to eat because their parents couldn’t afford to feed them.

WIC alone, Berg estimates, has prevented 200,000 babies from dying at birth.

“Progressives,” Morgan concludes, “should not be timid about extolling this achievement. And conservatives, above all, should welcome it” because safety net programs “enable millions more people to participate in the great American market,” e.g., by using food stamps to buy groceries, vouchers to pay rent to private landlords.

Many conservatives do appreciate the safety net, Morgan says. But, even by his own showing, many don’t.

For example, he quotes Newt Gingrich, whose latest tome notes that the 2009 poverty rate was about the same as when the War on Poverty began. “What did we get in return?” Newt asks — a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

We hear the same thing from the Republican Study Committee, which counts a large majority of House Republicans as members.

“Americans have spent around $16 trillion on means-tested welfare,”* it says. “Even with all these resources devoted to assistance for the poor, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s.”

This is the send-up for its broad-gauge attack on virtually the whole range of federal programs that constitute the safety net.

And RSC member Paul Ryan, who chairs the influential House Budget Committee, has personally championed radical safety net cuts.

As we head into the Fiscal Year 2013 budget season, both the administration and Congress will be looking for ways to reduce non-defense spending by $54.7 billion.

“The safety net will be a fat target,” Morgan warns.

Some major programs won’t get hit by the automatic cuts the failure of the Super Committee will trigger. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe, since Congress is perfectly free to change them — or the law that partly protects them.

Other programs are wide open, as the Congressional committees and subcommittees parcel out the mandated reductions.

We often focus on defects in the safety net — people who aren’t served, people who are but not sufficiently. This is still important.

But, taking a leaf out of Morgan’s book, I feel we urgently need to show how much good safety net programs do — and to revive the history of what poverty in America was like before them.

* This figure comes from the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation — a not always reliable source. The RSC is also indebted to the Foundation for its uniquely expansive definition of “welfare”.

Photo credit: Florida Keys–Public Libraries

Since 1999, the National Coalition for the Homeless has documented nearly 1,200 violent crimes against homeless Americans with one in five ending up dead. Nearly 90% of the perpetrators were male, and 80% were under the age of 25 years old.

The young man, nick-named “Izzy”, was recently charged with killing four homeless men in Orange County, California and perfectly fit the stereotype as if written by some Hollywood script writer. Male, 23 years old, with a military crew cut.

After hearing of the arrest, most homeless advocates probably first whispered under their relieved breaths, “I knew it.”

But the stereotype ended at the first glimpse.

With the media scouring Izzy’s background, as if he was a recently captured “Jack the Ripper”, the story of a disturbed young veteran of the Iraq war was revealed.

Yes, he was male and young. But family and friends tell the world that he was a compassionate young person who donated to Toys for Tots, and would even help homeless persons.

Izzy was an American hero, at one time, fighting for our country with the Marines, as part of the few and the proud.

Like many Americans hit hard by a stubborn economy, Izzy lost his job. His family lost their home through foreclosure, and his father started living in a vehicle.

The root cause for the transition from a typical middle-class American to a serial killer of impoverished people is probably found on the battlefield of a Middle Eastern country. The ghosts of battle haunt even the most compassionate individuals. Walk into any homeless shelter in America and one in five temporary residents will share their nightmares of the battlefield.

No wonder the Veterans Affairs Department is pumping billions of dollars into a program to end veteran homelessness in five years. Too many of our American heroes are returning home to homelessness.

It is so ironic and tragic that a veteran with a homeless father is the young man charged with brutally stabbing to death four homeless Americans.

Talk about dispelling stereotypes.

Photo credit: Sam Portillo

Shortly before his assassination, Dr. King turned his attention to highlighting endemic causes of poverty beyond racism, such as persistent unemployment and low-paying jobs that failed to pay living wages. He also noted that more whites lived in poverty and received public benefits than any other racial group, a historical fact that is still true today.

In the year 2012, with a bi-racial president and supposedly democratizing technologies, there is no denying that racism still plays a role in our society. Indeed, blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to be poor than people of other races. However, the fact that poverty impacts people of all races is undeniable. And while it is a cause many of us have dedicated ourselves to, our intentions thus far exceed our results.

Every now and then I see people debating whether we should focus on racial disparities, or if instead we should turn our attention to the larger enemy of poverty. As someone who has not been the victim of racism or poverty, I don’t think I am in a position to say that one is necessarily worse than the other. Indeed, while I am all for the use of metrics to improve the effectiveness of social outcomes, I do not find it productive to compare which is the worse of two evils.

Neither was Dr. King, which was the brilliance of his anti-poverty message. The data is clear that racial minorities are at a greater risk of poverty. That was true in the 1960s and it is true today. But while minorities are at a greater risk, there are significantly more whites living in poverty and receiving public benefits than any other racial group.

And while poverty is not color-blind, it is equally unforgiving to all its victims. So, can we think about poverty irrespective of race? I don’t think so. There is just too much evidence suggesting a strong link between poverty status and race. But race is not the only predictor of poverty, far from it.

As we move forward in our work, we need to be mindful of the racial elements of poverty – but to accept as Dr. King did, that there are factors beyond racism that affect people regardless of race. Whether one’s focus is on improving educational opportunities for all children or breaking down racial stereotypes that create barriers to employment, we are all working toward the same vision of a word free of poverty and full of mutual respect.

Photo credit: US Embassy New Delhi

As I’ve mentioned before, TANF is overdue for reauthorization, i.e., a thoroughgoing review and revision of the law that allows the federal government to spend money on the program and establishes its basic rules.

The Women for Economic Justice coalition organized the Hill briefing in part to change the “narrative” about single moms — this, I infer, because a fact-based view of their needs, ambitions and potential could lead to a better law than the one that’s been shredding the safety net since 1996.

If the five women who spoke can’t do it, I can’t imagine who could.

Stories of personal hardships — and mistakes — overcome by courage, smarts, energy and fierce determination to make life better for themselves and their children.

I’d expected them to address various issues often raised about TANF — woefully insufficient cash benefits, arbitrary sanctions, time limits, pressure to immediately get a job — any job, no matter how bad the fit and the pay.

And, indeed, we heard about some of these. But we heard most about educational opportunity — in some cases, how TANF had made higher education possible, in others how it thwarted college ambitions.

Magali, for example, was brought to the U.S. from Mexico when she was ten. She started working at thirteen because her mother couldn’t make enough to support them.

She married a man she thought was her “prince,” but found out was a life-threatening “monster.” For a long time, she felt she “had to keep quiet” because she depended on him for everything, including her tenuous immigration status.

But she ultimately fled with her children and wound up on TANF.

Given the opportunity, she passed the GED tests in a month. Then her local agency let her go to a community college rather than take a low-paying job — “gave her wings,” she said. Now she’s completing a degree at UCLA.

Rasheeda almost dropped out of high school after giving birth to her daughter. But she graduated with honors and went on to Temple University, where she completed a bachelors degree (with high honors) in three years and then a law degree.

With promise like that, it’s not surprising that she got scholarships and grants. The university provided housing for both her and her child. But without TANF cash assistance, she wouldn’t have had enough for their other basic living expenses.

Now she’s an attorney at a nonprofit legal services organization, where she represents and counsels low-income child care providers, “thereby increasing their economic stability and creating resources in the community” for low-income parents.

These are clearly exceptional women. And they seem to have had exceptionally good luck with TANF. Chalk this up partly to their state programs and partly, I would guess, to their caseworkers.

But we need to understand that the federal law severely restricts access to higher education and creates unique hurdles for those permitted to enroll.

Mary referred to some of them when she talked about her current experience with TANF.

She’d enrolled in the program when her first child was born, but then spent many years independently supporting herself and her family.

She returned to TANF fairly recently — one of the millions fired when the recession set in.

She wants to go back to school, thinking that a college education will improve her prospects in the job market. But TANF, she says, “allows only certain tracks.”

Specifically, she can enroll only in a program that qualifies as vocational education — unless, of course, she wants to pursue her studies while also putting in 30 hours a week in approved work-related activities.

Even with this restriction, she may or may not get work-activity credit for coursework. Under federal law, states can grant such credit to no more than 30% of their TANF participants — and then for only one year.

After that, studies can count for only part of a participant’s obligation. So Mary will have to put in 20 hours a week on other work activities — in addition to the time she’ll spend in classes and all but a fraction of  “unsupervised” homework.

This, of course, assumes she can get subsidized child care. Torrie was told she couldn’t if college was what she had in mind.

TANF is supposed to “end the dependency of needy parents.” Everything we know about the labor market tells us that postsecondary education is the best bet for doing that.

What sense does it make to impose artificial limits on college access? What sense to make successful completion more difficult for TANF parents than their better-off peers?

Questions one hopes our federal policymakers will ponder. And they might if they’d just get out of their ideological boxes and listen to real “welfare” moms.

Photo credit: House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats