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Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 19:44:45 2019 Homelessness at an all-time high in Los AngelesCBS Evening News Homelessness is at an all-time high in Los Angeles, affecting nearly every neighborhood. The factor is the high cost of living. Jamie Yuccas reports. |
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Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by cortelyounext on Mon Sep 30 19:49:11 2019, in response to Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 19:44:45 2019. I was in Riverside last week. There are a lot of homeless out there. |
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Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 20:00:09 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by cortelyounext on Mon Sep 30 19:49:11 2019. we see them all over the lacmta blue line everywhere:( :( |
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Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by BILLBKLYN on Mon Sep 30 20:04:13 2019, in response to Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 19:44:45 2019. It's Reagan's fault that these drug-addled 20 and 30-somethings are homeless!! |
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Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 20:13:24 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by BILLBKLYN on Mon Sep 30 20:04:13 2019. YOUR HERO REAGAN CUT ALL SOCIAL PROGRAMS THAT HELPED POOR HUNGRY ANDHOMELESS PEOPLE !! The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent onald Reagan used a recession as an excuse to cut spending on social services –– like the safety net that existed since the Great Depression. At Christmastime 1982, fed-up religious leaders called a press conference. The Rev. Paul Moore, New York City's Episcopal bishop, was furious. Standing next to Methodist and Catholic bishops, a rabbi and a Muslim, Moore laid into the source of his ire: President Ronald Reagan. At the time, there were 36,000 homeless people on New York's streets, a scene repeated in cities across the country, including San Francisco. But this new wave of needy was different. Instead of the single men with drinking problems who'd populated the hotels and alleys of South of Market after World War II, there were factory and office workers who had lost their jobs in the recent global recession slumped in doorways next to Vietnam War veterans. There were women, children, families. During a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1981, his first year in office, the new president — who would use the recession as an excuse to cut taxes and slash government spending to spark growth, the infamous “Reaganomics” — presented a solution to homelessness, an issue seen at the time as a temporary problem that would soon cycle itself away, just as it had several times before. In classic small-government fashion, Reagan's fix did not involve government. If only “every church and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families” each, the president said, the problem could be weathered until it passed. It was a truly conservative approach, reminiscent of how homelessness was addressed in the 19th century. And it was “absolute balderdash,” said the Rev. Moore, according to a Dec. 25, 1982 United Press International wire story picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. The responsibility for dealing with homelessness wasn't the church's — it was the state's, the bishop said, just as it had been since the Great Depression. “Housing the homeless and feeding the hungry is the responsibility of the public sector,” he said. “They should have a permanent policy whereby homeless persons would have a place to live.” People like then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch needed to stand up to people like Reagan and demand more help. After all, cities received the bulk of the money used for social programs like housing and welfare from the federal government. “Don't shirk your responsibility,” said Moore, addressing both the president and mayor. Faced with a glut of poor people huddled on the streets with nowhere to live and nowhere to go — many of them war veterans, others unemployed workers struggling to adapt to a changing labor market that no longer needed their skills — city leaders in Chicago decided to take action. They would keep a “large building heated through the night to house the homeless poor,” according to headlines printed in newspapers across the country, including the San Francisco Chronicle, whose readers were also living in one of the great waves of homelessness in American history. That was in 1869. To better understand why people are experiencing homelessness today and why solutions have been so hard to come by, it's worthwhile to look at what put them there — and why other periods of homelessness in America eventually ended. Tramps, vagabonds, hobos: whatever you call them, people without stable living situations have appeared in waves several times in American history. During the Revolutionary War, it was itinerant workers, the “wandering poor” of an agricultural society reliant on worker mobility. Before the Civil War, it was unemployed mill workers, dockworkers, and miners, displaced by business cycles or changes in society caused by the introduction of a rail line or telegraph station. After the Civil War, when a credit-fueled railroad boom went bust, breaking banks and killing jobs — the “Panic of 1873,” capitalism's first major worldwide economic downturn, known as the “Great Depression” until the bigger Great Depression in the 1930s — it was freed slaves and veterans, whose wartime habits of foraging (or sometimes pillaging) the countryside for food and provisions introduced the words “tramp” and “bum” to the lexicon. During the Great Depression, with unemployment at 25 percent and large swaths of agricultural land turned to literal dust by a combination of drought and over-farming, as many as 5 percent of Americans were homeless. Almost always, it was temporary. As soon as the economy recovered, homeless people recovered, too. They went back inside and resumed normal lives. In the meantime, there was a safety net. For colonial Americans living under English tradition, the community or local parish was responsible for poor residents. In the 19th century, religious and other charitable organizations offered almshouses where lodging and food were available in return for work. During the Great Depression, with one-quarter of cities offering no homeless services, responsibility shifted to the federal government, which provided job training, education, food, and housing. Thirty-six years after the Rev. Moore called out President Reagan at Christmastime in 1982, there are now more than 60,000 homeless people in New York City. That's more per capita than any other city in America except San Francisco, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By the time Reagan took office, HUD was the main federal agency that offered housing and other programs aimed at helping poor and working-class people. And beginning under Reagan but continuing with the next three presidents, HUD would see its funding reduced. By the time George W. Bush took office, it had been slashed almost 60 percent. Reagan — who famously could not recognize Samuel Pierce, his own HUD secretary, and failed to recognize and halt a scandal in which HUD money was funneled to Republican consultants rather than building and repairing low-income-housing — didn't shirk his responsibility. He abdicated it, a wholesale abandonment that signaled the near-end of the federal government's role in managing homelessness and housing policies, a legacy carried on by every American president since. “Homelessness has been a persistent and enduring feature in American history,” wrote retired HUD researcher Walter Leginski in 2007. “While there have been temporary lulls, from colonial times forward there has been no period of American history free of homelessness.” [page] But unlike in other eras, “the contemporary wave of homelessness has not subsided during good economic times.” In San Francisco, unemployment stands at a near-record low of 3.1 percent, yet there are officially more than 3,505 people living on the street — more than at any other time over the past 10 years, including during the height of the Great Recession. (Prior to the subprime crisis, when 20 percent of properties in foreclosure were rental properties, more than 1 million of the country's 2.5 million to 3.5 million homeless were employed. (There are almost certainly many more. Homeless counts are notoriously inaccurate. The city's “official” count of 7,539 homeless people in 2015, for example, counted only 853 youths at a time when San Francisco public schools reported over 2,300 homeless children in school. This is because the federal definition of homeless does not include people living in hotel rooms or doubling up with friends or family. Nationally, in 2015, homeless counts found 222,197 homeless households with at least one child, while the Department of Education reported 1.2 million homeless children in schools. ) The divestment that began under Reagan can help explain why what was once a cyclical phenomenon, in tune with the boom-and-bust of the nation's economy, is now a permanent urban fixture — which, in the years since the subprime meltdown turned swaths of suburbia into ghost towns, has spread out of cities. Under Reagan, federal spending on subsidized housing — including state-owned public housing, in which the poor and working class can live for a set percentage of what income they have; and housing vouchers, in which the government helps close the gap between the cost of housing and a person's ability to pay — dropped from $26 billion to $8 billion, barely enough to maintain the government's existing stock of public units. As much a champion of conservatives as he is nemesis and near-Antichrist for liberals, Reagan's influence is seen in every tent encampment in San Francisco. “Every park bench in America — everywhere a homeless person sleeps — should have Ronald Reagan's name on it,” says Peter Dreier, an urban policy analyst and the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles. But Reagan is not solely to blame. Other American presidents are at fault — in fact, everyone who has come since. As with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other nations around the world have signed onto international treaties that declare housing a basic human right. And as with widely agreed upon commitments to cut pollution like the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has never ratified the international treaties guaranteeing its citizens a right to housing, which is still in most places in America a barely regulated commodity. It's also in short supply, making low-income residents' hold on it even more tenuous. Bevan Dufty was San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's first homeless czar, a post he held from January 2012 until late last year. At first, most of the homeless people Dufty met were the “chronically homeless” — the kind of people who had been on the streets for years. Toward the end, “you saw everything,” he said. “I met people who had lost their apartment within the last two to three months.” The one factor in common, however, was a traumatic event: a bad illness, a relationship ending, loss of a job, an eviction, or being the victim of a violent crime (domestic violence survivors, for example, suffer higher rates of homelessness). “Something happened, and there wasn't a safety net,” Dufty said. Beginning in the Great Depression, Americans looked to the federal government for that safety net. And for most of the 20th century, federal assistance wasn't only for poor people; it created wealth and gave a foundation for a middle class. After World War II, eight out of 10 American men were eligible for no-money-down home loans from the Federal Housing Administration under the G.I. Bill. Forty percent of all mortgages issued in 1946 and 1947 went to veterans. There was clear racial discrimination — white veterans received more housing mortgages than black veterans, who were subjected to racially motivated tactics such as redlining. But if the lasting legacy for veterans of the War on Terror is PTSD, for their grandfathers coming home victorious from Europe and the Pacific, it was a house. Those unable to purchase their own home could still rely on the government to help house them. Construction of public housing boomed in America following World War II, and was used by working-class individuals and families on their way to the middle class. (Mayor Lee lived in public housing in Seattle; as one of six children raised by a single mother, it's not inconceivable for someone in that situation today to end up homeless.) Never perfect, public housing has been all but orphaned by the government. Today, there are about 1.2 million units of public housing in the United States, far less than the U.K. and France, where the state owns 11 percent and 16 percent of the total housing stock, respectively. In 1976, the year Reagan first ran for president, the outgoing administration of President Gerald Ford asked Congress to fund 506,000 new low-income housing units, including 400,000 rent vouchers to pay for privately owned housing in the Section 8 program. That was the high-water mark for federal assistance. Under Reagan, funding for new subsidies dipped below 100,000 units per year. By the time President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, fewer than 9,000 units were funded. Federal funding has since recovered, but the timing of the cuts coming during the current homeless crisis's beginnings could not have been worse. “If we had provided 500,000 additional low-income units every year since 1976, we would now have about 14 million families living in federally assisted low-income housing,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote in 2002. “But we moved in the opposite direction, and so now there are still more very-low-income renter households with 'worst case' housing needs than there are families living in federally subsidized, low-income housing.” [page] This is strongly felt in San Francisco, where local government has adapted to the Reagan-inspired federal exit from housing by handing over operation of public housing to nonprofit housing providers. (In the past few years, nonprofits like John Stewart Company, which manages the former military housing in the Presidio, has taken over management of once-notorious housing projects like the rebuilt Hunters View; other dilapidated public housing projects, like Sunnydale in Visitacion Valley, are still waiting for private investors to fund a rebuild before nonprofits take over.) The demand is clearly here — and it will never be met. In early 2015, homeless families were given the opportunity to sign up for the chance at a public housing unit, the first time in six years the wait list for public housing in San Francisco was opened up. More than 10,000 families signed up for a chance at one of fewer than 200 units. The wait list for a Section 8 voucher, which a low-income tenant can use to cover the growing difference between his or her means and market rate rents, is even longer. “We had 9,000 Section 8 vouchers,” Dufty says. “That's the same number we had 15 to 20 years ago. There's been no expansion of it.” With the federal government's safety net disappearing, local governments are tasked with filling in the gaps with far fewer resources — and not just for housing. With Reagan-admiring Republicans in Congress, federal money for other infrastructure like transportation has vanished, forcing vital regional resources like BART to turn to local voters to ask for tax increases to fund routine maintenance. To his credit, Mayor Lee announced a plan to build or fix up 10,000 affordable housing units by 2020. That's something. But more than half of those are the old public housing units virtually abandoned by the federal government — nearly all of which already have tenants. During his State of the Union address in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a “Second Bill of Rights,” which included the “right of every American to a decent home.” Roosevelt died in office the following year, but in the post-World War II era of unity that saw the formation of the United Nations, his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, saw housing included as a basic human right alongside food, clothing, and medical care in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. America's recognition of that right appears to have died along with FDR — a true example of American exceptionalism in a world that has repeatedly affirmed housing as a basic right alongside food and medical care. A later UN declaration in 1966, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, codified this. The UN's member nations — including the U.S., a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the UN's host nation — signed an agreement that “recognize[d] the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family,” including housing. Though the U.S. signed the treaty, the Senate never ratified it, making America one of only two UN member states to fail to ratify, along with Thailand. The U.S. has either failed to sign or failed to ratify at least six other international treaties in which housing was declared a human right. Other nations have taken notice and tried to get our attention. In 2006, the government's response to the housing disaster in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina elicited comparisons to apartheid South Africa. When given the opportunity in 2009, Shaun Donovan, President Barack Obama's former HUD secretary, shied away from declaring housing a human right. In 2010, the UN Human Rights Council subjected the U.S. government to a first-ever review. UN envoys heard testimony across the country, and housing was the “No. 1 human rights issue” mentioned, according to the State Department. Despite the testimony and the obvious gap between housing stock and population in the country, the U.S.'s official report to the Human Rights Council “carefully sidestep[ped] naming housing and other economic and social rights as rights,” the National Law Center on Housing and Poverty found. Roosevelt's speech was cited, but the housing element was ignored. That same year, Obama released the first-ever federal “Strategic Plan to End Homelessness” — which contained no action plan and no funding. The safety net was gone, and with a modest tweak to health care barely surviving a Republican-controlled Congress, it is never coming back. Reagan's reputation as the Great Communicator extended beyond his telegenic speeches and movie star good looks. His team was responsible for the “Morning in America” political ad campaign, possibly the most famous re-election spots in the country's history. The commercials depicted an idealized America full of flag-raising workers with nothing but opportunity in front of them. The first scene in the commercial is of a fishing boat bobbing in San Francisco Bay at dawn. In reality at the time, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein was a harsh critic of Reagan. She laid the blame for the Bay Area's growing homeless population — 20,000 people across five counties at that time — squarely at his feet. “When it started, it was looked at as an emergency phenomena, something that was going to pass … a phenomenon of high unemployment and families that weren't able to maintain a house and a car payment,” Feinstein told the Chronicle in 1987. “It's emerged into a whole subculture. A potpourri of many different things. Everything from frail elderly to drug abusers to alcoholics to women with children to single men to AIDS victims to the mentally ill … and that's a direct result of Ronald Reagan's policies.” If the federal government had responded to the most-recent homeless crisis with more housing or more funding rather than less, San Francisco might look more like Utah. That state cut its population of “chronically homeless” — someone without a home for lengthy periods of time — by more than half simply by giving them housing. [page] Instead, Reagan took it away — and then engaged in character assassination. In early 1984, the year he was re-elected in a landslide, Reagan appeared on Good Morning America to defend his record. The “people who are sleeping on the grates … the homeless … are homeless, you might say, by choice,” Reagan said. They — not him — were to blame for their own situation. This was Reagan's other lasting legacy. While continuing his budget policies, other politicians also followed his formula of blaming and demonizing the homeless for their situation, even in San Francisco. In 1991, when Mayor Art Agnos was unseated by former police Chief Frank Jordan, Agnos' “main criticism … is that he has been too kind to the homeless, not forcing them from parks as other cities have done and urging restraint on the police department,” The New York Times reported that year. Jordan was elected, and police started cracking down on the homeless, driving them from the temporary encampment Agnos allowed in front of City Hall. Other quality-of-life laws targeting homeless behavior followed. In 2010, midway through Mayor Gavin Newsom's vaunted 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, voters approved a new law outlawing lying or sitting on sidewalks. San Francisco police now spend $18.5 million a year responding to over 50,000 911 calls and other demands for service from the public directly related to homelessness. This fall, local politicians — including Supervisor Mark Farrell, a 2019 mayoral hopeful, and state Senate hopeful Supervisor Scott Wiener — will ask voters to approve a law giving police the ability to clear a tent encampment within 24 hours. Reagan, were he alive, would surely approve. He would definitely recognize the landscape. It's just as he left it. |
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Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 20:15:32 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by BILLBKLYN on Mon Sep 30 20:04:13 2019. Ronald Reagan's shameful legacy: Violence, the homeless, mental illnessAs president and governor of California, the GOP icon led the worst policies on mental illness in generations Excerpted from "American Psychosis" In November 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan overwhelmingly defeated Jimmy Carter, who received less than 42% of the popular vote, for president. Republicans took control of the Senate (53 to 46), the first time they had dominated either chamber since 1954. Although the House remained under Democratic control (243 to 192), their margin was actually much slimmer, because many southern “boll weevil” Democrats voted with the Republicans. One month prior to the election, President Carter had signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which had proposed to continue the federal community mental health centers program, although with some additional state involvement. Consistent with the report of the Carter Commission, the act also included a provision for federal grants “for projects for the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of positive mental health,” an indication of how little learning had taken place among the Carter Commission members and professionals at NIMH. With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states. The CMHC program had not only died but been buried as well. An autopsy could have listed the cause of death as naiveté complicated by grandiosity. President Reagan never understood mental illness. Like Richard Nixon, he was a product of the Southern California culture that associated psychiatry with Communism. Two months after taking office, Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, a young man with untreated schizophrenia. Two years later, Reagan called Dr. Roger Peele, then director of St. Elizabeths Hospital, where Hinckley was being treated, and tried to arrange to meet with Hinckley, so that Reagan could forgive him. Peele tactfully told the president that this was not a good idea. Reagan was also exposed to the consequences of untreated mental illness through the two sons of Roy Miller, his personal tax advisor. Both sons developed schizophrenia; one committed suicide in 1981, and the other killed his mother in 1983. Despite such personal exposure, Reagan never exhibited any interest in the need for research or better treatment for serious mental illness. * * * California has traditionally been on the cutting edge of American cultural developments, with Anaheim and Modesto experiencing changes before Atlanta and Moline. This was also true in the exodus of patients from state psychiatric hospitals. Beginning in the late 1950s, California became the national leader in aggressively moving patients from state hospitals to nursing homes and board-and-care homes, known in other states by names such as group homes, boarding homes, adult care homes, family care homes, assisted living facilities, community residential facilities, adult foster homes, transitional living facilities, and residential care facilities. Hospital wards closed as the patients left. By the time Ronald Reagan assumed the governorship in 1967, California had already deinstitutionalized more than half of its state hospital patients. That same year, California passed the landmark Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act, which virtually abolished involuntary hospitalization except in extreme cases. Thus, by the early 1970s California had moved most mentally ill patients out of its state hospitals and, by passing LPS, had made it very difficult to get them back into a hospital if they relapsed and needed additional care. California thus became a canary in the coal mine of deinstitutionalization. 00:00/01:12 The results were quickly apparent. As early as 1969, a study of California board-and-care homes described them as follows: These facilities are in most respects like small long-term state hospital wards isolated from the community. One is overcome by the depressing atmosphere. . . . They maximize the state-hospital-like atmosphere. . . . The operator is being paid by the head, rather than being rewarded for rehabilitation efforts for her “guests.” The study was done by Richard Lamb, a young psychiatrist working for San Mateo County; in the intervening years, he has continued to be the leading American psychiatrist pointing out the failures of deinstitutionalization. By 1975 board-and-care homes had become big business in California. In Los Angeles alone, there were “approximately 11,000 ex-state-hospital patients living in board-and-care facilities.” Many of these homes were owned by for-profit chains, such as Beverly Enterprises, which owned 38 homes. Many homes were regarded by their owners “solely as a business, squeezing excessive profits out of it at the expense of residents.” Five members of Beverly Enterprises’ board of directors had ties to Governor Reagan; the chairman was vice chairman of a Reagan fundraising dinner, and “four others were either politically active in one or both of the Reagan [gubernatorial] campaigns and/or contributed large or undisclosed sums of money to the campaign.” Financial ties between the governor, who was emptying state hospitals, and business persons who were profiting from the process would also soon become apparent in other states. Many of the board-and-care homes in California, as elsewhere, were clustered in city areas that were rundown and thus had low rents. In San Jose, for example, approximately 1,800 patients discharged from nearby Agnews State Hospital were placed in homes clustered near the campus of San Jose State University. As early as 1971 the local newspaper decried this “mass invasion of mental patients.” Some patients left their board-and-care homes because of the poor living conditions, whereas others were evicted when the symptoms of their illness recurred because they were not receiving medication, but both scenarios resulted in homelessness. By 1973 the San Jose area was described as having “discharged patients...living in skid row...wandering aimlessly in the streets . . . a ghetto for the mentally ill and mentally retarded.” Similar communities were becoming visible in other California cities as well as in New York. In Long Beach on Long Island, old motels and hotels were filled with patients discharged from nearly Creedmore and Pilgrim State Hospitals. By 1973, community residents were complaining that their town was becoming a psychiatric ghetto; at the local Catholic church, patients were said to “have urinated on the floor during Mass and eaten the altar flowers.” The Long Beach City Council therefore passed an ordinance requiring patients to take their prescribed medication as a condition for living there. Predictably, the New York Civil Liberties Union immediately challenged the ordinance as being unconstitutional, and it was so ruled. By this time, there were about 5,000 board-and-care homes in New York City, some with as many as 285 beds and with up to 85% of their residents having been discharged from the state hospitals. As one New York psychiatrist summarized the situation: “The chronic mentally ill patient has had his locus of living and care transferred from a single lousy institution to multiple wretched ones.” California was the first state to witness not only an increase in homelessness associated with deinstitutionalization but also an increase in incarceration and episodes of violence. In 1972 Marc Abramson, another young psychiatrist working for San Mateo County, published a landmark paper entitled “The Criminalization of Mentally Disordered Behavior.” Abramson claimed that because the new LPS statute made it difficult to get patients admitted to a psychiatric hospital, police “regard arrest and booking into jail as a more reliable way of securing involuntary detention of mentally disordered persons.” Abramson quoted a California prison psychiatrist who claimed to be “literally drowning in patients. . . . Many more men are being sent to prison who have serious mental problems.” Abramson’s paper was the first clear description of the increase of mentally ill persons in jails and prisons, an increase that would grow markedly in subsequent years. By the mid-1970s, studies in some states suggested that about 5% of jail inmates were seriously mentally ill. A study of five California county jails reported that 6.7% of the inmates were psychotic. A study of the Denver County Jail reported that 5% of prisoners had a “functional psychosis.” Such figures contrasted with studies from the 1930s that had reported less than 2% of jail inmates as being seriously mentally ill. In 1973 the jail in Santa Clara County, which included San Jose, “created a special ward...to house just the individuals who have such a mental condition”; this was apparently the first county jail to create a special mental illness unit. Given the increasing number of seriously mentally ill individuals living in the community in California by the mid-1970s, it is not surprising to find that they were impacting the tasks of police officers. A study of 301 patients discharged from Napa State Hospital between 1972 and 1975 found that 41% of them had been arrested. According to the study, “patients who entered the hospital without a criminal record were subsequently arrested about three times as often as the average citizen.” Significantly, the majority of these patients had received no aftercare following their hospital discharge. By this time, police in other states were also beginning to feel the burden of the discharged, but often untreated, mentally ill individuals. In suburban Philadelphia, for example, “mental-illness-related incidents increased 227.6% from 1975 to 1979, whereas felonies increased only 5.6%.” Of all the omens of deinstitutionalization’s failure on exhibit in 1970s California, the most frightening were homicides and other episodes of violence committed by mentally ill individuals who were not being treated. 1970: John Frazier, responding to the voice of God, killed a prominent surgeon and his wife, two young sons, and secretary. Frazier’s mother and wife had sought unsuccessfully to have him hospitalized. 1972: Herbert Mullin, responding to auditory hallucinations, killed 13 people over 3 months. He had been hospitalized three times but released without further treatment. 1973: Charles Soper killed his wife, three children, and himself 2 weeks after having been discharged from a state hospital. 1973: Edmund Kemper killed his mother and her friend and was charged with killing six others. Eight years earlier, he had killed his grandparents because “he tired of their company,” but at age 21 years had been released from the state hospital without further treatment. 1977: Edward Allaway, believing that people were trying to hurt him, killed seven people at Cal State Fullerton. Five years earlier, he had been hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia but released without further treatment. Such homicides were widely publicized. Many people perceived the tragedies as being linked to California’s efforts to shut its state hospitals and to the new LPS law, which made involuntary treatment virtually impossible. The foreman of the jury that convicted Herbert Mullin of the murders for which he was charged reflected the sentiments of many when he publicly stated: I hold the state executive and state legislative offices as responsible for these ten lives as I do the defendant himself—none of this need ever have happened....In recent years, mental hospitals all over this state have been closed down in an economy move by the Reagan administration. Where do you think these . . . patients went after their release? . . . The closing of our mental hospitals is, in my opinion, insanity itself. In response to queries about the homicides, the California Department of Mental Health had its deputy director, Dr. Andrew Robertson, testify before a state legislative inquiry in 1973. His testimony must rank among the all-time least successful attempts by a public official to reassure the public: It [LPS] has exposed us as a society to some dangerous people; no need to argue about that. People whom we have released have gone out and killed other people, maimed other people, destroyed property; they have done many things of an evil nature without their ability to stop and many of them have immediately thereafter killed themselves. That sounds bad, but let’s qualify it. . . . the odds are still in society’s favor, even if it doesn’t make patients innocent or the guy who is hurt or killed feel any better. 1980s: THE PROBLEMS BECOME NATIONAL Until the 1980s, most people in the United States were unaware that the deinstitutionalization of patients from state mental hospitals was going terribly wrong. Some were aware that homicides and other untoward things were happening in California, but such things were to be expected, because it was, after all, California. President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health issued its 1978 report and recommended doing more of the same things—more CMHCs, more prevention of mental illness, and more federal spending. The report gave no indication of a pending crisis. The majority of patients who had been discharged from state hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s had gone to their own homes, nursing homes, or board-and-care homes; they were, therefore, out of sight and out of mind. In the 1980s, this all changed. Deinstitutionalization became, for the first time, a topic of national concern. The beginning of the discussion was heralded by a 1981 editorial in the New York Times that labeled deinstitutionalization “a cruel embarrassment, a reform gone terribly wrong.” Three years later, the paper added: “The policy that led to the release of most of the nation’s mentally ill patients from the hospital to the community is now widely regarded as a major failure.” During the following decade, there were increasing concerns publicly expressed about mentally ill individuals in nursing homes, board-and-care homes, and jails and prisons. There were also periodic headlines announcing additional high-profile homicides committed by individuals who were clearly psychotic. But the one issue that took center stage in the 1980s, and directed public attention to deinstitutionalization, was the problem of mentally ill homeless persons. During the 1980s, an additional 40,000 beds in state mental hospitals were shut down. The patients being sent to community facilities were no longer those who were moderately well-functioning or elderly; rather, they included the more difficult, chronic patients from the hospitals’ back wards. These patients were often younger than patients previously discharged, less likely to respond to medication, and less likely to be aware of their need for medication. In 1988 the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) issued estimates of where patients with chronic mental illness were living. Approximately 120,000 were said to be still hospitalized; 381,000 were in nursing homes; between 175,000 and 300,000 were living in board-and-care homes; and between 125,000 and 300,000 were thought to be homeless. These broad estimates for those living in board-and-care homes and on the streets suggested that neither NIMH nor anyone else really knew how many there were. Abuse of mentally ill persons in nursing homes had originally come to public attention during 1974 hearings of the Senate Committee on Aging. Those hearings had described nursing homes actually bidding on patients in attempts to get those who were most easily managed; bounties of $100 paid by nursing homes to hospital psychiatrists for every patient sent to them; and exorbitant profits for the nursing homes. As a consequence of such hearings and a 1986 study of nursing homes by the Institute of Medicine, Congress passed legislation in 1987 requiring all Medicaid-funded nursing homes to screen new admissions to keep out patients who did not qualify for admission because they did not require skilled nursing care. Follow-up studies indicated that the screening mandate had little effect on admission policies or abuses. Abuse of mentally ill persons in board-and-care homes also periodically surfaced at this time: 1982: “Nine ragged, emaciated adults” were found in an unlicensed home for mentally ill individuals in Jackson, Mississippi. They were living in a 10-by-10 foot building with “no toilet or running water, only a plastic bucket to collect body wastes. A hose and faucet outside the building were used for washing. There were two mattresses on the concrete floor and a single cot in the room.” There were also “two vicious dogs chained outside the room.” 1984: Seven “former patients” died in a fire in a “rooming house” in Worcester, Massachusetts. “The report released this week said officials of Worcester State Hospital who referred the former patients to the rooming house had been warned by community health workers that the privately owned house was not safe.” Sociologist Andrew Scull in 1981 summarized the economics of the board-and-care industry: “The logic of the marketplace suffices to ensure that the operators have every incentive to warehouse their charges as cheaply as possible, since the volume of profit is inversely proportional to the amount expended on the inmates.” In addition, because many board-and-care homes were in crime-ridden neighborhoods, mentally ill individuals living in them were often victimized when they went outside. A 1984 study of 278 patients living in board-and-care homes in Los Angeles reported that one-third “reported being robbed and/or assaulted during the preceding year.” The problems of mentally ill individuals in nursing homes and board-and-care homes rarely elicited media attention in the 1980s. By contrast, the problem of homeless persons, including the mentally ill homeless, became a major story. In Washington, Mitch Snyder and the National Coalition for the Homeless burst onto the national scene by staging hunger strikes and sleep-ins on sidewalk grates. Their message was that homeless persons are just like you and me and all they need is a house and a job. Snyder challenged President Reagan, accusing him of being the main cause of homelessness, and the media extensively covered the controversy. By the time Snyder committed suicide in 1990, homelessness had become a major topic of national discussion. Despite the claims of homeless advocates, media attention directed to homeless persons made it increasingly clear that many of them were, in fact, seriously mentally ill. In 1981, Life magazine ran a story titled “Emptying the Madhouse: The Mentally Ill Have Become Our Cities’ Lost Souls.” In 1982, Rebecca Smith froze to death in a cardboard box on the streets of New York; the media focused on her death because it was said that she had been valedictorian of her college class before becoming mentally ill. In 1983, the media covered the story of Lionel Aldridge, the former all-pro linebacker for the Green Bay Packers; after developing schizophrenia, he had been homeless for several years on the streets of Milwaukee. In 1984, a study from Boston reported that 38% of homeless persons in Boston were seriously mentally ill. The report was titled “Is Homelessness a Mental Health Problem?” and confirmed what people were increasingly beginning to suspect—that many homeless persons had previously been patients in the state mental hospitals. By the mid-1980s, a consensus had emerged that the total number of homeless persons was increasing. The possible reasons for this increase became a political football, but the failure of the mental health system was one option widely discussed. A 1985 report from Los Angeles estimated that 30% to 50% of homeless persons were seriously mentally ill and were being seen in “ever increasing numbers.” The study concluded that this was “in part the product of the deinstitutionalization movement....The ‘Streets’ have become ‘The Asylums’ of the 80s.” The appearance of Joyce Brown on the streets of New York in 1986 added a new dimension to the national dialogue. Prior to taking up residence on a steam grate at the corner of East 65th Street and Second Avenue, Brown had worked for 10 years as a secretary. She had then become mentally ill, was hospitalized, and discharged. While living on the street, Brown was observed urinating on the sidewalk, defecating in the gutter, tearing up money given to her by passersby, and running into traffic. New York mayor Ed Koch ordered her to be involuntarily hospitalized, well aware that the Civil Liberties Union’s lawyers would contest the case. Koch’s statement reflected the sentiments of many: “If the crazies want to sue me, they have every right to sue, and by crazies I’m . . . talking about those who say, ‘No, you have no right to intervene to help.’ ” The civil liberty lawyers prevailed, and the civil right to be both psychotic and homeless thus added another legal wrinkle to the ongoing homeless debate. By the end of the 1980s, the origins of the increasing number of mentally ill homeless persons had become abundantly clear. A study of 187 patients discharged from Metropolitan State Hospital in Massachusetts reported that 27% had become homeless. A study of 132 patients discharged from Columbus State Hospital in Ohio reported that 36% had become homeless. In 1989, when a San Francisco television station wished to advertise its series on homelessness, it put up posters around the city saying, “You are now walking though America’s newest mental institution.” Psychiatrist Richard Lamb added: “Probably nothing more graphically illustrates the problems of deinstitutionalization than the shameful and incredible phenomenon of the homeless mentally ill.” * * * At the same time that mentally ill homeless persons were becoming an object of national concern during the 1980s, the number of mentally ill persons in jails and prisons was also increasing. A 1989 review of available studies concluded that “the prevalence rates for major psychiatric disorders . . . [in jails and prisons] have increased slowly and gradually in the last 20 years and will probably continue to increase.” Various studies reported rates ranging from 6% (Virginia) and 8% (New York) to 10% (Oklahoma and California) and 11% (Michigan and Pennsylvania). By 1990, a national survey concluded: Given all the data, it seems reasonable to conclude that approximately 10 percent of inmates in prisons and jails, or approximately 100,000 individuals, suffer from schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis [bipolar disorder]. This 10% estimate contrasted with the 5% prevalence rate that had been widely cited a decade earlier. Amid the various studies, disturbing trends were evident. Among 132 patients discharged from Columbus State Hospital in Ohio, 17% were arrested within 6 months. In California, seriously mentally ill individuals with a history of past violence, including armed robbery and murder, were being discharged from mental hospitals without any planned aftercare. In Colorado in 1984, George Wooton, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was booked into the Denver County Jail for the hundredth time; he would be the first prominent member of a group that would become widely known as “frequent flyers.” In several states the bizarre behavior of mentally ill inmates was also becoming problematic for jail personnel; in Montana a man “tried to drown himself in the jail toilet,” and in California inmates tried to escape “by smearing themselves with their own feces and flushing themselves down the toilet.” To make matters worse, civil liberties lawyers frequently defended the rights of mentally ill prisoners to refuse medication and remain psychotic. At a 1985 commitment hearing in Wisconsin, for example, a public defender argued that his jailed mentally ill client, who had been observed eating his feces, “was in no imminent danger of physical injury or dying” and should therefore be released; the judge agreed. As more and more mentally ill individuals entered the criminal justice system in the 1980s, local police and sheriffs’ departments were increasingly affected. In New York City, calls associated with “emotionally disturbed persons,” referred to as “EDPs,” increased from 20,843 in 1980 to 46,845 in 1988, and “experts say similar increases have occurred in other large cities.” Many such calls required major deployments of police resources. The rescue of a mentally ill man from the top of a tower on Staten Island, for example, “required at least 20 police officers and supervisors, half a dozen emergency vehicles, several highway units and a helicopter.” In an attempt to deal with these psychiatric emergencies, the police department in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1988 created the first specially trained police Crisis Intervention Team, or CIT, as it would become known as it was replicated in other cities. * * * Finally, the 1980s witnessed increasing episodes of violence, including homicides, committed by mentally ill individuals who were not receiving treatment. The decade began ominously with three high-profile shootings between March 1980 and March 1981. Former congressman Allard Lowenstein was killed by Dennis Sweeney, John Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman, and President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley. All three perpetrators had untreated schizophrenia. Sweeney, for example, believed that Lowenstein, his former mentor, had implanted a transmitter in his teeth through which he was sending harassing voices. As the decade progressed, such widely publicized homicides became more common: 1985: Sylvia Seegrist, diagnosed with schizophrenia and with 12 past hospitalizations, killed three and wounded seven in a Pennsylvania shopping mall. Bryan Stanley, diagnosed with schizophrenia and with seven past hospitalizations, killed a priest and two others in a Wisconsin Catholic church. Lois Lang, diagnosed with schizophrenia and discharged from a mental hospital 3 months earlier, killed the chairman of a foreign exchange firm and his receptionist in New York. 1986: Juan Gonzalez, diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychiatrically evaluated 4 days earlier, killed two and injured nine others with a sword on New York’s Staten Island Ferry. 1987: David Hassan, discharged 2 days earlier from a mental hospital, killed four people by running them over with his car in California. 1988: Laurie Dann, who was known to both the police and FBI because of her threatening and psychotic behavior, killed a boy and injured five of his classmates in an Illinois elementary school. Dorothy Montalvo, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was accused of murdering at least seven elderly individuals and burying them in her backyard in California. Aaron Lindh, known to be mentally ill and threatening, killed the Dane County coroner in Madison, Wisconsin. This was one of six incidents in that county during 1988 “involving mentally ill individuals . . . [that] resulted in four homicides, three suicides, seven victims wounded by gunshots, and one victim mauled by a polar bear” when a mentally ill man climbed into its pen at the local zoo. 1989: Joseph Wesbecker, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, killed 7 and wounded 13 at a printing plant in Kentucky. Another indication that such episodes of violence were increasing was a study that compared admissions to a New York state psychiatric hospital in 1975 and 1982. It reported that “the percentage of patients who had committed violence toward persons while living in the community in the 1982 cohort was nearly double the percentage in the 1975 cohort.” In addition, “the percentage of patients who had had encounters with the criminal justice system in the 1982 cohort was more than quadruple the percentage in the 1975 cohort.” Is there any way to estimate the frequency of these episodes of violence committed by mentally ill person who were not being treated? There was then, and continues to be, no national database that tracks homicides committed by mentally ill persons. However, a small study published in 1988 provided a clue. In Contra Costa County, California, all 71 homicides committed between 1978 and 1980 were examined. Seven of the 71 homicides were found to have been done by individuals with schizophrenia, all of whom had been previously hospitalized at some point before the crime. The 10% rate was also consistent with the findings of another small study in Albany County, New York. Therefore, by the late 1980s, it appeared that violent acts committed by untreated mentally ill persons was one of the consequences of the deinstitutionalization movement, and the problem appeared to be a growing one. Excerpted from "American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System" by E. Fuller Torrey with permission from Oxford University Press USA. Copyright 2014 E. Fuller Torrey. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey MORE FROM Dr. E. Fuller Torrey Related Topics ------------------------------------------ Books California Editor's Picks Health Care Homeless Homelessness John Hinckley Mental Health Mental Illness Mitch Snyder Ronald Reagan Related Image Joy Reid: America can save itself Image Non-English speakers face health setback Image EPA wants minimal limits on perchlorate Image What we learn from BLL's climate episode Editor's Picks Image "The Death of Dick Long" empathy dare Image An election between these guys? Hell no Image Two buildings at Yale: An American story Image Long aftermath of a mass shooting Trending Image Trump: "I always find a way to win" Image Tomi's "patriot" leggings made in China Image MSNBC host: I made an error in judgement Image Trump’s tax cut is worse than thought Our Community Get the best of Salon delivered to your inbox! Email Address Conversation(17) Sort byBest The reality of psychiatry is that it is an industrial complex, in every sense that people describe the military industrial complex as having a potential conflict of interest. During the time frame directly following the closure of mental hospitals under Reagan, countless inexplicable murders were committed by persons deemed sane by the majority of society. People deemed sane have killed other people because they cut them off in traffic, but were never considered mentally ill. Additionally, there is no scientific grounds for the determination of mental illness. It is merely a subjective opinion offered by a singular individual. There are no accounts in the above article of persons who were released from a mental hospital whose lives then improved, and I have to wonder if the author even sought evidence that would support that likelihood. ...See more Reply Share 9 Likes Show 1 previous replies You must have worked for the Ronald Reagan Administration!! I work downtown San Jose and seen what happens when Deinstitutionalization movement occurs. I seen it my whole life in San J ose, california. Its not a pretty site and the Reagan Administration failed deeply! All these killings during early 1970s till now falls on President Reagan and his sorry Administration!!! I dont blame those who did the killing and were mentally ill because they were not mentally stable enough to be out in public! How Ironic that Ronald Reagan was shot by someone who had schizophrenia. Still he Ignored it. How much longer America? 2019. Reply Share 1 Like According to Scientology, there is grave doubts about the success of drugging patients. Reply Share 3 Likes Show 1 more replies Let us be honest, there was a Democratic Legislature under Gov. Reagan and a Democratic Congress and Senate under Pres. Reagan. We all need to take responsibility. Reply Share 6 Likes TermsPrivacy Add Spot.IM to your site Fearless journalism in your inbox every day Sign up for our free newsletter • • • Trending Articles Trending Article Picture Kavanaugh lied. Republicans don't care Trending Article Picture EMTs under assault Trending Article Picture DeVos nixes positive view of |
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Posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:07:41 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 20:13:24 2019. Three words... Learn To TypeOr... Take A Test |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 21:09:01 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:07:41 2019. wrong glasses |
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Posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:29:58 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 21:09:01 2019. This stuff is an insult to the truly homeless folks. |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 21:31:51 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:29:58 2019. did you see the video ? |
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Posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:56:53 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 21:31:51 2019. Yes I did. And when I see a 24 year old pitching a tent with hubcaps for earrings wondering how he'll make ends meet I lose interest. Young and strong men shouldn't be in his condition. The other fellow with the daughter is lucky to have her because she is a very articulate child and will be successful. |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:06:26 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:56:53 2019. i do not remember homelessness until after regan !!1980s thats when this shit begain |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:06:36 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 21:56:53 2019. i do not remember homelessness until after reagan !!1980s thats when this shit begain |
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Posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 22:18:47 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:06:36 2019. I can't have that argument with you because I was a grade school kid during that era in NYC. You do bring up an interesting thought about Reagan because he was governor of CA from 1967 until 1975. So in the late 60s and early and mid 70s there was no homelessness in LA? Only when he became president did the roof cave in? |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:23:59 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 22:18:47 2019. The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness PermanentRonald Reagan used a recession as an excuse to cut spending on social services –– like the safety net that existed since the Great Depression. At Christmastime 1982, fed-up religious leaders called a press conference. The Rev. Paul Moore, New York City's Episcopal bishop, was furious. Standing next to Methodist and Catholic bishops, a rabbi and a Muslim, Moore laid into the source of his ire: President Ronald Reagan. At the time, there were 36,000 homeless people on New York's streets, a scene repeated in cities across the country, including San Francisco. But this new wave of needy was different. Instead of the single men with drinking problems who'd populated the hotels and alleys of South of Market after World War II, there were factory and office workers who had lost their jobs in the recent global recession slumped in doorways next to Vietnam War veterans. There were women, children, families. During a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1981, his first year in office, the new president — who would use the recession as an excuse to cut taxes and slash government spending to spark growth, the infamous “Reaganomics” — presented a solution to homelessness, an issue seen at the time as a temporary problem that would soon cycle itself away, just as it had several times before. In classic small-government fashion, Reagan's fix did not involve government. If only “every church and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families” each, the president said, the problem could be weathered until it passed. It was a truly conservative approach, reminiscent of how homelessness was addressed in the 19th century. And it was “absolute balderdash,” said the Rev. Moore, according to a Dec. 25, 1982 United Press International wire story picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. The responsibility for dealing with homelessness wasn't the church's — it was the state's, the bishop said, just as it had been since the Great Depression. “Housing the homeless and feeding the hungry is the responsibility of the public sector,” he said. “They should have a permanent policy whereby homeless persons would have a place to live.” People like then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch needed to stand up to people like Reagan and demand more help. After all, cities received the bulk of the money used for social programs like housing and welfare from the federal government. “Don't shirk your responsibility,” said Moore, addressing both the president and mayor. Faced with a glut of poor people huddled on the streets with nowhere to live and nowhere to go — many of them war veterans, others unemployed workers struggling to adapt to a changing labor market that no longer needed their skills — city leaders in Chicago decided to take action. They would keep a “large building heated through the night to house the homeless poor,” according to headlines printed in newspapers across the country, including the San Francisco Chronicle, whose readers were also living in one of the great waves of homelessness in American history. That was in 1869. To better understand why people are experiencing homelessness today and why solutions have been so hard to come by, it's worthwhile to look at what put them there — and why other periods of homelessness in America eventually ended. Tramps, vagabonds, hobos: whatever you call them, people without stable living situations have appeared in waves several times in American history. During the Revolutionary War, it was itinerant workers, the “wandering poor” of an agricultural society reliant on worker mobility. Before the Civil War, it was unemployed mill workers, dockworkers, and miners, displaced by business cycles or changes in society caused by the introduction of a rail line or telegraph station. After the Civil War, when a credit-fueled railroad boom went bust, breaking banks and killing jobs — the “Panic of 1873,” capitalism's first major worldwide economic downturn, known as the “Great Depression” until the bigger Great Depression in the 1930s — it was freed slaves and veterans, whose wartime habits of foraging (or sometimes pillaging) the countryside for food and provisions introduced the words “tramp” and “bum” to the lexicon. During the Great Depression, with unemployment at 25 percent and large swaths of agricultural land turned to literal dust by a combination of drought and over-farming, as many as 5 percent of Americans were homeless. Almost always, it was temporary. As soon as the economy recovered, homeless people recovered, too. They went back inside and resumed normal lives. In the meantime, there was a safety net. For colonial Americans living under English tradition, the community or local parish was responsible for poor residents. In the 19th century, religious and other charitable organizations offered almshouses where lodging and food were available in return for work. During the Great Depression, with one-quarter of cities offering no homeless services, responsibility shifted to the federal government, which provided job training, education, food, and housing. Thirty-six years after the Rev. Moore called out President Reagan at Christmastime in 1982, there are now more than 60,000 homeless people in New York City. That's more per capita than any other city in America except San Francisco, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By the time Reagan took office, HUD was the main federal agency that offered housing and other programs aimed at helping poor and working-class people. And beginning under Reagan but continuing with the next three presidents, HUD would see its funding reduced. By the time George W. Bush took office, it had been slashed almost 60 percent. Reagan — who famously could not recognize Samuel Pierce, his own HUD secretary, and failed to recognize and halt a scandal in which HUD money was funneled to Republican consultants rather than building and repairing low-income-housing — didn't shirk his responsibility. He abdicated it, a wholesale abandonment that signaled the near-end of the federal government's role in managing homelessness and housing policies, a legacy carried on by every American president since. “Homelessness has been a persistent and enduring feature in American history,” wrote retired HUD researcher Walter Leginski in 2007. “While there have been temporary lulls, from colonial times forward there has been no period of American history free of homelessness.” [page] But unlike in other eras, “the contemporary wave of homelessness has not subsided during good economic times.” In San Francisco, unemployment stands at a near-record low of 3.1 percent, yet there are officially more than 3,505 people living on the street — more than at any other time over the past 10 years, including during the height of the Great Recession. (Prior to the subprime crisis, when 20 percent of properties in foreclosure were rental properties, more than 1 million of the country's 2.5 million to 3.5 million homeless were employed. (There are almost certainly many more. Homeless counts are notoriously inaccurate. The city's “official” count of 7,539 homeless people in 2015, for example, counted only 853 youths at a time when San Francisco public schools reported over 2,300 homeless children in school. This is because the federal definition of homeless does not include people living in hotel rooms or doubling up with friends or family. Nationally, in 2015, homeless counts found 222,197 homeless households with at least one child, while the Department of Education reported 1.2 million homeless children in schools. ) The divestment that began under Reagan can help explain why what was once a cyclical phenomenon, in tune with the boom-and-bust of the nation's economy, is now a permanent urban fixture — which, in the years since the subprime meltdown turned swaths of suburbia into ghost towns, has spread out of cities. Under Reagan, federal spending on subsidized housing — including state-owned public housing, in which the poor and working class can live for a set percentage of what income they have; and housing vouchers, in which the government helps close the gap between the cost of housing and a person's ability to pay — dropped from $26 billion to $8 billion, barely enough to maintain the government's existing stock of public units. As much a champion of conservatives as he is nemesis and near-Antichrist for liberals, Reagan's influence is seen in every tent encampment in San Francisco. “Every park bench in America — everywhere a homeless person sleeps — should have Ronald Reagan's name on it,” says Peter Dreier, an urban policy analyst and the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles. But Reagan is not solely to blame. Other American presidents are at fault — in fact, everyone who has come since. As with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other nations around the world have signed onto international treaties that declare housing a basic human right. And as with widely agreed upon commitments to cut pollution like the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has never ratified the international treaties guaranteeing its citizens a right to housing, which is still in most places in America a barely regulated commodity. It's also in short supply, making low-income residents' hold on it even more tenuous. Bevan Dufty was San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's first homeless czar, a post he held from January 2012 until late last year. At first, most of the homeless people Dufty met were the “chronically homeless” — the kind of people who had been on the streets for years. Toward the end, “you saw everything,” he said. “I met people who had lost their apartment within the last two to three months.” The one factor in common, however, was a traumatic event: a bad illness, a relationship ending, loss of a job, an eviction, or being the victim of a violent crime (domestic violence survivors, for example, suffer higher rates of homelessness). “Something happened, and there wasn't a safety net,” Dufty said. Beginning in the Great Depression, Americans looked to the federal government for that safety net. And for most of the 20th century, federal assistance wasn't only for poor people; it created wealth and gave a foundation for a middle class. After World War II, eight out of 10 American men were eligible for no-money-down home loans from the Federal Housing Administration under the G.I. Bill. Forty percent of all mortgages issued in 1946 and 1947 went to veterans. There was clear racial discrimination — white veterans received more housing mortgages than black veterans, who were subjected to racially motivated tactics such as redlining. But if the lasting legacy for veterans of the War on Terror is PTSD, for their grandfathers coming home victorious from Europe and the Pacific, it was a house. Those unable to purchase their own home could still rely on the government to help house them. Construction of public housing boomed in America following World War II, and was used by working-class individuals and families on their way to the middle class. (Mayor Lee lived in public housing in Seattle; as one of six children raised by a single mother, it's not inconceivable for someone in that situation today to end up homeless.) Never perfect, public housing has been all but orphaned by the government. Today, there are about 1.2 million units of public housing in the United States, far less than the U.K. and France, where the state owns 11 percent and 16 percent of the total housing stock, respectively. In 1976, the year Reagan first ran for president, the outgoing administration of President Gerald Ford asked Congress to fund 506,000 new low-income housing units, including 400,000 rent vouchers to pay for privately owned housing in the Section 8 program. That was the high-water mark for federal assistance. Under Reagan, funding for new subsidies dipped below 100,000 units per year. By the time President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, fewer than 9,000 units were funded. Federal funding has since recovered, but the timing of the cuts coming during the current homeless crisis's beginnings could not have been worse. “If we had provided 500,000 additional low-income units every year since 1976, we would now have about 14 million families living in federally assisted low-income housing,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote in 2002. “But we moved in the opposite direction, and so now there are still more very-low-income renter households with 'worst case' housing needs than there are families living in federally subsidized, low-income housing.” [page] This is strongly felt in San Francisco, where local government has adapted to the Reagan-inspired federal exit from housing by handing over operation of public housing to nonprofit housing providers. (In the past few years, nonprofits like John Stewart Company, which manages the former military housing in the Presidio, has taken over management of once-notorious housing projects like the rebuilt Hunters View; other dilapidated public housing projects, like Sunnydale in Visitacion Valley, are still waiting for private investors to fund a rebuild before nonprofits take over.) The demand is clearly here — and it will never be met. In early 2015, homeless families were given the opportunity to sign up for the chance at a public housing unit, the first time in six years the wait list for public housing in San Francisco was opened up. More than 10,000 families signed up for a chance at one of fewer than 200 units. The wait list for a Section 8 voucher, which a low-income tenant can use to cover the growing difference between his or her means and market rate rents, is even longer. “We had 9,000 Section 8 vouchers,” Dufty says. “That's the same number we had 15 to 20 years ago. There's been no expansion of it.” With the federal government's safety net disappearing, local governments are tasked with filling in the gaps with far fewer resources — and not just for housing. With Reagan-admiring Republicans in Congress, federal money for other infrastructure like transportation has vanished, forcing vital regional resources like BART to turn to local voters to ask for tax increases to fund routine maintenance. To his credit, Mayor Lee announced a plan to build or fix up 10,000 affordable housing units by 2020. That's something. But more than half of those are the old public housing units virtually abandoned by the federal government — nearly all of which already have tenants. During his State of the Union address in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a “Second Bill of Rights,” which included the “right of every American to a decent home.” Roosevelt died in office the following year, but in the post-World War II era of unity that saw the formation of the United Nations, his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, saw housing included as a basic human right alongside food, clothing, and medical care in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. America's recognition of that right appears to have died along with FDR — a true example of American exceptionalism in a world that has repeatedly affirmed housing as a basic right alongside food and medical care. A later UN declaration in 1966, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, codified this. The UN's member nations — including the U.S., a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the UN's host nation — signed an agreement that “recognize[d] the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family,” including housing. Though the U.S. signed the treaty, the Senate never ratified it, making America one of only two UN member states to fail to ratify, along with Thailand. The U.S. has either failed to sign or failed to ratify at least six other international treaties in which housing was declared a human right. Other nations have taken notice and tried to get our attention. In 2006, the government's response to the housing disaster in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina elicited comparisons to apartheid South Africa. When given the opportunity in 2009, Shaun Donovan, President Barack Obama's former HUD secretary, shied away from declaring housing a human right. In 2010, the UN Human Rights Council subjected the U.S. government to a first-ever review. UN envoys heard testimony across the country, and housing was the “No. 1 human rights issue” mentioned, according to the State Department. Despite the testimony and the obvious gap between housing stock and population in the country, the U.S.'s official report to the Human Rights Council “carefully sidestep[ped] naming housing and other economic and social rights as rights,” the National Law Center on Housing and Poverty found. Roosevelt's speech was cited, but the housing element was ignored. That same year, Obama released the first-ever federal “Strategic Plan to End Homelessness” — which contained no action plan and no funding. The safety net was gone, and with a modest tweak to health care barely surviving a Republican-controlled Congress, it is never coming back. Reagan's reputation as the Great Communicator extended beyond his telegenic speeches and movie star good looks. His team was responsible for the “Morning in America” political ad campaign, possibly the most famous re-election spots in the country's history. The commercials depicted an idealized America full of flag-raising workers with nothing but opportunity in front of them. The first scene in the commercial is of a fishing boat bobbing in San Francisco Bay at dawn. In reality at the time, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein was a harsh critic of Reagan. She laid the blame for the Bay Area's growing homeless population — 20,000 people across five counties at that time — squarely at his feet. “When it started, it was looked at as an emergency phenomena, something that was going to pass … a phenomenon of high unemployment and families that weren't able to maintain a house and a car payment,” Feinstein told the Chronicle in 1987. “It's emerged into a whole subculture. A potpourri of many different things. Everything from frail elderly to drug abusers to alcoholics to women with children to single men to AIDS victims to the mentally ill … and that's a direct result of Ronald Reagan's policies.” If the federal government had responded to the most-recent homeless crisis with more housing or more funding rather than less, San Francisco might look more like Utah. That state cut its population of “chronically homeless” — someone without a home for lengthy periods of time — by more than half simply by giving them housing. [page] Instead, Reagan took it away — and then engaged in character assassination. In early 1984, the year he was re-elected in a landslide, Reagan appeared on Good Morning America to defend his record. The “people who are sleeping on the grates … the homeless … are homeless, you might say, by choice,” Reagan said. They — not him — were to blame for their own situation. This was Reagan's other lasting legacy. While continuing his budget policies, other politicians also followed his formula of blaming and demonizing the homeless for their situation, even in San Francisco. In 1991, when Mayor Art Agnos was unseated by former police Chief Frank Jordan, Agnos' “main criticism … is that he has been too kind to the homeless, not forcing them from parks as other cities have done and urging restraint on the police department,” The New York Times reported that year. Jordan was elected, and police started cracking down on the homeless, driving them from the temporary encampment Agnos allowed in front of City Hall. Other quality-of-life laws targeting homeless behavior followed. In 2010, midway through Mayor Gavin Newsom's vaunted 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, voters approved a new law outlawing lying or sitting on sidewalks. San Francisco police now spend $18.5 million a year responding to over 50,000 911 calls and other demands for service from the public directly related to homelessness. This fall, local politicians — including Supervisor Mark Farrell, a 2019 mayoral hopeful, and state Senate hopeful Supervisor Scott Wiener — will ask voters to approve a law giving police the ability to clear a tent encampment within 24 hours. Reagan, were he alive, would surely approve. He would definitely recognize the landscape. It's just as he left it. |
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The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent Ronald Reagan used a recession |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:24:41 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 22:18:47 2019. The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness PermanentRonald Reagan used a recession as an excuse to cut spending on social services –– like the safety net that existed since the Great Depression. At Christmastime 1982, fed-up religious leaders called a press conference. The Rev. Paul Moore, New York City's Episcopal bishop, was furious. Standing next to Methodist and Catholic bishops, a rabbi and a Muslim, Moore laid into the source of his ire: President Ronald Reagan. At the time, there were 36,000 homeless people on New York's streets, a scene repeated in cities across the country, including San Francisco. But this new wave of needy was different. Instead of the single men with drinking problems who'd populated the hotels and alleys of South of Market after World War II, there were factory and office workers who had lost their jobs in the recent global recession slumped in doorways next to Vietnam War veterans. There were women, children, families. During a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1981, his first year in office, the new president — who would use the recession as an excuse to cut taxes and slash government spending to spark growth, the infamous “Reaganomics” — presented a solution to homelessness, an issue seen at the time as a temporary problem that would soon cycle itself away, just as it had several times before. In classic small-government fashion, Reagan's fix did not involve government. If only “every church and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families” each, the president said, the problem could be weathered until it passed. It was a truly conservative approach, reminiscent of how homelessness was addressed in the 19th century. And it was “absolute balderdash,” said the Rev. Moore, according to a Dec. 25, 1982 United Press International wire story picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. The responsibility for dealing with homelessness wasn't the church's — it was the state's, the bishop said, just as it had been since the Great Depression. “Housing the homeless and feeding the hungry is the responsibility of the public sector,” he said. “They should have a permanent policy whereby homeless persons would have a place to live.” People like then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch needed to stand up to people like Reagan and demand more help. After all, cities received the bulk of the money used for social programs like housing and welfare from the federal government. “Don't shirk your responsibility,” said Moore, addressing both the president and mayor. Faced with a glut of poor people huddled on the streets with nowhere to live and nowhere to go — many of them war veterans, others unemployed workers struggling to adapt to a changing labor market that no longer needed their skills — city leaders in Chicago decided to take action. They would keep a “large building heated through the night to house the homeless poor,” according to headlines printed in newspapers across the country, including the San Francisco Chronicle, whose readers were also living in one of the great waves of homelessness in American history. That was in 1869. To better understand why people are experiencing homelessness today and why solutions have been so hard to come by, it's worthwhile to look at what put them there — and why other periods of homelessness in America eventually ended. Tramps, vagabonds, hobos: whatever you call them, people without stable living situations have appeared in waves several times in American history. During the Revolutionary War, it was itinerant workers, the “wandering poor” of an agricultural society reliant on worker mobility. Before the Civil War, it was unemployed mill workers, dockworkers, and miners, displaced by business cycles or changes in society caused by the introduction of a rail line or telegraph station. After the Civil War, when a credit-fueled railroad boom went bust, breaking banks and killing jobs — the “Panic of 1873,” capitalism's first major worldwide economic downturn, known as the “Great Depression” until the bigger Great Depression in the 1930s — it was freed slaves and veterans, whose wartime habits of foraging (or sometimes pillaging) the countryside for food and provisions introduced the words “tramp” and “bum” to the lexicon. During the Great Depression, with unemployment at 25 percent and large swaths of agricultural land turned to literal dust by a combination of drought and over-farming, as many as 5 percent of Americans were homeless. Almost always, it was temporary. As soon as the economy recovered, homeless people recovered, too. They went back inside and resumed normal lives. In the meantime, there was a safety net. For colonial Americans living under English tradition, the community or local parish was responsible for poor residents. In the 19th century, religious and other charitable organizations offered almshouses where lodging and food were available in return for work. During the Great Depression, with one-quarter of cities offering no homeless services, responsibility shifted to the federal government, which provided job training, education, food, and housing. Thirty-six years after the Rev. Moore called out President Reagan at Christmastime in 1982, there are now more than 60,000 homeless people in New York City. That's more per capita than any other city in America except San Francisco, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By the time Reagan took office, HUD was the main federal agency that offered housing and other programs aimed at helping poor and working-class people. And beginning under Reagan but continuing with the next three presidents, HUD would see its funding reduced. By the time George W. Bush took office, it had been slashed almost 60 percent. Reagan — who famously could not recognize Samuel Pierce, his own HUD secretary, and failed to recognize and halt a scandal in which HUD money was funneled to Republican consultants rather than building and repairing low-income-housing — didn't shirk his responsibility. He abdicated it, a wholesale abandonment that signaled the near-end of the federal government's role in managing homelessness and housing policies, a legacy carried on by every American president since. “Homelessness has been a persistent and enduring feature in American history,” wrote retired HUD researcher Walter Leginski in 2007. “While there have been temporary lulls, from colonial times forward there has been no period of American history free of homelessness.” [page] But unlike in other eras, “the contemporary wave of homelessness has not subsided during good economic times.” In San Francisco, unemployment stands at a near-record low of 3.1 percent, yet there are officially more than 3,505 people living on the street — more than at any other time over the past 10 years, including during the height of the Great Recession. (Prior to the subprime crisis, when 20 percent of properties in foreclosure were rental properties, more than 1 million of the country's 2.5 million to 3.5 million homeless were employed. (There are almost certainly many more. Homeless counts are notoriously inaccurate. The city's “official” count of 7,539 homeless people in 2015, for example, counted only 853 youths at a time when San Francisco public schools reported over 2,300 homeless children in school. This is because the federal definition of homeless does not include people living in hotel rooms or doubling up with friends or family. Nationally, in 2015, homeless counts found 222,197 homeless households with at least one child, while the Department of Education reported 1.2 million homeless children in schools. ) The divestment that began under Reagan can help explain why what was once a cyclical phenomenon, in tune with the boom-and-bust of the nation's economy, is now a permanent urban fixture — which, in the years since the subprime meltdown turned swaths of suburbia into ghost towns, has spread out of cities. Under Reagan, federal spending on subsidized housing — including state-owned public housing, in which the poor and working class can live for a set percentage of what income they have; and housing vouchers, in which the government helps close the gap between the cost of housing and a person's ability to pay — dropped from $26 billion to $8 billion, barely enough to maintain the government's existing stock of public units. As much a champion of conservatives as he is nemesis and near-Antichrist for liberals, Reagan's influence is seen in every tent encampment in San Francisco. “Every park bench in America — everywhere a homeless person sleeps — should have Ronald Reagan's name on it,” says Peter Dreier, an urban policy analyst and the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles. But Reagan is not solely to blame. Other American presidents are at fault — in fact, everyone who has come since. As with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other nations around the world have signed onto international treaties that declare housing a basic human right. And as with widely agreed upon commitments to cut pollution like the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has never ratified the international treaties guaranteeing its citizens a right to housing, which is still in most places in America a barely regulated commodity. It's also in short supply, making low-income residents' hold on it even more tenuous. Bevan Dufty was San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's first homeless czar, a post he held from January 2012 until late last year. At first, most of the homeless people Dufty met were the “chronically homeless” — the kind of people who had been on the streets for years. Toward the end, “you saw everything,” he said. “I met people who had lost their apartment within the last two to three months.” The one factor in common, however, was a traumatic event: a bad illness, a relationship ending, loss of a job, an eviction, or being the victim of a violent crime (domestic violence survivors, for example, suffer higher rates of homelessness). “Something happened, and there wasn't a safety net,” Dufty said. Beginning in the Great Depression, Americans looked to the federal government for that safety net. And for most of the 20th century, federal assistance wasn't only for poor people; it created wealth and gave a foundation for a middle class. After World War II, eight out of 10 American men were eligible for no-money-down home loans from the Federal Housing Administration under the G.I. Bill. Forty percent of all mortgages issued in 1946 and 1947 went to veterans. There was clear racial discrimination — white veterans received more housing mortgages than black veterans, who were subjected to racially motivated tactics such as redlining. But if the lasting legacy for veterans of the War on Terror is PTSD, for their grandfathers coming home victorious from Europe and the Pacific, it was a house. Those unable to purchase their own home could still rely on the government to help house them. Construction of public housing boomed in America following World War II, and was used by working-class individuals and families on their way to the middle class. (Mayor Lee lived in public housing in Seattle; as one of six children raised by a single mother, it's not inconceivable for someone in that situation today to end up homeless.) Never perfect, public housing has been all but orphaned by the government. Today, there are about 1.2 million units of public housing in the United States, far less than the U.K. and France, where the state owns 11 percent and 16 percent of the total housing stock, respectively. In 1976, the year Reagan first ran for president, the outgoing administration of President Gerald Ford asked Congress to fund 506,000 new low-income housing units, including 400,000 rent vouchers to pay for privately owned housing in the Section 8 program. That was the high-water mark for federal assistance. Under Reagan, funding for new subsidies dipped below 100,000 units per year. By the time President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, fewer than 9,000 units were funded. Federal funding has since recovered, but the timing of the cuts coming during the current homeless crisis's beginnings could not have been worse. “If we had provided 500,000 additional low-income units every year since 1976, we would now have about 14 million families living in federally assisted low-income housing,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote in 2002. “But we moved in the opposite direction, and so now there are still more very-low-income renter households with 'worst case' housing needs than there are families living in federally subsidized, low-income housing.” [page] This is strongly felt in San Francisco, where local government has adapted to the Reagan-inspired federal exit from housing by handing over operation of public housing to nonprofit housing providers. (In the past few years, nonprofits like John Stewart Company, which manages the former military housing in the Presidio, has taken over management of once-notorious housing projects like the rebuilt Hunters View; other dilapidated public housing projects, like Sunnydale in Visitacion Valley, are still waiting for private investors to fund a rebuild before nonprofits take over.) The demand is clearly here — and it will never be met. In early 2015, homeless families were given the opportunity to sign up for the chance at a public housing unit, the first time in six years the wait list for public housing in San Francisco was opened up. More than 10,000 families signed up for a chance at one of fewer than 200 units. The wait list for a Section 8 voucher, which a low-income tenant can use to cover the growing difference between his or her means and market rate rents, is even longer. “We had 9,000 Section 8 vouchers,” Dufty says. “That's the same number we had 15 to 20 years ago. There's been no expansion of it.” With the federal government's safety net disappearing, local governments are tasked with filling in the gaps with far fewer resources — and not just for housing. With Reagan-admiring Republicans in Congress, federal money for other infrastructure like transportation has vanished, forcing vital regional resources like BART to turn to local voters to ask for tax increases to fund routine maintenance. To his credit, Mayor Lee announced a plan to build or fix up 10,000 affordable housing units by 2020. That's something. But more than half of those are the old public housing units virtually abandoned by the federal government — nearly all of which already have tenants. During his State of the Union address in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a “Second Bill of Rights,” which included the “right of every American to a decent home.” Roosevelt died in office the following year, but in the post-World War II era of unity that saw the formation of the United Nations, his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, saw housing included as a basic human right alongside food, clothing, and medical care in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. America's recognition of that right appears to have died along with FDR — a true example of American exceptionalism in a world that has repeatedly affirmed housing as a basic right alongside food and medical care. A later UN declaration in 1966, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, codified this. The UN's member nations — including the U.S., a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the UN's host nation — signed an agreement that “recognize[d] the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family,” including housing. Though the U.S. signed the treaty, the Senate never ratified it, making America one of only two UN member states to fail to ratify, along with Thailand. The U.S. has either failed to sign or failed to ratify at least six other international treaties in which housing was declared a human right. Other nations have taken notice and tried to get our attention. In 2006, the government's response to the housing disaster in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina elicited comparisons to apartheid South Africa. When given the opportunity in 2009, Shaun Donovan, President Barack Obama's former HUD secretary, shied away from declaring housing a human right. In 2010, the UN Human Rights Council subjected the U.S. government to a first-ever review. UN envoys heard testimony across the country, and housing was the “No. 1 human rights issue” mentioned, according to the State Department. Despite the testimony and the obvious gap between housing stock and population in the country, the U.S.'s official report to the Human Rights Council “carefully sidestep[ped] naming housing and other economic and social rights as rights,” the National Law Center on Housing and Poverty found. Roosevelt's speech was cited, but the housing element was ignored. That same year, Obama released the first-ever federal “Strategic Plan to End Homelessness” — which contained no action plan and no funding. The safety net was gone, and with a modest tweak to health care barely surviving a Republican-controlled Congress, it is never coming back. Reagan's reputation as the Great Communicator extended beyond his telegenic speeches and movie star good looks. His team was responsible for the “Morning in America” political ad campaign, possibly the most famous re-election spots in the country's history. The commercials depicted an idealized America full of flag-raising workers with nothing but opportunity in front of them. The first scene in the commercial is of a fishing boat bobbing in San Francisco Bay at dawn. In reality at the time, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein was a harsh critic of Reagan. She laid the blame for the Bay Area's growing homeless population — 20,000 people across five counties at that time — squarely at his feet. “When it started, it was looked at as an emergency phenomena, something that was going to pass … a phenomenon of high unemployment and families that weren't able to maintain a house and a car payment,” Feinstein told the Chronicle in 1987. “It's emerged into a whole subculture. A potpourri of many different things. Everything from frail elderly to drug abusers to alcoholics to women with children to single men to AIDS victims to the mentally ill … and that's a direct result of Ronald Reagan's policies.” If the federal government had responded to the most-recent homeless crisis with more housing or more funding rather than less, San Francisco might look more like Utah. That state cut its population of “chronically homeless” — someone without a home for lengthy periods of time — by more than half simply by giving them housing. [page] Instead, Reagan took it away — and then engaged in character assassination. In early 1984, the year he was re-elected in a landslide, Reagan appeared on Good Morning America to defend his record. The “people who are sleeping on the grates … the homeless … are homeless, you might say, by choice,” Reagan said. They — not him — were to blame for their own situation. This was Reagan's other lasting legacy. While continuing his budget policies, other politicians also followed his formula of blaming and demonizing the homeless for their situation, even in San Francisco. In 1991, when Mayor Art Agnos was unseated by former police Chief Frank Jordan, Agnos' “main criticism … is that he has been too kind to the homeless, not forcing them from parks as other cities have done and urging restraint on the police department,” The New York Times reported that year. Jordan was elected, and police started cracking down on the homeless, driving them from the temporary encampment Agnos allowed in front of City Hall. Other quality-of-life laws targeting homeless behavior followed. In 2010, midway through Mayor Gavin Newsom's vaunted 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, voters approved a new law outlawing lying or sitting on sidewalks. San Francisco police now spend $18.5 million a year responding to over 50,000 911 calls and other demands for service from the public directly related to homelessness. This fall, local politicians — including Supervisor Mark Farrell, a 2019 mayoral hopeful, and state Senate hopeful Supervisor Scott Wiener — will ask voters to approve a law giving police the ability to clear a tent encampment within 24 hours. Reagan, were he alive, would surely approve. He would definitely recognize the landscape. It's just as he left it. |
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Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles |
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Posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Sep 30 22:44:15 2019, in response to Re: Homelessness at an all-time high in Los Angeles, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:23:59 2019. You whats funny? I work with homeless people and their children. And none of them live in tents or defecate in the streets. You'd almost never know they're homeless. But these characters push it in your face that they're homeless. There is a credibility loss the size of the Grand Canyon there with that attitude. |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by Olog-hai on Mon Sep 30 22:47:23 2019, in response to The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent Ronald Reagan used a recession, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Mon Sep 30 22:24:41 2019. Fake news. Social spending (so called) causes homelessness. |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 01:32:41 2019, in response to Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent?, posted by Olog-hai on Mon Sep 30 22:47:23 2019. NOPE THE TRUTH STARTRING IN THE 1980s ON !!REEEEGAIN !!! |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 09:59:29 2019, in response to Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent?, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 01:32:41 2019. BUMP |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by Train Dude on Tue Oct 1 10:06:47 2019, in response to Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent?, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 09:59:29 2019. More total bullshitBUMP By the way, you are starting to make bingbong sound almost rational. |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 10:16:38 2019, in response to Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent?, posted by Train Dude on Tue Oct 1 10:06:47 2019. NOPE !!IDWTP I AM NOT BING BONG |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by Train Dude on Tue Oct 1 10:20:28 2019, in response to Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent?, posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 10:16:38 2019. I didn't say that you were Bingbong. I said that your moronic rants are making her sound almost rational. |
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Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent? |
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Posted by https://salaamallah.com/ on Tue Oct 1 10:22:06 2019, in response to Re: The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent?, posted by Train Dude on Tue Oct 1 10:20:28 2019. WELL DONT GET CONFUSEDI DONT AGREE WITH EVERYTHING SHE POSTS I DID LIKE HER HUSBAND WHEN HE HELPED ME WITH COMPUTERS NICE GUY |
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