The Cost of Corruption

The time has come (it's past due like a lot of people's rent) for a new approach to housing the poor.

Many politicians and their subalterns haven't fully grasped the scope of the problem, to be sure, but many people around the country know the score. However, those people are rarely in a position to impact the crisis. Sometimes they work for organizations that poke at the problem, hoping it will go away; more often they erect the "services" panacea--that is, extra levels of bullshit one must navigate in order to get out of the rain.

Frances Fox Piven called it "regulating the poor."

The homeless numbers shoot up even as organizations like Portland's Central City Concern, in concert with the politicians and developers, toy with the problem--the 30% solution, wherein a federal subsidy is handed to the "non-profit" (this particular one has a $30 million a year budget and employs 400, which is to say it is, unfortunately, "too big to fail") to nibble at the edges of a profound problem.

After a long wait, and for approximately a third of your income if you have one, CCC might have a place for you--but more likely, because the entire enterprise is a numbers game, it will not.

And the numbers that really count--that is to say dollars--are very sweet for an outfit like CCC, which gets to charge "market rates" for its units. Who determines those rates?  Why other landlords, of course, at the beck-and-call of a government that says it's perfectly reasonable to pay a full third of your limited income for shelter.

Talk about a capitalist construct!

Multi-millionaires, or simply higher-income workers in general, don't do it, but the poor and shrinking middle-class are expected to. A person making the dough can eschew luxury and get along fine; the poor cannot eschew the basics.

The percentage the poor pay for the basics is always higher than what a well-off and frugal worker pays for basics.

The poverty industry is one helluva racket.

Homeless shelters pick up some of the slack in the burgeoning homeless equation, but as any self-respecting homeless person will tell you the shelters are overcrowded, frequently dangerous, and a poor alternative to sleeping under the stars, unless it is freezing outside.

But of course the problem is compounded by more inanity.  You can't sleep in the park. Why not?  Don't ask, move along.

And we all know what that boils down to, right?  People don't like to think about the homeless, and they absolutely loathe looking at them.  Never mind it's midnight and the taxpayers are mostly in bed snoring.  The very thought--someone is sleeping in my park!!!--gives them nightmares.

Poor people!!  Eeeeeeeeek.

So the cops are paid to protect the rose bushes and the sweet dreams of the comfortably-bedded, not the outlaw campers.  The cops will tell campers it's too dangerous to sleep in the park.  But is it as dangerous as the shelter?

How about the jail, where the camper will end up if he ignores the guy with the billy club?

The poor have few options.  For every unit that is part of a political plan to merge so-called "affordable" housing with the "community" at-large, two more homeless people appear.

Somewhere along the line the meaning of the terms "low-cost" and "affordable" became skewed. For low-wage earners there is no such thing as affordable housing at this critically-late date.

The terms are simply jargon now, codespeak among politicians, developers and poverty technocrats cashing in on our deliberately-designed inequity, the corrupt system.

Which brings me to this 2012 history of rooming houses in the Northwest.  Bring them back.


TS