Shelter Shorts

The Heart of the Story

CNBC's "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer's now-famous summertime tirade about the collapse of the subprime markets captivated media pundits and bloggers, as well as close to 2 million YouTube viewers. With his soliloquy about the mortgage crisis as "Armageddon" - extreme even for a man whose default mode is manic - the former hedge-fund manager momentarily shifted the focus of media attention from debt markets to people at the "bottom of the income ladder." While some cynics expressed doubt that the hardnosed investment guru really cared about the millions of low- and moderate-income homeowners facing the threat of foreclosure, Cramer used his post-rant appearances on shows ranging from CNN's "Reliable Sources" to Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" to underscore his concern that "there are a lot of people who bought homes...and they're about to be evicted or foreclosed, and it's a problem for all of America."

Shelters and food pantries are lifelines for homeless people. But soon they may be out of reach. When in May the House passed the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act (HR 1427), which allots approximately $500 million annually for affordable low-income housing, tacked on was an amendment introduced by Georgia Republican Tom Price that requires recipients of housing assistance and homeless services to prove their citizenship or legal status.

They must show federally acceptable forms of identification such as a passport, a Social Security card accompanied by a federal- or state-issued photo I.D. card, or a state-issued driver's license that is compliant with the 2005 federal REAL ID Act. But "homeless people don't have these forms of ID," says Tulin Ozdeger of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. And without any one form of identification, it's impossible to get another. To quote Yossarian, "That's some catch, that Catch-22."

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in July signed into law authorization to create the nation's first State Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) program. The as-yet unfunded program is designed to supplement the federal CDFI program and assist community-development credit unions and other alternative financial service providers in offering loans and other financial services to people and businesses in low- and moderate-income communities.

It's not easy to rattle Louise Arbour, the Canadian jurist who was the chief prosecutor for tribunals on the genocide in Rwanda and human-rights abuses in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Arbour, now the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, spends her days hearing about humankind at its most bestial.

Yet according to Maria Foscarinis of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Arbour was "visibly shocked" when Foscarinis briefed her this summer about ordinances banning or restricting public feeding of homeless people adopted by a number of U.S. cities, including Dallas, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Wilmington, N.C., during the past year. Charitable groups and individuals risk fines and imprisonment in these cities if they "share food with" homeless people in parks, parking lots, and on sidewalks.

Although a U.S. district judge in Las Vegas issued a permanent injunction against that city's anti-feeding ordinance in late August, human-rights and civil-rights groups have vowed to overturn the bans elsewhere in the country.

If you think "nightmare" when you hear about Chicago's high-rise public-housing projects, Beauty Turner wants to take you for a ride. Turner's "ghetto bus tour" acquaints sightseers with the vanishing world of the city's South Side projects and attracts an eclectic mix including journalists, academics, and white suburbanites. The 50-year-old Turner - assistant editor of the public-housing newspaper Residents' Journal - tells her audiences that "a little bit of everything in your community" was present in places notorious for gang violence and drugs. "The world needs to know that there was a community in public housing, not just a list of horror stories in the newspapers," she was quoted as saying in a Los Angeles Times report on her tour.

Since the late 1990s, the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation has moved residents out of and demolished 50 of the city's 53 public-housing high-rises to make way for mixed-income development. Housing Authority officials fault Turner for downplaying the plan's benefits. Close to 39,000 apartments are to be replaced with about 25,000 new or rehabilitated units, according to CHA spokesman Bryan Zises.

To Turner, who once lived at the Robert Taylor Homes, the process has severed vital human connections. The Section 8 vouchers handed to displaced residents "like trick-or-treat candy," Turner told NPR host Farai Chideya in a recent interview, are a bait-and-switch proposition, leaving many people unable to find affordable housing elsewhere in the city and without the prospect of returning to their neighborhood.

Professional athletes have become synonymous with big cars and bling, not with random acts of kindness. But the Houston Texans' Jason Simmons is not a stereotypical pro athlete. Simmons wore #30. But so did new teammate Ahman Green, who was traded in from Green Bay. As is the custom among athletes, Green offered to buy the number from Simmons for $25,000. Simmons countered his offer, asking Green to use the money to help a needy family buy a home. Green agreed. Impressed by the proposal, Texans owner Bob McNair matched the amount. In July, Regina Foster, a single mother of an autistic 7-year-old son, received $50,000 for a down payment toward a new home.

Why is it that no good policy goes unpunished in the Bush administration? Since its inception in 1997, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-Chip) has provided health insurance to millions of kids whose families couldn't afford private coverage but earned too much to qualify for Medicaid. After the U.S. House and Senate in August passed a reauthorization and expansion of S-Chip, the Bush administration issued a directive to state health officials with newly stringent hurdles that make it virtually impossible to extend the coverage to middle-class families: States must first find and enroll 95 percent of poor children in S-Chip.

This stealth attack on S-Chip echoes President Bush's threat to veto the congressional proposals to expand eligibility to families at 300 percent (the Senate bill) or 400 percent (the House bill) of the poverty level.

"The program is going beyond the initial intent of helping poor children," Bush said recently in Cleveland. "It's now aiming at encouraging more people to get on government health care."

But polling data from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey conducted after the congressional votes show "overwhelming" public support for S-Chip. And the view that it's a good thing for American society to take care of its kids cuts across political lines: Seventy-seven percent of Republicans, 86 percent of independents, and 93 percent of Democrats give the Decider a thumbs-down on his view that the emergency room is all the health insurance any kid needs.

Copyright 2007

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