A budget cutting move by desperate finance officers? A conservative smack at freeloaders? Hardly. This is done to help the people running shelters--aka folks who've devoted their lives to helping the homeless. I was pleasantly surprised to find my old boss from the homeless-helping nonprofit I once worked for quoted in the article:
Several nonprofit shelter providers, who asked not to be identified because they feared retaliation from the administration, said that they did not intend to evict any families from shelters.
But others said they were grateful for the ability to threaten the most difficult families with ejection.
"If you need a big stick now and then, for certain families, so be it," said Richard Motta, the president and chief executive of Volunteers of America of Greater New York, which runs three family shelters.
The lack of such a threat was a problem, Mr. Motta said.
"There's not a caseworker alive that wants to realize that threat, and as an agency, we don't want to move people to the streets," he said. "That's not what we're in business to do. But if you enter the shelter, if you know there's a threat of being put out of the shelter, you'll be more likely to follow the rules."
Though I doubt he remembers me (I was his secretary for something like six months), I can personally attest that Richard is a very, very nice man, who cares deeply about helping the homeless. So why does he want to kick them out of the shelter? Because families in crisis are sometimes in crisis because the head of household, or an older child, has a severe behavior problem. That minority can make life unbearable for the majority. They can also make life miserable for themselves, and facility managers would like to be able to open slots for new intakes by forcing refractory long term residents to, say, apply for jobs, or move into subsidized housing.
The point is not to ever exercise this threat. Rather, it's to make sure they don't have to. If a family knows they can't stay in temporary shelter forever, they'll be more motivated to follow the rules, and help get themselves back on their feet. Without that, a dysfunctional minority can choke the system.
It's a reasonable bet that within a few weeks (or less) a federal judge will issue an order stopping the practice.
A federal judge who would never in ten thousand years put up with anyone acting like in his court for five second.
I have never heard of a shelter where you can stay indefinitely before reading this post.
In theory you can't. In practice, what are you going to do with a family that insists on waiting for the perfect Section 8 apartment or assisted housing option to emerge?
Perhaps the problem is the Section 8 housing rules; one bedroom for each child, etc.
In my experience, poverty is humbling, not hubristic.
Zic -
"In my experience, poverty is humbling, not hubristic. "
Are you speaking about poverty-stricken, or are you speaking about chronic homeless?
People who are poverty stricken tend to be humbled, people who are chronically homeless tend to have a HIGHER PROPORTION of hubristic individuals who make their demands known.
I think the demands are more of a defense mechanism to put up a tough front, but that doesn't make them any less of an asshole (excuse my language).
Joe
P.s. I forget where I just read it, but it appears that not only the homeless population, but the prison populations, are being tremendously taxed by the lack of long-term mental health institutions since the great shuttering.
I think you're trying to generalize this to the whole population. The question is not whether all, or most, homeless people act like jerks. The question is, what happens when you can't kick the jerks out? I assume you will concede that there are some people who act like jerks in teh world?
Tree Joe,
you said it yourself -- mental illness.
In the early 1980's, I wrote several of the prototype computer systems for welfare fraud detection, part of "welfare reform." We, and this includes me, expected to find lots of abuse.
We found some, but not much. More common were examples the lady with a $60k bank account. Made the headlines. Come to find out, her husband had died, she had dementia, and didn't know about it. And that made the headlines, too.
Lesson I took away? Ask if there are extenuating circumstances, like severe mental illness, before passing judgment. Because most people who are in poverty and seeking help aren't there by choice.
But remember "waiting for the perfect Section 8 apartment" and chronic homelessness don't have a lot in common.
Yeah, I was just trying to clarify between your comment on poverty-humbling-hubris. I think we are on the same page.
Unfortunately, if there was ever a nationalized healthcare program I would get behind, it's something that would help take those with unstable mental illnesses off the streets/prisons and help care for them properly. Much as we care for our elderly (medicare, etc.), we should care for those who can't care for themselves.
Part of that, of course, applies to the elderly demented population.
Anyway, as you also pointed out, homelessness for those "stricken" by it tends to be a short-lived thing. For those with the mental facilities and motivation, it's not hard to stop being homeless. Though the homeless in Philly tell me it's hardest for a man without a family to utilize the available resources, and easiest for a lone woman with at least one child.
Megan, that's why I pointed out that I had never heard of a shelter where you can stay indefinitely.
But I would point out one thing: the "jerks" in the shelter often provide the incentive for others to move on and become more self-reliant.
Lesson I took away? Ask if there are extenuating circumstances, like severe mental illness, before passing judgment. Because most people who are in poverty and seeking help aren't there by choice.
While there is truth to this, I think your definition of "choice" is flawed in that it assumes a choice to be homeless, as opposed to a prior choice or a series of choices and attitudes that lead to homelessness as an inevitable end.
And believe it or not, the chronically destitute can and do sometimes adopt a rather appalling entitlement attitude. You can pick up on some of this by spending just one night in a soup kitchen -- for every seven or eight people who show up grateful to receive dinner, there are two or three who are grousing among themselves that the line is too long, that tonight's food doesn't differ in some preferred way from last night's food, why can't someone help them with [insert waitstaff request], etc.
That doesn't change the benefit to the 70-80% who are truly helped, of course, but another 20-30% are evidently maintaining this lifestyle because it is, in their estimation, easier than working.
They don't exactly deserve brownie points for it.
head of household, or an older child, has a severe behavior problem. That minority can make life unbearable for the majority. They can also make life miserable for themselves, and facility managers would like to be able to open slots for new intakes by forcing refractory long term residents to, say, apply for jobs, or move into subsidized housing.
The same dynamic applies at schools. Just one child committed to the cause of disruption of a classroom can halt the learning of everyone, and while one child here and there may be manageable, a classroom with several such students is one in which very little education takes place. Yet the provisions for removing such students are strict--to actually expel a student for serious violations such as assault or weapons requires overcoming a lot of legal-bureaucratic hurdles (if it's done at all), so forget it being done for constant disruptive behavior. "Alternative" schools are overcrowded and underfunded, if they exist at all, and behavior units within schools face the same difficulties. Couple that with a prevailing ideology of "mainstreaming" within education that stresses heterogeneous classrooms, and the chances of having such a student in a classroom can be very high. The losers in these situations are the average students who are nonetheless serious about school (or their parents are). Those most in need of assistance will get it from the special education teachers, and the brightest kids will escape to private schools or AP classes (the proliferation of which is in part due to the disappearance of formal tracking). This leaves those students in the middle to suffer along with their frustrated teachers, who lack the same credible threat of removal that these shelters now have.
the brightest kids will escape to private schools or AP classes (the proliferation of which is in part due to the disappearance of formal tracking
You have to wonder how long it will be until legal challenges put an end to AP classes. Steve Sailer has pointed out that every one of the 30+ AP tests would fail the disparate impact test that was the basis of the Ricci case.
Yes, they might fail the 80% rule, but that rule applies to employment, and I'm really not sure how a legal case could be mounted against AP tests unless one argued the tests didn't actually cover material typical of an intro-level college class. I'm not saying such a lawsuit would never come into play--only the naive are amazed at what people will sue over--but they would have a very high hurdle to jump over empirically.
Well, if there's someone whose views on race I can trust to be fair and unbiased, it's Steve Sailer.
I know you're being sarcastic, but I think that's a pretty fair description.
His commenters are a different story.
How on earth are the bright children supposed to learn poor study habits if they're allowed to escape to AP classes?
The same dynamic, I'm afraid, is part of the human condition. And it explains greatly why the "nirvana" peddlers are essentially liars.
There is no "program," government or private, that can change this dynamic. The only choices are unpleasant... ostracize, medicate, or incarcerate.
Still, I've yet to see a fourth choice that isn't basically a variation of these three.
I suggest putting their sins on the head of a goat and driving it into the desert.
Although that might come under "ostracize," I'm not sure.
The alternative, which is far more unpleasant, is to pretend that the problems don't exist, which is where we are now.
Without that (threat of punishment),
a dysfunctional minority
can choke the system.
Who has spent the last 50 years
removing that threat, and why ?
The same people who have made it
necessary for you and your commenters
to euphemize their way around the topic.
Men must be governed, and government is force;
As noted above by Mischief, those who make and
enforce the rules which choke the system exempt
themselves from the results of their actions,
which makes them dysfunctional, no ?
Megan said:
"In practice, what are you going to do with a family that insists on waiting for the perfect Section 8 apartment or assisted housing option to emerge?"
The subtext of this statement is that people who can't get a job are "just lazy". Or, when a speculative bubble has raised the rent on a one-room shack in a crack neighborhood to a little more than you make in a month that something is "wrong" with you.
So, please tell the audience exactly how much time you have spent homeless.
(sound of crickets chirping)
Thought so.
It's real hard to find a job when you have no place to live. Hygiene problems as well as problems storing your stuff, what little you have left, become very serious. And then, of course, since we offshored all of our production and those mythical "information jobs" never appeared to replace them, there might not actually BE a job for you to get even if you could work out all of the logistics of sleeping in a gutter and somehow managing to look presentable enough to GET and KEEP a job. Not to mention GETTING TO A JOB. The public transportation systems in most parts of the country are laughable, assuming even that you CAN afford to use them.
All things you have absolutely NO direct experience of. Therefore you really have nothing to say about the subject that is worth listening to.
No, seriously. You don't.
I know for a fact that people like you think you're pretty darned funny. But you aren't. And the unfunny-ness of this situation is only becoming more apparent by the day. All of those homeless in NYC are about to have LOTS of company. People who have never had the experience of homelessness in their entire lives suddenly losing everything as jobs dry up and the balloon terms in their once so easy looking mortgages start slapping them in the face.
People who will never again buy the line that people who can't get work are "just lazy".
Tens of millions of them. And they vote.
The financial holocaust that was just triggered by the pigs in the financial sector is going to make the 1930's look like a beach party. "Temporary Shelters" will become permanent tent cities. The streets of our cities will be teeming with armies of the newly disenfranchised, all looking for someone to blame.
And as for you... I hope you put all that lovely cash of yours in gold. Because if you didn't, you'll be starving along with the rest of them. Because right-wing pundits who make a living by blaming the poor for being poor are going to go out of fashion faster than the hula hoop.
-Jay Randall
http://www.econocataclysm.com