Tag Archives: Impoverished

Solving Homelessness: Legal Assistance and Reform

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Legal problems can, and often do, force people into extreme poverty, homelessness included. A court case can take over a person’s life, draining time, resources and funds. Depending on the reasons behind the case, it can cost a person their reputation, job and family – justifiably or not. Any involvement with the legal system is costly and winning is often the result of simply having more resources to devote to the process. If the issue at stake is important enough, people will (and have) devote every last resource to the fight, leaving them financially destitute.

Surviving extreme poverty (homeless or housed) is a legal quagmire of vagrancy laws; restrictions based on lack of a permanent address; illegal evictions; and accusations of theft, fraud, trespassing and simply existing (e.g.: sleeping in public). Attempting to report violent attacks or rapes is practically impossible and police brutality is not uncommon.

Those are just the most commonly known legal issues facing people trying to escape extreme poverty.

Any form of legal entanglement is devastating to impoverished families. Criminal cases are common and many of them are based on racial profiling or ridiculous laws specifically designed (and selectively enforced) to criminalize the existence of poor people because those with power don’t like seeing extreme poverty in public spaces.

I wish I could say that last sentence was an exaggeration or an analogy or even representation of worst-case-scenarios that pop-up through the country. Sadly, it is the cold-hard-reality faced by people surviving extreme poverty everywhere in the United States.

There are free legal aid programs, but they are inundated with requests for help, run by a small staff of volunteers and universally refuse to even discuss anything that is considered criminal. Legal representation provided within the court system is also overloaded and poorly managed.

As the experts in mass incarceration have pointed out, simply being part of a targeted racial group almost guarantees problems with the criminal justice system, regardless of your commitment to living a good and honest life. The same can be said for people surviving poverty – particularly those faced with extreme poverty and homelessness.

Extreme poverty and homelessness will not be significantly reduced, much less solved, until prejudiced and predatory laws are eliminated, all people are provided access to quality legal assistance and addressing an issue through the court system does not require being either extremely wealthy or a willingness to face complete financial devastation.

There’s a lot of work to be done here.
I don’t have a clean or easy answer.
It must change.
Period.

Mass Incarceration and Vagrancy Law Resources:

Homeless Payment Plan

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The large building had multiple floors and housed multitudes of San Diego’s homeless. With so many homeless people all in one place, we lost our individuality and became numbers for their population statistics. They stopped focusing on individual families and instead focused on the population as a whole; which translated to them caring about all of us, but they didn’t care about any one of us.

Living at St. De Paul’s over the next month had its ups and down. My mom had to pay a high percentage of the low wages she made from her new security job to the shelter every paycheck. They said it would help us save up to move out. They said upon completion of the six-month program they give all the money back. The keywords were “upon completion,” meaning if we didn’t complete it, we did not get the money back. Giving up most of her paycheck left us with little money to do anything else besides wash clothes and put a few minutes on the family cell phone; which wasn’t new. We had gone without buying them before so it wasn’t an immediate problem.

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.

Homeless Holidays

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I hated holidays in shelters. The shelter atmosphere always seemed to drain every ounce of holiday spirit from me. Every holiday, we had to sit in a room full of strangers and put on fake smiles pretending to be happy. Thanksgiving had rolled around and the only thing I was thankful for was my mother was still alive. I was thankful for my legs too.

The good thing about Thanksgiving is food is usually more abundant. Not in our current shelter, though. We had to travel down to another sister shelter nearby along with other homeless families, stand outside like a herd of sheep, and wait for them to let us in as everybody drove past and stared at us. Standing there wasn’t ideal, but we didn’t have another choice.

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.

Ghost of Poverty

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I had no jacket, no sleeping bag, nothing—except the clothes on my frail body. Transparent to the naked eye, I moved as a ghost. When I walked, no one noticed me. Maybe because my clothes were dirty. Maybe because my shoes were from a donation box. Or maybe because I embodied poverty. Whatever the reason, it made me invisible to everyone around me, except when my silhouette flickered from panhandling, frightening people.

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.

Fighting for an Education

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I believed I could become more than what their statistics believed I could. I also knew, outside of my mom and sister, no one else believed I could beat the statistics. But there comes a time where you have to follow your heart, where you have to make your own decisions to better yourself, even if everyone else calls you crazy. I knew to Mr. Robertson and English, I sounded crazy, naïve . . . a little homeless boy trying to dream big. I was being overlooked. I knew there were other non-homeless students in better schools who were given an opportunity. Wanting the same opportunity shouldn’t be a crime. How could they expect me to look around at my life and just accept it, and just roll over and die? Why couldn’t I have more? I didn’t choose the life I lived. But I could choose to opt out for a better life for myself since I was the only one who had to live it…Most kids I knew were dropping out. I knew I would have to fight the public school system with everything I had if I wanted to come out college ready. If, and only if, living on the streets didn’t kill me first.

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.

Library Kids

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We wandered to the downtown library where we had developed a sort of friendship or understanding with the librarians in the computer lab. We trekked to the library just about every day so eventually they started talking and interacting with us. I thought they knew we were homeless. The library is where a lot of homeless people go during the day to kill time or just to be inside for a change. We came to kill time. We had to linger around until my mom left work to pick us up and then find somewhere to park so we could sleep. We weren’t the only homeless kids who went there during the day. A group of us were there. I had lived in shelters with a lot of them before so we all knew each other and knew why each other were there. I talked to a few of them before I sat and did my homework. Completing homework had always been a fast way to kill time; it wasn’t difficult and it only helped me intellectually. Pooh and I sat across the table from each other, half doing homework and half talking.

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.

Katrina Refugees

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The most interesting people I met were the Katrina “refugees.” Not so much the adults but the children. They were regular kids just like me, but no one else saw them as normal. To the world, we all were outcasts, me for living homeless, them for being refugees. Every day they woke up remembering everything they lost, including people they cared about. I saw the girls cry. I saw the boys cry.

“It just feels so bad,” Cornell said. He was my age but his physique far bigger. Whatever they fed to those kids down in Louisiana to get them so big, I wanted some. “One minute everything’s fine, the next everything’s gone. They’re calling us refugees like we’re AIDS babies from Africa. Or like were from Pakistan or wherever the Middle East is. I’m American!”

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“My friends died in those waters, man. I lost everything. I don’t deserve this, bro. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.

Poor People’s Campaign: Lincoln Nebraska

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The Poor People’s Campaign launches today with coordinated local protests in state capitals all over the USA.

Nebraska is one of the states that does not have a campaign organised, so I took a photo of the capital and modified it a bit:

Now there’s a protest in Lincoln, NE!

It doesn’t have the same powerful (and important) effect as a real life protest, but it’s the beginning of something…hopefully…even if that something is just an idea.

Homeless Communities

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All of the following groups are working to establish communities for people trying to survive extreme poverty (homelessness):

Rootz of Change: (Atlanta, GA, USA) An intentional community, farm, training center and a community of anti-poverty activists.

Dignity Village: (Portland, OR, USA) A tiny house community offering temporary living to people trying to survive extreme poverty (homelessness). Also maintains a collection of micro-businesses. Quote from website: We feel it’s necessary to establish a community-based living facility where people living on the streets can have their basic needs met in a stable, sanitary environment free from violence, theft, disruption of peace, and drugs and alcohol.

Right to Dream Too (R2Dtoo): (Portland, OR, USA) Safe camping location/community offering a safe location to sleep. Video tours and interviews of the community are listed on the website. I recommend watching this one: Right To Dream Too (R2D2) City Hall Meetings Portland OR 2013 Quote from website: Right2DreamToo (R2DToo) was established on World Homeless Action Day, Oct. 10th, 2011. We are a nonprofit organization operating a space that provides refuge and a safe space to rest or sleep undisturbed for Portland’s unhoused community who cannot access affordable housing or shelter. We exist to awaken social and politcal groups to the importance of safe undisturbed sleep. Our purpose is to create a placewhere unhoused people can rest or sleep without being rousted by police or private security and without being under the threat of violence.

Opportunity Village: (Eugene, OR) Micro-housing community providing transitional housing and community support for homeless. Managed by Square One Villages, a non profit  dedicated to creating self-managed communities of cost-effective tiny homes for people in need of housing.

Build Our House Project: (Philadelphia, PA) Quote from website: Sustainable, supportive housing, organised by poor and homeless people, for poor and homeless people. Working to end homelessness in Philadelphia through justice and compassion.

Community First!: (Austin, TX, USA) Quote from web page: A 27-acre master planned community that provides affordable, permanent housing and a supportive community for the disabled, chronically homeless in Central Texas. A development of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, this transformative residential program exists to love and serve our neighbors who have been living on the streets, while also empowering the surrounding community into a lifestyle of service with the homeless. Additional information, upcoming events and videos can be found on the Community First Village Facebook page.

Homeless Ecoville: (Richmond, VA, USA) A self-sustaining, tiny home community created by and for extremely poor (homeless) people. Quote from website: It is a community of people who work together toward being a self-sustaining village. A Go Fund Me page has been set up to raise funds for the land.

Tiny Cabins 5 Safe Harbor: (Seattle, WA, USA) Quote from Facebook page: A safe harbor from the mean streets of Seattle, a community of tiny cabins & dorm tent shelters, doing what we can to help one another.

American Style Starvation

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The food might not have been pretty, but it kept us alive. Sustenance was the most important part because homeless people like us died daily, and nobody ever noticed or cared. Late at night, I tossed and turned. Hunger pains were like I had been shot in my abdomen, I gripped my belly in pure agony. I wanted to scream for God but the shelter would kick us out for breaking noise compliance. None of us were asleep, but we all remained quiet; we didn’t have any words to speak. I would have eaten a rat if I saw it. My mom told me to try to keep my mind off eating, but how could I when my stomach kept digesting itself? It gurgled louder than any other thought I could think. It prickled the inside of my stomach like a cactus scraping against me. The hunger so painful I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t do anything but lie there and take it. I would have snuck out to find some food, but security caught the last family and they had to leave the next day. Not fair, but nobody cared about being fair to us. I just laid there depressed, thinking about how many other people in the world who were hungry. Bottom line, whether it is Africa or America, starving is starving.

–My Way Home: Growing Up Homeless in America by Michael Gaulden

From the preface:

This memoir covers the latter part of my homeless journey, ranging from age fourteen to seventeen, predominately my high school years. The horror of my homelessness is what I call it. Allow me to take you down my path and to walk in my footsteps along my own hellacious underground railroad. If you are reading this in the midst of your own overwhelmingly challenging journey, it is you for whom I write….It is you whom I urge not to quit. I know your pain and through my pain, I wish to give you strength. For everyone else reading this, please understand my story is only one of millions of other homeless people.