Marco and Cherese from invisible people on Vimeo.

As a society it comes down to this: what do we do for those who fall through the cracks? Marco and Cherese are not invisible. I for one see them all the time here in Washington DC. I have a Conservative friend who says people are poor because they want to be poor. Obviously, he hasn’t met people like Marco and Cherese.  Cherese has worked at jobs in the past and Marco tries to find work whenever he can. They both live in an RV right now.

Meet Marco & Cherese. They are living in a small RV and their primary income is panhandling. Cherese was the victim of a hit-and-run on an exit ramp, suffering a broken collar bone and a broken arm. Since she doesn’t have health insurance, the hospital just let her go, assuring her that the breaks will heal on their own.

Marco & Cherese are just like you and me. They’ve made a few mistakes in life (who hasn’t?), they’re extremely faithful, and they are good people just trying to survive the nightmare of homelessness.

Cherese was also a drug addict which obviously contributes to the predicament she finds herself in. She got counseling and was clean for a long time as she mentions in the video. She is human after all and humans make all sorts of bad choices. We’re bailing out Wall Street bankers like John Thain at Merrill Lynch for their failures, but we can’t help others? They talk about more and more people hitching trailers onto their trucks because homelessness is growing. This economy may very well send more to those ranks. So how do we as a society deal with this?

Many people would rather ignore it all. We simply cannot ignore it. Whenever a society becomes so polarized with its economic classes there are repercussions. Those gated communities and security guards cannot protect you forever. There has to be a balance. While we all can’t be millionaires (actually from what I understand its more like billionaires now) we all should be at a certain economic equilibrium. Talking about the middle-class can at sometimes seem cliche to me, but I think this is where we should strive to get everyone who isn’t already there to. We also have to support the middle-class and not let it shrink. I think the Middle Class Taskforce is very important in this regard. Can we also have a Poverty Taskforce too?

Mark from invisible people on Vimeo.

I just saw the latest video on the Invisilbe People videoblog.

On a recent trip to Phoenix, Arizona I met Mark. He is 22 years old, lost his job four months ago, and has been on the streets ever since. Mark’s one and only wish is to find a job.

Mark spends every day that he is homeless looking for a job. He hits all the stores and many of them are not hiring. If we’re going to stimulate the economy we have to get people like Mark help as well.

Viper from invisible people on Vimeo.

Everytime the Invisible People video blog puts up a new post I try and blog about it. I would like to see them getting a lot of traffic. They must not remain invisible any longer.

Activists Seek New ways to Get Food to 35 Million

The goal is to make food more easily available to working poor women, children and others who, research shows, are a larger portion of the hungry than the urban homeless. They also hope to lessen the stigma associated with standing in line for a hot meal or groceries.

“The first generation of soup kitchens are getting to the point of outgrowing their kitchens and thinking they have to build new multimillion-dollar facilities,” said Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen and a nationally recognized anti-hunger activist. “And we’re saying, ‘We need to be adapting to future needs, not building the same things but bigger.’ “

It sounds to me like decentralizing the process might be the way to go. Make the distribution points smaller and networked not huge centralized locations where everyone must queue up.

Wordle art generated from the words in the RSS feed of the website Invisible People.

I came across the story that jobs paying below the poverty line have increased by 4.7 million in the last four years.

The number of jobs with pay below the poverty threshold increased to 29.4 million, or 22 percent of all jobs, in 2006 from 24.7 million, or 19 percent of all jobs, in 2002.

“The real surprising news, the alarming news, is that both the number and percentage of low-income families increased during this period,” said Brandon Roberts, co-author of the report. “This was a time when we had solid and robust economic growth.”

Technorati Tags: Bush

I’m really curioius as to why I’m not hearing anything about this in the local media or in the Washington Post at all.

Soon, as cops on cars and motorcycles started showing up, everyone started crossing with the walk signal in the crosswalk, which is completely legal. Nonetheless, this tactic shuts down left and right turns as motorists must yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk.

As of the 23, Franklin is down to about 73 beds while men are SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR at the shelter on NY Avenue. A resident there who gives out blankets on “detail,” confirmed that he was giving out blankets to men sleeping on the floor.

As this is going on and about 20 people have alreay lost that so-callled “permanent supportive housing,” the Mayor’s men are still taking apart beds at Franklin Shelter! This is despite last week’s council legislation demanding the shelter be kept open-which will not take effect until Sep 30, presumably without Fenty’s signature.

I fear that the Mayor is focusing a lot on development and progress—but at the same time ignoring a need for affordable housing and adressing the homeless situation. That is, unless he plans to run the homeless and poor out of the district. Look, I know it’s hard to solve the problem of homelessness and poverty. Does this mean we have to give up and accept it? While we may never truly eradicate it can’t we focus on keeping the levels as low as possible?

I could not help but blog about this article over at Mother Jones.

India’s waste-pickers-often women and children-join free-ranging cows and other less sacred animals in a daily forage through the garbage of the streets. They’ve been recycling trash for decades, since long before recycling became fashionable in the West, and in Delhi, a 13-million-person metropolis, the waste-pickers number in the tens of thousands. For slum-dwellers, such recycling of plastic, paper, and metals-anything that can be turned into cash-is often the only source of income.

Bharati Chaturvedi, the director and cofounder of Chintan, a small Indian NGO that provides education to waste-pickers, claims that more than 1 percent of Delhi’s population sifts through garbage, recycling as much as 59 percent of the city’s waste. “These waste-pickers are providing a public service-for free,” she says.

That may soon change. A new waste incinerator that turns trash into electricity is slated to be built in Timarpur, a suburb of Delhi. Because it will reduce the amount of methane off-gassed by landfills, it will generate carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol. But the incinerator will also emit cancer-causing dioxins, mercury, heavy metals, and fly ash. Are the carbon credits available under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism worth putting thousands of impoverished waste-pickers out of business?

It really doesn’t make sense. It’s sort of ironic that the Kyoto accord would allow a cancer-causing incinerator to be in operation.

Technorati : india, waste pickers

– from Daylife.com

Since I’ve been working and living in the DC metro area I’ve noticed scenes like this way too often. I’ve come across beggars in the street and in the corridors of metro stations almost daily. Sometimes I stop to give them some of the change in my pocket. Most of the time I don’t really have any money on me (you know the whole debit card thing). Every morning on my way to work in Dupont Circle I walk past the same homeless person. Every time I see him I’m reminded of the homeless situation occurring in the nation’s capitol. Part of me often wants to ask him “why don’t you take a job”? Any job that would allow you to not have to live and beg on the streets. For that matter why not go to a homeless shelter? Or is the shelter system too full? Do they only allow people to stay there at night? I also remember speaking to a homeless person back in Westchester County, NY who told me that shelters can be unsafe, so maybe that’s it.

Then part of me also realizes that a lot of the time things aren’t that simple. Even those who are working are barely above or are still below the poverty level. While they may have a roof over their head, their living conditions are usually still deplorable and there’s still a lack of access to opportunity for upward mobility. We call them the working poor and actually up until last year, before I moved, my income put me in that classification. The job I have now–which I’m thankful for since I’m doing something I want to do in the advocacy field–actually put me squarely in the middle class for the first time.

Of course homelessness is nothing new to America. After all I’m from New York and this is something I grew up around in the Bronx. Even when I moved to Westchester homelessness wasn’t hard to find in the county. The question that always comes to mind for me is, why does the local government allow homeless people to loiter and sleep on the streets in the first place? If anything this can be seen as a problem akin to public indecency. Regarding the visual component of homelessness; I was once told that there was an effort in NYC to remove the spectacle because people complained, but nothing was done to solve the problem. The homeless weren’t seen anymore but they were still homeless.

When it comes to the homeless in the District of Columbia, I was also told a story that when the Clinton administration was in power there was less visible poverty in DC. If this story is true then that would mean things have reverted back for the worse. This leads me to my question for the new President. My question is: can we do something to get the homeless out of the streets of the nation’s capitol? I realize that the President will be the leader of the entire nation, but his residence will be here in DC. Shouldn’t he have a vested interested in ensuring that the capitol is a shining city on a hill? Of course by asking this to the new president I’m not absolving the local DC government of anything. My question to them is: why is poverty as visible as it is now? What has the city government done and how high is this a priority for them? While there are some innovative initiatives out there like Street Sense, it’s going to take a lot more to solve this problem.

Technorati : dc, mccain, obama, potus

In the book Nobodies written by John Bowe he quotes a spokesperson from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers named Lucas Benitez a former tomato picker from Mexico on the unlikely idea that lawsuits and politicians are likely to improve working conditions for farmworkers.

From the book:

Without bothering to by cynical about it, Benitez dismisses the idea that lawsuits and politicians are likely to improve the abysmal conditions facing farmworkers. “If you want true change, ” he told me one day at coalition headquarters, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, “it won’t come from Washington, or from the lawyers.” Even if lawsuits are won and laws are passed, he said, you’ve only won the battle. The war against overall poor treatment of farmworkers will continue. However, he told me, “if you change people’s consciousness”— and by “people,” he means “workers,”— “the people themselves take care of it.” Change from the top down is a nice thing to dream about, he said with a shrug, leaving behind decades of liberal pieties, but really, “who cares what happens to a bunch of pelagatos— a bunch of nobodies?”

This excerpt really sort of goes along with what I’ve been thinking for the past few years. And this sort of thought process doesn’t only apply to labor issues like those of the farmworkers. I’ve been of the belief that if people want change they need to band together and help themselves. If you’re living in a dilapidated area who’s to say that people couldn’t organize and clean things up? Another quote that I’ve found that would fit with what I’m trying to get at is “helping people help themselves”. That’s not to say that you leave government out of this, that’s not the right thing at all. But people who are taking their living conditions into their own hands and who are organized will be more powerful when they go to government for the funds and other resources that will assist them to help themselves.

When I did some canvassing back in 2004 for a local candidate in Yonkers, NY. I entered into a housing project complex and it reminded me of the projects I’ve grown up around in NYC. That is to say they weren’t a place that would be your first choice to live in. Inside the development and even the area surrounding it outside were places that people would most likely avoid if they could. I did not ever live in the projects however. I lived in an apartment in the Wakfield section of the Bronx, which, would still qualify as a pretty sketchy neighborhood when I look back on things now. Housing projects were notorious for being in bad condition. The smell of urine, graffiti, and broken infrastructure is common. From the memory jog back in 2004, this led me to ask the question of why do things have to be this way?

Of course the local government could probably be doing more to keep up the infrastructure, but I also think it’s up to the people to take back their neighborhoods as well. I’ve always felt just because you live in a low income area it doesn’t mean that it has to look that way. People need to organize, it’s the only way. I’m not saying it’s simple and that it’s not already being done, but I think there are millions more that can be brought to start participating in revitalization projects. There are groups like ACORN and Community Voices Heard who are doing tireless work (and I mean tireless work, I’ve seen what ACORN organizers do and it’s tough!). Providing grants and other assistance to these organizations is definitely an area that federal and local governments could really sink their teeth into. A book by Paul S. Grogan titled Comeback Cities talks about how these non-profit organizations and citizen groups have been able to rebuild areas.

So this now gets me to my new home in the DC metro area. The first thing I noticed was the homelessness and that this homelessness hangs over the city whether you want to acknowledge it or not; for Washingtonians just look for people selling Street Sense newspapers on street corners and they’ll tell you all about it. I’ve also noticed that while the NW quadrant is lovely, the NE and SE areas are really in need of development (and good development, I’d even say mixed income neighborhoods should be the ultimate goal) and services for the people that live there. Of course there’s also this sort of de facto segregation of the city (and DC isn’t the only one that has this it’s due to economics and etc) that is really weird as well. I’m not going to even touch on the overarching issue of the local economy and the public school and general education situation of DC. But if it’s anything like comparable areas anywhere else, then those schools are in need of assistance as well.

So taking the quote of Mr. Benitez in the beginning of the post. What can we the people do about it? Is this a project that people would want to take on? When I first went down to the Penn Quarter (Gallery Place) I was amazed by the stores and, well, development that had occurred. I was moved to go onto Wikipedia and read about the Penn Quarter and learn that Congress had established the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation on October 27, 1972. However, I’ve been told that most of this development has happened only recently. Why is that?

What if we the people got together and started a new project of our own? A District of Columbia Development Corporation (DCDC)? A non-profit organization formed to take on the problems that have been outlined here? Pooling all the knowledge of organizing from groups like ACORN and the CIW it would be a great force. Of course there’s always the option of organizing and working with groups already doing this work in DC.

What do you all think?

Technorati Tags: nobodies, john bowe, ciw, coalition of immokalee workers