15 Myths on Homelessness
Notes p26, quoting A. Lincoln - “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.” p31 - “The most destructive aspects of the Calvinist belief system have endured and serve most importantly to emotionally distance the domiciled from the visibly impoverished–preventing us from fully investing in humane solutions proven to work.” p40 - “In March 1990, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it would begin conducting a yearly national census of homeless people—a single-point-in-time numeration of Americans who were visibly homeless. The following morning, homeless activist Mitch Snyder—leader of Washington DC’s largest shelter, …, responded by dumping a massive load of sand on a bridge, preventing many Virginia commuters from entering DC. Once the two-ton dump trunk [sic] had emptied its load, Snyder conveyed this simple but enduring explanation: “It is easier to count grains of sand than homeless people in America.”” p88 - “After famously not recognizing his own HUD secretary at a meeting of urban mayors (Samuel Pierce was Black), Reagan slashed HUD expenditures—both for public housing complexes and portable Section 8 vouchers—from $26 billion to $8 billion. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this carnage. If you are looking for the single, most significant factor that transformed US homelessness from a cyclical ebb-and-flow to a permanent fixture on the American landscape, this is it.” p102 - “Democratic support for the federal government’s central role in providing affordable housing had diminished so thoroughly that, early on in negotiations to ‘reform’ welfare, to avoid the possibility of any outright veto being overridden, Clinton offered House Speaker Newt Gingrich the wholesale dismantling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the realization of a decades-long Republican dream.” (TB: Hey Bill, go fuck yourself. Idiot.) p109 - “[Broken window theory] origins can be traced to a now infamous 1982 Atlantic article by George Kelling and James Wilson, which badly twisted a 1969 research paper by Stanford Universities Philip Zimbardo, by concluding, “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Kelling and wilson’s enduring malignant conclusion: law enforcement should come down hard on small acts of disorder or they will metastasize into something far bigger.” TB: Zimbardo! I had no idea he was the origin of Broken Window. You may know him from the Stanford Prison Experiment. p112 - “For the first time ever, median rent in the fifty most populous metro areas exceeded $2,000. Put simply, “In no state, metropolitan area or county in the US can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home by working a standard 40-hour work week.” More than 40 percent of US workers cannot afford even a one-bedroom fair-market rental with one full-time job.” p125-128 or thereabouts, discussion on the point-in-time counts. Good discussion! Huge undercount, bad at counting rural populations, etc. p136 - start of section on Housing First, an evidence-based best practice that you will likely see more or less scuttled by the second Trump administration for no good reason. p163-172 - great section on international perspectives on affordable housing, including co-ops!! Review Odd double feature with my other review/finished book today, On Tyranny. ...