• A tent city in the Otay Mesa area near the Donovan prison facility as a permanent campground for the city’s homeless.
Each year in San Diego nimby-ism unleashes its annual fear campaign at council members who are considering a temporary winter shelter site. Despite dozens of homeless people dying each year on the streets, in the canyons and riverbeds, the homeless situation in the city is bounced around like “a very hot potato.”
Using the successful Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon, which houses several hundred homeless in a safe environment of permanent tent structures as a model, we can create housing quickly and cheaply. Year after year, the Homeless Task Force’s surveys find that over 60% of the homeless wanted shelter but were turned away for lack of space.
“This city cannot continue with the usual suspects dominating the discussion and direction of homeless programs and funding through their deceitful declaration of a so-called 10 year plan to end chronic homelessness,” the San Diego Renters Union recently announced. . “The Plan is a desperate attempt by the city to continue grabbing federal funds earmarked for poor people, after the Feds were unhappy about sloppy accountability and transfer of funds to other projects such as designer trash cans in Little Italy and other projects for business groups.”
The mayor’s office has used federal funds earmarked for the homeless as a slush fund to pay outrageous salaries to his cronies. In 2010, he proposed almost a quarter of a million dollar increase for “administrative costs” to run the homeless programs, even though he fired the city’s homeless coordinator years ago. Can you imagine, he spent over $2 million in 2009 just to pay his buddies for doing the paperwork on these federally funded poverty grants. The Mayor spent this two million administering around $7 million on 67 projects within the city. That’s over a 25% administrative cost, while the national Social Security system administers billions of dollars to millions of people with a 3% administrative cost.” No wonder, that the Mayor’s office was being audited by the Compliance Unit of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for excessive administrative costs.
Recently, my good friend Linda Evans reported, “Now, the politicians and especially those professionals who profit from these funds – the homeless industry – don’t want you to sit back and take a common sense look at the issue. Spreading the funds around, channeling it through various private organizations and their well-paid CEO’s and staff, diverting vast sums to developers and wealthy corporate landlords, paying off expensive lobbyists to expedite political donations hides the real benefactors of your tax dollars earmarked for the homeless ,” Evans said.
“Now, these poverty pimps and the corporate media will tell you that the homeless are bums, scum of the Earth, alcoholics and druggies, yet women and children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population,” she outlined in her speech. “However, even the most fallen, the least of those amongst the least, must deserve our understanding and at Dignity Village, where the homeless work their way into leadership position.”
Linda Evans told a recent gathering that San Diego had a tent city in Balboa Park back in 1992 where 72 people moved into 23 tents on an unused parking lot but the tourist industry and upscale museum endowers threatened the only Democratic mayor in the history of San Diego, Maureen O’Conner, and she moved police in to close down the encampment and arrest its homeless organizer, Larry Milligan. “This, in spite of the fact that Councilman John Hartley, a rarity in San Diego politics, a man of tremendous courage and conscience, introduced an emergency ordinance which would have created an outdoor tent city in an old hospital parking lot.”
“Guess what?” she asked her audience. “The Mayor and Council killed the idea and opted for a committee to study the issue of homelessness in San Diego and incredibly, ethically indefensibly, the smart-asses at City Hall are still studying the issue after 18 years.”
“This is an outrage,” she announced. “The County must pay its fair share; at a tent city all the participants should be required as condition of their housing to secure General Relief checks from the County for which they are entitled as paupers to help pay for their home. San Diego County, with the lowest participation rate of the poor in the Food Stamp Program in the nation, should be forced to grant each occupant at the village their fair share of Federal Government allocations for food. Also, the County’s pitiful winter voucher program should be expanded and help pay for the new campground.”
Her voice hoarse, quivering with anger, she shouted “the politicos in San Diego don’t want to solve homelessness in our city. They are not dumb people, they know that private corporate housing developers will not build cheap housing because it is unprofitable, they know that banks will not finance poor people or even housing co-ops composed of the marginalized, they know that real estate agents and speculators will continue to drive up the cost of vacant land, and, finally they know that the wealthy will fight tax increases to pay for public housing.”
“Only public housing will solve homeless,” she said. “If the city doesn’t have the money – or the political will to extract it from the wealthy – to build buildings; then, the only common sense proposal is to create a tent city. A community where, however small and plain, the tent is still their home, a place on this Earth they can call their own. Without dignity and pride, how can we expect a person to shuffle out of institutionalized warehousing and re-enter society?”
”At Dignity Village in Portland,” Evans reported, “they don’t plan to end homelessness; they have done it. They start from the premise that every individual has a right to safe, sanitary shelter. Their motto is to stop criminalizing poverty and create a legal place of refuge for every homeless person. With permanent and emergency tents, with adequate sanitation facilities, showers, laundry room, telephones, internet access, medical and mental health clinics, storage, employment contacts, free food and water, they give the homeless the tools they need to survive with dignity.”
“Not only survival needs, but each occupant of a tent must do clean-up and security duty,” she related. “The village has its own board of directors and legislative branch, made up of former homeless residents. There are five basics rules for the encampment that have kept it thriving and peaceful for almost 7 years. 1. No violence to yourself or others. 2. No theft. 3. No alcohol, drugs or drug paraphernalia. 4. No disruptive behavior. 5. Everyone must contribute to the maintenance and operation of the camp.”
“Can you imagine if our city was run on those five simple yet powerfully engaging rules?” she asked. “What a truly compassionate, caring, sharing community we would be living in today rather than the selfishness and opulent consumptive sickness we see all around us.”
“But more importantly, Dignity Village’s tent ownership concept restores self-esteem, ‘personhood’ as John Paul II liked to call it,” Evans said. “How can we call the homeless our sisters and brothers if we treat them like stray dogs or abandoned cats, forcing them into human kennels, stripping them of their dignity, telling them they are unworthy of a place of their own?”
• Build 1,000 permanent supportive housing units by 2018. This would save taxpayers over $15 million dollars each year. A September 2010 study by the Downtown Partnership Corporation showed that over 134 homeless people had used hospitalization or emergency services because of their vulnerability at a cost of $25 million a year, roughly $186,000 per person. And those interviewed were only a fraction of the estimated 738 people they counted during the survey.
• I propose that we pay for those units by raising the remodeling fee on any home or business to 10 percent of the cost of the remodeling job. Those of us who own our own homes must, I believe, in good conscience make some effort to help our homeless citizens. Donating to individuals and shelters help, in the short run, but only permanent supportive housing will give a quality of life to every person who needs it.
Economic Growth in San Diego
Like the end of the Old West, its frontier gone; modern capitalism is at its end and like any dying entity the vultures are moving in to carve up the remains – in our case, predatory corporations. Local businesses, self-employed craftsman (like myself), service providers, teachers, public employees, even home care nurses, are being forced down, ever closer, to the poverty level.
In spite of what the corporate owned pundits tell you, we are in permanent recession and their will never again be a period of viable, sustainable economic growth in our current economic milieu. First, American jobs went overseas and to Mexico, now, U.S. dollars are being drained away by trade deficits. Soon China and other nations will own the United States economy.
The federal government cannot continue to prop up local governments by borrowing money from the fat cat bankers which created the problems in the first place. As anyone with a credit card knows, the interest is what these leeches are after, not the improvement and health of our nation.
On my third day as Mayor, I will host a conference of local business and labor leaders called “Circling the Economic Wagons” to look at ways this city can create local institutions of economic independence from the speculative dangers of Wall Street speculation and the greed of national banks.
For one, a city-wide, non-profit, public owned Credit Union charged with loans for micro-businesses, home industries, group mortgages, land trusts, cooperative housing projects, co-op food buying facilities. A top priority will be to create viable plans to keep San Diego dollars in San Diego.
With the end of economic growth as we have known it, we need to look toward new models to ensure economic prosperity for all our citizens. With permanent recession and no new substantial funds into the economy – government stimulus will end soon – we must either look at massive redistribution of present income or create new modes of economic cooperation and sharing of our communities resources.
Of course, we as a community can do nothing. Let our local leaders continue to plead helplessness, it’s the market and we can’t touch that, while they continue to enrich themselves by defending the affluence of those who control the wealth of the market, particularly San Diego’s Oligarchy. But to do nothing, means all of us who work will continue to see our wages fall and the cost of living become further monopolized by a few giant corporations, like Sempra, to the point where our children and grand children will face bleak futures amid despair and rampant crime by the desperate.
One way to consider the fundamental issue is to ask: is the economy here to serve workers, or are workers here to serve those who own the economy? Thom Hartmann
City Owned Credit Union
Taxes
Current crop of politicians, from Councilmen DiMaio and Falconer, are not tax savers but tax shifters.
No Politics as Usual
In this age of environmental and economic collapse….
The Republicans politicians are not the doctors, they are the disease. The present political system cannot solve our social and economic problems because they are part of the problem. Only fundamental change…..
Roads
San Diego motorists travel on the sixth worst roadways of any major city in the United States because the Mayor directs staff to concentrate on upscale enclaves, like La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe, and tourist corridors rather than middle-class and working neighborhoods. Fifty-three percent of city streets have pavement in poor condition, according to a study by a Washington, D.C. highway engineering study group. Incredibly, another 33 percent of city roads are rated “mediocre.” San Diego residents pay over $600 a year in higher automobile costs ($200 a year more than the national average) due to wear and tear on the vehicle and tire deterioration. Another $1,081 dollars per San Diegan is lost in wasted time and unnecessary fuel consumption, with 52 hours a year lost to traffic congestion.
The report blasts city government, saying “just 10 percent of major roads are in good condition” and notes that “a desirable goal for those in charge of road maintenance is too keep 75 percent of major roads in good condition.” The report said 263 people were killed in San Diego traffic accidents in 2008.
In addition, alarmingly, “twenty percent of the bridges and overpasses in the San Diego region are structurally deficient and functionally obsolete,” the TRIP survey revealed.