"They Just Need to Get a Job"

Odd double feature with my other review/finished book today, [b:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century 33917107 On Tyranny Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Timothy Snyder https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1484763736l/33917107.SY75.jpg 54882949] (link).I started this book a month or two ago waiting for some friends to get to dinner, and when they got there I ended up drawing maps of processes and systems that take place in homeless Continuums of Care all over the opening pages. So in some ways, the book is semi-un-loanable because it looks like a lunatic has had a time with it. In others, if you had any of the words to go along with it, you could get a pretty good sense of coordinated entry systems, prioritization, funding flow, and more. But mostly you'd just get a lot of bad sketching. (And I'm happy to loan it out anyway.)I have little in the way of nuanced thought about it. The 15 myths are quite well structured and Mary does a tremendous job of providing the historical angle, her personal practice experience, and practical policy thoughts on the myths. It is non-technical and straightforward without being overly simple. This is somewhat because homelessness is not a difficult moral problem if you have a heart. It is mostly because Mary has spent decades working on this cause and knows what she is talking about.I have been in the field for a little while and arguably have a policy job in homelessness. I think this book will be my go-to from now on when people want a ground-level introduction of why the systems are as they are in this country and the myths that go along with them. Most of these myths I have known and have worked against. Some of them I believed myself, and really value the background that Mary provides (that one would be Myth 4, that Ronald Reagan created modern homelessness – though he did exacerbate it, as we'll see shortly).It also gave me a chance to bust out my absolute disdain for Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan again. Clinton hollowed out and almost totally destroyed the social safety net with PRWORA, but I had no idea he outright offered the destruction of HUD:“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.”(page 102)Hey Bill, what the fuck?Reagan gets a lot of well deserved scorn. Here's one that I didn't quite know all of:“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.”(page 88)Very frustrating that these are the folks in leadership positions. And that was back then. Take a look at who is in power now. You'd better be as worried as I am. And I know what to worry about, so please take my word for it.I really loved the section on international perspectives on affordable housing, particular the Finnish models. I love co-ops! I wish we better supported them in homelessness programming. I think it would be tremendous if some of our first-time homebuyer programs had options to help people purchase property in a co-op fashion and maintain affordability permanently.But again, relatively few thoughts on this. It is very basic and a great entryway into this area. I'd recommend it to folks looking to learn the high-level stuff.Notes/highlights:* 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!!