Remember George W. Bush and his “Faith-Based Initiatives?” I know it was a long time ago, in a place far, far away, when we had a Republican president reviled by a significant portion of his own citizenry, and many of the world’s leaders—with the exception of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. How can Berlusconi, a 60-year-old man fingered in the Italian press for his “friendship” with a teenager, look down his Roman nose at anyone? So back to steering tax dollars to religious-based organizations so that those organizations can then do the work of helping those in need. Bush argued that religious organizations needed to play a bigger role in serving the poor and meeting other social needs.
Say what you like about George W. Bush, but he wanted to get religious organizations involved in the country’s fight against homelessness and poverty. It wasn’t a horrible idea, except for that church-state separation obsession that some people seem to have. Oh, and that part of Big George’s Faith-Based Initiative program that legalized discrimination in hiring at religious institutions based on religion and sexual orientation. Other than that, the program was a dream come true. Well, except for those worry warts who fretted that the whole Faith-Based Initiative program was just a barrel full of pork funding for Bush’s evangelical buddies.
Before those of you who voted for Obama spit three times against the evil eye and thank the Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or whichever higher power you worship) that Obama was elected, let me point out that President Obama didn’t get rid of Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives. He just tweaked it by Executive Order.
So what the heck does all of this have to do with Ann Arbor? Interestingly, after A2Politico posted the October 12th piece, “Mayor Tells A2 Affordable Housing Virgins His 3-Inch Accomplishment Is A 9-Inch Beauty,” at the very next City Council meeting, on October 19th, we had a dog and pony show on homelessness in Ann Arbor, and what our local politicos are doing to combat the growing problem. The show starred several elected officials who got some nice bullet points for their political résumés: First Ward Council members Sabra Briere and Sandi Smith, and Mayor John Hieftje.
The ringmasters at the October 19th Council meeting were Third Ward Council member Leigh Greden, and Council member Smith. The show revolved around Mary Jo Callan, who’s director of the combined county-city office of community development. According to Callan’s carefully staged presentation, there is a significantly increased demand on area homeless shelters: The number of single adults has increased 20 percent from 919 to 1,106; the number of chronically homeless adults has grown 33 percent from 179 to 238; and the number of families has risen 29 percent from 368 to 474, an increase in total homeless family members from 1,162 to 1,359.
The short-term solution to homelessness is, of course, the homeless shelter. Callan tallied up the current local shelter inventory: 159 beds and 50 places for single adults in the winter only. That’s 209 spots for 1,106 homeless adults. Thus, the odds of getting accepted to Harvard are better than getting a bed at the shelter in Ann Arbor. In our city, 82 percent of the homeless are left out in the cold, literally and figuratively. But wait. Callan explained that Ann Arbor plans to add 25 beds to its homeless shelter and increase the number of winter “rotating shelter” spaces from 25 to 50. Those “rotating shelter” spots are provided by local churches and synagogues at their own expense.
Ringmaster Greden then walked Callan carefully through an explanation of what Ann Arbor’s elected officials have done with respect to long-term solutions to combat the problem. She told those present that since 2005, the City of Ann Arbor has built 58 new units of “supportive housing” to go with the 161 units that the city already has. Where was the Mayor, I wondered? This was a prime opportunity to brag to the Press that since 2005 Ann Arbor has increased its stock of “supportive housing” by 26.28 percent.
Sandi Smith then took over the three-ring show. She asked how community members could help meet the immediate short-term need of the thousands of homeless people in our community. Evidently, paying some of the highest per capita taxes in the state isn’t quite enough. Neither is having elected officials such as Mayor Hieftje, Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo, Fourth Ward Council members Margie Teall, and Marcia Higgins, Leigh Greden and Sandi Smith who, between them, have a collective 45 years in elected office and/or on boards of organizations that purport to address homelessness in our community. Some people might say expecting elected officials to figure out how to design and fund a program to end homelessness for individuals and families after only 45 collective years in office is, well, bloody cheeky.
Ellen Schulmeister, director of the Shelter Association of Washtenaw County, suggested that the expansion of the rotating shelter program as an opportunity for the community to step up and help the City of Ann Arbor address homelessness. Ned Staebler then addressed Council. Since 2007, he has been the Chair of the city’s Housing and Human Services Board. Staebler’s Board advises City Council on the “needs of the city’s low income residents.” Evidently, adequate housing and a significant bump in the number of shelter spaces were not among the pressing needs of low income residents in Ann Arbor this year. Or last year. Or the year before that one.
53rd District Representative wanna-be Staebler, who launched his campaign in early October, and who makes a tidy living doling out your tax dollars in the form of Michigan business, personal, property, income, and other tax abatements to businesses at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, suggested people in Ann Arbor could help combat homelessness locally by hitting up whatever nonprofit or community group they were members of. I like it! Let’s start with local non-profits like the nearby golf clubs where the Mayor plays. We could then move on to for profit companies. Christopher Taylor could hit up his partners at Butzel Long to take in homeless families, Carsten Hohnke could exfoliate the homeless gratis at his Vie Fitness club, and Sandi Smith’s Trillium Real Estate agents could convince customers to donate their homes to the homeless and just take a tax write-off.
The Chair of the Housing and Human Services Board finished his near perfect public performance by declaiming that, “This [Ann Arbor] is not the kind of place where we let people freeze to death on the streets.”
No. It’s the kind of place where Briere, Smith & Hieftje voted to fund underground car housing to the tune of $50,000 per space, and voted to fund a $541,000 professional services agreement for engineering services to design the Fuller Intermodal Transportation Station to please the University of Michigan. It’s the kind of place where our politicos put on a three-ring circus for the dog and pony crowd to tout the very little our politicos, over their collective 45 years in office, have accomplished to end homelessness in our community.
At the end of the presentation on homelessness, they pulled together, those Band of Bullet Point Brothers, those Fauxgressive (tip o’ the keyboard to Lou Glorie) Few, and with enough noblesse oblige to choke une vache somehow they managed to scrape up enough money to to house a small fraction of the growing number of individuals and families who are homeless in our community before the snow flies. The rest of the work of housing the remaining thousands of homeless, they’ll leave to The People of the Book(s). It’s a Faith-Based Initiative to alleviate (not end) homelessness brought to us by Ann Arbor’s City Council, and it’s a totally unfunded mandate.
My fellow politicos, even George W. Bush wasn’t that much of a cheap SOB when it came to serving the poor.
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While a hundred people in Washtenaw County are looking for a place to pitch a tent, lay down some cardboard, and many more are living in their cars, abandoned homes or dumpsters; our “community leaders” go to bed with a good conscience for having fought off “boobus americanus” –the foes of subsidized, “desirable” affordable housing in Ann Arbor. Ms. Callan’s recitation the litany of good deeds done by the current council, mayor and “community leaders” in increasing the “affordable housing” stock, was gratuitous. Tacked on to her presentation on what the city might do to help shelter the hundreds of homeless in our city, this was a digression from the issue—sheltering the indigent. There is no such thing as “affordable” housing for the penniless.
Callan’s performance strung together the rosary of shelters and affordable housing our sainted burghers have provided. But, bringing “affordability” up to the pulpit, Monday night, confounded the issue. Shelter of the indigent and affordable housing are not answers to the same problem. Ms. Callan’s presentation was PR, pure and simple. It did little more than soothe the liberal nimby-beaters and bolster our city’s shaky political regime, which is partly held in place by our local NGOs who rely on the grace and favor of Larcom to stay in business.
People camped on publicly owned wastelands are being rousted from those wastelands by state police. They’re told to go to the shelter. (Haha—good one) No room in the shelter? Go to a church. No room in the church? Or the church’s legal council has advised against? Now we get to the apologetic portion of the show, ladies and gents: Sorry, that’s all we can do for now. We’re working on a long term solution—affordability, and oh yes those 100 units that were supposed to be at the downtown Y and jobs. This will take while. Please stand by. Sorry for any interruption in your program to stay warm and dry. The job mention was a plug for the MDEC.
Among Callan’s concrete proposals was funding for “supportive services”–the supportive services being a significant portion of the budgets for handling this crisis. The inference is that the homeless are individually responsible for their status as beggars, therefore requiring services to correct their deficits of hygiene and comportment. We can’t keep doing this–baming humans for becoming the waste products of a paracitical system. At some point we need to work on the systemic problem.
The need to find refuge from the financial blizzard, drought, famine—whatever catastrophic metaphor you like—has been brought upon us in part, by a political class who have taken on the enforcement of the law of the jungle. We’ve made mendicants of the non-profits, keeping them on a diet of what ever crumbs are left lying on the council floor at the end of Monday night, then sending them off to cover our shame. It is not surprising that about all they can do is to bring little tin cups of charity to fill in the chasms of need.
Meanwhile, the commons are shrinking. Even medieval peasants had more rights than a homeless Ann Arborite. Graze your cows in the Diag? Let your pigs forage in the Arb? Grow some veggies in a concrete flower box on Main St.? Pitch a tent next to US 23, make a little cardboard shelter under an M 14 overpass? No that’s STATE LAND. You don’t own that! Who does? It belongs to the state. Are you the state? Little by little during the two centuries we’ve been celebrating our democracy rather than practicing it, we’ve been cut off from the commons—but we can lease it for oil, lumber and gold. We’ve grown intolerant of people having the nerve to take possession of public space for the sake of their subsistence.
Many liberal, good hearted people will go to their warm beds tonight, in a state of grace because they’ve stood up to the evil nimbys. They’ve cast their fellow citizens as the problem. They’re fighting a battle in black and white, good vs. evil. No nuance what so ever in this dreamscape of the liberal mind. Here is the perfect example of liberal citizens perfectly happy to work within the system because “this is what I can do, this is how I can make a difference, this is MY purpose on the planet”. Purpose driven Mememememeism. It would be unseemly for ME to hold up signs or make angry noises in council chambers. The function of the liberal as a buffer between the powerful and the powerless is purpose enough. The petits pouvoirs of half measures are all they ask in recompense.
We’re not talking about good vs. perfect here. What is being done falls so far from the mark that the only good that can come of it is to keep politicians from falling from grace and office, and keeping some non-profits in business. But the gap is growing wider and more and more of our fellow citizens are falling into it.
This crisis needs to be worked from many, many angles. First of all, the homeless should be empowered to work with us on the solutions. And we shouldn’t think a once and for alL, big, perfect solution will be the result. This will be a process. I’d like to see us explore a rebuilding of the public health and shelter infrastructure we once had. This is probably an essential part of the solution. One of the pieces missing from our current discussion of healthcare reform, is the need to rebuild this system. We’re talking about the public option as though this were something never before seen on these shores. But, we used to have a public health system that included places for the indigent and mentally disabled. It was a flawed system that was demolished rather than repaired. Two decades ago, the revelations of the weaknesses of these systems met up with mistrust of any government venture and the push to privatize everything. What’s left? Is there a public hospital in our county? Is there a publicly provided place of refuge for the indigent that adds up to anything but a gesture?
In the crisis we now face, if we do not step up to create adequate shelter for the hundreds left out in the cold, we will be guilty of shrinking the demands of our consciences down to a size acceptable to our market-based faith in a market-based government. And some of us will sleep just fine having provided 50 more beds. And some of us won’t.
Comment by Lou Glorie — October 22, 2009 @ 2:37 pm
Here. Here. Well said. The notion that 50 extra beds is worthy of a public presentation is simply outlandish! You’ve touched on all the pertinent points and said it better than most. Thank you.
Comment by Yale89 — October 22, 2009 @ 2:59 pm
Well said and it is about time someone identified the pseudo-liberal citizen that has all the comforts and just talks the talk without getting uncomfortable about anything – never a protest or a real commitment to doing anything. Ann Arbor used to have some values. Money was not always everything.
Comment by balancedview — October 22, 2009 @ 9:43 pm
Hello!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
Comment by Polprav — October 23, 2009 @ 1:05 am
The 14 “Supportive Units” that justified the recent North Main PUD will be accompanied, eventually, by a liquor store in the building. I bet that if we placed a liquor store at the Delonis Center, too, we could generate a lot of money to house the homeless.
From my experience at our downtown church, many of the people sleeping on our sidewalks and church yards have mental health and substance problems that “jobs” or “income” will not fix. Poverty may be the problem for some homeless, but not for all.
Comment by John Floyd — October 23, 2009 @ 2:32 am
Polprov,
Welcome to A2Politico. You are welcome to quote a post with a link. Thanks!
Comment by A2 Politico — October 23, 2009 @ 7:00 am
John,
A liquor store at the homeless shelter to help offset the costs of operation? What are, you? Some kind of genius? I have to say, though, I am a bit surprised that none of our current fiscal watch-dogs on Council had the idea first. Then again, we’ve not seen all their emails sent during Council meetings while “discussing” the North Main project. One important point: only single serving containers should be sold to maximize profits.
Seriously, though, I’ve worked at my religious institution’s “rotating shelter” and it’s clear from the groups that come in there is a wide range of issues that have forced those individuals out onto the streets. I’ve also volunteered at Alpha house, and it’s the homeless families who are even more difficult to provide shelter to. That North Main project would have been an excellent opportunity to add, say, seven duplexes to the system to house 14 families. The current design, with its complete reliance on one-bedroom units and “workforce housing,” was a grand PUD to fish an over-extended developer’s financial fanny out of the fire.
Comment by A2 Politico — October 23, 2009 @ 7:18 am
Genius? Gee, and all this time I thought I was a dim bulb – after all, I do live in the 5th Ward. Thanks!
I admire your “Single Serving” suggestion. You have an analytical mind, you must live in a different part of town.
I would like to see the Townships do their share to address homelessness, and not leave all of it to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Concentrating human problems seldom makes them easier to address.
Comment by John Floyd — October 24, 2009 @ 1:00 am
Not to be unduly negative, but isn’t it true that we will always have homelessness? I don’t think an end to the problem is necessarily the best goal. That said its not reasonable that our council and mayor have done so little to address this problem. What happened to the Y site? It’s a parking lot now. Have those units ever been replaced? I agree with Lou Glorie that the crisis needs to be worked from many angles. Exactly what the angles are though I’m sure people disagree on. The important point is to have the issue brought forward honestly. Having a presentation at council like the one described here is not an honest discussion. It’s a political statement to try to fool people into thinking that we can sleep soundly. We can’t. We shouldn’t.
Comment by Jane G. — October 24, 2009 @ 9:26 am
Mentally ill homeless- that is most of them. Jails, too. . Reagan’s people. Remember how they got there? Maybe Reagan supporters were private prison owners.
Comment by donna Treloar — October 24, 2009 @ 9:41 am
Donna,
Welcome to A2Politico. I voted for Reagan. Twice. Then, I checked myself into the Betty Ford Clinic for political addictions and came out a Dem.
Comment by A2 Politico — October 24, 2009 @ 9:57 am
Should the Palin ad on this page be taken as a sign that you have not completely exorcised the republican demon from your soul? Or did you just include her pic because, as far as politicians go, she’s kinda hot?
Btw, I used to identify with the dems when I thought they opposed the needless and costly wars started by the other party…but now?…not so much.
Comment by Michael Schils — October 25, 2009 @ 12:09 pm
It should be taken that the Google folks see “politics” as a tag and serve up the ads from there. I’ve noticed ads from different parts of the spectrum, so maybe they’re finally tweaking the kinds of ads that get served up here a bit. It’s kind of amusing.
Sadly, at least for my Dem friends, I am a moderate Dem. I think this stems as much from those early, early years as a Republican, as much as it does from owning a business. Then again, as I am ambidextrous and this is seen as a “cool” trait, perhaps being fluent in two political languages is equally trendy. You’ll tell me.
Comment by A2 Politico — October 25, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
I’ve been wondering about those Palin ads myself! I’m glad you asked Michael.
As for the ability of A2Politico to be fluent in two political languages, it is a bonus. One of the reasons I like this site is that it’s not all sunshine and roses for the Democratic party. The inability of many of my friends to look at Democratic practices, policies and hypocritical principles drives me nuts sometimes. I was raised a Dem and can’t imagine life outside the Dem tent. But I have a hard time figuring out what that tent is and why some of the people who say that are Dems (progressive Dems even) just don’t seem to belong, and people just don’t seem to want to talk about it.
Comment by Yale89 — October 26, 2009 @ 9:44 am
[...] bloating, swollen ankles, weight gain, gas, nausea and heartburn, coupled with City Council’s fiscal and political machinations, alas, Ann Arbor has become the kind of place where we will let people freeze to death in the [...]
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