NEWSBYDANNY FENSTER

I wait for new writing from George Packer like a zealot. He's a personal favorite of mine, and while we don't always agree, I enjoy him nonetheless. Such is the case in a fairly recent essay of his about reading Charles Dickens in Lagos, Nigeria, which, to my dismay, engages in the sort of first world-third world cliched comparisons I loathe.

Packer paints a tableau of thwarted ambitions and grinding poverty in less developed parts of the world. The conclusion: the depravity and despair that inspired Dickens and other 19th century writers of the West "no longer exist in the civilizations that produced their work. In the great cities of the West, the standard of living is too high, public life too rationalized . . . Modernity and the welfare state did away with the naked sympathies and tragic destinies of the late-nineteenth-century novel."

He quotes a young Burman he met in Rangoon, a voracious reader of Dickens:

“Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone is dirty. That is Dickens. In that Dickens atmosphere I grew up."

This week, the Chicago City Council's Housing and Finance committees voted 13 to 8 to send an affordable housing bill to lame-duck mayor Richard Daley. Can it make the windy city a bit more hospitable to low-income people?

The measure, known as the Sweet Home Chicago bill, would require that 20 percent of the city's TIF (tax increment financing) funds be set aside for affordable housing within TIF districts. It will go to a vote of the full council as soon as Wednesday.

Alderman Walter Burnett is the chief sponsor of the bill, which was held up in the Housing and Finance committee for months, causing protests by community organizers such as the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

The Mayor opposes the bill, and some — like Progress Illinois — expect a contentious vote. Opponents say the bill could tie the hands of city planners, and city attorneys say the bill's pooling of TIF money across areas for a single use may be illegal.

TIF funds are a portion of tax money collected on the difference in property values over time in designated zones of blight, set specifically aside for reinvestment and redevelopment. The concept is in wide use across the country, but rarely is it as controversial as in Chicago, where oversight and transparency has long been questioned.

The nation's Department of Veterans Affairs serves about 92,000 homeless veterans. Veteran homelessness is a difficult task to tackle, and the VA is no doubt making a commendable effort, no matter how short the scope of its assistance may fall of the ideal. Unfortunately, there are still another 15,000 homeless veterans on the streets of America, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

While all homelessness is something we ought to be ashamed of, veteran homelessness — 23 percent of the homeless population, according to United States Interagency Council on Homelessness — is unique. Veterans have contributed to our country in a way no other citizens have. They have offered up their lives, their safety, and often times their sanity, for our freedoms and way of life.

Tell the Senate to pass the End Veteran Homelessness Act!

We can disagree about foreign policy or the justness of certain wars, but when a young person decides that the best or only way he or she can individually give back to this country is to risk everything — and everything bears repeating here — we need to honor him or her.

What, in this instance, does honor include? Our productivity and our excesses, our freedoms and our transgressions are all predicated on the work of veterans. Like the unseen cells that form the organs with which we fight disease, our lifestyles are guarded by our soldiers. The least we owe them is our full guardianship.

It is a task perhaps too much to ask of the government, which makes the work of organizations like Swords to Plowshares so important. Started in 1974, the non-profit provides a continuum-of-care approach to serving veterans in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 1976, the Ralph Civil Rights Act, named after civil rights activist Ralph David Abernathy, was passed in California. The bill tries to guarantee any state resident freedom from violence or intimidation based on personal characteristics including race, gender or political affiliation.

Decades earlier, Abernathy became the student body president of what is now Alabama State University while earning a degree in mathematics. In 1955, he organized with his close friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in doing so essentially co-founded the American civil rights movement.

Abernathy shared a motel room with King on April 3, 1968, the night before King was assassinated, and introduced him to a gathered crowd on the 4th, when King began his last speech by saying, "Ralph Abernathy is the best friend I have in the world."

After King's death, Abernathy expanded his struggle, fighting for poor blacks, Latinos, whites and Native Americans, leading the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. He strove to raise our moral awareness of the needs of our "most oppressed and poverty-stricken citizens."

In February of this year California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal introduced into the state legislature A.B. 2706. The bill sought to expand the Ralph Act to grant the homeless the right to be free from violence based on their inability to afford or maintain a home. Lowenthal, commenting on the bill, wrote, "The perpetrators may perceive the homeless as easy defenseless targets. They may see the homeless as second-class citizens, unworthy of respect or mercy. These criminals may prey on the homeless because they know the likelihood of suffering legal consequences from their actions is not as high as it would be if they assaulted another member of the community."

Michelle Chappel was once voted the "Most Inspirational Professor of Psychology" at UC Santa Cruz. She then did the next logical thing: quit teaching to pursue a career in the music business.

"I don't write songs," she says. "I kind of feel like they write themselves." That's how she recalls the creation of her Billboard-recognized song "No Place Like Home," not even fully aware of what the song was about. Later, when she began selecting scenes for the video, she realized it was a song about the injustice of homelessness, and has since devoted her life and her music in large part to that cause.

She performed at a charity concert in San Jose, California on World Homeless Day last weekend to benefit two organizations working to end homelessness in Silicon Valley, EHC Lifebuilders and Project Homeless Connect of Santa Clara County. Admission was free but she asked attendees for donations of food, blankets, toiletries and more.

As she optimistically fought a late-onset flu, she spoke with me in the run-up to the show about her shape-shifting career, her music and her new passion for ending homelessness.

Where did the song "No Place Like Home" come from?

Actually, I used to be a professor of psychology, and I found I wrote songs about psychology a lot — things about inspiring or encouraging people to follow their hearts. I remember sitting down one day and saying to myself: 'I'd like to write songs that make a difference on a bigger scale.'

First, I'll say that I don't really write songs, I kind of feel like they write themselves. But with that in mind, that wanting to write about something bigger, I wrote a song called "No Place Like Home."

I actually didn't even realize it was about homelessness, believe it or not, until we made the video and put the images together. And when we started picking the images, I was like 'Oh my god.' It may sound weird, but it's happened with a lot of songs in the past where I don't fully realize what they're about until months later. When I said I wanted to make a difference, I feel like I was being told by something bigger than me — I don't know what, but something bigger.

Josh is a funny dude. Most of our time together is spent doubled over in laughter. He draws these amazing comic strips in this tattered old sketchpad he carts around in his backpack (that's his work in the photo to the left). He talks often and intelligently about growing up black in a black neighborhood in Baltimore in the '60s and '70s, about liking Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan more than the O'Jays or the Isley Brothers, and about how most black people were just as afraid of white people as white people were afraid of them. He wrote a poem about it for the high school newspaper his senior year. The poem got picked up by a group of poets in New York and printed in a collection featuring young writers from America's inner-cities.

He met his wife at a waffle shop when taking a lunch break from constructing the Baltimore harbor. He stuck by her and tried to coach her free when years later she got involved with hard drugs. Finally, no longer able to put up with his me-or-the-drugs dictum, she told him she didn't love him, and overdosed a few years after that. He stopped drawing comic strips and stopped writing poetry. He worked as a custodian for hospitals in the Baltimore area for 30-some-odd years, lifted weights, played basketball. The weights ruined his back pretty good, and every once in a while he would have to take a month off work, crash at an uncle's or a friend's house to recoup, then get another job somewhere when things got better.

His asthma flared up around 2005 and he was in and out of the hospital for a year. He was prescribed a steroid inhalant he says worked but became unaffordable after three months. He moved in with his mom, who was mentally ill and living alone. He took care of her for four years, though his asthma was so bad at times he could barely make it the length of a bedroom. Locked in the bedroom, he started drawing again. A few years ago a friend recommended an herbal supplement which he still swears by.

I was down in the basement of the public library, where the periodicals and microfiches are stored, when Josh was telling me about the police officer that came by and asked him to leave the shaded spot on a local college campus where he sleeps, a spot he affectionately calls his rock. It is basically a concrete block against a lecture hall that serves as a makeshift bench. He sleeps there behind the trees and shrubs, sitting upright. He had moved out of his mom's place when the violence and frustration became too much, and his younger brother moved in.

The numbers have been streaming in from all across the country and there's no ignoring it; poverty is on the rise. In 2009, almost 44 million Americans fell below the poverty line. Most tragically, more young people than ever are leaving for school in the morning not from home but from shelters, friends' couches or elsewhere. They are the estimated one million homeless students in this country.

As the mid-term elections near and we all begin demanding promises from politicians not known for keeping them, activists are asking how we're going to engage those seeking our votes on issues of poverty and homelessness.

In Oregon, the Rev. Chuck Currie noted that 19,000 children in the state's public school system were homeless, a 5.5 percent increase from the previous year and a 134 percent increase over the past seven.

"As the 2010 election campaign rages where are the politicians and how will they address growing poverty and homelessness, particularly the needs of homeless students?" he asked before offering some policy suggestions — expanding TANF funding (something we have also encouraged), certain tax credits, a realignment with the Half in Ten campaign to cut poverty by 50 percent in a decade.

In Loveland, Colorado, an anti-poverty group recently posed questions about poverty and homelessness and the role of government and the private sector in ameliorating problems to politicians running for local office. Some of the solutions offered: luring green-energy industries in to create more jobs; expand educational opportunities to create skilled workers; direct government action in keeping down the cost of living. So far, so good.

Of course, as the debate plays out everywhere, the main disagreement was where funding for poverty- and homeless-eradication programs ought to come from — the public or private sector. Unlike social justice issues like gay rights and environmental protection, few argue with ending poverty and homelessness. Still, no one can agree how to do it.

Napoleon advanced on Alexandria and through Egypt; the U.S. Public Health Service began to take shape; and in Britain, as French troops offered support to the Irish rebellion at the dawn of the seventeenth century, Thomas Malthus wrote somewhere from an ivory tower about the inevitability of poverty in the now-famous An Essay on the Principle of Population.

Poverty persists, he wrote, because poor people continue to have kids. But the desire to have kids is fundamental to human nature. So we populate the land to the point at which we exceed our ability to sustain ourselves; then there are too many laborers, wages go down and people go hungry. We get too hungry to think about sex, and are led back to the more stable balance from which we started, at which point we begin the cycle again. Poverty and hunger, for Malthus, are here to stay. (Of course, seeing the pounds of pizza and French fries and organic produce thrown from restaurants and grocery stores into dumpsters every night, and the trend towards fewer children rather than more as some of the poor and laboring gain wealth and education today, one knows that things have changed fundamentally since his time.)

But that is not what's most jarring about reading Malthus today, 200 years on. What strikes the reader most (the progressive reader, I suppose) is the complacency he feels with the suffering going on around him and, even more so, the draconian policy solutions offered. Not long after declaring it the most fundamental of human nature to produce children, he offers as a solution to poverty the abolishment not just of public assistance for the needy, but specifically, "that no child born from any marriage ... should ever be entitled to parish assistance ... and to enforce it more strongly on the minds of the lower classes of people, the clergyman of each parish should ...  read a short address stating the strong obligation on every man to support his own children."

A relic of an older age, right? How about this comment from a story that ran last week in a Tulsa paper about a mother and her two daughters, 4- and 2-years old, who've found themselves homeless after a divorce:

"Can't feed em don't breed em! Bleeding heart liberals make me sick ... Want a better future, get an education, work, pay your dues, put in your time. I'm a middle class, Christian, white guy, and nobody has ever lined up to give me anything, yet through education and work I can feed my family, INSURE my family, and enjoy a comfortable life because I want it and I am willing to work for it. That is capitalism at work!"

In a small room with two beds and a mini-fridge near the end of a chain of motels in San Jose, four-year-old Jasmine watches cartoons while her older sister is at school. Just outside the open door, standing in the parking lot, her mother Heather tells me about their trip here. She was in her late-20s and had a a good marriage and a good job at a veterinarian's office. This was up in Fresno, where her husband's family lived.

The couple was always social, she says, so the line where her husband's drinking crept from appropriate to problematic was, in retrospect, always tenuous. But past a certain point the trajectory down became intense and unmistakable. A year ago, Heather took the two girls and fled back towards familiar ground. San Jose is where she grew up, and she still has family in the county. They offer help where they can, but they can't offer much. Taking anything causes Heather feelings of failure and guilt.

Heather went to a family shelter for a short while, then to a shelter for women and children, but there are maximum allotted days — between 60 and 90, if you can qualify for an extension — and she has surpassed them. She is splitting the $62.01 cost of the motel room with two other women whose shelter stays expired at the same time  — one who is working full-time at Walmart and the other part-time, both looking for second jobs.

Earlier this year Senator John Kerry and others wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid asking for an extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund. The fund was set up in 2009 to help with the stresses of the recession by creating jobs for low-income families and to assist those families in emergency situations. As it now stands, this TANF funding is set to expire on the 30th of this month.

Kerry began circulating a sign-on among his colleagues last week asking for

Erika Schultz over at the Seattle Times posted some thoughts this week on her experience reporting the paper's excellent "Invisible Families" series.

The series focused on families experiencing homelessness, much of it due to the shortage of employment during the current recession. Family homelessness is a frightening, and quickly increasing, segment of the homeless community.

Schultz talked about the difficulty of finding people experiencing these sort of setbacks who are willing to discuss it publicly. People are scared enough when faced with the prospect of having no home and no job. They might be embarassed or ashamed to "go public."

But individual stories have the power to change attitudes — the attitudes of those they see passing by on their way to work or home. Take Cherie Moore and her 17-year-old son, Cody. When the Seattle Times profiled them, they were living in their car and had $6 between them. It's hard to think of the homeless the same way after reading about them. So the strength to share one's story is something that ought to be commended.

Working on a similar project in San Jose, California right now, I have run into the same issues as Schultz. Nobody wants to be the public face of homelessness, and with all the false mythology about homelessness in our society out there, who can blame them? But the only antidotes to combating common views are the anecdotes from the struggles we go through.