Talk is Cheap; Time for Real Compassion!

Will our President and Congress really feel the pain of Americans ravaged by economic woes? When will they actually do something to help millions of impoverished households now bearing the brunt of the greed meltdown so aptly depicted by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show?

Those of us who knew the economic “system” was amok years ago are not sitting back in smug satisfaction for being right, but we sure would like to halt the hemorrhaging of people—parents, children, teens and adults—on poverty’s fast-track to homelessness. We don’t have enough motel rooms to house the escalating number of families forced to stay in these cramped, expensive, hellish 21^st century shelters.

A few years back I worked with a family whose daughter was illegally barred from her high school she attended (and excelled in) for almost four years. Her “crime” was homelessness. She, her disabled brother, her Chicago Public School teacher mother and her self-employed (but then disabled) general contractor father were evicted from their predatory loan company-financed home. The family crammed in a nearby motel, a block or so out of district boundaries.

We managed to right the wrong with the school but, the loan shark’s reprehensible actions tainted this family’s credit. They finally rented an apartment, starting over with new appreciation for the palatial surroundings of their bigger-than-motel-room home.

The turn of this century gave birth to a spate of predatory loan practitioners, apparently operating with full blessings of federal regulators. Following close behind—the dandelion-like escalation of a variety of sanctioned financial rip-off entities: payday loan companies, rent-to-own home furniture stores, car title loans, etc. It’s been infuriatingly insane watching them prey on fiscally-precarious people, often causing or perpetuating homelessness. Then we have federal policies….

Sandra, the mother I wrote about last week, told me that she now faces eviction because her utilities are about to be shut off. HUD has a policy, I verified, that if a tenant has utilities shut off, it violates their rental agreement, and they face eviction (becoming homeless because they are broke).

This previously homeless family stares at the horrible reality of it happening again. The only community “shelter” is a well-intentioned grassroots operation in a collection of bedraggled trailers run by a local woman who can stand to see people with no place to go. Sandra and her daughter have scant possibilities for any kind of help. Instant consequences for poverty. Hmm…what about penalties for the many culprits in this global greed-fest?

Seems to me that in this time of gross violations of every moral, ethical and financial standard imaginable by those who have ravaged the economic fiber of the WORLD, maybe HUD could rethink and halt homelessness creation caused by evicting otherwise decent tenants for inability to pay rapidly escalating utility bills. The penalty for utility shut-offs shouldn’t be homelessness.