Special Issue
the JHU POLITIK December 2014
HOUSING & HOMELESSNESS
the
JHU POLITIK EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eliza Schultz MANAGING EDITOR Christine Server
HEAD WRITER Julia Allen
ASSISTANT EDITORS Katie Botto Dylan Etzel Preston Ge Abigail Sia
POLICY DESK EDITOR Mira Haqqani
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Diana Lee
STAFF WRITERS Abigail Annear Olga Baranoff Arpan Ghosh Alexander Grable Rosellen Grant Rebecca Grenham Shrenik Jain Christine Kumar Shannon Libaw Robert Locke Sathvik Namburar Corey Payne Juliana Vigorito
COPY EDITOR Florence Noorinejad MARKETING & PUBLICITY Maria Garcia FACULTY ADVISOR Steven R. David
WEBMASTER Ben Lu
COVER PHOTO COURTESY: AOK LIBRARY & GALLERY, UMBC, HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/UMBCLIBRARY/4010856835
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• December 2014 • FALL SPECIAL ISSUE
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22
Baltimore’s Long Journey Home Rebecca Grenham ’16 Indefinite Detainment:
The Dark Side of Australia’s Asylum Policy
Abigail Sia ’15
Interview with Robert Balfanz Gabriela Mizrahi-Arnaud ’17 With Liberty and Healthcare for All? A Profile of Healthcare for the Homeless
Sathvik Namburar ’18 Colombia:
A Country and People in Transition
Robert Locke ’15
San Francisco’s Growing Housing Crisis Olga Baranoff ’16 Profiles of Housing Disparities in the Middle East Dylan Etzel ’17 The Legacy of Redlining in Baltimore: Using Credit to Curb Social Mobility
Shrenik Jain ’18
Interview with Meredith Greif Samuel Sands ’17 List of Local Organizations Fighting Homelessness Juliana Vigorito ’16
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BALTIMORE ROW HOUSES / PHOTO COURTESY: ERIC PARKER, HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ERICPARKER/8382437300/
Baltimore’s Long Journey Home By Rebecca Grenham ’16, Staff Writer
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n 2008, after encouragement from the federal government and then-Mayor Sheila Dixon, Baltimore City unveiled a strategic plan to address homelessness. The plan, also known as The Journey Home, was developed in hopes that careful analysis of the issue would enable Baltimore to implement practices that would make homelessness rare and brief within a ten year timeline. City policymakers laid out four key goals they believed would bring an end to homelessness. “We developed our goals around what the community saw to be the real structural challenges around homelessness – affordable housing, health care, sufficient income, and also to build a robust safety net through good preventive and emergency services for when people do find themselves in a housing crisis,” said Adrienne Breidenstine, Executive Director of The Journey Home. Breidenstine was appointed to this position last year, when City officials, disappointed with the plan’s progress, decided that having a full-time director to oversee all activities would help The Journey Home gain traction. “In spite of establishing their mission, for several years there was no real direction of The Journey Home,” noted Matthew Weisberg, a lawyer with the Homeless Persons Representation Project (HPRP). “Recently, however, with the creation of The Journey Home Board and hiring of a paid executive director [Breidenstine], I’d say that the City is beginning to address in concrete terms how to move towards its own targets.”
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Since her appointment, Breidenstine has focused on advancing these four broad goals through specific strategies. The City sets aside a certain number of housing vouchers (designed to subsidize rent) for chronically homeless individuals and families. As part of a “Housing First” approach, whereby people are placed in permanent housing quickly before being offered other services, The Journey Home has increased the allotted 500 housing vouchers to 650. Weisberg commented that 650 vouchers “is still too small considering the much greater number of homeless individuals.” Breidenstine, on the other hand, considers this one of the plan’s successes. “Creating more housing opportunities is a big challenge, so getting those additional 150 vouchers is a lot,” she commented. Breidenstine argues that the traction that the plan has gained over the past year is due to its inclination to try out new and innovative practices, such as the improved rapid re-housing program, an initiative whereby families experiencing homelessness are quickly rehoused and given necessary funds to afford preliminary expenses, such as security deposits, furniture, and other bills and needs. Over time, these funds are decreased until families can take over their leases. This past year, 92 percent of the families who were put into housing have remained housed after this external funding stopped.
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The success of this program is almost unparalleled in other communities, which see much higher rates of recidivism. New York’s rate of recidivism, for example, is 56 percent. Due to its success, Baltimore plans on conducting an evaluation of the program, which may be used to help shape practice nationally. However, some populations have been neglected under The Journey Home. Breidenstine admits that homeless youth are not largely represented in the plan. Ingrid Lofgren, a lawyer with HPRP who serves homeless youth, argues that it is particularly important that housing housing be made more accessible to this population, as their levels of maturity and lack of familial support pose additional challenges and necessitate unique services. To address this concern, a consultant will be joining The Journey Home in 2015.
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“There’s a lot that the City could be doing but there are real constraints.”
Though researchers estimate that roughly 640 individuals between the ages of 13 and 25 experience homelessness on any given night, Lofgren explains that Baltimore has only two emergency shelters – each with a mere eight beds – a handful of transitional programs, and a single permanent housing program with 43 beds for homeless youth. “When you consider that number [640], and the fact that it’s a really dramatic undercount because it’s a point in time estimate and homeless youth are hard to find, and then consider the amount of housing and shelter for them, it’s clear that the available resources are inadequate,” said Lofgren. When asked about the Baltimore’s progress toward making homelessness rare and brief, Lofgren noted that external limitations have hindered their efforts. “It’s important for all of us involved in The Journey Home to keep up momentum but also recognize that there are real constraints, some of which come from the federal government, such as its definition of homelessness, which can exclude certain groups from receiving services. There’s a lot that the City could be doing but there are real constraints.” One such constraint is financing these projects, particularly housing. “Our biggest priority is also our biggest challenge,” said Breidenstine, explaining that the intricate City system and the limited means of clientele make housing the homeless difficult. “We need to find ways to develop housing in an inexpensive way, as a lot of the people we house cannot afford market rate housing,” she explained. Creating affordable housing, then, is a significant financial investment, for which Baltimore does not have the funds. To find a source of revenue, the City is turning to the private sector. Baltimore is set to embrace the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a new federal initiative that encourages private developers to manage public housing through tax credits. The goal is for private businesses to refurbish many of these decaying buildings and address
complaints of poor maintenance in a manner more efficient than the city could manage. According to some reports, Baltimore plans on selling 22 public housing buildings to private developers. For some, RAD is another innovation that, although not so thoroughly vetted, could prove successful. According to Scott Gottbreht, Assistant Director of Strategic Partnerships at United Way of Central Maryland, many critics of Baltimore’s approach to homelessness have expressed concern that the City “tends to look for silver-bullet solutions, which end up taking the form of a multitude of pilot programs rather than a sustained, comprehensive strategy. RAD is perhaps a symptom of this, as it is another ‘new approach’ to housing that we are ‘trying out.’” In response, Gottbreht argued that “Baltimore’s framework for addressing homelessness has begun to turn around for the better, with innovations in technology and organization now contributing to a more holistic approach to the problem, especially with The Journey Home and coordinated partnerships with nonprofits such as United Way of Central Maryland.” RAD, then, seems to fit in snugly with a string of new and largely untested practices that could be incredibly successful, such as rapid re-housing. However, many advocates worry about the effects of the program on residents. “HPRP, along with Maryland Legal Aid Bureau, Maryland Disabilities Law Center and the ACLU of Maryland, has been focusing our advocacy on making sure that the rights of the current residents who live in the public housing buildings will be maintained after the sale,” said Weisberg. “The concern is that because public housing is owned by a public entity, it is a public resource and asset, but if you sell that in full or lose control, there’s a danger that you might never get it back. One long-term trend across the United States and in Baltimore City in the past few decades has been a loss of public housing.” Weisberg explains that some of these concerns have been allayed, as the Housing Authority has agreed to keep the buildings under the control of the City but will lease them in the long term to private developers. However, the concern that the sale may further deplete the small supply of affordable housing in Baltimore City remains legitimate. According to a study by the Urban Institute, for every 100 extremely low-income households, only 43 housing units are available. Selling public housing could potentially widen this gap, as it is unclear what long-term protections will remain in place to keep these units affordable. While RAD could help improve living conditions among Baltimore’s poor, it could also add to the housing shortage and force a larger portion of the population into homelessness. Either way, RAD will most certainly affect the progress and plans of The Journey Home in some form. As Breidenstine noted, federal policy and national changes, such as financial crises, can be difficult for City policymakers to address: “Structures that are outside of our control, such as the economy, health care, etc., can create a problem faster than we can solve it.” Federal initiatives and national trends can pose unique challenges for city policymakers by limiting city budgets, changing procedures, or making particular moves politically unpopular. The question is, then, whether RAD will create this type of problem by creating a housing shortage, and if Baltimore City is equipped to address it. ■
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Indefinite Detainment:
The Dark Side of Australia’s Asylum Policy By Abigail Sia ’15, Assistant Editor
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bola and ISIS may currently be trending on Twitter, but a just few months ago, everyone was talking about the “unaccompanied minor” crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Tempers and emotions ran high as news outlets started reporting on the nearly 40,000 unaccompanied children – mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador – who were apprehended while trying to cross into the United States. Pictures of crowded detainment centers overflowing with young, frightened children flooded the Internet – and so did videos of angry, protesting Americans. What didn’t get a lot of media attention (at least not in this hemisphere) was the detainment at sea of over 150 Sri Lankans seeking asylum in a Western country. Their intended destination? Australia, which receives about 2 percent of the world’s total claims for asylum. Their detainment was just the latest development in Australia’s decades-long efforts to prevent “irregular maritime arrivals,” also known as “boat people,” from landing on its shores. In a rather surprising twist for a country colonized and settled by citizens of the British Empire (a direct result of the British Crown losing its American colonies), Australia has wrestled with the issue of asylum seekers – especially those arriving by boat – for a very long time. The plight of these asylum seekers, most of whom come from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq, and Myanmar, is particularly tragic and not unlike that of Cuban migrants arriving in Florida by boat. They often pay large sums of money to smugglers (predominantly in Indonesia) to take them to Australian shores and risk their lives on a perilous maritime journey that has claimed hundreds of lives in the past.
on Manus Island are overcrowded and unhygienic, with insufficient access to health services and drinking water. BBC reports that as of October 2014, two men have died as a result of their detention on Manus Island: one, Reza Barati, died in a violent riot in February; the second, Hamid Khazaei, suffered a severe infection from a cut on his foot and was declared brain dead in September. It is no surprise, then, that Australia – especially given its status as a signatory to the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees – has drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups and the UN. They accuse Australia of violating its obligations to grant entry to anyone fleeing persecution in their home country and seeking asylum. Additionally, the UN High Commission for Refugees worries over the lack of adequate refugee protections in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. To make matters worse, even if these detainees do eventually receive refugee status, they are often not resettled on Australian territory, as current Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s promised in his 2013 campaign. That same year, Canberra reached agreements with Papua New Guinea and Nauru dictating that detainees granted refugee status will be resettled in the country where they were held. Additionally, in September, Australia successfully negotiated a “pilot program” with Cambodia (which is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention) in which Cambodia agreed to accept a certain number of recognized refugees in exchange for money and aid. Regardless of whatever horrors they endured on the journey to Australia and while languishing in the IDCs, many detainees are ultimately shuttled to places far unlike their intended destination.
Since 2012, Australia has employed a “third country processing” policy, which mandates that anyone arriving on Australian soil seeking asylum and lacking a valid visa be transferred to an immigrant detention center (IDC). However, they are not detained on Australian territory; instead, they are transferred to one of two IDCs – either the facility on Manus Island in nearby Papua New Guinea or the facility in Nauru, a tiny, remote Pacific island nation – while their applications for refugee status are reviewed. According to The Guardian, Australia currently has roughly 20,000 asylum seekers in detention centers both on the Australian mainland and offshore. The IDCs in Papua New Guinea and Nauru hold an approximate combined 2,200 detainees. And while detaining asylum seekers has been a government policy since the 1990s, there is still no legal provision that limits the duration of their detainment. One man, Peter Qasim, originally from Kashmir Province, arrived in Australia in 1999 only to be detained for nearly seven years. Qasim was detained on Australian soil, and like many other detainees, began to suffer from depression during his record-breaking incarceration. According to a 2013 report by Amnesty International, the facilities
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BOAT OF ASYLUM SEEKERS / PHOTO COURTESY: ACBC MEDIA BLOG
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“Human rights groups accuse Australia of violating its obligations to grant entry to anyone fleeing persecution in their home country and seeking asylum.”
The asylum seeker issue is a unique and strange one that has hovered ominously over Australian political life since the first asylum seekers began arriving by boat from Vietnam in the 1970s. Asylum seekers have figured especially prominently in political debates and dialogues for well over 15 years, and countless governments have labored to find a solution that will deter these asylum seekers from ever making the perilous journey in the first place. Some attribute Australia’s firm opposition to a genuine desire to prevent asylum seekers from risking their lives and dying horrible deaths en route to Australia. Others blame a deep-seated, decades-old discomfort with globalization and all of its implications. This matter has even strained Australia’s relations with its closest and biggest neighbor, Indonesia. Under Abbott, Australia initiated Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013, a policy under which the Australian military intercepts smuggler boats carrying asylum seekers and tows the vessels back to Indonesian waters. This, too, was part of Abbott’s 2013 election campaign promise to “stop the boats.” The operation has become the latest flashpoint in Australia’s immigration policy, especially after the 157 Sri Lankan asylum seekers were intercepted and detained for nearly a month until human rights lawyers challenged Australia’s ability to adjudicate claims at sea. This group of Sri Lankans, which was the first intercepted group since December, was then moved to a facility in Western Australia. They were relatively lucky; in July, Australia handed another group of about 40 Sri Lankans back to the Sri Lankan government despite the asylum seekers’ conviction that they would face violence and persecution upon their return.
MANUS ISLAND REGIONAL PROCESSING CENTRE / PHOTO COURTESY: DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION
Aside from the tens of thousands of detainees languishing indefinitely in IDCs, the real loser in this situation is Australia itself. Ironically, Canberra’s treatment of these maritime arrivals vastly obscures Australia’s otherwise impressive refugee record. Approximately 88 percent of asylum seekers are granted refugee status – provided, of course, that they obtain a valid visa, arrive legally in Australia (i.e. not via smuggler boats), and then apply for protection. But few know about this, because whatever human rights press Australia receives is usually focused on its irregular maritime arrival policy. To the casual outsider, Australia seems hostile and xenophobic – a sad sentiment of a country built by immigrants. If Australia wants to elevate its position on the international stage, it should seriously consider revising its detainment policy. Detractors might point to China as an example of a rising power with a questionable human rights record, but Australia will never be able to match China’s influence simply because the Australian economy is much smaller than that of China. Instead, Australia should look to build its stature on the world stage in other ways and lead by example, particularly regarding human rights. However, until it addresses the detainment of asylum seekers, Australia will continue to rest on shaky moral ground. ■
ALEXANDRA HEADLAND, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA / PHOTO COURTESY: ARISTOCRATS-HAT, HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/36821100@N04/4734471389/
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Interview with ROBERT BALFANZ
of the Johns Hopkins School of Education By Gabriela Mizrahi-Arnaud ’17, Contributing Writer
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obert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Balfanz also serves as the director of the Everyone Graduates Center and cofounder of Diplomas Now, two organizations working toward a 100 percent high-school graduation rate. Dr. Balfanz was recently named Champion for Change for African American Education by the Obama Administration.
How are your organizations working to combat the issue of low graduation rates? We really attack it on three levels. First, we do the analytics to understand what the challenge is. Around the year 2000, we showed that half the nation’s dropouts came from 2000 high schools, which was about 12 percent of all high schools. This shows that the problem is highly concentrated. Showing that it was highly concentrated in a small subset of schools oddly made people feel that it was more solvable because you don’t have to fix every school; you have to fix a small subset of schools. In another line of research we did, we asked ourselves: “How early are kids signaling that they’re on the path to dropping out?” We were able to show that as early as sixth grade, kids in high poverty neighborhoods are signaling that they’re going to drop out and no one is paying attention. We showed that it was because of the ABCs: attendance, behavior and course performance. If you’re missing a month or more of school, if you’re constantly getting in trouble, if you’re failing math or English in sixth grade, it’s not going to correct itself. People always thought the answer was just to give it time, but in poverty it just gets worse; it doesn’t get better. Then we actually tried to develop solutions. We develop school reform models that are then tested in schools and implemented. Right now we have a model that combines whole school reform with enhanced student support and an early warning system. This is part of the largest randomized field trial ever done of secondary schools and it’s being used by 60 schools and 12 districts. Finally, we try to build people’s capacity to use those tools. What exactly is the problem with attendance? Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10 percent or more of school, which is essentially a month of school. It’s largely driven by three big reasons. Some kids can’t come to school because they’re
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doing sibling care or elder care. They might be working to pay for the electric bill, going to court, or even they’re homeless and they moved and they’re in a shelter and they can’t get to school. Alternatively, some kids don’t come because they’re avoiding something in school. Whether that be being teased or being bullied, they don’t feel safe going to school or being in school. Or sometimes kids are absent for silly reasons like they know their teacher will yell at them for not having their homework done. So they think it’s better to miss the day than be yelled at. And then some kids truly just learn and think that they can get by on the four-out-of-five-day plan and think they can just take a day off, and it’ll be okay because not much is happening in school, and often that’s true. What kind of solutions have you been working on for the problem of absenteeism caused by homelessness? The homeless problem is a very interesting connection. One thing that’s kind of startling because of our sense that the economy is finally picking up again is that the number of homeless kids in the nation’s schools is at an all-time high. You wouldn’t expect it to be at an alltime high now; you would think it would be getting better. Also what was interesting was that, for the first time, the federal government had data on adolescents who were living on their own. It turned out that there were 70,000 kids who were essentially emancipated minors, living on their own and homeless. These kids are without any kind of family support. And this doesn’t take into account all of kids who are couch-surfing between friends and relatives and don’t really have a stable home. So homelessness is a driver of absenteeism because oftentimes, kids are just in a very unstable place. They might not fall asleep until two in the morning and then they’re supposed to get up at six, and then they may not even know the bus connections. If you’re homeless and the shelter is way on the other side of town from school, you may not even know the bus path back to your school. So helping with that knowledge is one simple way to get kids to come to school.
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We also did some work in New York City with Mayor Bloomberg in getting agencies to talk to each other. New York City had a system of respectable family shelters, but they recognized that those shelters didn’t know if their kids were going to school or not because they didn’t get the attendance. The Mayor was able to get the agencies to talk to each other and they found a simple solution. Now the homeless shelters recognize that it is their responsibility that their kids get to school and have a way to get to school. And they get data on if the kids actually made it to school. That alone made a difference. And then the homeless shelters realized what else they could do to support their kids, like build them a homework center.
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“Homelessness is a driver of absenteeism because oftentimes, kids are just in a very unstable place.”
Were the homeless shelters evaluated based on their kids’ school attendance? They were evaluated by looking at if they are paying attention to it, doing something about it, and trying to figure out a way for their kids to get to school. People who work in high-poverty neighborhoods often themselves did not grow up in poverty and don’t live in poverty, so they’re not even totally aware of the challenges their kids face. Oftentimes schools don’t have systems even for that information to be shared. So we do work on this early warning system idea. The big idea is to have groups of teachers who share kids in common to get together and talk about those kids. But it turns out that, in a normal school, there’s no structure for that because traditional high schools departmentalize.
They haven’t quite cracked the high school problem yet because we still don’t have a deep enough understanding of why high school kids don’t attend. It could be that we’re under-appreciating some of the homelessness issues of kids living on their own and emancipated minors without a place to live. The challenging news is that one in three kids still aren’t graduating, and there are still thousands of kids who are chronically absent across the city on any given day. What is the cost-effectiveness of these programs? Some things cost and some things don’t. Some of this coordination is almost free since it’s just adults sharing information and creating systems. That includes broadly sharing between systems, like between homeless shelters and schools and also the micro-level sharing between teachers. The actual interventions for kids to solve the problem can be much more costly. The data is very clear: dropouts cost society a lot over time. One dropout costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in the course of his or her lifetime because of both higher social service costs and lower taxes because they’re not working. The problem is, the federal government pays a much greater share of juvenile justice and health care costs – often 50 percent or more of the cost. However, it only pays about 10 to 15 percent of education costs. So you’re telling the local government to raise taxes to save the federal government money. The thing is, there’s huge money spent on the social sector on last-ditch efforts that don’t work and have very low batting averages in juvenile justice and various other means for kids who have fallen off track, and so it would be much better if you shifted them up front. But that’s getting people to move money across their budgets. ■
Another part of the problem is that kids aren’t immediately going to say “I’m homeless” or “I’m couchsurfing.” Instead they act out, and then the system sort of grinds against them by suspending them. Kids are also afraid that you’re going to call social services. Their lived experience is that social service is not always a good thing. Even though it’s designed to help, they’re afraid its going to pull them away from their friends or family. They’re uncertain that the help will actually be helpful. What do graduation rates and chronic absenteeism look like here in Baltimore? There’s good news and bad news in Baltimore. The good news is that the graduation rate has gone up from around 50 to 70 percent in the past decade. Baltimore is actually one of the first places where they actually had a joint city-school effort to combat chronic absenteeism. It actually made a lot of headway, especially in the middle grades.
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With Liberty and Healthcare for All? A Profile of Healthcare for the Homeless By Sathvik Namburar ’18, Staff Writer
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MURAL OUTSIDE HEALTHCARE FOR THE HOMELESS / PHOTO COURTESY: LAURA CROWNOVER, HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/OKIEGIRLPICS/5109021742/
veryone deserves to go home.” Painted on a wall outside the Maryland headquarters of Healthcare for the Homeless, located in downtown Baltimore, these words serve as the organization’s unofficial motto. In a city where homelessness is particularly rampant, Healthcare for the Homeless provides primary care services for homeless individuals and works to place them in permanent affordable housing. The American Hospital Association recently found that a single day’s stay in a given hospital in the United States costs a patient $1,700 on average. Given the exorbitant costs of healthcare, it comes as no surprise that unpaid hospital bills remain the primary cause of personal bankruptcy in America. Homeless populations are particularly susceptible to illness, more so than most Americans. According to the National Institutes of Health, because the homeless face unsanitary living conditions, they are especially likely to develop health issues, which leads to a nearly unbreakable cycle of homelessness and illness. While the 1986 Healthcare Quality Improvement Act prevents hospitals from denying emergency healthcare services to those unable to pay, the homeless usually only seek medical assistance in true emergencies. This tendency comes at devastating physical cost to the individual, and amounts also to a burdensome financial cost to the healthcare system as a whole, as 70 percent of the homeless lack health insurance.
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Healthcare for the Homeless (HCH), a community-based health care program established in 1985, is one of many organizations attempting to address this issue. The HCH site in Baltimore, one of 208 chapters nationwide, offers numerous health care services, including primary and preventive care, pediatric care, mental health and substance abuse counseling, and dental care. HCH, which believes that sanitary living conditions are absolutely essential to the well-being of homeless individuals, also tries to cover the homeless’ non-medical costs and find them stable employment and housing, an integrated solution that targets some of the root causes of homelessness. According to volunteer coordinator Patrick Diamond, HCH distinguishes itself from regular clinics in that it is readily accessible to all potential patients. It employs a flexible walk-in policy that allows anyone to receive primary care services, regardless of their health insurance status or ability to pay. By emphasizing primary and preventive care, HCH aims to tackle health problems at an early stage, before they become chronic and exponentially more expensive to address. HCH also devotes a large amount of resources to helping the homeless overcome substance abuse and mental health issues, two issues that commonly plague homeless populations and usually lead to further complications if left unaddressed. “We are in many respects similar to your typical health center,” Diamond stated. “But the population that we serve is unique, so some of our services are, too.”
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HCH also helps patients acquire health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has benefited the clients of HCH Maryland. “We are fortunate to live in a state that is expanding Medicaid,” said Diamond. He pointed out that, whereas previously less than half of HCH Maryland patients had health insurance, now over 90 percent are insured. This dramatic increase in the number of insured patients has allowed HCH Maryland to begin billing insurance providers for its services and increase its revenue. As a result, HCH Maryland has been able to further expand and re-invest in its services.
have to wait hours for care due to the high demand for health services. Since HCH Maryland only offers primary care, it is also unable to treat those with more serious health issues and can only refer them to other hospitals. Finally, because the government does not fully fund HCH, the organization must constantly look to outside sources for financial assistance, in what is a burdensome and sometimes fruitless process. Still, the staff at HCH Maryland are determined to continue their efforts.
“We are in many respects similar to your typical health center, but the population that we serve is unique, so some of our services are, too.”
Until homelessness in America is eradicated, the health problems faced by the homeless will continue to pose a multidimensional challenge to our healthcare system. Meanwhile, HCH, with its emphasis on primary and preventive care, will continue to work to reduce the financial burden of homelessness and, most importantly, break the cycle that has trapped far too many Americans in illness and homelessness. ■
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The relationship between the federal government and the homeless, especially regarding health care, is tenuous. Critics have contended that the government has long neglected the homeless, and has failed to provide them with easy access to primary and preventive care. Research has indicated that such programs would decrease long-run health care costs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that an additional annual investment of $10 per person ($3.16 billion total) in preventive care programs would yield an annual savings of $16 billion, or a return of $5.06 for every dollar spent. $3.16 billion may seem steep, but it amounts to just 0.09 percent of the federal budget. With such a high return on investment, increasing the availability of preventive and primary care seems to be an ideal way to improve the lives of the homeless and save taxpayer dollars.
NEW HEALTH CARE CLINIC AT 421 FALLSWAY, BALTIMORE / PHOTO COURTESY: HEALTHCARE FOR THE HOMELESS
While the government does not directly operate primary care clinics, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Human Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) funds many organizations that do. In 2012, HRSA-funded health centers served more than 1.1 million homeless people. HCH is the primary government-funded organization specializing in this area. While the passage of the ACA has enabled some homeless individuals to acquire health insurance, and has, at least in theory, made it financially feasible for them to access primary care, Diamond believes that the government can go further to help these people. Diamond pointed to “holes in the existing structure,” lamenting that since the 1980s, government housing projects and housing subsidies for the poor have been reduced in favor of loan subsidies for middle-class families. Federal housing programs for the poor now have massive waitlists that can last for several years. Until they find a stable housing situation, the homeless usually continue live in unsanitary conditions, which can create and exacerbate health problems.
MARYLAND’S FIRST DENTAL CLINIC FOR THE HOMELESS / PHOTO COURTESY: HEALTHCARE FOR THE HOMELESS
HCH Maryland faces challenges beyond the difficulty of finding permanent housing solutions for the homeless. Most walk-in patients
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COLOMBIA:
A Country and People in Transition By Robert Locke ’15, Staff Writer
SOACHA, COLOMBIA / PHOTO COURTESY: EPISCOPAL DIGITAL NETWORK
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he April 1948 assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, then the leader of the Colombian Liberal Party, sparked a two-day riot that resulted in thousands of deaths, destroyed much of downtown Bogotá, and ultimately led to the expulsion of many Colombians from their homes. At the time, a sharp divide existed between the rural and urban populations; the former believed that the Conservative Party in power in Bogotá had little, if any, idea of what the population needed. A Liberal-Conservative divide has dominated Colombian politics since as far back as the 1880s, and although a coalition government was in power in 1948, it was growing increasingly fragile and weak. Gaitan was an immensely popular figure whom many considered to be the country’s best hope for a democratic future. However, for many Colombians, Gaitan’s assassination marked the end of that vision, and is often cited as the watershed event that began years of violence and instigated the birth of rebel groups. Fearing continued unrest, subsequent administrations became much more authoritarian, which only exacerbated tensions between the two sides. Taking a page from Fidel Castro’s book, individuals from rural areas formed armed rebel groups in an effort to forcefully convey their grievances and push for representation and political power.
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Almost 70 years later, Colombia is still recovering from these years of violence and turmoil. In fact, it is still suffering – many of these militant groups still terrorize regions of the country. The 50 years of violence peaked in the 1980s and 90s, and while the situation is notably different today, the remnants and memory of those militant decades still affect millions of people. The conflict has resulted in the world’s largest internally displaced population. Since the conflict began, more than five million Colombians have been driven from their homes. In order to finance their operations, militant groups (most notably, FARC, ELN and M-19) have largely resorted to drug trafficking. Participating in the drug trade requires huge amounts of land to cultivate coca, and process, package and distribute the final products. As a result, these militant groups have forcefully removed millions from their land. They have kidnapped people, burned down their homes and committed a whole host of other violent acts. Fearing for their lives and with no other place to go, many of the campesinos fled to the burgeoning cities at record rates.
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It is important to note that almost 30 percent of Colombia’s land is used for agricultural purposes to produce millions of metric tons of potatoes, bananas, sugarcane, orchids and coffee beans each year. A large portion of Colombia’s 48 million people continues to make their living off the land. However, the millions forced out of the countryside and into the cities are now unable to perform the only work they have ever known. Poverty in rural areas runs close to 60 percent, and violence has disproportionately affected small farmers. The cities offer few other venues for productivity, as jobs and other critical resources are already scarce. With no other place to go, the 5.2 million internally displaced persons are relegated mostly to the poorest areas in the outskirts of cities without a steady source of income. They still fear for their lives, and in some cases, they are even ostracized from the urban population due to the public perception that these unwelcome rural people are using up city resources. To make matters worse, large numbers of these immigrants find themselves living in informal housing settlements across parts of Colombia’s major cities, where relief and aid services are difficult to administer. The international response to the conflict has been decidedly limited. Of the 5.2 million people directly affected, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is currently only serving about 400,000. Two elements commonly associated with the mitigation of refugee crises – the establishment of formal refugee camps and mass migrations to neighboring countries – are noticeably absent from Colombia. Some displaced persons, if they are fortunate enough, have moved in with other family members; others who relocated to the outskirts of cities have attempted to assimilate into city life. Because it is difficult to trace these individuals, it has proved a challenge also assist them. International agencies other than the UNHCR are helping where possible, but funding and resources have been limited due to the difficulties in identifying those in need of assistance. Domestically, the government has made some significant strides in recognizing individuals who have been displaced. Specifically, it has implemented a policy known as the “Victim’s Law”, which recognizes the rights of the displaced millions and commits to providing them with social services and enacting land restitution. There is one major obstacle to this policy, however. In order to identify as a victim of the conflict, a displaced person has to provide his or her name. Although violence has now been confined to mostly remote areas, many still fear that releasing their name to the government will put them in danger. Thus, they seek to avoid identification and therefore cannot receive the benefits of the Victim’s Law.
The future of Colombia rests on the peaceful resolution of the conflict. If the talks continue to drag on, negotiations will lose both credibility and the political capital necessary to pursue an agreement. Should this happen, the millions of displaced Colombians looking for a better life will continue to suffer the most.
{
“Since the conflict began, more than five million Colombians have been driven from their homes.”
If helping millions of people emerge from the shadows is not enough reason to push through with the peace talks, Colombia’s economic prosperity hangs in the balance as well. The sooner the threat of violence subsides, the sooner foreign direct investment (FDI) can help boost beleaguered sectors of the economy. Domestic security and stability is the critical deciding factor for companies in deciding to do business in Colombia. In 2013, Colombia attracted a record $16.8 billion of FDI; this number, third amongst Latin American countries, has steadily increased in recent years at rates faster than any other country in Latin America – a direct correlation to the improving security situation. With greater domestic stability comes an increased potential for jobs and economic opportunity. Farmers will be able to return to their land, and the government will be able to afford to support their endeavors. And perhaps most importantly, Colombians will be able reclaim their country after nearly 70 years of warfare and violence. They will be able to return to a sense of normalcy, one that will allow them to take pride in a land that, despite facing incredible adversity, they continue to call home. ■
Currently, the Santos government is in the midst of peace talks with the rebel groups. The negotiations, though promising, have been underway for almost two years now. Until there is a formal resolution to this conflict and both sides are committed to a peaceful, sustainable future for Colombia, victims of the conflict will continue to live in the shadows and in fear. They will continue to be deprived of the services they need and are entitled to under Colombian law.
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San Francisco’s Growing Housing Crisis By Olga Baranoff ’16, Staff Writer
O
ver the past 30 years, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial spirit and proximity to Silicon Valley have made it attractive to technology firms and their employees. The current technology boom has induced an influx of young, rich, mostly white and single residents to the city, driving housing costs beyond the reach of long-term residents. According to an article in The Guardian, formerly “seedy” neighborhoods have been “transformed by geek-driven gentrification.” Tech workers prefer living in urban San Francisco to suburban Silicon Valley, and corporate shuttles facilitate this preference; private buses pick up employees throughout the city and drive them down to company headquarters in Silicon Valley. The flood of wealthy residents drives up the demand for housing, and old rental buildings and long-standing tenants are being targeted to meet the demand. Renters, who make up over two-thirds of the residents in San Francisco, suffer from rent displacement – eviction due to rising rents in units without rent control. These residents can no longer afford the rent their units command as a consequence of the rising demand for housing in San Francisco. This gentrification accounts, at least in part, for the shrinking of minority neighborhoods. Residents of these localities, divided mostly along racial and income-level lines, have more or less stayed put for the past 40 years or so for various reasons, one of which is housing affordability. However, as housing demand increases, new renters seek affordable housing in all areas of the city, encroaching on low-income minority neighborhoods and out-bidding long-term residents. Although there are policies that politically support tech company growth in San Francisco, there has not been much policy so far to match the housing demands that the growth of the tech industry brings or to support long-time, lower-income residents. While the increasing demand for housing in San Francisco is met with a relatively limited supply, the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) and the city have worked to improve the stock of public housing. SFHA was established in 1938 and includes over 45 developments throughout the city. Today, it serves over 20,000 individuals through the Housing Choice Voucher Program and through government-owned public housing projects. San Francisco was also a beneficiary of the HOPE VI program, under which the city revitalized five obsolete public housing sites with 1,149 new units of public and affordable housing.
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In addition to HOPE VI, San Francisco is piloting HOPE SF, a program that established its guiding principles in response to the failures and successes in HOPE VI programs around the country. The program aims to revitalize severely distressed public housing by creating mixed-income communities. Eight public housing properties, which would have been more expensive to repair than to rebuild, were selected for HOPE SF. The first five developments are expected to be completed by 2020 and are financed primarily by the private sector. HOPE SF rebuilds each site in phases to minimize relocation, pledges to rebuild every unit and therefore will not, in theory, permanently displace residents, and aims to make current residents the beneficiaries of the program – not only through new housing, but through greater access to services, schools and job training, as well. While HOPE SF projects are still in early stages of development (construction has only started for one of the sites), the pilot program could help to alleviate cyclical poverty and serve as a useful guide for similar programs in cities throughout the country. Although the influx of money to San Francisco from the tech boom and subsequent gentrification has had some positive outcomes, the groups that are most negatively affected tend to be the most socially disenfranchised. The limited supply of housing in San Francisco, coupled with high demand, has caused rental prices to escalate as renters “bid up” one another, resulted in displaced renters who can no longer afford to live in neighborhoods they have called home for decades, and pushed residents to seek housing outside the city. As a result, the tech boom has spread gentrification to Oakland and other parts of the Bay Area, further displacing low-income, predominantly minority residents in those areas.
GOOGLE BUS PROTEST / PHOTO COURTESY: BUSINESSWEEK
• December 2014 • FALL SPECIAL ISSUE
SAN FRANCISCO HOUSING PROTEST / PHOTO COURTESY: SILICONBEAT
In The Atlantic, Gabriel Metcalf of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) points to a need not just for more affordable housing within San Francisco, but also for a more regional approach. Metcalf calls for working with other cities in the Bay Area to collectively resolve the housing crisis. Government-subsidized housing can only do so much. As they currently exist, HOPE VI and HOPE SF are not slated to build more units necessarily, but simply to replace existing ones for current residents. Furthermore, more affordable housing for middle-income and not just low-income residents is necessary step toward keeping San Francisco a livable city for individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Proposition K, a local ballot measure in the November 2014 election, calls for establishing a city policy to “help construct or rehabilitate at least 30,000 homes by 2020, more than 50 percent of which will be affordable for middle-class households and more than 33 percent of
which will be affordable for low- and moderate-income households.” Although a “declaration of policy” such as this one is non-binding, acknowledging the need to establish housing policy in San Francisco is a step toward improving and expanding the city’s housing stock. More policy measures similar to this, as well as ones that concretely and actively address the housing crisis, are necessary. If growth and development from the tech boom – which is predicted to bring 70,000 more residents to San Francisco by 2030 – are sustained, then housing solutions that account for all sectors of the population and not just those who can afford it must be found. Otherwise, the city risks displacing the low- and middle-income residents who contribute to San Francisco’s unique vibrancy. ■
MAPS COURTESY: SOCIAL EXPLORER
Left: Census 2000. Average gross rent for Specified renter-occupied housing units Right: ACS 2006—2010 (5-Year Estimates). Average gross rent for Renter-occupied housing units Darker areas correspond to higher rent - darkest area is rent greater than $1,500, lightest area is rent $350-$550.
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Profiles of Housing Disparities in the Middle East By Dylan Etzel ’17, Assistant Editor
DUBAI SKYLINE / PHOTO COURTESY: DANIEL CHEONG/HOTSPOT MEDIA
P
icture the Middle East. For many, riots, violence and poverty constitute a mental illustration of the region. Few consider the recent development of luxury real estate in the Middle East. The Emirates Palace, Burj Al Arab Hotel, Le Gray, Qasr Al Sharq, and Al Bustan Palace are all examples of the exorbitant wealth represented by luxury hotel businesses. These colossal structures serve as a daily reinforcement of economic inequality in the Middle East.
Now consider a Saudi Arabian who, cognizant of the existence of these immense luxury hotels, lives only a mile away in a slum in Jeddah. The hovel he calls home is a fraction of the size of one of the suites at Qasr Al Sharq, the most expensive hotel in Jeddah. How hard is it to imagine that he dislikes the Saud family, head of a government notorious for its inattention to one of the world’s worst housing crises? The Saudi Arabian government passed landmark housing reforms about a year ago in order to quell protests that many feared would lead to an Arab Spring uprising in Saudi Arabia. The government pledged £40 billion to improving affordable housing, but only £2 billion is currently scheduled for investment into projects. Still, a 500,000 home shortage exists in Saudi Arabia, according to an article in Businessweek. It is easy to imagine why our hypothetical Saudi would flock to the streets to protest against the regime. He might be living on the streets anyway.
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But at the same time, the Saudi Arabian travel and tourism industry is expected to compose SR33.5 billion dollars (almost 9 billion USD) of total investment by 2020. Economically, this might seem reasonable, as luxury hotels in Riyadh and Jeddah are lucrative and popular destinations for wealthy travelers. However, it is dangerous politically. If the state continues in failing to address the housing crisis, unfulfilled promises of reform will not be able to quell the anti-government sentiment. The Saudi Arabian housing market is built upon pillars of inequality. Other Middle Eastern countries are in the midst of a housing crisis as well, which explains why the newly-minted President of Egypt Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ran on a campaign platform that promised to build one million homes for low-income Egyptian youth, specifically in Cairo. Unfortunately, Mubarak left a legacy of not following through with housing reform in the 1990s. According to the Arab Observatory for Rights and Freedoms (AORF), Sisi has already spent 30 percent of the housing project’s budget on bribes. Rumors are circulating that Sisi envisions Egypt’s economic development resembling that of Dubai’s. If this is true, then protests in Cairo would certainly arise anew; Dubai’s hotel industry investment returns ranked first in the world in 2013. However, the Times of Oman did report that Arabtec, the UAE-based construction firm, projects the first of new affordable homes to be completed by 2017, and the last by 2020.
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{
“If the state continues in failing to address the housing crisis, unfulfilled promises of reform will not be able to quell the anti-government sentiment. The Saudi Arabian housing market is built upon pillars of inequality.”
allocated 50 percent of the housing project for affordable housing for Palestinians. While Netanyahu would have to satisfy a parliamentary coalition to do this, it would reverse much of the demolition that has already occurred in Area C of the West Bank, the largest area, where government bulldozers have displaced thousands of Palestinians over the last few years. While acknowledging that this would not be a solution to Israel-Palestine conflict, it would undeniably help soothe tensions in the area and make peaceful political progress more attainable in the future. By comparing the economics of Middle Eastern housing with the politics of some countries in the region, it becomes evident that the current state of housing investment is exacerbating political tension. Egyptian and Saudi Arabian leaders have a history of promising affordable housing and reneging on these policies later on. Other Gulf states are experiencing an influx in luxury hotel investment; all the while, unrest in these countries is intensifying. Finally, a fractious political environment in Israel is forcing the government to accelerate its path towards a war whose origins lie in housing. Thus, if these countries predicted long-term political costs, affordable housing should appear to be a clear treatment, if not a solution to worsening social unrest. ■
Dubai, on the other hand, faces less political and more economic turmoil ahead. The foundation of Dubai’s domestic economy is cheap labor; however, laborers in Dubai have been unable to pay rent contracts since housing prices went up 30 percent following a surge in the market. This surge can be attributed to Dubai’s heavy investment in luxury housing, which developers have likened to Manhattan. Working-class families have been forced to relocate to the outskirts of the cities, generating a demand shortage in the downtown areas and leading to unrest among workers. If investment is not allocated more efficiently, the economy will inevitably suffer. This issue intersects recent reports that Emaar Properties, Dubai’s largest real-estate developer, will soon commence affordable housing projects. Meanwhile, the most controversial matter of housing in the Middle East is undoubtedly in East Jerusalem, where the building of new homes is actually causing unrest. Prime Minister Netanyahu recently pledged to expedite apartment buildings in the West Bank, where Israelis have been immigrating since the 1990s, leading to mass protests by Palestinians. Tensions in the area are already high on account of the ongoing Gaza conflict. Until now, civilians have remained relatively peaceful, and Israel’s war has been largely against Hamas, the insurgent network that fights on the Gaza Strip. Should the housing projects reach completion, it is reasonable to predict that they will contribute to further violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Assertions that the new houses will also be home to Palestinians have not convinced citizens. The Eastern Jerusalem housing project exemplifies a system that is misguided politically. Imagine that the Israeli government, instead of reserving the new homes for Israelis or setting the prices too high for Palestinians to purchase or rent them out, changed paths, and instead
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The Legacy of Redlining in Baltimore: Using Credit to Curb Social Mobility By Shrenik Jain ’18, Staff Writer
T
he housing crisis that plagues Baltimore City has gained national infamy. From its extensive coverage in The Wire to the estimated 46,000 vacant homes, the lack of adequate housing for residents has become an integral part of the City’s identity. But not every neighborhood is rife with foreclosure signs; Baltimore is a city of great inequality and has affluent areas with high median income and homeownership rates. Strong correlations between a neighborhood’s overall well-being and its racial makeup hark back to the practice of redlining, a form of institutionalized racism. While the era of government-sanctioned segregation may have ended, it appears that lines drawn decades ago remain distinct racial, social, and economic boundaries. Redlining refers to the common tendency of banks to refuse business loans and mortgages to individuals from certain localities or charge higher rates for them, rather than evaluating potential debtors by their assets and income. Redlining dates back to the Great Depression, when the national housing market was in shambles. In response, the federal government established the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) as part of the New Deal and charged it with increasing both home-ownership and employment rates. The HOLC surveyed the metropolitan regions of the United States, evaluated the financial risk of investing in individual neighborhoods, and assigned each a color based on their perceived financial stability. Red demarcated the most volatile neighborhoods. While the criteria used in the assessment included factors such as the average age of a resident and the infrastructure of a neighborhood, the HOLC’s rubric heavily weighted its racial and ethnic composition, which meant that black Americans were drawn into districts where it was almost impossible to obtain a loan. While this government-sanctioned segregation became illegal following the passing of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, redlining continued through private enterprise. Numerous studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated that minorities in many metropolitan areas were forced to pay higher interest rates for mortgages and other loans than whites of similar incomes but from different parts of the same cities.
The long shadow of redlining in Baltimore extends to this day. It was notably observed in the 2008 district court case City of Baltimore v. Wells Fargo, in which the municipal government of Baltimore sued Wells Fargo for charging interest higher than market rates to
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black debtors from certain areas. The City claimed that this practice contributed to the unaffordability of housing and financial instability in many inner-city neighborhoods, which in turn exacerbated the 2008 housing crisis. While the district court ruled in favor of the City, the case demonstrates that the legacy of government redlining still lives in Baltimore. Areas initially redlined by HOLC include Berea, Seton Hill, Midtown, Upton and Sandtown-Winchester, and these neighborhoods today are rife with high poverty rates, decreased average life expectancy, and low percentages of homeownership. Moreover, all are host to a significant portion, if not a majority, of black residents. 44.2 percent of redlined districts have had more than 20 percent of their populations living in poverty since 1970, while only 13.8 percent of non-redlined districts report a comparable persistence of poverty. Poverty rates and incidence of poverty correlate strongly with educational achievement and performance. A study conducted from 2005-2009 found that Middle East Baltimore saw 17 percent of elementary school students miss over 20 days of school, while the wealthier Roland Park area saw only 1 percent of its elementary school students miss a comparable number of school days. The Baltimore average was 7 percent. This disparity only grows as students advance in school, and can be observed in middle school standardized test scores and the proportion of the population holding a college degree. The most disturbing metric, however, is life expectancy. Baltimore has an average life expectancy of 72.7 years, compared to 78.7 years for Maryland and 77.9 years for the United States. Even within Baltimore, there exists an enormous disparity. The average resident of the greater Roland Park area is expected to live until he or she is 86.3 years old. Meanwhile, the average Upton resident is expected to die at of 56.7 – a life expectancy comparable to that in the Republic of the Congo. A key reason the HOLC initially practiced redlining was to evaluate the real estate of neighborhoods, and those redlined in the past report a variety of negative housing statistics. Areas around Midtown in particular have low rates of homeownership, which began to dwindle in the 1970s. As neighborhoods succumbed to urban decay, residents with the means to move out did, and oftentimes simply abandoned their houses to foreclosure. This contributed to the vacant housing crisis that continues to plague inner Baltimore today.
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Left: Percentage of African-American population in each neighborhood of Baltimore City.
DA TA C
OU
RT E
Neighborhood SY :C
EN
SU
SD
EM
OG
RA
PH
ICS
20
10
Poverty Rate (%)
Median Income ($)
Berea
16.7
24,200
Seton Hill
39.4
30,197
Midtown
24.6
32,563
Upton
58.7
16,213
Roland Park
2.0
111,250
SandtownWinchester
42.4
29,472
DATA COURTESY: BALTIMORE NEIGHBORHOOD INDICATORS ALLIANCE
While the lingering effects of government redlining remain significant, perhaps more troubling is the redlining currently practiced by creditors. The repeated refusal of banks to issue home, business, and student loans to residents of certain communities greatly constrains social mobility by limiting the ability of citizens in a certain area to improve their socioeconomic status. As relatively wealthier residents observe the effects of redlining in in their neighborhoods, they flee and leave the most impoverished behind. Since boarded-up houses send property values plummeting, residents who remain will watch their assets – and their bargaining power in future loan negotiations – depreciate. As this vicious cycle of flight and depreciation continues, the aforementioned problems intensify in severity. Even as the role of direct, institutional racism has diminished in recent years, the growing plight of these neighborhoods forces creditors to redline. Violent and vacant neighborhoods pose a genuine financial risk, and lenders are forced to account for that in the form of higher interest, which furthers urban decay. While Baltimore has struggled to overcome the legacy of redlining, the private market’s continued use of the practice remains largely unaddressed. Plenty of activist groups address Baltimore housing, but they mainly focus on issues such as rent prices and vacancy rates.
What often goes unnoticed is how critical it is for individuals to be given the opportunity to invest in something stable, such as property, in order to financially secure their future, which often cannot be done without loans – a house that costs $150,000 is just as unaffordable as one that costs $200,000 if an individual cannot obtain a mortgage. Today, although we see dramatic protests against municipal policies, one of the true constraints to social mobility is still propagated by private money lenders. Although a legal precedent exists to prosecute lenders for unscrupulous practices, many fear that continuously prosecuting creditors for what they see as a rightful hedging of their risk will simply scare them away from lower-income neighborhoods, in effect recreating redlining once more. Even so, steps must be taken so that poorer Baltimoreans can take out fair loans. Until the redlining issue is addressed, its extensive practice will continue to inhibit economic and social mobility while intensifying a long and systematic decline of inner Baltimore neighborhoods. ■
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Interview with MEREDITH GREIF,
Johns Hopkins Professor of Sociology By Samuel Sands ’17, Contributing Writer
M
eredith Greif is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the homeless experience both internationally and domestically. She teaches a number of courses including Housing and Homelessness and Urban Sociology.
In your 2008 article for the Journal of Health and Social Behavior titled “Homelessness and Hunger,” you wrote about three distinct types of homelessness: transitional, episodic, and chronic homelessness. Can you briefly elaborate on those classifications? Up until relatively recently, people thought of the homeless population as very homogenous. They did not distinguish between people who had long-term, chronic experiences versus people for whom homelessness was a temporary, isolated episode. For the transitional group, homelessness is a one-time experience. It’s an episode of some housing insecurity in between two overall experiences of housing security. That’s what we’re seeing more of these days and that’s why it’s important to think about that category. The episodic homeless tend to cycle in and out of homelessness, often for shorter spells of time; for them housing security comes and goes. And then the chronic homeless population has much longer spells of homelessness, which could extend over many years, maybe with some interruptions, but often it’s something that approximates a permanent condition. For the chronically homeless in particular, there is growing evidence that it’s more cost-effective to provide them with permanent supportive housing instead of spending on costly resources and services that they disproportionately use, including emergency shelters, hospitalization, police intervention, and incarceration. Dozens of organizations around the country provide help to homeless people to find and fulfill basic needs. How viable are these options, and are they truly utilized to their full potential? There is strong evidence that homeless people are not aware of all the benefits they could be taking advantage of even while they’re on the streets. They are eligible for Supplemental Security Income; they are eligible for food stamps and Medicaid, Medicare, and housing vouchers. These are things that people are not often aware of because it often requires contact with the social service system. As time goes on, people who are in the chronic homeless group might pull away
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from services or just not seek out information as much anymore and just make use of the short-term services like shelters, soup kitchens, and more. It would be really important to ensure that people are aware of all the different benefits and services they are eligible for. That’s something I think the public has become more aware of in recent years: spreading the word about different kinds of options and, for some, that could be the thing that could lift them out of homelessness and into some sort of supportive or secure housing experience. But many of these options require much more funding in order for them to make a real dent in homelessness. For example, in many areas there are tremendous waitlists for housing vouchers, and people who are currently homeless are not always moved up the list. Veteran health and homelessness has become a hot button issue. Is there a distinction between the processes dealing with veterans and the general homeless population? People always question why are we so focused on veteran homelessness and why it is an issue. In large part it’s because people experience post-traumatic stress syndrome, and also face obstacles to re-integrating into civilian life, especially if they were away for a long period of time. Both can result in the loss of social ties that would have helped them weather a tough economic crisis. For example, marriages fall apart because of distance, or veterans just lose touch with other people that could have helped them out. They might not have set up a place to stay when they get back. They need a safety net. The safety net is extremely important. Take two groups in very similar situations: one person in a high-paying job and seemingly secure, and another a household or family that’s seemingly very low-income and could be on the brink of homelessness, but what could determine and distinguish between which actually becomes homeless could be a safety net. If there isn’t a family member that you could stay with for a short amount of time, or someone that could loan you some money, or a connection to someone who has some information about a job opportunity or knows about housing or shelter opportunities, that could be what makes or breaks people.
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That’s one reason why with veterans we see higher rates of homelessness, because some ties have been severed if they’re away for a long period of time. If they’re away for a long time, they get out and they have the stigma of a criminal record and they’re mostly left to fend for themselves. When drug abuse and alcohol are used as a coping mechanism, this can further people’s spiral towards homelessness. So, in broad ways the treatment need not be highly different towards veterans versus general populations, but understanding why veterans are more at risk than non-veteran populations is important. Is there truth to the theory that people who are homeless purposefully commit crimes to find security and refuge in prison, such as food, health care, clothing and shelter?
no other explanation for why they are on the street and I’m not on the street. And in a way, thinking more deeply about psychological processes, it almost can make people feel more safe to put up boundaries around certain populations, and the more you “other” them, the more you feel like that will never be you. So, we might pay attention to some of these stereotypes that we already have about homeless people and use them to reassure ourselves that we will never be like them.
In the short term, some people do make use of that option, out of desperation at least. If it’s an especially cold night or people are really without food or any of their basic needs they might turn to that, but most of the time homeless people actively are dodging the police. We’ve set up a system where their mere existence practically qualifies their behavior as illegal or criminal. Sleeping on the sidewalk or in an abandoned building is illegal, but there isn’t necessarily enough shelter space for everybody, so where are they supposed to go? If we don’t have public restrooms available, people relieve themselves on the street, but that’s also illegal. You see people getting chased out of areas with high amounts of tourism and commerce. They can’t be there because they’re homeless but anyone else who didn’t seem to meet the stereotypical image of a homeless person wouldn’t be chased for standing on a corner all day. But as soon as there’s someone who comes in and looks like they might be homeless, suddenly flags are raised and police, and shop keepers, and the general public starts trying to find ways to get them out and possibly even arrest then. I just think that is such a shameful way to treat people. We are not giving them options; we just want to shoo them away, but shoo them to where? Where are they going? We don’t have enough shelter, we don’t have spaces for people to meet their important needs, so it’s sort of like musical chairs with the outcome for some people being arrested, and then that’s one more layer added to their problem. It can become a downward spiral.
There is definitely a national push in the sense that we see legislation evolving to try to capture the complexity of the homeless experience and population. For example, some more recent policies have emphasized rapidly re-housing people when they lose their homes. There has always been, of course, a national awareness and an interest in ending homelessness, but there are so many factors that really would need to change in order for me to feel confident that homelessness will soon be a thing of the past. To be clear, many people are working really hard on this, and all of their work is extremely valuable, but to some extent, some of our solutions are quick fixes to a system that really needs to be changed fundamentally. At the national level there is definitely a push to end homelessness. I think at the local level, in many areas, there is a push to fix it, and also to move it away. At local levels you’re more likely to see interested parties wanting to just rid the local area of the homeless population. There are all kinds of measures that have been used: bus tickets to nowhere, protesting the presence of homeless shelters, and clearing people out of some parts of the city during the day to rid that public image of homelessness. At the local level, you absolutely have many people who are highly interested in ending homelessness but also are very interested in just seeing it disappear in their locality and have another locality deal with it. ■
Are we currently seeing a push to end homelessness altogether, or is the emphasis on removing homeless populations from very public areas to keep them out of sight, out of mind?
Why is there such a strong stigma against homeless people and the homeless population? Where does this sentiment originate? From a sociological standpoint, some key visuals and images have contributed to people’s stereotypes about homelessness. In a lot of cities there have been skid row areas, where homeless men congregated, maybe getting together to drink, forming a larger and more visible mass that drew the attention of the public and reinforced existing stereotypes. So I think early on that cemented people’s thoughts. They could see on full display a large congregation of homeless people, possibly doing things that they frowned upon or believed contributed to their homelessness, like drinking. You don’t see many skid rows anymore. Gentrification and urban renewal in many cities have broken them up, and you’re less likely to come across that kind of image any more, but I think it’s left an imprint that’s stayed with us today about who homeless people are and what they do, which leads to us more easily stereotyping them. On top of that are American ideals of individualism and the idea that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. People have this idea that the homeless must be lazy, that they must want this because there is
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List of Local Organizations Fighting Homelessness Compiled by Juliana Vigorito ’16, Staff Writer Homeless Person’s Representation Project (HPRP) http://www.hprplaw.org/ Provides pro bono legal assistance to homeless and atrisk individuals Public Justice Center http://www.publicjustice.org/ Provides legal help to tenants through Baltimore City’s Rent Court My Sister’s Place http://www.catholiccharities-md.org/my-sisters-place/ Provides a full spectrum of day services to women in need Martha’s Place http://www.marthasplace.org/ Provides transitional housing to women experiencing homelessness and/or addiction The Franciscan Center http://www.franciscancenterbaltimore.org/ Provides a full spectrum of day services to people experiencing poverty United Way of Central Maryland http://www.journeyhomebaltimore.org/index.php Organizes through Baltimore City to reduce homelessness
Baltimore Outreach Services www.baltimoreoutreach.org Provides supportive services for women and children The Baltimore Station www.baltimorestation.org Provides housing and rehabilitative services to military veterans Project PLASE, Inc. www.projectplase.org Provides transitional and permanent housing to people in need Our Daily Bread www.catholiccharities-md.org/our-daily-bread/ Provides daily meals and job training programs St. Vincent de Paul of Baltimore http://www.vincentbaltimore.org/ Provides comprehensive daytime services and shelter assistance Youth Empowered Society www.yesdropincenter.org/ Provides drop-in services to young people experiencing homelessness
Health Care For the Homeless www.hchmd.org Provides comprehensive healthcare services to individuals experiencing homelessness
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JHU Politik, founded in 2008, is a weekly publication of political opinion pieces. We proudly seek to provide the Johns Hopkins community with student voices and perspectives about important issues of our time. Rather than hide within a cloistered academic bubble, we know we must critically engage with the world that surrounds us. That, we believe, is at the heart of what it means to be learning. We are lucky to be situated in the city of Baltimore, a city with a rich history and an ever-changing politics. We aim to look at the politics of the Homewood campus, the city of Baltimore, the domestic landscape of the United States, and the international community . While we publish the Politik weekly, we work simultaneously on our special issues which come out once per semester. These magazines confront a single topic from multiple angles. We have run issues covering topics like the political nature of research, the Arab Spring, and our city Baltimore.
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