SF Chron: Homelessness barely existed before Reagan

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/10/MNG8V73F8V35.DTL&type=printable


RONALD REAGAN
1911-2004
Amid tributes, activists lament Reagan's failure on homelessness
- Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2004

Praise for the late President Ronald Reagan's sunny resonance with the common man has been rasping all week on the ears of many activists and social workers who watched in vain as homelessness exploded under his watch --

and they hope the history books remember one thing:

Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics - - and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it -- they were seemingly everywhere.

And America had a new household term: "The homeless."

It's funny how the advocates for the homeless they quote in the article are reluctant to blame Reagan.

I wonder if they're dependent on Republican money.

I can attest to this. Reagan was governor of our state for eight years before he first won the Presidency, so we saw homelessness before the rest of you, and for the same reasons. He simply transferred his heartless policies to the national level. One of the worst things he did was cut mental health patient funding, turning many of them out into the streets. I have vivid memories of this as a child.

When I traveled to San Francisco, I was amazed at the amount of homeless there.

I’m in Austin right now, and we have some homeless, but nothing like I had seen in California.

In the late 70s, even with the economy in the toilet, ridiculously high interest rates, high inflation, and high unemployment, the few homeless people we saw were alcoholic men who had drunk up their pension checks and were waiting for the first of the month so they could find another rooming house or fleabag hotel. By 1983, we were seeing huge numbers of mentally ill people and whole families on the street.

Part of this was the tax policy transferring money to people who used it to turn all the old rooming houses back into single family mansions, displacing alcoholics and sober marginal workers alike. Another part was transferring money to corporations who blasted poor neighborhoods into oblivion so they could put up new monuments to capitalism.

Reagan and his tax policies still are the enemy of the American people. I don't know what it will take to wake people up to the fact that they are struggling for crumbs because the wealth that should be in their hands has been transferred upwards for the past two decades.

He didn't move to the Bay Area until just about 1980 so he didn't have a "before" picture of the place.

I reminded him about the homeless (my brother among them during the last of the Reagan regime), and the kids killing each other for Nikes and dimebags of crack. For a while (circa '85-'86), there was a shooting at Oakland Tech about once a month, and that's one of the BETTER high schools in town.

I could go on...

Even here at DU, hardly anyone mentions this, so I'm impressed that a newspaper would print this.

I''m going to write them a thank you, and I hope many here will, also. It needs to be noted and thanked!

Thanks for posting!

Kanary

Would you be so kind as to share your own personal story here for us?

It might wake up some people.

:loveya:

Your invitation takes me by surprise.......

I appreciate the offer, and will give it some thought.

However, there is soooo much criticism and attacking here that, to tell you the truth, I really don't feel safe in sharing any personal experiences like that. It's really too bad that there isn't more support here....... it would be good for *everyone*.

I've been through a lot, and just have to take care of myself. I hope you understand.

Thanks..... I appreciate the interest.

Kanary

I was homeless in San Fran. for about 3 months. The only thing that
saved me was the fact that I had a car and could get around....

It sounds like hyperbole to say that homelessness did not exist before the Reagan administration, but it isn't as far from the truth as one might think. Rampant poverty has existed in America at least since the Gilded Age, however, the low-income housing and welfare cuts Reagan made during his tenure led to a shortage of shelter for those on the bottom wrung of the economic ladder. By cutting the low-income housing programs, the government made a radical shift into a policy that you had the right to housing and food as long as you could afford non-subsidized housing that was privately owned. By kicking the severely impoverished out of housing projects, Reagan created a new social class, the homeless.

meditate on that figure for a bit........

Thanks for bringing this up.......

Kanary

I've been saying that for over a decade.

Is it too much to ask that he sleep in a gutter in Hell?

Make us fear more.
I remember when the goon made these changes. The homeless in Minnesota is appalling. And the mentally ill in prison is just --there is no vocabulary for it. My brother is a guard and it is so bad it makes him sob...
The pressure on these guards to watch the murderer's and then have to attend to the mentally ill is too much. They can't do it--it is a complete stress swing in watching over cruelty to the helpless.

... and looking at the numbers and the evidence, it's pretty compelling.

And it seems like homelessness is on the rise here (Columbia, SC) - I see a lot more of them out in the street, a lot more panhandling.

But it should be said that Capitalist societies are by nature designed to promote an efficiency in labor and labor costs, so you are always going to have less people than you need to do all of the work a society requires (so "full employment" is 95% or whatever). The European countries realized this long ago, and designed a safety net for the unemployed masses, fearing the breakdown in social cohesion that would result, if a bunch of desperate people were always out on the street.

We just hire more cops, and it probably ends up costing more than just giving the poor a squat somewhere.

Since the topic is homelessness, I want to bring this issue to your attention, and request that you use this oportunity to speak out on yet another upcoming cut to low-income housing.

In the budget for next year, 2005, is included a slash of Section 8 vouchers. As I understand it, this will affect over 130,000 people nationwide. Can you imagine how many more homeless people you will have in your respective cities?

The figures are hard to find, and I mostly have them for Colorado:
*Over 3,000 low-income, elderly and disabiled families in Colorado will lose their federal housing assistance in 2005 under cuts proposed by the Bush Administration. By 2009, over 8,000 low-income families in Colorado could lose their federal housing assistance.

The total amount that Colorado would lose in housing assistance funding from the federal program would be $25,499,420 in 2005, and $67,951,833 in 2009.

Given that there is *Already* a severe shortage of low income housing, these people won't just be moving to new residences..... they will have to crowd in with relatives or neighbors, or be in shelters or on the street.

Please call 1-00-839-5276, ask for the congresscritter of your choice(s), and speak up about these cuts!

Please do this....... hardly anyone even knows about this, and it is going through with hardly a whisper.

THANKS!

Kanary

I want to help out.

I appreciate that muchly.

Could you help me spread this far and wide? It's going through with no attention paid.

THANKS!

Kanary

Catherine Austin-Fitts

http://www.whereisthemoney.org/

http://www.solari.com/gideon/

EXPERIENCE WITH FHA-HUD
BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR:

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

IS MORTGAGE SECURITIES FRAUD
SPONSORED BY THE US TREASURY & FEDERAL RESERVE BANKS
A PART OF THE US ‘STRONG DOLLAR’ POLICY?

By Catherine Austin Fitts
June 2003



In the summer of 2000, a member of the staff for the Chairman of the Senate appropriation subcommittee (with jurisdiction over HUD and its FHA mortgage insurance and Ginnie Mae mortgage securities programs) confided to me that they believed that HUD was being run as "a criminal enterprise." I responded that I "did not disagree."

Reaching that conclusion was a long time coming. It took many years of experience implementing practical and sound reforms to the FHA mortgage system, only to have the system reject any and all efforts to have it become anything other than an integral part of a significant mortgage bubble and a pork and slush fund operation. Because FHA and its securitizing agency, Ginnie Mae, as a practical matter are run by the US Treasury, the Department of Justice, the NY Fed (as depository for the federal government and manager of the Exchange Stabilization Fund) and a group of defense contractors and JP Morgan-Chase, the implications regarding the integrity of the US financial system are profound.

The following list describes some of my representative experiences working with FHA, the lead US mortgage insurance agency and regulator, as Assistant Secretary-FHA Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, as the President of Hamilton Securities Group, the lead financial advisor FHA during the Clinton Administration, and then as a litigant with the US Department of Housing & Urban Development and their informant, Ervin & Associates, during the Clinton Administration and the second Bush Administration.



Just google Catherine Austin-Fitts, more there that anyone can get through in a day. Another genuine whistle-blower.

Thanks so much for looking up HUD info...... I agree that this is important, and needs to be dealt with.

However, because of all the fraud in the mortgages part of HUD, it is angering people, and causes calls for cuts. Those cuts, however, are NOT being made to the fraudulent mortgages section, but to the LOW-INCOME HOUSING section. Of course... just like it *always* is. Harm the poor and make them pay for the crime of the rich. GRRRRR!!!

What I haven't been able to find is more specific information regarding cuts to the Section 8 voucher program. I'd appreciate any help with that I can get. :)

Kanary

I remember when I was in Washington DC, the capital of the richest nation on Earth, there were innumerable homeless.

My experience there is something I'll never forget.


A blind woman, missing both her eyes, was clutching the hand of her young child.

Her child was guiding her throughout the city apparently, and I was a tourist walking about.

They approached me and said they needed some money to eat.

They were both a heartbreaking sight, and I couldn't help but give them some money.

Oddly enough, as I was walking Bush's entourage later passed by.

This was after he was just selected, and hadn't fucked everything up yet.

roots going back to Ronald Reagan and his heartless policies that barely got noticed at DU.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=111x16544

I'm glad the issue is coming out in the main press. People need to know that people are not homeless by choice. If they were you would not notice them much because they wouldn't be out begging and struggling to survive on the streets.

Thanks for posting this.

I remember during the primaries, John Edwards talked about the homeless and those living in poverty in his "two Americas" speech.

He must see it often in his home state.

I would like Edwards to be in Kerry's administration in some position to help address this great problem, but we still need a Congress that we can work with.

Nobody can escape the fact that progressive policies brought us out of the Great Depression, and the pro-corporate forces that are destroying our country today brought us there.

:kick:

What I *STILL* don't understand is why the Dems have turned their backs on this whole issue. I truly don't understand that, and it's really depressing to me. The death of HOPE?

I really don't know about Edwards, but I *Do* wonder if he would take up this issue in a more active way in the position of VP.

Certainly, somebody needs to.

Kanary

:kick:

In Los Angles, it was the hot story everywhere. It didn't take long for the rayguns to fuck things up. I learned about it firsthand later in the decade, along with the terms gentrification, when the old apartment buildings where 60.00 would provide a months shelter were sold off and there was no place left to go.

I remember in 83 finding shelter under a hyway overpass, luckily with an envelope full of foodstamps, so at least I could hold off hunger. Lifestyles of the poor and powerlessness.

ignore it.