Activities and Opinions

In a surprise to no one who has been following the progress of Mayor Joe Boles' hand-picked commission on homelessness, Home Again St. Johns, there has been no word for months on a 10-year year plan to end homelessness.

It is now 17 months since Michael German of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness spoke in St. Augustine.

"Local mayors agree to 10-year homeless plan" -- St. Augustine Record, July 17, 2008:
Michael German, an Atlanta-based regional coordinator for the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, told the crowd of about 150 at the Flagler College Auditorium that the typically cold-hearted, profit-driven private sector could benefit from the warm-hearted work of housing homeless people.

It is now a year since the mayor's commission started meeting.

"Opinion: Businesses best to lead homeless effort" -- St. Augustine Record, Feb. 15, 2009:
"We're not governmental, and we're not stakeholders. We're bankrollers. It is costing us more to ignore homelessness." That is St. Augustine Mayor Joe Boles' assessment of the impact of homelessness on businesses.

"Plans on track to curb homelessness" -- St. Augustine Record, May 31, 2009.

It's been seven months since the community was promised a plan, not a "paperweight" by the commission's chairperson. "How many "paperweights" started out with great enthusiasm and are now stacked on shelves in offices? We're confident this plan will be successful. Its leadership is in the hands of business leaders. They don't waste time. They're goal-setters and action oriented."

When People United to Stop Homelessness (PUSH), gave a presentation to the St. Johns County Commission in June 2009, they showed camps and migrant housing conditions and gave testimonies based on personal interactions with our homeless. Prior to the meeting, PUSH was assured by Jerry Cameron, Assistant County Administrator, that the Home Again St. Johns' report would be released in mid-December 2009. With that timetable in mind, PUSH volunteered to survey the county and provide the Home Again St Johns commission with some real numbers and locations of camps. This information could also be useful for both the point in time survey for HUD in January 2010 and the U.S. Census in March 2010.

After weeks of advance planning and mapping the county using topological and satellite images, volunteers spread out into the woods and rural areas as well as St. Augustine, St. Augustine Beach, Ponte Vedra, Hastings and Armstrong. A pilot survey form and a count sheet, designed by the Center for Community Initiatives at University of North Florida, were used. This project was completed over a two-week period in November 2009 and a preliminary report is available on the PUSH Web site: www.pushsjc.org The Center for Community Initiatives offered to perform the statistical analysis and release a full report at a later date.

So there's now actionable data. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has already provided a proven template for a Ten Year Plan, which has reduced homelessness in cities all across the nation by up to 40%. Home Again St. Johns needs to use this data and the already identified resources in our area and then acquire the necessary funding streams. Excuses about the economy and lack of funding don't wash: you don't get grant money without a clear, actionable plan.

After the massive destruction the "cold-hearted, profit-driven private sector" has wrought on our society, is it any surprise that "bankrollers" can't seem to come up with a plan to end homelessness? No, not to those of us who have been watching and waiting, along with the homeless and the impoverished, for the last year and a half.

-- Mary Lawrence
Originally appearing in the St. Augustine Record

If you spent anytime downtown at the Plaza, you saw Bob. He usually sat alone at the north east end on a bench, long hair hidden under a knit cap no matter the weather, writing in his small notebook. It took me over a year to learn how to approach Bob and get him to look me in the eye and speak to me. When he did speak, you could hear an educated intellect in his language. From time to time, I’d notice the huge swelling of his hands and feet then he’d be missing for a week or so. I would later learn he’d been hospitalized to drain the fluid from his body only to return to downtown in hospital slippers to reclaim his bench. Once, clean shaven from a recent hospital release, I was shocked to see how young he really was. Over the course of the last two years, Bob had been taken to the hospital several times and then he died this year. Yes, Bob was homeless and his death was stoically accepted by the rest of the homeless community.

Even if you didn’t know Bob or don’t care one way or another about homeless people, the expensive, systematic and ultimately useless emergency medical care he received should concern you. Our community absorbed the cost of caring for Bob but we never followed through, to our communal moral disgrace. Housing First, with wrap around services to follow up on care, has been proven in cities all across the nation to not only be the most effective, cost efficient solution to chronic homelessness, it is the essential, moral one. Let’s hope the "Home Again St Johns" commission gets it right this time.

--Mary Lawarence
originally appearing in the St. Augustine Record, 08/31/09

Editor: Why is eradicating homelessness not the number one priority of our town, county, state and country?

There need not be a single involuntarily homeless person in a nation that can spend, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, $3 trillion dollars on a preemptive war waged against the people of a non-threatening, sovereign nation (Iraq). A fraction of one percent of that amount would end homelessness.

There need not be a single homeless person in a nation that can afford to bail out "too big to fail" corporations to the tune of $700 billion. Isn't the huge and growing homeless population "too big to fail?" Why aren't the same favors bestowed upon corrupt, incompetent, greed-ravaged Wall Street operatives extended to homeless children, veterans, single moms and seniors? There need not be a single homeless person in a nation that spends hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars annually on imperialistic conquest. According to Dr. Chalmers Johnson, professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, the U.S. occupies 130 countries with over 700 military bases staffed by half a million U.S. troops. For a mere fraction of the cost of maintaining this wanton empire, homelessness can be immediately eradicated.

In what has to be the mother of all ironies, at St. Augustine's recent $150/plate homelessness benefit in the posh Lightner Museum, a homeless man was denied entrance. Apparently Mayor Joe Boles' merciless statement, "We don't want to be crippled by compassion," has become official policy.

Now, our president-elect has vowed to expand the unwinnable Afghanistan War, continue to build Star Wars, and further increase an already preposterous Pentagon budget. Change we can believe in?

The number of homeless people increases daily. Homelessness is a national disgrace, a criminally negligent failure on the part of every U.S. public official and uninvolved citizen.

Tom Santoni
Veterans For Peace
Hastings

Prinetd in the St. Augustine Record 11/28/08

Editor: Nov. 10 marked the 5th anniversary of the St. Augustine Food Not Bombs, one of the longest-running actions in the nation which feeds anyone who is hungry in public places.

To celebrate, more than 100 homeless people, advocates and church group members participated in the first annual March of the Impoverished, advertised in your own paper. It's dismaying that only one of all the invited city and county officials attended. It's regrettable such a watershed event did not merit coverage by this paper.

At one end of the Plaza de la Constitucion, a small group of citizens sat listening to bands playing "patriotic" music in honor of Veterans Day. At the other end of the Plaza, many enjoying the Food not Bombs celebration of human dignity and empowerment were in fact homeless veterans needing a meal among countless other things.

--Mary Lawrence
Originally appeared in the St. Augustine Record

We hope that the commissioners of St. Johns County, St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach are actively working for a responsible resolution to the problem of caring for unfortunate people who are homeless.

Surely we must all be shocked, after reading the demographics of the homeless in St. Johns County.

We were shaken to see that 49 percent of their numbers are working families, some including children an estimated 50 to 70 children are homesless in our county at any one time. They live in cars or under plastic tarps, with no sanitary facilities handy, because there is no affordable housing available. Furthermore, 7 percent are single adults who work full time, but cannot find afforable housing to rent or buy.

The school system is doing a valiant effort to see that homeless children are transported to the school of their choice, but how can a child do homework, or get the proper amount of sleep, living under these conditions?

Another shocker: We call our troops "heroes'' and wear magnetic stickers on our cars proclaiming "Support Our Troops.''

It is an exercise in hypocrisy. if we do nothing to help the more than 30 percent of our homeless who, without proper care from the Department of Veteran Affairs, have been retired from the military without proper treatment for disabling physical and mental ailments contracted while fighting in American's wars.

We were invited to eat lunch recently at St. Francis House with the homeless who were there that day. A veteran seated with us, with a look of desperation in his eyes, said: "No one who hasn't been there can imagine what it is like to be homeless.''

Some of us have worked on putting together a Habitat for Humanity house; but such attempts provide but a drop in the bucket as compared to the need.

We have asked previous boards of county commissioners to provide more affordable housing, and surely not homes valued at $175,000 that were labeled as "affordable." That is hardly in the realm of a worker on minimum wage earnings even working more than one job.

The commissioners were not up to the challenge. In one instance, they okayed a development of regional impact, on condition that it included a percentage of "affordable" homes. After agreeing to those conditions, once the permit was granted, the developers changed their minds, stating that they couldn't afford to include the affordable homes and were allowed to continue their development anyway.

Even our firefighters, police, teachers and nurses the backbone of any community are unable to afford homes in St. Augustine, although they work here, and have to commute from places like Palm Coast and Elkton. And yet, our county is awash in homes for millionaires.

Meanwhile, our county and cities have an obligation to cooperate in funding expanded facilities for temporary housing for the homeless, with social services such as job counseling and substance abuse therapy available, as well as medical services. No matter how much all the charitable organizations contribute to this cause, their efforts will be futile if our governing bodies do not form the core for action to resolve this crisis.

Cities which have tackled this problem responsibly have found that they actually saved money in the long run, by rehabilitating the homeless rather than herding them to less visible areas, or, the worst possible action, putting them into our expensive jails.

As for our children these are the future strength or weakness of this nation.

--Mary Lawrence
Originally appeared in the St. Augustine Record