Homeless for the Holidays

by Lydia Howell
Another friend is homeless.
This fall, every mayoral and city council candidate talked about the affordable housing crisis. A case can be made that this issue alone toppled a mayor and shook up the Minneapolis City Council, ejecting five incumbents. From the City/County Taskforce on Homelessness to nonprofit organizations, homelessness has been documented beyond all denial. With a vacancy rate of less than 2 percent and rent up 34 percent (and climbing) since 1990, homelessness can’t be ignored as “bums under a bridge” or “a voluntary lifestyle choice.” The following stories are true*.
My recently homeless friend, Mike, is 46, white and working in a hospitality-related industry, heavily reliant on conventions and tips. Both industries are down. His monthly income fluctuates between $500 and $1,100.
A month before Sept. 11, Mike’s South Minneapolis building caught fire, although its fate had been precarious for years. As new, market-rate housing was built nearby and the century-old building changed owners, rumors of “eviction for condos” began to circulate. This is the fearful refrain increasingly heard in inner-city neighborhoods, a fear confirmed by the $200,000 housing going up, often with some public funds.
Mike’s old building had 50 units priced at $210-$400 each with utilities included. It had survived previous fires, and many tenants had lived there for years. With three days’ notice, the owners said the building wasn’t worth fixing. The just-released Minneapolis State of the City report says efficiencies (if you can even find one) average $507, a 150 percent increase in Mike's housing cost.
For almost four months, Mike has been showering at my apartment and living (illegally) in a spare office his boss offered, trading maintenance chores for rent. Those studying the crisis will never count Mike. The numbers, high as they are (4,000 in Hennepin County last year), underestimate the problem. Why? Because so many, like Mike, survive invisibly.
On and off for several years, Anthony slept on a couch in the basement in the restaurant where he worked. Luke rented a garage for $50 a month and lived in his car for five years. Then he rented a warehouse space for $250 a month, telling the landlord he needed “studio space.” People trying to stay off the streets regularly violate zoning laws. Grandmothers in Section 8 senior public housing risk eviction by allowing their adult children and grandchildren to stay with them. A slang term, “couch surfing,” describes moving from friend to friend while searching for permanent housing. It’s commonplace and violates leases.
“There’s some value to getting middle class people to the city. That increases the tax base,” explains Gavin Kearney, director of research and programs at the U of M Institute on Race and Poverty. “Whether or not Minneapolis is striking the right balance between creating affordable housing and middle-class housing—that’s the question. It’s different priorities and I can’t say Minneapolis has always made the right decisions.”
Through examination of the housing crisis the complexity becomes clear. Myriads of issues are interconnected: economic development, transit, sprawl, environmental degradation and green spaces, housing construction, tax base, etc. Stratified economic/social forces collide: private developers, first-time home-buyers, the working poor, employers, middle- and upper-middle-class folks who want to return to central cities left to rot decades ago. At the core, it can be distilled to some basic math: older, affordable housing has increasingly been destroyed while primarily higher-income housing is built.
“Demolition of usable, affordable housing is criminal,” asserted Dean Zimmerman, new 6th Ward city council member at a Nov. 3 rally, protesting luxury condominiums built downtown. The Green Party members pointed out what officials never say. “Lots of housing is being knocked out. Older housing is affordable because it was paid for years ago. It’s NUTS to be tearing it down. Why are they tearing it down? They tear it down so these big corporations can make more money building new housing.”
Around the corner from my Seward apartment building, I watched this process at work. A 1920s four-plex with two bedroom apartments, renting for $525 was demolished. This summer, loft condos replaced the building and are priced from $165,000 to $185,000. The family I knew there lived on a combination of the husband’s disability check and the wife’s $7-an-hour cashier job. Housing that cost three to four times their rent displaced them. The State of the City reports that two-bedroom apartments average $888, 75 percent higher than this family’s previous rent.
The lame duck mayor, Sharon Sayles-Belton, justified the massive demolition of hundreds of affordable housing units as “part of the war on drugs.” Label a building as a “crackhouse,” send in the city inspectors to deem it “substandard” and tear it down. Almost two years ago, I challenged Sayles-Belton on the demolition policy and she admitted “it was a mistake and we’ve changed it.” There was a slight shift in demolitions in 2000, but what’s being built with the help of tax dollars is too expensive to house those displaced.
“MCDA (Minneapolis Community Development Agency) is the lightning rod for what other groups want to do,” says the agency’s director, Steve Cramer. “We’re not going to just build affordable houses. But we do make conditions for awarding grants to developers.”
That was not the case with the Washington Avenue Mill City Project, protested Nov. 3 by the Association of Communities Organized for Reform Now, or ACORN. The $69,000 in public money per units, created housing for sale at $300,000 to $900,000 each. Cramer asserted that the cost was for environmental clean-up and historical preservations of the adjoining mill museum, saying “nothing would be built there” without city funds.
For years, Sayles-Belton said the city was committed to a 100 percent replacement for demolished lower-income housing. However, advocates point out that the bottom-line reality never measured up.
“They didn’t spend a lot of money on this in relation to the need,” says Herb Frye, director of Alliance Housing, committed to permanent housing for the most desperately homeless. “MCDA spent about $1 million on affordable housing. We need 1,000 units, they fund 100.” ACORN cited $350 million in public money going to middle-upper income housing.
In the last ten years, homelessness at least doubled, but the city didn’t approve opening even one new shelter. Women and children have been the fastest growing group of the homeless, says the Family Housing Fund. As their 1999 study figures show, those working (in largely female occupations) are “earning low wages [but] providing essential services—child care, food service, health care—are often priced out of the housing market.”
Cam Gordon, 2nd Ward city council candidate, observed that some Target employees were staying in shelters. The company received more than $100 million in city funds for its new downtown store and corporate headquarters, but was allowed to avoid paying workers a livable wage. Other underfunded social issues contribute to homelessness.
It’s been over 10 years since Pamela was homeless, however this 50-something African American grandmother still speaks bitterly of her five years on the streets. Escaping a brutal husband, this 5’3” woman was hurled into vulnerability to further violence.
“I ended up trading the fear of one man for the fear of many men,” she says bluntly, adding that she had been an alcoholic as well. Battered women’s shelters often refuse women with addictions or mental health problems, even though these seem the obvious results from years of abuse.
Half the homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence. The United States has three times more shelters for animals than for battered women and their children. Once homeless, a woman can be charged with neglect and have her children taken away by the state, a punishing predicament that the Welfare Rights Committee says is more common than people imagine.
“They’ll pay someone else more to raise our children than they’re willing to help us to keep them,” says WRC’s Dee Dee Francis. The July 2002 time limit on welfare will cut off 5,000 families, further increasing homelessness.
I met Lennie during the takeover of the downtown Minneapolis Armory by homeless activists. They wanted the site rehabbed for a new shelter and community services center, not torn down, as proposed, for a new jail. Lennie is a crusty, working-class character I’ve known on the West Bank ever since. On one level, he fits the stereotype of who is homeless: an intermittently employed, middle-aged, male alcoholic. Lennie is also a veteran, along with nearly 40 percent of all homeless men.
Even solidly employed, sober men can be daunted when trying to get off the streets. For over two years, Mary Gallini has struggled with the labyrinth of city bureaucracy and a handful of recalcitrant business owners to open a new shelter for such men.
“It’s expected that people fear what they don’t know,” said Gallini, a 13-year advocate for the homeless currently working with Simpson Housing Services. “But I wish the shelter was open so we could get 25 more people inside this winter. When people see the shelter concretely, they’ll see their fears were baseless.”
Already funded by the United Way and the city, the proposed shelter will offer mats on the floor, small storage and 25 will use two showers. Residents will be referred, not lined up outside the south Washington Avenue mission facility. Open only 5 to 7 p.m., it’s unavailable to night-shift workers; 41 percent of homeless adults work, and 26 percent of that is full-time.
Joan Campbell, defeated city council member in the 2nd Ward, had never advocated for the shelter, although the city committed to adding 100 new shelter slots in spring 2000. Gallini hopes the shelter will finally open next spring.
Campbell did work diligently to close the Hard Times Café, a refuge for the most invisible homeless: teen-agers. The City/County Taskforce estimates that there are over 800 youth on Minneapolis streets nightly, with only 50 shelter beds available.
“Thousands of youth you see on the streets are homeless,” says Raquel Sermones of Project Off Street, emphasizing that the counts of youth are especially low. “They’re running away from abuse or neglect. Some parents have been institutionalized. They end up on the streets because of poverty, racism, and homophobia.” Studies find that 42 percent of homeless youth identify as queer; 60 percent are people of color.
“We’re also in a total housing crisis now. Being 18 with no rental history and limited employment history, chances of you finding housing is slim to none,” adds her colleague, Ann Snyder.
“It’s legal to discriminate based on age. As a landlord you can say ‘I only rent to those over 25.’ That’s another housing barrier,” said Sermones.
Mayor-elect R.T. Rybak immediately put his campaign promises into action with an affordable housing work group, creating a strategy for his first 90 days. Participants include grassroots advocates, neighborhood, nonprofit and government groups. Rybak’s taken the ideas to communities, legislators and Gov. Ventura to get feedback. The result is a practical vision, in Rybak’s words, to “have an immediate impact on this crucial problem.”
A stalled economy coupled with the squandered state surplus means that Rybak will have a tough time getting the kind of funds Sayles-Belton lavished on corporate projects. Instead, Rybak proposed systemic changes in zoning, regulations, and city departments and agencies as a first step.
“We have to preserve existing housing stock, rehab and find cost-effective ways to expand it,” he told a press conference on Dec. 18.
“Smart codes” can reduce costs of rehabbing older buildings and expand the possibilities for affordable housing: attic and garage apartments, currently outlawed, could add as many as 2,500 units for single adults. He supports a moratorium on demolitions as part of developing a preservation program. He proposes streamlining different processes related to housing by changing regulations and reorganizing city departments. Fees for development properties and land cost reductions, lowering taxes for low-income properties and other incentives are intended to preserve and expand housing.
Rybak takes a Green Party idea to the table: establish a housing trust fund dedicated to affordable housing. He hopes $4 million in 2001 NRP for affordable housing can be released by March 31. He’d consider borrowing against Minneapolis Public Housing Authority assets to acquire more Section 8 properties.
To be affordable, housing should cost one-third of an income. The city already vowed to build for those making 50 percent of the metro median: $37,000. Rybak repeated this commitment. Those hardest hit in the crisis make far less. Jobs are being created outside central cities without public transit or housing.
“Until sanity is restored to housing price, the only way to afford low-income housing is with government help,” says Frye of Alliance Housing.
“We can solve homelessness,” says Gallini. “It’s just a matter of making it a priority.”
Rybak’s 90-day strategy is a hopeful sign that priorities are shifting, but only time will tell if “couch surfing” is no longer essential to survive in Minneapolis.
For more information, see www.mnhomelesscoalition.org .