Bob Dylan’s latest album, Christmas In The Heart, is an unusual collection of Christmas standards. All proceeds from the album will go to support homeless services. Dylan granted an interview exclusive to members of the North American Street Newspaper Association to talk about the album.

Bob Dylan has at various times revolutionized folk, rock, country, and gospel music. However, any Dylan fan who claims not to have been surprised that Bob has released an album of traditional Christmas songs is pulling your leg. Christmas In The Heart is another surprising move by an artist famous for surprises. Yet when you hear Dylan’s direct and obviously sincere readings of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Little Town Of Bethlehem,” and “The First Noel,” this unlikely exercise seems of a piece with the rest of Dylan’s work.

From the very first, this was an artist who made us look at the familiar with new eyes and ears. While some critics tie themselves into knots analyzing Dylan’s motives, it has usually turned out that Bob Dylan means exactly what he says. Featuring members of his touring band along with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Chess Records vet Phil Upchurch, Christmas In The Heart is Bob Dylan’s celebration of family, community, faith, and shared memory. And a timely celebration it is. Recognizing the worldwide problem of hunger, Bob Dylan has donated all of his proceeds from the record, in perpetuity, to organizations around the world to help with hunger and homelessness.

We sat down to talk in the Waterfront Plaza Hotel in Oakland on a rainy, windy, October day.

To read this article in full, get a copy from a local Street Sheet vendor. If you’re not in San Francisco, there’s a good chance your local street paper is running the interview.

It’s common, if infrequently articulated, knowledge that homelessness isn’t good for you. Homelessness is accompanied by a substantially higher mortality rate than has the population at large, difficulty obtaining employment, and enormous social stigma.

These negative impacts are compounded for homeless children, and their schooling suffers as a result. Researchers at Columbia University have found that homeless children are half again as likely as their housed peers to perform below grade level in reading and spelling, and more than twice as likely to perform poorly in math.

The causes are obvious: Without stable housing, homeless children are subject to far higher stress; they frequently do not have adequate space to do homework. They lack access to many of the resources employed by their housed peers.

With the current recession, this problem is expanding dramatically. Looking at the first year of the recession, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) and First Focus published the report The Economic Crisis Hits Home: The Unfolding Increase in Child & Youth Homelessness. NAEHCY looked into homeless student populations at 1,716 school districts across the country. In the first semester of the 2008–2009 school year, nearly 20% of these districts had enrolled more homeless students than they had in the entirety of the 2007–2008 school year. A further 49% had seen at least half the prior year’s number of students within the first few months. Over 95% reported some increase. And 2008–2009 built on increases the prior school year.

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The bold, blunt, sans serif of page 1 is the same: Street Sheet, it reads, followed by The Newsletter of the Coalition on Homelessness. Despite a few tries by graphic design classes over the past couple decades, that look has never changed, and even in our more daring or playful layout experiments, the Street Sheet has always remained recognizable as that same publication that first hit the streets of San Francisco in December of 1989.

On October 17 of that year, beneath the Santa Cruz Mountains, the San Andreas Fault slipped—a deceptive name for a devastating event. Like the massive cuts to public housing that had ushered in the ‘80s, the Loma Prieta Earthquake closed out the decade by creating a massive new population of homeless people.

Since 1983—when the cuts to public housing had forced the opening of San Francisco’s first homeless shelter—the City had partially addressed homelessness through a program that paid for-profit hotel owners an average of $3 million per year to shelter homeless individuals for a maximum of one week at a time. But in the quake, 25% of these “Hotline Hotel” buildings were destroyed or made uninhabitable. In response, the Department of Social Services (DSS—the antecedent to our current Department of Human Services [DHS], which is one half of the Human Services Agency [HSA]) decided to phase out the Hotline Hotel system.

It was in this context that volunteers at the Coalition on Homelessness issued the organization’s first newsletter. The first article addressed this phase-out: “…the first group of individuals affected by these changes spent their final day in Hotline with the following results: of the approximately 114 people displaced on that day, 20 applied for GA [General Assistance: county cash assistance]. Of the 20, only one person was actually accepted. Twenty-five people have signed up for the GA Modified Payment Program and received more permanent housing. It seems that 88 people have fallen through the gaping holes in the safety net provided by the Department of Social Services, holes created by the department’s reneging on its initial promise to house undocumented individuals, and by the department’s refusal to loosen in any way the current GA requirements.

“In light of the current progress of the plan, one would have to wonder: is DSS planning a phase-out or a bailout of the Hotline system? Are they planning to help people out of the homeless cycle, or simply help them out of town?”

We weren’t pulling any punches.

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A story that organizers often hear when they fist start working to influence Federal politics involves a meeting of civil rights leaders with LBJ in the oval office. Those were the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the civil rights leaders argued that this bill was a moral obligation—no matter the fierce of opposition of Southern Democrats. LBJ agreed—or so the story goes—and then said: “Make me do it. Go organize your communities so that I have no choice but to do what’s right.”

Replace Southern Democrats with Blue Dog Democrats and it’s the same situation we find ourselves in today: We almost assuredly do have a President who will support our agenda, but we also most assuredly know that we are the only ones who can make our agenda a reality in the financially corrupt and morally bankrupt corridors of Washington D.C.

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Rejecting the Governator’s transparent attempt to balance a bungled budget on the backs of students, children, people with psychiatric diagnoses, and elders, Californians voted down six of his May 19 Special Election Predatory Props, including 1D and 1E, that targeted youth and people who use and need our communities’ mental health services.

Nonetheless, elders and people with disabilities are still simultaneously whacked by Federal, state, and City budget cuts.

Faced with a $575 million budget shortfall—proportionately worse than the state’s—San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is trying Arnold’s gambit: During an economic downturn when Federal and state funds are needed most, he’s slashing Department of Public Health services to San Francisco’s most vulnerable people in order to balance his budget.

You didn’t read in the pro-Newsom Chronicle that Tuesday, May 12, at 10:30 a.m., almost 700 elders, folks with disabilities, and supporters baked in the Civic Center sun under the Mayor’s office window protesting the budget cuts. This was the Silver Tsunami.

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Come join us for an evening of fun, dance, music, and entertainment.

The Coalition on Homelessness has been Fighting for Justice for the Poor and Homeless in San Francisco for 20 years.

Musical performance by Antioquia

Admission is on a sliding scale: $10-25. Free parking available.

Anybody who is homeless in San Francisco and trying to reserve a bed in City-funded shelters is likely to be turned away an average of six times within a month. Chances are they’re just as likely to wait one day as well as over a week to get a bed. And they also believe the shelter system could be improved by fixing the reservation system, improving staff training, and creating more beds.

These were just some of the findings in a study of shelter seekers the Coalition on Homelessness will release this month. The survey of over 200 homeless city residents included in The Runaround also revealed that they had an even-money chance of having favorable or unfavorable experiences finding a haven in the shelter system.

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You’ve been hearing it on the radio, and perhaps you vaguely recall voting for the Mental Health Services Act (2004’s Proposition 63), but maybe all the budget mayhem going down in Sacramento makes all this rather confusing. So here’s the skinny: The MHSA is a special tax levied on the wealthiest Californians that provides funding for county-level mental health programs. Proposition 1E would reallocate somewhere between a quarter and a third of the money used for these programs to the state’s “general fund”—that section of the budget which our elected officials can allocate as they like.

Opponents of Proposition 1E make a lot of good points:

It Cuts Services to Those Who Need Them: In a time of social crisis, we need to provide our communities with more support, not less. MHSA funds have provided healthcare for over 200,000 people. This number will necessarily be reduced by Proposition 1E reductions.

The First Cut is the Deepest: There has already been discussion on the state level of moving all MHSA money to the general fund. Given that political will, we need to be careful not to set a bad precedent. If this recession continues, and our politicians continue to value other expenditures over social services, we will most likely see proposals of further cuts to core mental health and other poor people’s services.

It’s Unnecessary: MHSA funds amount to less than a quarter of a percent of the state budget. The potential impacts in other budget sectors of the loss of services could well amount to more than this.

There’s No Accountability: While the MHSA had strict auditing and accountability requirements, Proposition 1E will move hundreds of millions of dollars to a legislature that can spend without any special recession-period restrictions.

None of us benefits from living in a state that can’t balance its books: We need a sane state budget. But we cannot ask our society’s most vulnerable members to bear the burden of our legislators’ profligacy. For this reason, the Coalition on Homelessness and the Street Sheet join with organizations across California in asking you to vote against Proposition 1E, and to thereby save mental health services for the people who this recession is hitting the hardest.

Most arguments made in this article come from the California Council of Community Health Organizations, but factual claims have been checked against existing and proposed law.

We have come a long way since 1886 when police in Chicago’s Haymarket Square fired on people demonstrating in support of striking workers who were demanding eight-hour workdays. Many years have passed, and people around the world still commemorate May 1 as a day on which we celebrate the right of people to work and to do so with basic rights. But what does it mean to celebrate May Day in 2009? What does it mean to celebrate May Day during a deep recession or depression? What does it mean to celebrate May Day when so many people are losing their jobs?

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In the face of the growing numbers of families losing their homes, of having to split up for survival’s sake, and even of some children’s ending up in the hellhole of the Foster Care System, what is our Federal government doing? Unbelievably, what it seems intent on doing is systematically creating obstacles to families trying desperately to find a roof over their heads.

On April 2, the House (HR 1877) and the Senate (S 808) both reintroduced legislation entitled the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act of 2009. If this bill becomes law, as many people fear, thousands of destitute and poor families will fail to “qualify” for services funded with Federal homeless assistance dollars because they will be deemed not to be homeless enough.

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