The safety net for millions of Americans has gaping holes. There are fewer jobs, lower real wages, higher health care costs, and less access to welfare and food stamps. There has been a continued decrease in government spending on social services since the early 1980s.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 has constricted the number of people receiving assistance from the federal government.

The housing stock in this country is very low and real estate prices climb higher and higher. The funding available for low-income housing is declining.

Consequently, many people are falling through the cracks and ending up on the streets.

Data from the FY 2002 Federal Budget offers a broad overview of federal spending trends. In looking at the Federal Budget spanning 24 years, from the Ford administration to the current Bush administration, federal spending on housing for the poor (adjusted for inflation) has dropped by a third, while the overall Federal Budget (adjusted for inflation) has increased to almost twice as much.

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The Department of Public Health and Department of Human Services were asked to submit “baseline” budgets to the Mayor in February, as airport and sales tax revenues were down. They were asked to submit also a contingency list of cuts in case revenues were down.

BASELINE

Baseline means they submit the same budget amount as last year. That means any cost of living increases, or increased pay for civil services employees has to be paid for by cutting programs or additional revenue. DPH had huge increase in civil service, but they also had an increase in MediCal revenue. So they cut out all the new programs (mostly) that were added into the budget last year by Supervisor and Mayor. DHS baseline went a little deeper (see below)

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I have seen much of the budget process, but since space is limited, I have picked one program that is facing the present budget crunch. Watching group after group that come to City Hall asking that their budget or program not be slashed is a sad affair. The truth is that an argument could be made for all of them.

While thinking of the budget process, my mind wanders to our present Mayor’s re-election campaign. All those high salaried special assistants he hired took leaves of absences to work on his campaign. Somehow, the City was not forced to declare a state of crisis or emergency. In fact, the City went on with its business without so much as a burp. That has been our Mayor’s MO; in-your-face favoritism and overspending.

In a budget surplus situation, despite opposition, he could and did get away with it. In a budget deficit climate he’s counting on the public’s short memory. That is the point of this article, to remind people of some of the political spending that, if better managed, could have helped with some of our budget woes. What’s really troubling is that this mismanagement is still going on, and the budget cuts are being dumped on the backs of the poor. This isn’t really surprising with Brown’s administration and in today’s political arena; where money means more than people or their vote.

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Once a week for the past six months 44-year old Francisco, who didn’t want to give his last name, has been coming to the UN Plaza from his one bedroom Mission district apartment to sell items he gets from his family to make money to pay the rent.

“I’m broke, I don’t have any money,” he said. “I need money to pay my rent.” But lately, it has been harder for him and the other homeless and low income people who sell items at the Plaza because police officers from the Tenderloin Police Station and the Federal Protective Service have been increasing their patrols in the area, stopping street vendors from selling and making money.

“Sometimes they give you a tickets, sometimes they don’t,” he said about the police. “It depends on the officer.” For Francisco it is very hard even though he works five days a week to pay the $290 needed to keep his one bedroom apartment, so on Sundays the father of two sells items to make up the difference. But selling at the Plaza is becoming a hardship.

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Grupos de organizaciones que creemos en dar poder al pueblo y mucha gente de nuestra comunidad inmigrante y de color, nos dimos una cita al lado de edificio de la Sra. Diana Feinstein en el día del obrero. La calificamos como una monstro infernal por pasar leyes Federales que quitan todos los derechos a los pobres aquí en este país y también por apoyar al Gobierno de Bush por darle dinero a Israel para que continue matando gente pobre, familias enteras y niños en Palestina y expropiendoles sus tierras.

La necesidad de vivienda digna y accesible se ha hecho muy popular en estos últimos años. En San Francisco, hay casi quince mil deamparados incluyendo familias enteras con sus niños que vienen en los refugios (shelters) que parecen más como carceles que hogares. Las familias en hoteles residenciales viven en precarias condiciones, con abusos de de los encargados del hotel y en unos cuartitos minusculos que enferman a sus niños. Demandamos a la Feinstein que en vez de que esta sinverguenza use dinero para crear leyes racistas que criminalizan los derechos civiles y humanos de la gente pobre de color y inmigrante, debería dar prioridad a la creación de viviendas.

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Mi nombre Roberto y yo soy uno de los tantos residentes que habitamos en los shelters por no haber vivienda accesible y barata para nosotros los pobres que trabajamos al día. Solo ganamos para mantener nuestras familias en nuestras lejanas tierras de donde hemos venido. Este artículo es para que se sepa la verdad de como es vivir la vida en un shelter y como algunos de los llamados trabajadores sociales actuan en maneras corruptas sintiendose prepotentes. De esta forma mis compañeros y yo logramos ser escuchados y se tomen los correctivos necesarios.

Quiero hacerles saber que habitamos en condiciones deporables, con cocineros que no cumplen con sus funciones, con algunos supervisores que creen que esos centros son carceles ó correccionales, y con directores que cuando se les plantean los problemas y se les sujieren soluciones, ellos ven lo sugerido como confrontación personal.

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Summer Reading for the Socially Conscious
OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNES: Media Billionaires
and How They Change World Culture
by Rod and Alma Holmgren
ISBN: 0-9713929-0-0
available at most Bay Area bookstores or through BookPeople

Part of bring a decent writer (or editor) is knowing when to leave well enough alone. In the case of Rod and Alma Holmgren’s self-described “labor of love,” this important work should speak for itself, so we have reprinted a key chapter here. And for all the other mediageeks in our reading audience, this book is the motherlode — exhaustively researched and documented, and it even has footnotes for the all of us skeptics out there. -c.m.

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Starting Michael Steinberg’s latest novel, my first impression of Homes Not Jails! was that it’s a thinly disguised manifesto. The homeless advocacy and squatter organization’s logo, bolt-cutters and a crowbar superimposed on a broken circular chain, adorns the cover. The opening chapters lay out the political landscape of San Francisco, circa 1992: “Over a decade’s worth of Right Guard Republicanism’s wicked waves appeared to be surging hard onto the battered shores of California’s bankrupted liberalism, knocking the last duplicitous demagogic Democrat into the foaming fulmination emanating from every ass crack and crotch crevice of the Groping Ogre Party.

“With Pistolwhippin’ Pete in the Governor’s Mansion and the other Jordan’s rules insinuating their way into San Francisco’s tarnished-topped City Hall, there was no reasonable doubt that they were in complete control from sea to oil slick sea.” Steinberg, a longtime Homes Not Jails (HNJ) member and author of I Work the Tenderloin and The End of Tobacco Road, then introduces us to protagonist and narrator, Joe Singleton. Joe contents himself with a low-wage job at a produce market (where he smokes weed each morning with his coworker, Jerry, a fiery Food Not Bombs activist) and a tenuous relationship with his live-in lover, Corrina. On a whim (as well as with a sense of fatalism), Joe agrees to occupy an abandoned building with Jerry and his new, homeless comrades.

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THE ROUGH
by ARCHIE BOUVIER WASHINGTON
$12.00 (plus shipping & handling)
available from Archie Washington
206 W. 6th St. #801
Los Angeles, CA 90014

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experiences, and how to record truth truly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The Civil Disobedience Handbook
A Brief History and Practical Advice for the
Politically Disenchanted
Edited by James Tracy
$ 10.00 from Manic D Press, www.manicdpress.com
ISBN: 0-916397-76-9

Wow, what an impressive book! This seems like for the first time in many years a book that finally speaks to everyone on something as basic as our right to protest. The best part is anyone a disenfranchised homeless person to a punk rocker to a little old grandmother can actually read and understand this handbook.

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