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GREENFIELD BLUES: HOMELESSNESS IS NOT JUST A BIG-CITY PROBLEM IN MASS

Greenfield City Hall by ToddC4176 at en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0] from Wikimedia Commons
Greenfield City Hall by ToddC4176 at en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0] from Wikimedia Commons

August 7, 2018

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

 

We don’t get much news about Western Mass in Boston. And since the population is relatively small in the largely rural western counties of the Commonwealth, it can be easy to miss significant stories. Because the scale of noteworthy happenings is naturally smaller there. Because our diminished metro news outlets have trouble covering the entire state. And because, let’s be honest, Bostonians don’t usually care about what happens west of, like, Brookline.

 

So at first glance, word of a homeless encampment out in Greenfield isn’t something that would get much attention hereabouts at the best of times. But for a city with a population that fell by more than 500 people to 17,456 between the 2000 and 2010 censuses—with a median household income of $33,110, and 14 percent of residents below the poverty line—it’s an important enough development to warrant a series of articles in the local press. And I think it deserves coverage here in the Hub as well.

 

Especially when the encampment is on the Greenfield Common, opposite the Greenfield City Hall (better known as the Town Hall prior to a recent change in nomenclature). Something unusual is definitely afoot.

 

It seems two local homeless people began camping on the common a couple of months ago. A number that quickly grew to 20 regular residents in as many as a dozen tents. According to the Greenfield Recorder, their “de facto spokeswoman” Madelynn Malloy “and others have said previously they are camping on the common because there is no other place that is safe for homeless residents to go and because current city law allows them to stay there day or night. There are no requirements for licenses or permits to be there and the homeless residents’ actions are not considered loitering, but public assembly. The city has an ordinance prohibiting loitering, but it only applies to sidewalks.”

 

A city count of last January pegged the homeless population at 39, but area charities have said the actual number is significantly higher—as they noted during the brutal cold snap at the end of 2017 when their shelters were so overwhelmed that the Salvation Army put up $1,600 to house people at Days Inn. Since that time, the Greenfield Human Rights Commission and homeless advocates have been pushing for the city to do more. Meanwhile, the encampment has put a very human and public face on the crisis, and has sparked meetings and debates in local government about how to find housing for the homeless.

 

Unfortunately, there seems to be at least as much concern from Mayor William Martin to get the city council to pass rules effectively banning camping on Greenfield Common as there is to find ways to house local homeless people. The latter being the obvious policy priority, if for no other reason than to relieve overwhelmed private social service agencies.

 

Most recently, a breakthrough of sorts—also reported in the Greenfield Recorder—happened when the city council voted to put a port-a-potty closer to the common than the one local churches previously made available. “According to the Department of Public Works, the cost of a temporary restroom is $150 a month and includes emptying it. The mayor’s office said the first two months of the portable toilet would be paid for by the Interfaith Council and an unnamed local business. There is no plan currently in place for funding after the two months.” The council also voted, apparently contrary to the mayor’s wishes, to decrease “regulations on churches to set up temporary shelters” and open “the former Wedgewood Gardens property on Kimball Drive as a possible site for an encampment.” The mayor then vowed to “attempt to find temporary housing solutions through a ‘rapid re-housing team’” made up of “city officials and social service and humanitarian agencies.”

 

Baby steps perhaps. But it would not do to underplay the difficult situation Greenfield government finds itself in. It’s going to take officials time to find even a stopgap solution. Large cities like Boston aren’t doing a great job of dealing with a growing homeless crisis either; so it’s obviously more difficult for smaller municipalities with fewer resources to house and provide services for even a few dozen people.

 

Particularly when, as was pointed out in a DigBoston op-ed by Lawrence social services executive Joe D’Amore in January, many communities in Massachusetts ban people from sleeping in public spaces or even “loitering” there. Which merely shifts the burden of dealing with homelessness to more densely populated and tolerant locales with more social services like Lawrence. Or Greenfield.

 

Hopefully people will retain the right to sleep on the Greenfield Common overnight when needed, and the city government will cobble together some longer-term housing options for its homeless population before winter sets in.

 

Yet however things turns out in the largest burg in Franklin County, the situation is interesting not because it is unique… but because it is sadly commonplace. Across Massachusetts and all over America the story is the same. Despite claims of a “strong economy” from Republicans and many Democrats, homelessness is ever more persistent and ever more desperate.

 

To see an actual strong economy in a place like Greenfield, one has to look back to the 1950s—when the city was home to major metal-working concerns, the largest being Greenfield Tap & Die. But that plant was sold off to a larger company in 1958, and most of its jobs disappeared over decades. The city’s last major manufacturing business, Lunt Silversmiths, went under in 2009 during the Great Recession.

 

According to the Republican, Lunt had 800 employees in 2001. And only “12 to 15” by the end. It’s difficult for even larger cities to recover from that kind of blow to their job base, let alone a small city like Greenfield.

 

It will thus shock no one that the rise of the opiate crisis tracks closely to this decline in the city’s fortunes. And it’s therefore ironic in the extreme that the former Lunt plant is now home to two drug treatment facilities, Franklin Recovery Center and Northern Hope.

 

The opiate crisis relates directly to the homeless crisis. And both relate to the ongoing jobs crisis. Increasingly unregulated capitalism, as I often write, is clearly incapable of providing good jobs for our population. As the job base collapses, people in Greenfield, Boston, and around the nation are stuck with lousy part-time, temp, contract, independent contractor, and day labor gigs. Or with no jobs at all.

 

As these downwardly mobile people see their lives collapsing, they turn to opiates. Maybe because they got injured in their precarious pseudo-jobs and got put on addictive pain killers by well-meaning doctors being suckered by criminal conspiracies like oxycontin-maker Purdue Pharma of nearby Stamford, Connecticut. Or maybe because they couldn’t take the humiliation of no longer being able to provide for themselves and their families, and reached for the strongest, most reliable, and readily available chemical solace. And soon enough, more and more of these folks end up on the streets.

 

Without public jobs programs, new public housing, and cradle-to-grave public healthcare, local, state, and federal governments will not be able to fix these related crises. Even if they wanted to. Which they don’t in this era of gangster capitalism. Nor will “private” charities. Many of which already rely on shrinking pools of government money to do what little they can do to stem the tide of rising poverty.

 

So it’s critical that people in big cities like Boston—especially press and policy makers—pay careful attention to small municipalities like Greenfield. They are canaries in the coal mine of a political economic system that can only be called failing, the less it is able to provide for the growing number of people on the bottom of our societal pyramid.

 

As such, we ignore the Greenfields of our nation at our peril. We must act now to stop the rest of our communities, large and small, from continuing their rolling collapse. A task we can best begin by rebuilding government at all levels to focus on the human needs of all of its denizens. And stop privileging the schemes of the rich and powerful few over the livelihoods of the struggling multitude.

 

Townie is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. His Apparent Horizon column is winner of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2018 Best Political Column award. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

HOMELESS FOR THE HOLIDAYS: SAVAGE CUTS AND CRAPPY JOBS ARE WHAT GOT US HERE

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December 6, 2016

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

For many people, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the only time of year that their thoughts turn to the plight of the homeless. Money, food, and presents are donated. And time is volunteered at shelters. All to make sure that people without a home of their own have a nice holiday—at least for a few hours. Worthy efforts to be sure.

However, despite this periodic outpouring of compassion, there’s still an unfortunate tendency to individualize homelessness in our society. As with poverty in general, casual observers assume that it’s personal failings that cause people to end up without housing.

And while it’s a truism that every person bears some responsibility for the straits they find themselves in, there are three major structural problems out of the control of impoverished individuals that best explain the rise of homelessness in Massachusetts: savage cuts to our state mental health system, an economy that creates large numbers of bad low-wage jobs, and the destruction of affordable housing.

Taking these issues in turn, the Commonwealth started shutting down most of its oft-criticized inpatient mental hospitals on budget and civil liberties grounds in the 1970s—leading to the first wave of homeless people with few places to turn for help and little ability to escape their fate. Things have only gotten worse since then. According to Mass Live, over the last 20 years the legislature has cut spending on inpatient mental health services by half and outpatient spending has remained stagnant.

Next, National Public Radio recently reported that wages and benefits “essentially flatlined or declined for four of five Americans between 2007 and 2014.” As big business racked up super profits, and crushed labor unions. Continuing a trend that also started in the 1970s where wage growth has slowed dramatically for most working people even as their productivity has increased. People at the bottom of the economic pyramid have been hardest hit, and ever more working people are finding themselves unable to pay mortgages or rent with the money they make working two or even three bad low-wage jobs with no benefits and little opportunity for advancement.

Then there’s the acute problem of skyrocketing housing costs in the Bay State. Especially in the hot Metro Boston real estate market where either buying or renting has become terribly difficult for poor folks.

This situation began when rent control—which limited the ability of landlords to raise rents in a number of cities in Mass—was torpedoed in 1994 with a state referendum backed by the real estate industry. When rent control ended in 1995, landlords immediately started jacking rents far beyond many tenants’ ability to pay, and housing developers started building luxury apartments and condos at a far higher rate than desperately needed affordable housing. Building new public housing, once a saving grace to poor families, has been taken pretty much off the table on ideological grounds since the Reagan era.

Making matters worse, the devastating subprime mortgage scandal that started in 2007 and caused the Great Recession of 2008 led to nearly 22,000 foreclosure filings in one nine-month period in Mass in 2009, according to the Boston Globe. And there have been thousands more in the years since. A trend which is now accelerating again.

The result? As a 2016 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition points out, the Commonwealth is short 166,960 affordable housing units for extremely low income households making 30 percent or less of their area’s median income. And the Mass Coalition for the Homeless states that the approximately 3,000 night shelter beds for individuals statewide are usually full or beyond capacity—and that there were 21,135 people in Massachusetts counted as experiencing homelessness during the January/February 2015 headcount conducted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Numbers which barely begin to describe the magnitude of the crisis when hundreds of thousands of hard-working Bay State residents are just a couple of paychecks away from penury.

So if you really want to help homeless people—during the holidays and every day—you should consider joining advocates working to end homelessness. It’s not rocket science. Increasing our state mental health budget, passing living wage laws to make more jobs into decent ones, restoring rent control, devoting public funds to build lots of decent affordable housing, and properly taxing the rich and corporations to pay for such needed reforms will go a long way toward stopping the structural poverty forcing people out of their homes. Making us a better and more compassionate society in the bargain.

This column was originally written for the Beyond Boston regional news digest show – co-produced by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and several area public access television stations.

Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director.

Copyright 2016 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalismand media outlets in its network.

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