There Shall Be No Needy, Part 6: What makes a home?

As a former tenant and a longtime landlord, as someone who worked at an agency that prevented eviction and as a member of a city commission against housing discrimination, I have been acutely aware of issues around housing and homelessness. In There Shall Be No Needy, Rabbi Jill Jacobs shows that you don't have to have had my life experience to see those issues as Jewish issues. They are deeply rooted in Jewish experience and Jewish text.

I don't altogether buy her argument that "the lack of a secure home" because of exile has created a Jewish sensitivity to homelessness. The two situations are not comparable. At most, when we reflect on how distraught our ancestors were on being expelled from the land and how much it disrupted their whole society, we can understand that losing one's apartment or house, today, is not just a personal tragedy. That is important to realize, I agree.

Here are some other, stronger points that Jacobs makes about the search for housing justice being rooted in Jewish values:

• Rabbinic texts assume that even poor people who have no food have homes. (Again, how deeply this is a criticism of contemporary American life, where that assumption is invalid!)
• Poor people cannot be required to give up their homes to receive assistance (tzedakah). Instead, the rest of us are under an obligation to make sure they can live in those homes in dignity.
  
• There is a model of what permanent housing is NOT: the sukkah. Houses that let the rain in, that have no heat, that are unsafe to live in for extended periods of time, are not homes, and providing such housing is not justice.
• There is a model of what a permanent home IS: the kind of place where we must affix a mezuzah. She summarizes Maimonides' definition; it must be of adequate size, and:
  

A permanent home, in Rambam's description, must have doors and a roof so that the residents be protected from the elements and from other potential dangers, such as robbers. Finally, just as a sukkah should be constructed with the intention that it be temporary, a home must be constructed with the intention that it be a permanent dwelling place. According to these requirements, it may be that transitional housing, FEMA trailers, shelters, and other nonpermanent or unsafe residences would not qualify as homes... (144)

•  The commandment to build a guardrail around a flat roof shows "a house should protect people, to the greatest degree possible, from all potential danger. Concern for human life must, literally, be built into the fabric of the house." (145)
• Landlords have a deep and broad responsibility to ensure the place they rent out is safe and secure. We also have an obligation to prevent homelessness. This is not like renting out an animal (or a car). We have a commanded role to play in creating housing stability.
• The federal government has had a long, evil history of creating racial segregation in housing and evicting poor communities en masse from their neighborhoods. (For a much more detailed discussion of this history, I recommend The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein.) Therefore, we as a country must do teshuvah, repentance, for the sin of creating a racially biased housing crisis, creating homelessness and not preventing it.
  

A Life Sentence for Vets

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, was blunt about psychological and family problems of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan--including high rates of homelessness.

"This is not a 10-year problem. It is a 50- or 60- or 70-year problem."

Think about that. The decision to go to war means condemning a certain number of the men and women in uniform to a lifetime of suffering. We call them heroes, but we punish them with a life sentence--them, their spouses, their children, and everyone who loves them and is forced to watch them struggle with horrors most of us will never see.

Think about it again, hard, whenever you imagine the U.S. using military force again. President Obama, think about that when you calculate your troop increases in Afghanistan. Know that when we go to war, we make our own soldiers the enemy. What is there in the world that could justify doing that to our friends, neighbors, and countrymen and women? How dare we?

We Can Still Win the War on Poverty

Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty and poverty won." Ronald Reagan lied.

1. Poverty did not win. From 1963, when Lyndon Johnson took office, to 1968, poverty declined dramatically. The number of people in poverty stayed at that reduced level until 1980. All that changed when Reagan was elected. "The average number of people living under the poverty line during the eight years of the Reagan administration was 33.1 million, 25 percent more than the 26.2 million living in poverty during the previous administration."
2. Reagan fought on the other side. It's not just that he propagandized against poor people. Reagan actively cut programs that helped families and individuals get out of poverty. Let's take just one example: housing. Reagan cut the federal investment in housing from $74 billion to $19 billion in constant dollars. Reagan's cuts almost single-handedly created the homeless problem as we know it today; then he said on Good Morning America that people sleeping on the streets "are homeless, you might say, by choice." If there really were a war on poverty, Reagan was a deserter and a traitor. But...
3. There never was an all-out war on poverty--"rather a collection of small projects aimed to improve education and community development, such as Head Start and the Job Corps," as Peter Edelman points out. "A complete war on poverty would involve much more: ensuring a quality education for every child, the guarantee of good jobs, universal health coverage, quality child care, adequate housing assistance and a safety net for those not in a position to work. In other words, a jobs and income strategy."
   

The so-called war on poverty remains to be fought--and it can be won.

Money for Nothing?

What just happened in Congress this week? Was the bailout of Wall Street investment firms a necessary evil--or just evil?

1. In this corner, arguing that it needed to happen, are almost all the "experts" in mainstream economics and "leaders" in Washington. (There's a revolving door between the two, so it's hard to tell them apart sometimes.) Bush, Clinton, McCain, Obama, Pelosi, Paulson, and Barney Frank all come down in favor, and the Boston Globe editorialized, "Pass this dreadful bailout"--because they fear the alternative is worse.

It's not a question of which businesses are too big to fail. If it were, I would simply reply as Bernie Sanders does: "If it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist." The horrible possibility that makes all these people (and half of me) support the bailout is that if we do nothing, the loans will simply stop. No new mortgages, school loans, personal loans, no short-term working capital that enables small businesses to tide things over from a bad day to a good one. Many economists think that doing nothing would lead to a deep, long-lasting recession or a replay of the Great Depression.

That's scary. But a part of me wonders whether these "experts" and "leaders" are crying wolf. Some of them are the same people who panicked America into a Global War on Terror ( instead of targeting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and increaseing commonsense security at home) and into war in Iraq (completely optional, and it has turned out to be a disaster). Others are new voices speaking the same message: be afraid, be very afraid--and give us more power. Why did Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson originally ask for absolute power to buy and manage failing banks? Is it the same reason that Bush and Cheney have claimed more and more unreviewable power for the executive branch?

2. Over here, in this corner, are economists like Paul Krugman and James Galbraith. They thought the original Paulson plan was garbage but reluctantly support the compromise that passed on Friday. They are not convinced about the Depression scenario, but they believe government must act, and the bailout is only the first step. Robert Reich argues against them that the Democratic bill is not really any better than the Paulson bill, so they are selling their souls by supporting either one.

3. Sometimes these guys slip over into the third corner of the room, where economist Joseph Stiglitz is standing. Stiglitz reminds us that the basic problem isn't banking: it's housing. Banks made terrible loans because they had to find somewhere to invest the global pool of money. They were looking for payback that's just not sustainable over the long run. Stiglitz sees a need to restore the banks to solvency, but he doesn't want us to get stuck with the bill--and he does want us to control the banks more in the future, through regulation. That makes sense to me, I admit. (But isn't there a crisis that forces us to do something? See David Sirota for reasons to disbelieve.)

4. Over in the fourth corner of the room are people like Chuck Collins of United for a Fair Economy. He agrees with Stiglitz that the rich should pay for their miscalculations and greed, and he offers a practical plan on how to raise the money without soaking the taxpayers. But this is the smaller part of our problems. The bigger part is how to reverse the massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich that's been going on for the last 30 years.

In other words, there's been a crisis in this country for a long time, especially for poor people and those who have become homeless. It's just now that the rich are noticing it, the government is being called to act. Now that the bailout bill has actually passed, the question of whether or not to act is moot. Our job is to make sure they don't act in a way that makes things worth for most of us--and to put pressure on to make things better. If we're going to spend $700 billion, it had better not be money for nothing.