AUSTIN ADVOCATE |
 |
Stop Panhandling!
Stop Panhandling is the hue and cry of "the people" that went up in the middle of August or at least it was from Clare Fleming, executive director of a non profit cafe and cultural arts center Ventena del Soul. She and Pastor Alfred Krebs suggested in a weeks long picket that panhandlers were some how making an unsafe environment for the community’s children. On the other hand, panhandlers at the intersection of IH 35 and East Oltorf reported that it was not they, but rather the students who had been getting into fights and tried to sell them drugs. They asserted that they do not bother children or speak to them. They just want to be left alone. If the "no aggressive solicitation" ordinance was being broken, House the Homeless would be the first to call for police involvement. No means no. And for us, anything else is aggressive panhandling and already outlawed.
Now Austin City Council member Jennifer Kim is coming forward with an n ordinance that will outlaw panhandling across the board (except for entities that have budgets of 3 million dollars or more). These are clearly the people who need to panhandle. Does this mean that the Austin Advocate Newspaper is on the chopping block? What about our civil rights? I guess it's only for the wealthy...
House the Homeless has a different take on things. Texas is one of the ten states that have voted not to allow a minimum wage to be set above the Federal Minimum Wage. Here is a civics lesson for us: At $5.85 per hour, or about $13,000 per year, we defy you to secure an efficiency apartment, pay utilities, put clothes on your back, food on the table, cover transportation costs and have enough leftover to go to the emergency room when you break a finger. It just can't be done. In fact, using existing government guidelines it would take $11.12 per hour to accomplish these things. That means people must either double up in an apartment or have more than one job. We have people working full time and still not being housed. As a result, some people have pulled out of this broken system and taken their appeal directly to the people. They ask people for help because Austin businesses are not acting as responsible community partners. Do you think employers are saying, "Gee Sally, I must not be paying you enough. You need a living wage. A fair wage for a days work". This is beyond doubtful.
I have a seventeen year old daughter and I'll be damned if I want her confronted or affronted by a stranger asking for money. But I didn't get reports that that is happening. People asking for monetary help do not think the children have money. For the most part, they stand on the side of the road displaying a hand made sign that says "Need Help", "down on my luck" or "Anything will help. God Bless". Who would stand on the side of a busy road in 100 degree + Texas heat receiving rejection after rejection if they didn't feel they had to? When a motorist is moved to give them some change or a dollar the response is usually one of gratitude.
House the Homeless does not promote panhandling. We give out the Plastic Pocket Guide to direct people to services, but we sure understand and defend to the death people's right to benignly, non-aggressively appeal to there fellow citizens when the federal Government and local business creates a situation that answers their poverty. Buddy have you got a dime?
Richard R. Troxell
President
House the Homeless
Mayor and City Council Members
City of Austin
301 W. 2nd St. 2nd Floor
Austin, TX 78701
Dear Mr. Mayor and Council Members:
We represent a broad base of churches, unions, community/student groups, legal organizations, and individuals. We are writing to express our concern over the proposed anti-solicitation ordinance, which bans all solicitation of services or employment between the occupant of a motor vehicle and a pedestrian. We oppose this ordinance because:
* It is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment.
* It will be very costly to enforce.
* It is unnecessary. Laws to ensure public safety already exist.
* It will affect the most marginalized and impoverished individuals in our community. Individuals could be arrested while seeking work or charitable donations.
Furthermore, Municipal Court Judge Alfred Jenkins found Austin’s existing anti-solicitation ordinance to be unconstitutional on July, 22 2005, and courts across the country have found similar anti-solicitation ordinances unconstitutional. For example, the ordinances struck down in Glendale City, CA and Redondo Beach, CA are very similar to what is now proposed for the City of Austin. We encourage you to examine these legal decisions and respect the constitutional rights of all of Austin’s residents when considering anti-solicitation ordinances.
We believe Austin is one of the best cities in the country, in no small part because of the hard work city council does to improve the quality of life of many Austinites. However, we feel that this ordinance does not match City Council’s record in equally representing all of its constituents. We are hopeful we can work together to address issues of community safety and protect the constitutional rights of all Austinites.
We urge you not to pass the current proposed ordinance.
Respectfully,
The Homeless Media Project
To my fellow Homeless Men and Women of Austin, Texas:
By Patricia Mendiola
You know life is tough. Life is hard out here with all the things we go through day after day after day. But we must not give up. Don't ever give up. What's that song, "When you walk through a storm"? Hold your head up high and don't be afraid of the rain, for at the end of the storm is sunshine, hope and a beautiful rainbow. Just look at the skies my homeless friends.
We're not animals and we're not meant to be treated like animals. God didn't create us to be an animal, or we'd be one, right?
You just keep your faith. Whether you're in need of a job, health care, a car (to get to work), don't give up!!! The illegal immigrants don't give up. A lot of them died or put their life on the line to get a better life over here. And a lot of them made it, and a lot of them didn't have a house. Never had been to this country of ours. But they pulled together as one group of people trying to make it.
And that's what we need to do. Pull together, as one group. We, the homeless, pulling together and straightening out all of our differences. Stop fighting and start helping. I guarantee we will start seeing results in no time.
What we need to do is all meet together, be it at the ARCH or Zilker Park or someplace, have some refreshments and have people share their experience, strength and hope. And we as the homeless, I believe in my heart, can find a way to solve all of our problems, one by one. So let's get together once a week or once a month and talk about issues and problem. And maybe invite some of the "higher-ups" in this city to hear what it is really like being homeless and the areas in which we desperately need help.
P.S. Contact Alfred or Clif and get ten free papers.
BUDDY CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?
Testimony by Richard R. Troxell
Before the Austin City Council
September 27, 2007
Good afternoon, my name is Richard Troxell, President of House the Homeless. We oppose the proposed changes to the Solicitation ordinance for the following reasons. An argument is being made to ban solicitation city wide. The reason being raised is safety: Safety for our children and safety for the individual.
First safety for our children.
This effort is based on the undocumented, unsubstantiated assertions by a single parent that somehow it is unsafe for her children to be around poor, homeless people. The week before school started, she made signs and held an educational picket. She saw homeless people in the general vicinity of where her children would be in the weeks ahead and became afraid. She projected her fears on her children and now the entire city. There were no incidents, or documented encounters. No one was hurt, touched or even approached. There was no solicitation of the children and certainly no aggressive solicitation. There is no list of complaints and no stack of grievances. As a result, we see no basis for a hearing on the subject because nothing has happened.
No means no. In response to previous concerns in East Austin a non-aggressive solicitation ordinance was passed by the city and along with increased policing to that area, the situation has changed. If someone is aggressively solicited then there is a law that outlaws that act and it must be enforced. Chicken Little the sky is not falling.
Safety of the solicitors
As a former volunteer firefighter, I hold up a photo from the year 2000 of Austin firemen walking in traffic soliciting money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Fill the Boot Campaign. And here is a similar photo taken in April 2007. I am told that organizations with budgets over $3 million are exempt from this proposed change. So I guess it’s only if you’re poor that it becomes a safety issue. I guess the homeless Advocate Newspaper and their venders with a budget of less than $10,000 is too poor to be exempt and therefore, for them, it is a safety issue. Similarly, poor homeless individuals will be subject to the ordinance. So, it’s only for the wealthy that there is no safety issue. And while we're are on the subject of exemptions and targeting the poor, these proposed ordinances will make it illegal to solicit a cab...but I suppose that will become an exemption also. I suppose we’ll also exempt the girl scouts and high school car washes. We’ll exempt everyone...except the poor because after all, that’s who we're targeting...we’re targeting the civil liberties of the poor.
ULW
So now our discussion has evolved to poverty and money our 2nd major issue.
It was about four years ago that this city council endorsed the Universal Living Wage. It is the idea that a full time minimum wage worker in Austin should be able to afford an efficiency apartment, eat and put clothes on their back, but 4 years later, the federal minimum wage is still only $5.85 and businesses are still not stepping up to the plate and saying to their employees, “Stuart am I paying you enough? Sally, is your housing secure? Cindy, are you eating enough”? Hey folks, that’s about $13,000 per year. And no one from the city council dais is saying to Austin ’s businesses...”How is it that a person can work for you full-time, and you still do not pay them enough to get an apartment? If our City Leaders had pressed the cause of fair wages four years ago, when the council voted to support the concept, then most homeless people would have worked themselves off the streets of Austin by now and this would be all but a moot issue. And yet, it is these same businesses and at least one elitist council member who (while perhaps well meaning) are working to pass more laws against the poor and fanning the flames of racism and fueling anger against our hard working immigrant brothers and sisters.
Fear Mongering - Quality of Life Ordinances
For the last 8 years the National Coalition for the Homeless has been chronicling hate crimes against the people experiencing homelessness. I am holding up the 2006 Annual Hate Crimes Report. It shows that in those 8 years, 614 violent acts against homeless people have occurred. 189 deaths have resulted. People have been beaten to death with a claw hammer, brutally beaten with baseball bats and sticks, bludgeoned with a shovel, and raped repeatedly. In Austin, David Davilla was set on fire for soliciting a cigarette and James Clements, while on blood thinners, almost bled to death when three young men in a pick up truck marauded in the downtown area shooting homeless people with pellet guns in the middle of the night. They were shooting them like fish in a barrel... for sport.
Downtown businesses from all across America have pressed for “quality of life” ordinances, in greater and greater numbers: No camping, No lying down, No sitting, No aggressive solicitation while referring to homeless people as transients, painting them as faceless and implying that they are transient in nature...You know, just passing through our town with no relationship to us and we having no responsibility for them. Painting them as subhuman. A number of years ago, House the Homeless conducted a statistical survey showing that the average person experiencing homelessness had lived here for 7.5 years on average...more than some of our high tech businesses.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 61% of the attackers and perpetrators of hate crimes were young people between the age of thirteen and nineteen. An overwhelming 83% of the accused were 25 and under, citing motives as being “boredom, thrill and fun.” Austin has now been named the 10th meanest city in the nation for the number of "Quality of Life Ordinances" such as this that it has already passed against those experiencing homelessness.
So what kind of tone are we setting when we pass law after law in city after city against the poorest among us? What sort of message do we send to our children when we wrap Christmas toys and place them on the blue Santa sleigh in December and then in August then drag our children to a picket line to protest their very presence as a civics lesson. What values are we teaching our children? Pure and simple it is hate mongering. Now here’s a civics lesson. Compare the wage of a full time minimum wage worker and the cost of getting into an efficiency apartment and see how much you fall short of actually being able to afford a roof over your head (other than a bridge).
Finally, every time City Council has passed one of these Quality of Life ordinances and we cry for relief, we are always, told, “Oh you make valid points but right now, we just have to do something, we just have to do something.”
In 1992, Diane Breach Malloy an MCI worker of 10 years was turned out of her job. A severe cold settled in her chest. She became sick with walking pneumonia. She was told that she was a good employee “but, your sick leave has run out and we have to get the job done.” So they let her go. Three months later, she drowned in Town Lake having lost her job, her apartment, and then fell into homelessness on our streets. Since then, House the Homeless has invited City Council member to attend the Homeless Memorial in November. On this City Council, Council Member Lee Leffingwell has seen fit to attend and listen to the cry of our people. And we respectfully thank the Council Member.
You are all supposed to be a council of all the people... not just the Haves, but also the Have Nots. The number of lost citizens has escalated every year since we first placed the memorial and planted the Tree of Remembrance on Town Lake, this last November, we read the names of 93 more people.
House the Homeless does not promote panhandling and will not tolerate aggressive solicitation, but we will continue to defend to our deaths the right of every human being including those abused, neglected, and those having been taken advantage of by business, to calmly and benignly petition our fellow citizens for help.
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Wage War or Living Wages?
Photos of the Universal Living Wage Campaign:
Bridge the Economic Gap
Photo by Clif Taylor
On September 21, 2007 House the Homeless and the Universal Living Wage Campaign joined the United Nations' International Day of Peace by wedding the two ideas together.
Wage War or Living Wages?
Which Benefits the Children?
Photo by Val Romness
Not a Happy Camper
By Rebecca Jinks
So how are those homeless not choosing to live in shelters residing here in Austin? Some are choosing to live in camps, tents, hooches. Here's the reason why. No curfews, real relaxation without distractions from other humans and more independence.
This life of camping is for real, not a weekend event, but everyday. Believe it or not this is home to these individuals. Unlike what is known as a structured home, some of the campers will their camps with vivid imaginations creating their own ideas of comfortable living in a rather crude way.
I have experienced this kind of living myself. It's not that fun. A rather rough and tough way of life. It can be really challenging.
This quality of life has a drawback especially for females. There are no bathroom facilities. For a decent shower to get a real clean feeling, you have to go elsewhere. And because some of the critters that are in the woods, you have to be careful of your groceries. Remember no refrigerator to keep your perishables cold in the summer. In the winter months your food probably won't spoil because of overnight colder temperatures. At any rate having extra food at your camp could be hazardous to your health.
There isn't any electricity which means no lights, A.C. or heat. As far as keeping your body warm in the winter, there better be plenty of blankets and sleeping bags to keep you well insulated.
When you get bored, entertainment is usually a battery operated radio to listen to music, news and weather. When your day is done, there is a place to stretch out your very tired body. Maybe you might get a good night of sleep. But is it actually safe? Good question.
Leaving and entering your camp has to be discrete. You try not to be too obvious that you are living in the woods just like animals because we are human beings that choose not to live in shelters. For the moment this is where you call HOME. And you can survive this way with common sense and it will make you a stronger person not only physically, but in other ways as well.
This is a female version of being a homeless camper. Maybe next time we'll get the story of this lifestyle from a male.
Homeless
I look up and see bare trees
rising above me to the sky
Concealed in the afternoon
behind my barricades
Why I wonder why
I am breaking this law you see
Cause I live on posted land
I don't have any money see
I do what I can
To live on this here posted land
Now I have done this kind of thing
For a good time stretching into years
In various places here + there
And I drink my share of beer
It wasn't always this way though
And there's been times along the way
when I lived as other folk
You know, the Normals, as they say
Some folks actually go to work
And come home at the end of the day
Me, I keep a good look out,
So I won't get taken away
--John Curran
Me no more
By Derrick P. Clark
I don’t want to be me no more,
Everything I adore kept me sore.
What I do ……….. make me hide from reality,
There’s plenty of pain living up to the hoods sins.
Weed, pills, sex and money cover the insanity,
Hustling this hard………. Only to loose my soul in the end.
My grandpa was told he was nothing,
He taught my father to be nothing .
I learned from daddy to fall for anything.
All direction of my life reveals painful things.
Burden ears with Satan’s number one lies,
Caused many lost as young spirits die.
Flashy troys are like chasing fools gold.
Winner erudite the greatness of being God’s creation,
Giving the world back it’s…….. VISION and FRUSTRATION.
Yesterdays problem ended, so life can take on new phases,
There’s no growth! Existing in the same mazes.
I don’t want to be me no more,
Everything I adore kept me sore.
Last Words
By Derrick P. Clark
Mighty winds lifted souls in opaque cocoon.
Allowing spirit to shine as stars prancing around the moon.
Well fed ghosts don’t abide behind emotional bars,
It takes the substance inside, to end inner wars.
Thoughts of men are what they see, hear and admire.
Does visioning dancing fire, spark the holly spirit desire.
Indicating, God at work purifying soul against pain and shames,
Like red, orange and yellow dominating heated flames.
God’s spirit traveled on the deepest waters.
Before Heaven became a canopy, and Earth, mans shelter.
Meaningful words touch and teach,
God hands are always within reach.
Picture the ocean playing its beat.
Roaring to lyrics, nourishing souls with meat.
His spoken three---so man greet his peak.
Do you love me---YES LORD----- Then feed my sheep
Goin' Down
By Thomas Coykendall
verse I
The mother load I've
been told is somewhere
out in the desert...
The Dutchman's Mine
could've been mine.
but I couldn't stand the weather
whether or not it's always hot
even in the middle of winter
and if all else fails I'll go
straight to jail three hots and a cot forever
chorus I
Yea I'm goin' down, down, down right past
the gates of hell, gonna
end up some where in China
I'm goin' down, down, down like this
bottle of beer, I wish I had
another cigarette.
verse II
I've taken advice from the
so called wise and it's
always been a hard pill
to swallow...
They thought I was bent
when I couldn't forget
the platinum blonde Jean Harlow...
The Titanic sank I swear I was
first mate - Imagination's everything
you see...When Al Capone
made Chicago his home John
Dillinger was a hero to me
chorus II
Yea I'm goin' down, down, down
right past the gates of hell.
Gonnna end up some where in China
I'm goin' down, down, down
like this bottle of beer
I'd walk a mile for a cigarette.
verse III
The Mafia was tried and JFK died
while Ruby down them a favor...
Johnson swore the Vietnam War
could go on forever... Hoffa said
Bobby's dead, that'll make room
for Nixon... I knew right
then the world was gonna end
without any questions answered
"cept"...
chorus III
I'm goin' down, down, down
right past the gates of hell.
Gonna end up somewhere in China...
I'm goin' down, down, down
like this bottle of beer - Hey Man!
Could you spare just one cigarette?
verse IV
They shot the Reverend
Martin Luther King on a
balcony in Memphis...I cried
all night when I heard the news
even though I know he went
straight to heaven... A simple
man's fate is written on his face
I'd say from the time of conception
The red, white and blue once meant
dreams could come true, perhaps
I'm the exception - cause
I'm goin' down, down, down
Right past the gates of hell
Gonna end up some where in China.
I'm goin' down, down, down
Like this bottle of beer
I wish I never started smoking
those damn cigarettes...
Yea, I'm goin' down.
These cuts need love to heal
He said the words so well
Why can't anyone hear
voices calling
others say don't answer
they say it’s wrong
but sometimes
its
the only advice I have
the only security
of being needed
being
something more than
a beggar saying
can you spare anything
change
a dollar
a smile
a few words
a look of acceptance
why can't anyone hear?
Cathy #281
With Me
Broken, beaten, pleading for
ease
confused, lost and on the
streets
My Lord, Jesus, was there with
me.
Fighting for rights to see
my own daughter.
Thinking, "I just can't go on
much further."
My Lord, Jesus, was there with
me.
He, leaving the 99 just
to follow one,
during the days I didn't
see sun.
My Lord, Jesus, was there
with me.
I remember all of those times I wrote about, and I hope that these lines can help others to feel as if they are not alone in the world.
Thank you for what you do!!!!
Sincerely,
Misty S. Villarrea
|
|
Stop Panhandling Letter to the Mayor and To My Fellow Homeless Buddy Can You Spare Wage War or Living Wages? Not a Happy Camper Poetry Homeless Me no more Last Words Goin' Down Untitled With Me |
