“Joel!”

I stopped, right smack in the middle of the flow of bodies in the crosswalk, spinning a full circle in search of the distant voice with no success.

Why would I risk being hit by a passing car or shoved by a dozen frantic people bustling to their destinations?

Because I heard my name. Such a powerful word. Our names — Jacob, Olivia, Carlos, Joel — can stop us mid-stride, just to find the source of the sound.

Our names connect us to our identities. Some people are named after heroes or favorite family members. A grandmother, a President, a celebrity. The word gives a sense of dignity when it is signed.

Numerous times, however, I have been reminded that naming people “homeless” or “the homeless” is insensitive, almost name calling. I used to think this was just another overly-sensitive, politically correct response from activists who spend their days looking for reasons to complain.

But when I am on the streets talking to a person who is homeless I don’t start the conversation with, “Hey, you homeless person.”

I usually start with, “Hi, my name is Joel. What’s yours?” Because using a person’s name is the respectful thing to do.

How do we instill that sense of respect when we are describing a whole group of people who are homeless on the streets of America? Homeless people? The homeless? Those are the typical, ubiquitous terms.

But if we were describing another group of Americans, would we say the same? The Asians? The Mexicans? We might say, “The homeless need housing.” But would we say, “The Mexicans need housing?”

Usually the politically correct way of describing groups of people is Asian-American, Mexican-American, African-American. But when describing people who live on our streets, we name them by their state of helplessness: the homeless.

It just doesn’t feel right. Especially when we all know a name is a significant part of who we are. A name connects us to a tribe. Often, people who are homeless are also tribe-less, without much connection to family.

I am a Roberts. My name is not very “Asian,” but it is my identity whether I look it or not. My name marks my tribe and engulfs me in a sense of belonging. My tribe has Christian missionary roots in China. The Roberts tribe, with its own roots in Europe and America, wanted to change the world. They jumped on a ship and headed to Asia to preach a message of hope and change. In the process, they changed the life of an Asian boy — me! — by adopting him.

My name possesses deep meaning, strong roots, and is a powerful sign of hope. My name destined me to help tribe-less Americans.

In the process of helping people who are homeless, we must change the way we name them. How about Homeless Americans?

And we should remember the importance of knowing each Homeless American by their real name, whether it is Jacob, Olivia, Carlos… or Joel.

He said he was afraid the children would be taken away from them. I asked him if anyone had told him that. Not exactly, but he was worried.

“We’re not bad parents,” he said. “We’re just down on our luck.”

He said it twice during our conversation. And I could see it was true from the way he was cuddling the baby.

I think of him now because the Family Resources Center has started reporting all homeless families with no place to stay to the Child and Family Services Agency, the District’s child welfare program.

This means that the parents can be charged with child neglect — and their children put into foster care — just because the District won’t provide them with shelter or other housing.

As the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless notes, they shouldn’t be. District law specifically states that “deprivation due to the lack of financial means … is not considered neglect.”

But that doesn’t mean homeless children won’t be taken from their parents.

As Professor Matthew Fraidin has written, we simply don’t know what goes on in the courtroom when parents are charged with neglect.

Judges are free to ignore the legal exemption for lack of financial means. And they may when they understand that the children have no safe place to stay — or decide that’s due to parental irresponsibility.

What we do know, from a recent report by the Citizens Review Panel, is that CFSA has taken many children from their parents without getting a court order first. And, in more than half the cases, the precipitous removals were not justified.

Also know, from CFSA’s own report, that “inadequate housing” was the primary reason it placed 35 children in foster care in 2010.

Are we to understand that parents with sufficient financial means deliberately chose unsafe housing — or no housing at all?

Rhetorical question. What the placements tell us is that homeless parents have good reason to fear that the powers-that-be will take their children away.

They certainly don’t have adequate housing, and CFSA has no resources of its own to provide it.

At the very least, families the Center reports are likely to be subject to intimidating investigations. Children may be interrogated. Imagine how frightening — even if nothing comes of it.

More likely, however, parents won’t ask for shelter when they’ve no place to stay if they’re told, as they are, that the Center will report their situation to the child welfare authorities.

This is already happening. Many Legal Clinic clients with nowhere to stay have left the Center for fear they’d lose their children, according to testimony by staff attorney Amber Harding.

Another client tells us that she stopped asking for shelter after Center staff repeatedly warned her that they’d have her kids removed if she couldn’t provide them with a safe place to sleep. “I won’t be calling again,” she says.

What the [expletive deleted] is the Department of Human Services doing?

Director David Berns, I’m told, claims that the department is just trying to do a better job of ensuring compliance with mandatory reporting requirements.

I don’t altogether buy this. Under District law, poverty and its immediate consequences, e.g. homelessness, don’t constitute abuse or neglect. So what’s to report?

“Safety risks,” Berns says. But there’s no mandate for reporting these unless they’re risks posed by abuse or neglect.

So we’ve got either an excess of zeal or a covert strategy for controlling the waiting list of homeless families the department can’t help — 308 of them, at last count.

I’d like to believe the former. But what I believe doesn’t matter.

What matters is that DHS doesn’t have the funds to protect all the families who’ve got no safe place to stay and instead is exposing children to all the risks that foster care entails.

Photo by Jackal of all trades.

But that sad photo does not accurately reflect America’s hungry, particularly among the homeless population.

A recent study by researchers from Harvard and Oxford revealed an almost paradoxical conclusion: One third of America’s homeless population is obese.

How can people struggling with poverty on the streets, who don’t know when or where their next meal will be, also be battling obesity? How can hungry homeless people be fat?

Doesn’t the idea of overweight homeless Americans just reinforce the perspective that some people within the homeless population are just lazy, and really not hurting or hungry?

In today’s health-conscious American society, carrying extra weight does not mean someone is carrying extra money. Obesity is not a reflection of wealth. In fact, the opposite is often true.

Where do expensive, healthy boutique groceries, like Whole Foods Market, build their stores? In upscale neighborhoods. And who shops there? Skinny people with fat wallets.

Sure, there are overweight Americans with similarly overweight bank accounts, but for more and more people obesity correlates to poverty.

Americans with very low incomes cannot afford the healthy options at Whole Foods Market, so they resort to cheap foods—which are frequently high on carbs and low on nutrients—or frequent trips to fast food restaurants with their 99 cent menus and meals containing thousands of calories.

And for those homeless Americans struggling with extreme poverty, the added problems of depression, sleep deprivation, and stress just exacerbate the fight to stay physically healthy.

Small wonder more and more homeless Americans are becoming obese. They have no money for healthy food, and struggle with living conditions that just make a bad situation worse.

The world of homelessness needs the help of Richard Simmons, that quirky, sometimes obnoxious, but amazingly motivating health guru, to redesign the menus at homeless shelters and teach struggling people how to live healthy lives on small incomes.

Those who work to house homeless Americans preach, “Say farewell to the streets!” Instead, Simmons would preach, “Say farewell to fat!”

Both messages are important.

Photo by A_minor.

Does the charity world need a similar hero?

A recent UCLA study revealed the urgent need for some sort of rescue effort for charities in Southern California. While trying to follow up with the nonprofit groups they had surveyed 10 years ago, UCLA found that 15% had gone out of business. And, of the housing and homelessness charities, nearly a quarter had disappeared.

It’s a sad fact: Charities are going out of business.

A Southern California funders collaborative hosted a sustainability summit for charities to explore the viability of nonprofits merging together in order to survive. More than 700 charity leaders showed up.

I have seen several charities go out of business just in the last year. From a nonprofit that helped homeless youth to an advocacy group that fought to feed hungry Americans. This fragile economy is not only hurting American families, but also the agencies that help them.

In the for-profit business world, many would say this is just Darwinism in action. Only the strong survive. Let the weak charities die.

But I disagree. There are amazing American philanthropists with the passion and ability to transform hurting people. Some of these leaders have the uncanny ability to help a teenaged gang member walk a new path, protect a woman from an abusive husband, or house a person who has been homeless for decades.

Unfortunately, these caring people don’t always have the skills to market their programs as well as Charity: Water does, or to balance their books like Deloitte & Touche. Being good at empowering hurting people doesn’t mean someone has an MBA from Harvard and knows how to make money. Marketing a cell phone to the masses is different than convincing a jaded American public to donate $20 per month to a good cause.

The nonprofit world needs help. Companies like Twitter need to help our struggling charities learn how to market their cause on social media. Companies like Apple, that are raking in more money than most nations, need to help social good organizations create their own crowd of fanboys (or fangirls).

The charities that know how to transform America’s hurting people need to be taught how to attract the eye of America’s donors.

We need the Robert Irvine of charities to make over the way we present ourselves in this changing world.

Otherwise, the most effective social good organizations will be forced to close their doors because more experienced marketers have shut them down.

Photo Credit: Marius Watz

The Ways and Means Committee also had to find more savings — $53 billion over the next 10 years. And it too met its target by shifting costs to low-income people. But they’re not the only ones who’ll be harmed by what it’s come up with — far from it.

Here’s what the committee passed — and what the full Republican majority in the House almost surely will pass before week’s end.

Child Tax Credit Restriction

Ways and Means dusted off a proposal that earlier surfaced a way to offset some of the costs of extending the employee payroll tax cut andwhat remains of long-term unemployment insurance benefits.

Under the proposal, only parents with Social Security numbers could claim the Child Tax Credit. Immigrants who pay their income taxes using a number issued by the Internal Revenue Services would have to pay more because they’d lose the credit.

And those toward the bottom of the income scale would lose the partial reimbursement the tax credit provides.

First Focus reports that 5.5 million children would no longer benefit from the extra money their families have to spend on basic needs.

Elimination of Social Services Block Grant

Ways and Means would wipe out the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) altogether. This also is a rerun, already revived in the current House budget plan.

SSBG is a relatively small program that provides states and the District of Columbia with funds they can use to meet a wide range of needs.

It’s commonly used for subsidized day care, services to protect both children and vulnerable adults from abuse and neglect, foster care and services that help seniors and people with disabilities live independently, e.g., Meals on Wheels, transportation.

Many states and the District also use SSBG funds for casework services that link people to programs that can help them.

The House Budget Committee calls the services “duplicative” because other pots of federal money fund them too.

This is misleading for two reasons. First, some states use the block grant for services that aren’t covered under other programs, e.g.protective services for elderly victims of abuse and neglect.

Second and more importantly, services aren’t duplicative just because states can draw on more than one program to fund them. Low-income parents who get child care subsidies funded by SSBG, for example, don’t also get subsidies funded by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

In other words, SSBG enables states to extend services they consider essential to more people who need them — over 22.6 million, according to the latest official figures.

Unlimited Health Care Subsidy Repayments

This is a bit technical, but it’s a big deal. So bear with me here.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), people who aren’t poor enough to qualify for Medicaid can get subsidies to purchase health insurance through the exchanges, i.e., the upcoming state-level insurance markets, if they meet two conditions.

Their incomes must be at or below 400% of the federal poverty line. And they can’t get adequate, affordable health insurance through their employers.

The initial size of the subsidy is based — as it must be — on their income at the time they purchase or renew their health insurance. The lower their income, the bigger the subsidy.

What if their income rises substantially during the year? They’re unemployed at the beginning, but get a job, for example.

Under current law, they have to repay the excess they received, but only up to a fixed amount. Congress established a limit so that people wouldn’t choose to forgo health insurance because they might get stuck with a big repayment.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, Congress has twice raised the repayment cap to offset the costs of other health care legislation.

House Ways and Means would eliminate the cap altogether. The repayment some people could face would be more than five times the amount of the penalty they’d have to pay for not having health insurance.

An estimated 350,000 people — mostly the healthiest — would chose the penalty over the potential shock to their budgets later. Some, of course, would then be devastated by unexpected health care costs.

Meanwhile, people still in the insurance pool would, on average, have higher health care costs. So premiums would rise and, with them, the costs of subsidies.

The added stress on the exchanges would undermine the basic structure of the ACA — not an unintended consequence for the Republican majority. Nor is the outrage some people would feel when hit with a big repayment bill.

More support for the ACA repeal Republicans promise, if the Supreme Court doesn’t kill the law first.

Well, the House Ways and Means proposals, in their current form, won’t even get a vote in the Senate. But what we see here is that bad ideas don’t die just because they’re not enacted right away.

We should expect to see these and others resurface when House and Senate negotiators sit down to work out a way to avert the across-the-board cuts due to begin next January.

Lots of pressure. Lots of horse-trading then.

Photo credit: Images of Money

What about angry neighbors who create blogs that post contact information of homeless advocates? Not surprised.

But I am astonished by what is going on in downtown San Francisco. Even this sometimes jaded charity executive cannot believe the actions of the managers of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, located in the city’s Tenderloin district and home to hundreds of people who are homeless.

They have set up speakers on the surrounding sidewalks in order to blast ear-piercing noises – like the sound of jackhammers, chainsaws, and aircraft carrier alarms – with the hope of dispersing people sleeping on nearby sidewalks.

It reminds me of when the U.S. Government tried to disperse Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of a Catholic center by blasting loud rock music into the compound. Of course, hurting people on the streets of San Francisco are not Third World dictators, at least none that I have met.

I wonder what Billy Graham, the evangelist would say? Oh wait, the auditorium is named after concert promoter Bill Graham, not the evangelist.

I wonder what the concert promoter would say? Graham the promoter, produced large-scale charitable concerts like Live Aid and Human Rights Now! I’m guessing he experienced hundreds of people sleeping on the sidewalks outside of his concert venues. He only used loud speakers to entertain his concert goers, not shoo away homeless people.

I’m surprised that the City of San Francisco, home to the innovative community response to homelessness called Project Connect, would allow such ruckus. This initiative, created eight years ago, mobilized thousands of San Franciscans to help bring services to their homeless neighbors. Is the city now frustrated that their innovations are not ending homelessness in downtown?

I do realize that most communities around the country are frustrated that very poor Americans are squatting on land throughout this country. Not-In-My-Backyard has almost become a popular community anthem. But police sweeps and angry blogs are not very effective.

There is, however, a very simple way to disperse our homeless neighbors. House them!

Photo credit: The Justified Sinner

Under Mayor Gray’s proposed budget, more than 6,100 families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program will lose a fifth of their meager cash benefits come October — this on top of the same sized-cut imposed last April.

The figure I led off with is what a family of three would be left with. Additional benefits cuts would follow until the family got nothing at all.

More than 11,000 children under thirteen would be plunged into even deeper poverty. Some of them, as the Children’s Law Center warns, would be put into foster care simply because their parents couldn’t afford adequate housing.

The families who’ll suffer are those who’ve spent 60 months or more in the program — not necessarily consecutive.

In many cases, the affected parents haven’t gotten the services they need to overcome severe work barriers, e.g., mental and physical health problems, domestic violence trauma, minimal or no marketable job skills.

Some were expected to engage in what passed for work preparation activities — sessions on workplace behavior, writing a resume, interviewing, etc.

Then, as one participant said, “[t]hey have you on the computer all day,” searching the online listings and pressured to take the first job offered.

Many have cycled back into the program because they didn’t have the skills for the jobs they’d found — or hadn’t gotten the help they needed to overcome other barriers. Others, I suppose, returned when they lost their jobs due to the recession.

Not all the parents whose benefits will be cut were required to engage in work activities for their whole term in the program. Some were excused for awhile because their barriers made work activities wholly unrealistic. But the time off is being counted toward their 60-month maximum anyway.

What’s happening here is that part of the Department of Human Services’ TANF redesign is barreling ahead — the part that gives parents a stronger incentive to engage in required work preparation and work search activities.

Nothing like facing a penniless future to get one moving — unless, of course, one’s too ill, disabled or occupied with other responsibilities,e.g., caring for a severely disabled child, to move on the work front, even knowing the hardships awaiting.

The administration could exempt up to 20% of such “hardship cases” from the 60-month limit and still use federal funds for a share of their cash benefits. But it’s chosen not to.

The other part of the TANF reform — in-depth individual assessments to identify their individual strengths and needs — is lagging behind. Thus also appropriate agreements on what they should do to fulfill their responsibilities for striving toward self-sufficiency.

As of late February, DHS had completed only 12% of the assessments needed for families at immediate risk of cash benefit loss.

At the reported rate of 150 assessments a week, it won’t get through them all until months after the next 20% cut kicks in.

It might if the rate applied only to parents subject to the phase-out rather than to all parents who show up when they’re told to. Some at immediate risk haven’t heard, don’t understand or perhaps figure it’s futile because they’re going to lose their benefit anyway.

Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown have introduced a billthat would temporarily stave off the benefits cuts and mandate reasonable time-limit exemptions, such as many states provide.

Advocates have suggested ways the bill could be strengthened, including a longer reprieve period. But it’s a whole lot better than what’s coming down the pike.

Why didn’t Mayor Gray fold a version into his proposed budget? Surely he knows that TANF families will lose benefits because the program failed them.

For the same reason he put the benefits phase-out into last year’s proposed budget. Savings to help close the budget gap. This year he expects to save more than $5.6 million.

Well, the DC Council could do what the Mayor wouldn’t. The Human Services Committee took a step in this direction last week with a vote (4-1) in favor of the Graham-Brown bill

Now comes the need to find funds to substitute for the Mayor’s proposed savings — and to get at least three more Councilmembers on board.

Maybe we should launch a TANF Challenge along the lines of the popular Food Stamp Challenges.

Who knows what might happen if our elected representatives had to try living on $275 for a month?

Photo credit: US Department of Agriculture

The generation before me consisted of traditional activists who rebelled against an American society that they thought had wrongfully sent young men to kill Southeast Asians without much clear rationale, other than to fight some political theory that supposedly threatened democracy.

Back in the 1960s, the young adults who differed with our country’s political leaders fought hard to change the direction of the country and world.

Back then, there were no iPads, Internet, or smartphones. They simply had their cardboard signs, megaphones, and power in numbers. They changed the world with sit-ins, love-ins, and physical battles with shielded police sporting batons and water cannons.

Those grainy black and white television images of young people with headbands, long hair, and bell-bottom jeans standing up to armored national guards still resonate today.

Today’s activists, however, don’t typically knock heads with plastic police shields or get hosed down by a coercive stream of water. Why put yourself in harm’s way when you can sit at your Ikea desk, open up your Macbook Air, and click a few buttons?

Click, click, click, and you just reduced carcinogens in the environment. Click, click, to join the fight to end AIDS. Click, and that emaciated Third World child will eat a well-nourished supper tonight.

Changing the world is way easier today than when those hippies in the 1960s battled it out with angry uniformed men. All you need to do today is join some cool world-changing movement on Change.org in the comfort of your bedroom in your parents’ house, and you are a bona-fide activist. Just ignore those critics who call you a slacktivist.

Click, click, and you just housed a homeless person.

Wait. Is it that easy? For decades, homeless advocates have been struggling to help people on the streets overcome mental health issues, addictive behavior, and find permanent housing that would nurture people back to physical and emotional health. Can a click of a button do all of that with one simple push?

I wish ending homelessness was as simple as pressing that bright red Staples Easy Button. Can a simple Tweet house a homeless person?

Of course, one click of a button won’t magically transport a family of three from living in their van to walking across the threshold of an apartment. But as homeless advocates are figuring out today, it takes the whole community to mobilize enough resources to permanently house their homeless neighbors.

And that’s where social media is at its best, when a community wants to mobilize everyone.

So why not create a KONY 2012-type of campaign to end homelessness? Create a moving, very personal YouTube video of why our country needs to end homelessness, and then Tweet it out to celebrities who have the influence to rally millions of people.

In fact, why not Tweet those celebrities who have been homeless themselves. Famous people like Jim Carrey, Hilary Swank, and Shania Twain.

“Hey @JimCarrey, you already know homelessness is not a joke! Help end homelessness.”

“@HilaryASwank, you know the drama of being homeless. Help us end homelessness.”

“@ShaniaTwain, you know homelessness is not a beautiful country ballad. Help end homelessness.”

I know, it may sound like a desperate gimmick. But when the drama of homelessness has sadly persisted for decades in this country we need all the help we can get.

So should we start clicking away?

Photo credit: Robert Raines

The guns at issue here are funds for defense. Sequestration, i.e., the annual across-the-board cuts required by the Budget Control Act, would reduce them by $54.7 billion a year.

Nobody in a position of power wants those cuts, including the President.

His proposed Fiscal Year 2013 budget would hit the total deficit reduction targets in the BCA by a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases. It would also, as the BCA does, protect certain key programs for low-income people, including food stamps.

House Republicans will have none of this. Their budget plan, among other things, charged six committees to come up with more non-defense savings — enough to hit the deficit reduction targets, but without touching defense.

The House Agriculture Committee had to save $33.2 billion over the next 10 years, beginning with $8.2 billion in the upcoming fiscal year.

It could have gone after the costly subsidies our government pays to farmers — actually, for the most part, large farming operations.

Some of these provide special benefits for producing certain crops, e.g., yearly payments (even if the farmer grows nothing), compensation to make up for lower market prices. Another subsidizes insurance against crop losses. Yet farmers also get compensated when droughts, frosts,etc. ruin their crops.

All told, these subsidies cost some $25 billion a year. Nice safety net, huh?

The House budget plan itself identifies some of these subsidies for “reforms.” But they’re for another day.

So the Agriculture Committee, heeding “assumptions” made by the Budget Committee found its mandated savings — all of them and more— in the food stamp program.

First, it would shave months off the expiring boost in benefits that was part of the Recovery Act. They’re now scheduled to end in November 2013 — thanks to earlier cutbacks Congress made to offset the costs of other measures.

Under the House Agriculture plan, the boost would end two months from now. For a family of four, this would mean $57 less per month, according to a new brief from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The bulk of the savings, however, would come from two changes in the food stamp law itself.

One of them would, in effect, require households to be poorer to qualify for food stamps.

Under current law, a household can generally have no more than $2,000 in assets — or $3,250 if any of its members is a senior or a person with a disability. Total household income must be no greater than 130% of the applicable federal poverty line.

But most states — and the District of Columbia — have used an option in the law to eliminate the asset test. They’ve expanded their definition of “categorical eligibility,” i.e., types of low-income households that automatically qualify for food stamps.

This not only allows low-income families to conserve what they can for unexpected expenses. It also lets states raise the income eligiibilty threshold up to 200% of the federal poverty line — the level that many analysts use for classifying the low-income population.

The House Agriculture Committee would put a stop to this. Only households in which all members receive cash assistance could be deemed categorically eligible.

No more categorical eligibility for those that receive other types of publicly-funded support for low-income people, e.g., child care subsidies, job training.

Nor for households where only the children receive cash benefits through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program or asSupplemental Security Income.

At least two million people — perhaps as many as three million –would be forced out of the program. More than 280,000 children would lose not only food stamp benefits, but free school meals.

The other change in existing law would permanently reduce the benefits some households receive — again by severely limiting an option a growing number of states now use.

Briefly, the complicated formula states must ordinarily use to calculate food stamp eligibility and benefits levels includes an income allowance for utility costs, based on those applicants actually have to pay for.

But if the family receives benefits from the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, it automatically qualifies for the maximum allowance.

Fourteen states — and the District — have given families in the food stamp program a small LIHEAP benefit. Some of the families get higher food stamp benefits as a result. No big windfall here, however.

The House Agriculture Committee would virtually eliminate the so-called “heat and eat” option — or so I infer, since it expects to save $14 billion.

All this would be in addition to, not instead of the $133.5 billion House Republicans intend to save by converting the food stamp program to a block grant.

Moral of this story: Some people’s safety nets are worthier than others.

Photo credit: Bread for the World

The businesses and homeowners admonish local politicians by threatening to withdraw their financial campaign support, while advocates for the homeless use their vote-getting potential to insinuate they will support a leader who sympathizes with their cause to protect people on the streets.

Local elected officials and non-government organizations are caught in the messy middle.

Take Venice, California, for example. This Los Angeles westside neighborhood sits next to the Pacific Ocean and has roots in its eclectic, bohemian community where its ocean boardwalk is famous for tattoo artists and bizarre knife swallowing daredevils. Nestled in this tourist attraction has always been people sleeping on the sand or in their rundown VW beach vans.

So when Southern Californians figured out that Venice was one of the last coastal neighborhoods affordable enough that they didn’t have to sell their youngest child, the inexpensive beach cottages became gentrified residential estates.

And so, the battle for the streets began in earnest.

Imagine investing a million dollars into your dream house near the beach, only to discover an encampment of homeless neighbors squatting in the alley near your home. Although you compassionately support social services in your community, you call the police and your local representative to complain about the loud noise at night, and the remnants of trash in the morning.

You are told that their homelessness is not a crime, and unfortunately they have the right to be there. So you become the newest neighbor to fight to protect your streets.

It used to be the battles between property owners and homeless advocates occurred in the chambers of city councils. But with elected officials struggling to find Solomonic solutions to the problem of extreme poverty colliding with wealth, property owners are turning to other tactics.

Their logic is simple, albeit controversial – If you, advocates for the homeless, support homeless people’s rights to camp out in front of my house, then why don’t you let them camp out in front of your house?

And so, the online battle began.

Property owners created their own blogs, and listed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of key community leaders who support homeless people’s rights to live near their homes. If you are going to live on the streets, they say, go live near the people who advocate for you. This list included neighborhood leaders, homeless advocates, and even the Mayor of Los Angeles. They call the list a  “Westside Guide to Safe Camping Locations for the Homeless.”

Advocates are furious. They call these property owners “bum-haters” who are bashing privacy rights.

Is posting addresses of homeless supporters  a form of online bullying? Sort of like a group of teenagers bullying a peer on Facebook?

It seems to me if stakeholders, on both sides of the homelessness debate, are going to use online tools to promote an agenda to rid the community of homelessness, they should promote ways to link their homeless neighbors with access to permanent housing.

That, to me, is the Solomonic solution.

Photo credit: Zach Klein