David Michael Miller
Since The Progressive magazine moved offices a year ago to the top of State Street, I often walk to work through an encampment of homeless people.
One weekend I took my young daughter along. She tugged on my arm. “Mom!” she said urgently, “that man’s sign says ‘homeless’!”
It’s troubling how inured we adults have become to the awful reality of homelessness.
Up until the bitter cold struck, I would see men, women and little kids sleeping outside the Veterans Museum. Even in the bad weather there were sleeping bags and piles of stuff outside.
The city of Madison has been grappling with the growing problem of homelessness — made worse by our state Legislature, which has preempted local ordinances that protect people from being evicted.
But there is some good news. According to Brenda Konkel of the Tenant Resource Center, who often clashes with Mayor Paul Soglin over what she sees as the punitive policies toward the homeless downtown, there has been notable progress on the issue in Madison.
The city is building new affordable housing units. A new day shelter will open in the old Department of Commerce building downtown in the fall. And service providers are coordinating their efforts. There are homeless liaisons in the schools. They serve the 1,100 homeless children enrolled in our school district. Think about that for a minute. Our whole community has recognized that homelesseness is a serious problem.
But the measures we’ve taken don’t come close to solving the problem. The 60 new units at Rethke Terrace are the first stage of the city’s “housing first” effort to get homeless people into apartments near services and stabilize their lives. But there are more than 500 families on wait lists for affordable housing, according to Melissa Mennig of the Road Home. The housing crunch — made worse by the Epic effect on local rents — means that some people wait years for a precious housing voucher, she says, only to have it expire before an affordable apartment becomes available.
Coincidentally, during the same year my office move brought me face-to-face with Madison’s homeless population, the university chose Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City as the community-wide Go Big Read book.
Desmond spent years living in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee. He paints a riveting portrait of the families who face repeated eviction there.
“The home is the center of life,” he writes. “It is a refuge from the grind of school, the pressure of work and the menace of the streets.” Home makes us who we are. “Civic life too begins at home,” Desmond adds. “It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens.” Without stable homes, we can’t function properly as human beings, nor as a society.
Seeing the homeless outside my office, I have a visceral feeling of society coming apart.
According to the Dane County Clerk of Courts, there were just under 2,000 eviction cases filed in the county in 2016.
“I’ve never met someone who was evicted and then went right into housing,” said Jani Koester, who works with homeless children for the school district’s Transition Education Program (TEP).
Koester read a couple of poems at a recent panel on homelessness hosted by the Madison Institute, a nonpartisan progressive policy center. One, by an evicted mother, described how her son begged her to retrieve his teddy bear from the pile of their possessions dumped on the curb when they were forced from their home.
“If you wonder why I get so fierce, it’s because I know these people,” Brenda Konkel said during the same panel discussion.
Konkel described how joining Occupy Madison, and sleeping outside with 300 homeless people, changed her life.
“The more I saw, the crazier it became,” she said. “The city was threatening to fine me for letting people sleep on my porch.” Konkel put lockers on her porch so people could store their belongings there, and began driving people to campgrounds where they could legally spend the night.
The problems can seem overwhelming. But the Madison Institute panelists had some concrete suggestions — starting with saying hello. “You’ll make someone’s day,” said Koester. “People feel invisible.”
The Tenant Resource Center has a small anti-eviction fund. Donations helped prevent the eviction of a woman who was $60 short on her rent.
Konkel also needs volunteers to feed quarters into washing machines at the Bubbles Laundromat on East Johnson Street, so homeless people can do their laundry.
On Jan. 25, Madison will conduct a homeless census. Anyone can help conduct on-the-street interviews all night, beginning at 10 p.m.
And then there’s politics.
“We could set standards so the Madison public housing agency is not one of the top evictors,” said County Board member Heidi Wegleitner.
Show up to city and County Board meetings. Show you care.
Ruth Conniff is editor of The Progressive.
