The Springfield Republican wrote an article yesterday describing how Charlie Baker, in a visit to Worcester, voiced his support of Worcester’s plan to put work requirements and a three to seven year time limit for families to be able to reside in public housing.
The Worcester Housing Authority sought to require that all public housing residents residents enroll in “The A Better Life” program. The plan requires “residents of public housing and Section 8 housing to have just one member of the family either attend school full time or be employed and work no less than 1,200 hours during the year. All families are allowed three years in public housing and those that follow the employment or school rule will be allowed to stay up to seven years, with a hardship review board approving longer stays on a case by case basis.”
There are currently 60 families who voluntarily signed up for this plan in exchange for being moved to the top of the housing waiting list; of those 60, just 15% have moved out of public housing. That means 85% of this select group were not “motivated” to rejoin the economy by this program, using a word that Worcester Housing Authority Executive Director Raymond Mariano used (his exact quote was “For some people you need to find a motivator. That’s why we put the time limits in, that’s why were offered the priority”.
The federal Housing and Urban Development department recently withdraw approval of this plan after initially approving it. The Worcester experiment was done with private funds provided by Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts.
Although Baker didn’t voice his support for the program to roll out statewide, hedging by saying “what works in one place may not work in another”, he seemed sufficiently appreciative behind the philosophy of this program – a philosophy that, in my opinion, is guided by the Republican tenet that “the poor are just lazy”. Baker affirmatively stated that he would advocate for the WHA in its efforts to implement this.
Baker may try and pretend that he is a moderate, but things like this show what his true colors and beliefs look like – that people are poor because they deserve to be, and that we should take away the safety net because it makes people lazy. Does he really think that if we take away public housing, that all “those people” are going to just yawn, stretch, and then go get a job? I think he honestly does.
Why won’t you poors just stop being so poor? Here, let’s cut some more holes in the safety net, maybe that’ll help.
My sister got kicked out of her Section 8 since she got robbed at gun point in her own apartment by thieves who mistook her for the drug dealer next door. She got kicked out for failing to report the drug dealer earlier and for ‘inviting a criminal element into our housing complex’. Ma helped find her a lawyer to help, we litigated, and we lost.
Now she is stuck in substandard housing on the outskirts of Marlborough and considering leaving the state as soon as my niece goes off to school. She has bounced around from Cambridge to Chelsea to Marlborough chasing affordable housing. I remember the four months she and my nephew lived with us after rent control was overturned and she got kicked out of Cambridge.
We have to do poor than punish the working poor, it helps to have a candidate understand that these women are our mothers and sisters rather than deadbeats. My mother worked tirelessly to get off of welfare as soon as possible, as did my sister. Nobody wants to be poor. My brother in law is working more jobs than most people to keep them afloat.
or whether there are better alternatives, so I think this is NBD.
Again, another issue that the random undecided voter is not going to use to make his/her decision and unlikely they’ll believe that
I think he’s the re-incarnated Jefferson Davis and he actually wants the return of slavery. Note I would say he’s the Antichrist but I don’t want to offend the sensitivities of the atheists on this board.
I’m not worried so much about the random middle. I’m starting to see Democrats supporting Charlie Baker, and I haven’t yet seen liberals embracing Martha Coakley.
People may say “Meh, Baker won’t be so bad”. But if he is willing to come out in public and state that he supports a program that limits someone to 3-year subsidy if they don’t work or have kids, or a 7-year subsidy over their life, then people need to realize that a Baker administration is going to make this state a lot worse.
Baker is clearly blowing a tea-party dog whistle. A lot of voters respond to that, but I think that the nonsense of his proposal should be obvious by asking:
* We have been in a downturn for almost six years. Won’t a three-year limit fail during such as economic downturn?
* Where are these jobs coming from? Do you even know how many jobs we would need to get to full employment (I estimate that we would need 20,000 jobs in the Springfield region alone).
* Is Baker willing to pick someone currently in Section 8 housing and show them how to get a job in a week or two without pulling strings?
Very few people support a “welfare for life” society, but by rallying to clamp down harder on the poor when we are nowhere near out of the biggest economic downturn in 80 years, I think that at least liberals should recognize that this is not appropriate, and that it will not create jobs in this state.
We are not in a recession because people are on housing vouchers. People are on housing vouchers because we are in a recession.
You clearly don’t know much about Republicans in MA.
For one thing the number of Republicans opposed to Baker is a small section of the electorate so no sense risking any unenrolleds by reaching out to them. If he was, he’d have to change his statements on about five other issues before they would consider him. I actually know these people.
Secondly outside the BMG world there’s some hostility to people living in public housing. Even here in Andover, teachers, the solid base of the Democrat Party, are not that keen on the public housing kids, not because of the kids themselves (though they are often problematic, but hey that’s what we’re here for), but because the parents are often not that great (kids not fed, dirty, homework not done, etc.). You can call that Republican lies but I’m just repeating what I heard from people within the schools. The town projects are not in my part of town so they’re not at my school.
I’m only suggesting that for Baker to bring this up might very well be because it’s been tested as an issue with unenrolleds.
I meant to suggest that the Democrats need to rally the base, and this could be a way to remind the base that a Baker governorship will move us in this direction.
I know what you mean about most Democrats also hating on the poor in this state though. It is a bit sickening to watch people gleefully kick others who are down, believing that making the poor more poor will somehow make them less poor.
homelessness. Between 2007 and 2012, homelessness increased by 58%. I didn’t find anything about people getting lazier. 19,000 people experienced homelessness in 2013. Schools serviced 15,000 kids who experience homelessness the same year. We’re sticking them in hotels and motels because we don’t have enough affordable housing.
There are some people who need transitional assistance, but there isn’t enough affordable housing for people once they transition off. I haven’t seen what effects the increased minimum wage will eventually have on poverty, but I doubt it will keep up with inflation and increased rent.
allowing people to afford decent, non-subsidized housing in Massachusetts, then I may be a bit more open to listening to arguments that people may not need more than a few years in subsidized housing.
But if it’s low wage and you have kids and you list your house or the landlord jacks up rent beyond what you can afford, what do you do?
Laziness has nothing to do with our homelessness problem. High living costs, the lack of a livable wage, a poor social safety net and a mental health and addiction crisis across the state do. If a family suffers from one or more of these problems, the likelihood of homelessness will increase.
These issues really aren’t that complicated – even if people like Charlie Baker aren’t willing to spend the give minutes necessary to figure them out because they’d rather blame the victim than own up to the results of the policies they support.
A poor man said to a rich one:
“All my money goes on food.’
‘Now that’s your trouble,’ said the rich man. ‘I only spend five per cent of _my_ money on food.’
from The Magic Monastery by Idries Shah