Song: “The Hills are Alive With The Camps Of The Homeless”

To the tune “The Hills Are Alive”, from “The Sound of Music”

Refrain:

The Hills are alive with the camps of the homeless.

But there seems to be no camp for me.

Why Can’t I find a camp for me?

I will make my own camp, and it will be just I, myself, and me!

 

Verse 1:

It will be the smallest homeless camp

and be the best run.

There’ll be no Maurice Young

so we will all have fun!

 

Verse 2: 

We will connect people to the services

to get them out of the street.

And connect them to resources to survive

and get them back on their feet.

 

Song: “Heartless Bastards”

To “Anatevka” from “Fiddler on the Roof”.

Alternate non-copyrighted song: “Faith of Our Fathers”

[“St. Catherine” by Henry Frederick Hemy]

Refrain: Heartless bastards in your ivory towers living your lives of ignorance while my friend dies. I hope those ivory towers fall on your head and make you like my friend dead, dead, dead.

verse 1: No one should have to watch their friend die, die in their arms while I could do nothing but cry. The Establishment will lie that they did try, but we would not go to the mission & they don’t understand why.

Song: “I’m Homeless”

To the song “Maria” from “West Side Story”

Non-copyright tune Hyfrydol (“Alleleluia Sing to Jesus”)

Refrain: I’m homeless! I just can’t believe that I’m homeless! Whatever will I do? Wherever will I go, from here? I’m homeless! I just can’t stop saying “I’m homeless”

Verse: Homeless. Say it loud and it will make me go crazy, Say it soft and it’s almost not scary. Homeless. I just can’t believe that I’m homeless.

I’m Homeless! I’m Homeless!

I’m homeless. I’m homeless.

Song: “I Hear Wheeler”

To the song “I’m So Pretty” from “West Side Story”

Alternate non-copyright tune “Sing of Mary” (Pleading Savior).

 

Refrain: I hear Wheeler! I hear Wheeler! I hear Wheeler up in my camp! I hear Wheeler ! And I do not understand that!

verse 1: All this snoring and farting, it’s true. All this coughing and hacking too! And oh my God what is that smell? It is hell!

verse 2: I can’t believe they brought Wheeler back into my camp. The laughter from me over their stupidity is causing me to cramp in the evening dew and damp!

I Fed A Squirrel From The Wrong Side Of The Park Sidewalk–I feel so ashamed.

Written 8 May 2014 and copyright2014 by Michael-Tyrrannis I Saurranno-Schwing. All rights reserved.

I feel so ashamed. She came up to me like she knew me. I held out my hand. She made contact. She took the pizza crust from my hand in her little mouth. She ran off to eat it. It was then, as she continued running, that I found out to my utter horror I HAD FED A SQUIRREL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF THE PARK SIDEWALK!!! One of THOSE squirrels had infiltrated among my friends, snuck up and ran off with their blessing! You know the kind of squirrels I mean. Those homeless ones in the side of Military Park by Blackford Street. The ones that stare at you when you’re eating, then come up when you leave looking for tidbits of food. The ones that know if they ask for anything we will call the police on them for aggressive panhandling and harassment. That depraved kind deep in their fermented mulberry addiction. The ones that pee on every tree and poo behind those same trees. The ones that run and hide when you walk through the park, staring at you so they can catch you off-guard and jump you for your food. But there is no privacy in the park. There are eyes everywhere: begging squirrel eyes, little beedy black goose eyes, hawk eyes looking down at you, meadow vole eyes looking up at you, faceted mosquito eyes targeting in on you, ant and beetle eyes on your rubbish left behind. It’s still sending shivers down my spine that I had to even look upon one of THOSE homeless squirrels stealing from the cultured tax-paying society centered on the gazebo on the real side of the park by West Street; on the correct side of the sidewalk. It detests me I was forced to interact with one of THOSE KIND of scavenging low-life squirrels. Me a taxpayer who cannot enjoy my park without seeing or hearing, or worse, interacting with one of THEM!

[Those who are familiar with me or my writing will catch the humor derived from metaphor. To the rest of you, THOSE squirrels from the wrong side of the sidewalk represent the stereotypes some people have of homeless people. While sometimes those ideas are correct for the particular person involved, one must understand other homeless people like myself are no threat to you, are citizens, taxpayers, and voters enjoying the park we own too, and need nothing you have even though some of us may be “service provider resistant”, a term I found reading some responses to Channel 8 WISH news stories about homeless people, agencies and the Homeless Bill of Rights.]

Inspiration for this came from actually feeding a squirrel that ran to the other side of the park and my very active imagination. While I sometimes feed the squirrels on the other side of the park, it is usually by throwing the food at the base of their trees and they come down at their own leisure. Contrary to some opinion I do not always make the squirrels take it from my hand and only a few will do that.

Post I made 11 Jun 2014 to this video of the Davidson Street Camp Destruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyIzxSBh7kw

tavran1

7 people only were housed with ESG money. Three months later, money gone, back to the street. “Shelters” are NOT housing by any definition. This action was illegal and violated Federal Law from September 2012. The tents and other things should have been taken into storage, not thrown in a dumpster. The persons involved should have been able to retrieve their things within 90 days. Everyone who helped “dispose” of those things should be arrested and taken to Federal Court, have their assets frozen, sit in jail till they lose their jobs, then be released into the streets homeless. Then they can learn and understand.

Indianapolis, Indiana, Tests Homelessness Neutron Bomb (in the tradition of “The Onion”)

Indianapolis, Indiana, Tests Homelessness Neutron Bomb, First one Detonated in the United States
Michael V. Schwing, Reporter (in the tradition of “The Onion”)

16 July 2012, 9 pm, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

Indianapolis, Indiana, was the scene this evening of the detonation of the first homelessness neutron bomb ever made and used. It is believed to have sent over 2000 homeless people to their permanent housing out of the streets. It must have been effective as this reporter could only find, at this time, surviving homeless persons who were sleeping in the IUPUI Library or on the computers in the IUPUI Library at the time of detonation.
This collaborative effort of HUD, the Department of Energy, CHIP, the Governor’s Office, NASA, Ed the Talking Horse, the Department of Defense, and Panda Express restaurant cost over 7.5 billion dollars.
Among the comments from the homeless in the IUPUI Library which this reporter was given permission to publish were:

Mark Zonderburgmeister said, “Yippee! More bags of food for me at the feedings!”
Linda Pumperniklebred replied, “It should really make it easier to find campsites at the River, the Jungle, and Military Park. They were really getting crowded.”
Penelope Nase-in-deine-Gesellschaft, a housed IUPUI German exchange student, well-known for speaking her mind on various causes, intruded into our conversation, “I think it would have been better to have used the 7.5 billion dollars to buy housing for the homeless and then connecting them to the services necessary provided by already existing trained service providers to stay housed. We could have housed thousands of families and eliminated homelessness in the top 10 most plagued Indiana cities.” After being congratulated for actually reading the first “Blueprint to End Homelessness in Indianapolis”, she was immediately made the Chair of the CHIP Homelessness Advocacy Council, of which only three members could still be found.
“Chill Will” MacGillicuddy, holding his sign, “Why Lie. It’s for beer!” asked if someone would put some money in his cup so he could go to the liquor store and get some “gin medication to self-celebrate.”
Another CHIP Homelessness Advocacy Council member (English name with-held by request, but his Dinarisian name is Tavran Saurranno, but you didn’t hear it from me) stated he was glad to see in this day of various levels of governments, private donors, and massive non-profits downsizing their donations to every cause including homelessness, that one governmental program to help the homeless is still getting major funding: the “Keep the Homeless in Case Management Till They Die in the Street and We Commemorate Them at the Homeless Memorial Service Program”. He stated further, “It makes me really proud as a native of Indianapolis and Indiana to know that we have more than corn and sports in Indiana: we also have compassion for our fellow human beings and wish them the best, especially the homeless who will be helped by this new final solution. (All the more, since the powers that be keep refusing to let me build a Soylent Green factory in Indianapolis and make the homeless, geese, sewer rats, squirrels and rabbits useful).”
This reporter will keep you readers apprised of future developments of this story.

My paper for a Sociology Class at Ivy Tech:Why Are There Still Homeless People in Indianapolis?

Why are there still homeless people in Indianapolis?
Michael V. Schwing
Sociology 111-OGH
Dr. Carmon Hicks

Why are there homeless people still in Indianapolis?
Here is some personal background on me. I am homeless. By HUD standards and my standards, I am not homeless as I live in co-operative housing for homeless men with incomes called Peter’s House Co-op. I moved back to the Cumberland Peter’s House on 1 October 2010. HUD is the US Federal Housing and Urban Development Agency responsible for seeing that people in this country have adequate housing and utilities and even education. This agency also collects data on homelessness.
I do not do drugs, drink alcohol, come from a poor or low income family, or lack high school education, so I am not the typical homeless person. I became homeless because I stupidly mortgaged my house to help others, then with reduced work hours and my car breaking down thus creating a new bill for car payments, I fell behind in my mortgage payments. I brought my mortgage current with a loan from a friend the first time. The following year I fell behind again. This time I could not bring the mortgage current. I filed bankruptcy, first as Chapter 13, then as Chapter 7. I had no family who would help me, nowhere to turn. I also did not know then that when Washington Mutual Bank, my mortgage holder, refused payments sending my home into foreclosure, I was a victim of a predatory bank. Friends and family blamed me for the loss of my home, including the very people whom I had helped by mortgaging it in the first place.
In Indianapolis, my story has been repeated by hundreds of others. The largest section of homeless people in this city is families who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis. At the CHIP (Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention) Annual Meeting in 2009 at the Barnes and Thornburg Lawyers Office, one of the speakers who works for a family shelter in Indianapolis said that there are now hundreds of homeless families who have lost their homes although they have jobs and educations and “we don’t know how to help them”.
Families with jobs and education becoming homeless change the face of homelessness in Indianapolis. As our textbook says, “In the past most homeless people were older White males living as alcoholics in skid row areas.” (Schaefer, 2010, p. 467). Now most homeless are under 40 and too many are children. The city of Indianapolis conducts an annual homeless count and now also a summer homeless count. This annual homeless count occurs in January. I was housed in the co-op at that count but I was missed in the summer count while sleeping on a bench at the Canal.
In October 2002, the Indianapolis Housing Task Force appointed by Mayor Bart Peterson completed its study of homelessness in Indianapolis and published its strategy to end homelessness here in a book called the Blueprint to End Homelessness in Indianapolis. The agency appointed by the mayor to implement this Blueprint is called the “Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention”, its abbreviation is “CHIP”. It maintains a website at http://www.chipindy.com on which the Blueprint and the emergency Help Manual are located with other information such as the Homeless Count statistics. I am a member of the CHIP Advocacy Council of homeless and formerly homeless men and women who advise CHIP on services needed and gaps in services as well as take the message to the community to raise homelessness awareness and to inform homeless people what services are available and how to access these services.
The following may not stand up to the rigors of “proof” that academicians and professionals demand, but in the world of homelessness, a multi-million dollar “business” in this city, even a published fact could be wrong or quickly become outdated. Some “facts” told to the public, even by their own (and my own—I have voted in all eight presidential year elections since I turned 18) elected officials are lies. Lies said to make them look good to the voters, lies said to look like they “give a damn”.
According to various private and public reports concerning the homeless in this city there are approximately 6000 homeless people through the course of the year, but fewer than 2000 are in the street.
Homeless Count Report
On January 21, 2010, 1,488 individuals were experiencing homelessness in Indianapolis, according to a comprehensive count conducted that night. According to the 2010 Homeless Count Report, 39% or 580 of the individuals experiencing homelessness in our community are members of a homeless family. Our homeless neighbors include individuals who are employed, veterans, women fleeing from domestic violence, and 362 children under the age of 18. Read more…
Many people associate homelessness with panhandling. However, four downtown counts taken in 2008 and 2009 found that none of the individuals engaged in illegal panhandling were homeless, and even those few individuals who were engaged in legal, passive solicitation represented fewer than 1% of the city’s nearly 1,500 people experiencing homelessness. (CHIPIndy.org webpage, accessed 10/5/2010)
Many stay with friends and relatives and in shelters such as Wheeler Mission and the Salvation Army. Now here is another “fact” for you. There are in Indianapolis, as of the homeless count last summer when police officers also counted the number of abandoned buildings, over 5000, some say as many as 7000, abandoned houses in this city. And at any time there are hundreds of non-abandoned houses and apartments for sale or rent. The Indianapolis Housing Authority has at least a dozen buildings, usually full and with waiting lists with apartments for as low as $50 a month. However, the four buildings in the downtown area are now senior citizen and wheel-chair handicapped person’s buildings only. Partners in Housing has at least 13 apartment buildings in Indianapolis, all paid for by the Lilly Endowment and the United Way (their most recent building was purchased for over 6.1 million from Lilly and over 855 thousand from United Way as per the Partners in Housing according to the Partners in Housing website accessible from their Facebook page). While I support Partners in Housing, which is the only real solution which has grown out of the Blueprint to End Homelessness, many of the people they house are not homeless. It also requires the stamp of approval of Midtown (for people with mental health issues or drug-dependency issues) or HVAF (for veterans) to get into one of these buildings. Being homeless is not enough. One must be homeless with another issue such as a physical or mental disability with a check from which to deduct the rent. Only people receiving SSI usually qualify as they have the requirements necessary.
Another new thing on the scene is the co-op. The Peter’s House Co-op which the house I live in is owned by (with mortgage) is one of the first successful applications of co-operative housing in Indianapolis not run by HUD. Peter’s House is a private corporation. It is the master’s thesis in action of William Earl Ross, its founder and CEO. I met William because we are both on the CHIP Advocacy Council. The co-op rents (or in some cases buys) the house from a landlord and promises to pay the rent and keep the property clean and taken care of. The renters, the co-op members pay the co-op for the rent and our share of the utilities (in my house divided by five-the number of bedrooms and men in the house), then the co-op pays these bills with that money. If someone moves or is not a fit for the arrangement (as room-mate situations do not suit everyone, nor does sharing a bathroom or kitchen), then they go to a different house and the co-op covers their rent until that room is filled again. We are protected from room-mates who refuse to pay rent or who disrupt the house in some unacceptable way.
Wheeler Mission, the last mission in Indianapolis for men who are not in a drug treatment program, does not house people. They do have case-managers who help connect one to the available resources. These are usually either the Horizon House or HIP (Homeless Initiative Project). Both of these organizations, which I have issues with for lack of properly doing their jobs, have programs of paying apartment rent down payments if one is working, and job training programs, and other support services to get housed. They both receive federal and state funding(from your tax dollars!) and yet between them house no more than 10 people a year. The usual process being when one has completed all the requirements of the program for housing they are in, they get housed with this grant money for one, three, or six months. Now when the grant money runs out, the person becomes homeless again.
There are also group homes, usually charging a rent, for homeless men. Some are run by churches, some by private people; few by public agencies. It can be hard to find out about them as they rarely advertise. I was surprised when I was looking at a map of known group homes, co-ops, shelters, and the like on the wall in the CHIP office at 3737 North Meridian. I had never heard of most of them.
Back to the question of my paper, “Why are there still homeless people in Indianapolis?” I think it is a good question since I know about the federal and state programs to house people, the millions of dollars being poured into this city for the homeless, the group homes, shelters, co-ops, and abandoned houses, all more than sufficient to house 6000 homeless. I haven’t even discussed the local neighborhood organizations almost all of which by up properties in their areas and fix them up to rent or preferably sell to low income families. Habitat for Humanity is also active in this city, although they will not sell to homeless in the street or in shelters because ‘the homeless are not trustworthy” and don’t pay bills. (Bill Schwartzkopf, personal interview 2009) Bill Schwartzkopf is also the one who found that the Horizon House throws away the listing of available housing which the City of Indianapolis sends every month to the Horizon House. One of my complaints with said organization is that I know more about housing in this city than my housing case-manager. There is nothing to house people for free. The planned Dinaris House would do that, run by the fraternal organization called the Kingpire of Dinaris, but the funding may never come.
People seem to have the idea that with the coming of the Super Bowl to this city that the city is housing homeless or will send them somewhere else for two weeks. I could barely believe my ears when I heard a woman on the bus say that this city was housing the homeless, and the bus driver saying they would send the homeless somewhere else for a couple weeks—that the homeless will be banned from the city or rounded up and sent elsewhere. When I stated the city is not housing the homeless, everyone got quiet and no one mentioned the homeless again while I was on the bus. As strange as it may seem to the housed, the idea of rounding up the homeless and shipping them off to another city has been and is being considered by your legally elected representatives to the State Legislature as if this were Communist Russia or Nazi Germany!
As I remind people including police officers, when did I lose my civic rights? I lost them when I became homeless? Ridiculous, at least for me personally it is. I engage in my civic responsibilities of paying taxes, voting, reporting crimes, cleaning up after myself, etc. I go to church, hold a job at times, own a car, own my own business, serve as a volunteer at the State Museum for the Watanabe Garden, and am a political activist online for Save Darfur, Tobacco Free Children, and homeless and poor person’s causes. I sit on or have sat on three corporate boards, I count lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, clergy and ministers, and state representatives as friends. I am a distant cousin of President Barack Obama and Senator Evan Bayh and more closely related to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, all through our descent from King Edward I. (President Obama’s ancestry is online at http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html).
In conclusion, this paper is not about defining homelessness, although a working definition is necessary. Here, a homeless person is anyone who does not have a safe and proper shelter or place to sleep, store their belongings, and be out of the elements in a shelter normal for human occupation. Living in abandoned buildings and cars fulfills the “out of the elements” and maybe even safe requirements, but is not adequate or normal housing. It can also include doubling up with another family in a house meant for one family. This paper is also not about what made me homeless, which is the topic of a different paper written for English class. But a brief description of what made me homeless was useful as this is the outline scenario of the majority of homeless people in the city of Indianapolis.
Which paradigm of sociology is this? In dealing with homelessness we use all four paradigms, but for different uses. To define and study homelessness we use the fundamentalist approach of looking at all the pieces. To decide how to help and what things need to be done requires the conflict approach as people always want to “do something about it” but NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) then kicks in. No one seems to want an apartment complex turned into a low income housing building that might house some of “those people” (homeless in this case). The feminist view is also important here though not considered nearly as much as it should be as most of the homeless families who actually live in the street for a time are headed by women, either single or divorced. The interactionist view is what actually houses people and helps them stay housed with the support services of job placement and preparedness classes, medical treatment, parenting, anger management, and drug addiction therapy and classes. Home ownership classes and information on mortgages and banking information is also useful.
For me personally, I am now in the interactional viewpoint as I now try to help others leave their homelessness behind them. Others helped me, now I want to help others. I just want this city to stop being so homeless hateful and start accepting housing of the homeless, even if “in their backyard”. We need free temporary housing to get most people off the street and more low income houses and apartments to get our families out of shelters and doubling-up situations and into their own houses again.

Cause and Effect paper on My Personal Homelessness written for a class at Martin University

Michael V. Schwing
English 158.11
Professor Brian Gaddie
The Causes and Effects of My Homelessness
As I wrote in another paper, there are many reasons for an individual’s homelessness.
I learned at the annual meeting of the Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention (“CHIP”) that my main reason, the mortgage crisis, was almost non-existent ten years ago. It now is the leading cause of homelessness for families, which are the fastest growing sector of the city of Indianapolis’s homeless population. (Blueprint 8). There are several causes of my homelessness, some of the effects of which became causes themselves.
One cause that plagues me to this day is my lack of higher education. Although I went to college after graduating high school as expected, I did poorly in college and after four years I had to leave. I could no longer afford to pay for college. I completed only two years in the four I was there. Without a degree in something, I could not prove I know what I know and could not get one of the better paying jobs which would have paid for good housing.
Another cause is my personal laziness. I have never done more than I needed to do pertaining to a job, work, or career. I never worked all the hours I could, or sought better jobs than the pizza delivery jobs I enjoyed where I was comfortable. I did work to pay student loans or car payments. When those things were paid, I did not care if I had a job or not. Consequently, the natural effect of this philosophy was I was more unemployed than employed.
The effect of these two causes is that I now, when I need to get and hold a job, do not have one. I should be at the point in my life where I have a career and a family. The children should be grown or almost grown, and out on their own, which the ones I legally adopted are. I can work some jobs and enjoy them. However, I lack the education to get a career I need to stay housed. I have addressed this issue by returning to college after a gap of 20 years since I was last in Pontiac Business Institute before they closed.
The next group of causes and effects which became causes concerns the mortgage I took out on my house. I inherited the house outright from my father with no mortgage on it as he had paid his mortgage in full before his death. For two and a half years I lived the “American Dream” of owning my own house outright, paying the taxes due on time, and enjoying my life as a dad and grandfather. When my second adopted son and the family whose daughter he “married” (they believe they are common law married, but that has not existed in Indiana since the 1950s) and with whom he had two children needed to leave the house they were in, I mortgaged my house to help them and myself. This was the second biggest mistake
of my life. The biggest mistake of my life was refinancing that mortgage with Washington Mutual Bank to save several points off the interest rate. Had I stayed with the original mortgage, I would have been able to keep my house over the long term. My job allowed me to pay an extra $100 or more a month and in some months a double payment of $700, with all extra funds applied to the principal of the loan. They had originally given me the mortgage loan with no income because I had a $45,000 stock and mutual fund account. I got a job delivering pizzas at the local Papa John’s Pizza which more than covered the new mortgage payments. The funds were used to buy a trailer for my son and his immediate family, pay a down payment for the trailer for the family of his “wife”, and restore my account with my stockbroker. This stockbroker will be discussed later.
Due to the nature of the pizza delivery business, I tended to fall behind in payments in the middle of the winter and the middle of the summer. The winter payments tended to be paid in full in March when the business and the tips increased. It was one summer’s payments that fell behind to the point of a foreclosure threat because I had lost some hours and income when my car’s engine burned up.
Digressing to the car cause, I got the car engine fixed with the last of the money I had remaining in my stock account from the first time I had a stock account. This destroyed my financial safety cushion against illness or temporary job loss. While the car was being fixed, I used a rental car, which consumed all my tips and commissions for the rent and gas usage. I could only pay my bills out of my paychecks so I fell two months behind. Then my nice red Chevy Lumina car (the one dad would have liked to buy, but thought too flashy for his American Legion friends so he bought the “sand-grouse” colored one, a golden tan-brown) decided the old transmission could not operate with the new engine and caused the transmission to die. Then I had no car, which meant no job or income as my then current job was dependent on having access to a car.
I went to Cal-Cars and got a car with my paycheck. Cal-Cars is a “buy-here-pay-here” dealer. This is one thing my first adopted son did for me before he left my life. His older biological half-brother was the manager of the particular Cal-Car dealership to which I went. At my son’s request, his brother dealt with me even though I lived outside the radius of ten miles. Now I had a car payment eating up my tips and commission. Falling farther behind.
In my ignorance of thinking more money would fix the problems, I got a second mortgage to “catch-up”. This was a short-term fix and a long term failure. The effect of this cause was to add to my debt beyond an ability to pay it. I restored my stock and mutual funds account. Now back to my mortgage problems.
The first time I went into foreclosure, I had the help of a man who loaned me the money necessary to past due payments, interest, and lawyer’s fees current on the mortgage. A couple years later, the process repeated itself. This time there was no one to help me. I tried to negotiate a re-payment plan as the mortgage papers allowed, but someone named Michael refused to accept anything less than the entire past due amount and at the mere mention of his name customer representatives at WAMU actually hung-up the phone on me refusing to take or post payments of any kind. Refusing any payments, WAMU sent me into foreclosure. I reacted by filing bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy was originally a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which if successfully completed, would allow me to keep the house. New issues with the bankruptcy trustee then started. Apparently, he felt I should not have a bankruptcy. Every month, even though I made my payment, he filed a complaint. Finally, jobless, broke, and with no resources to turn to, I had to terminate the Chapter 13 bankruptcy. The trustee allowed the change from Chapter 13 to Chapter 7. I would have to give up the house, but I would keep my car and my credit card debt was eliminated. Five years after I lost my house in foreclosure, the news broke about “predatory banks”. Washington Mutual (also called WAMU) and its mother company Wells-Fargo top almost every list of “predatory” banks. Predatory banks were those which made mortgage loans to people who could not afford them and then filed foreclosure papers to take the house. By the mid-2000s decade, entire neighborhoods had been destroyed by these banks. When Barack Obama became President of the United States, he gave “bail-out” money to many of these struggling banks and mortgage lenders. I had to laugh when WAMU got in line for a bail-out. No one bailed me out, and Washington Mutual had sold the mortgage after they realized they would get no more money after I filed my bankruptcy. My bankruptcy also prevented them from coming back to sue me for the difference from the sale of my house and the amount which they said I owed.
One cause not yet mentioned is my stockbroker. I do not know if I signed a paper that somehow allowed him to do this; I will never know what happened, but he stole from me anywhere from $5000 to $20,000 over a five year period. When I had my first account with him after my father died, I had taken a loan for something I do not now remember, instead of selling the stocks. This was a mistake I will never repeat, although I repeated this same mistake the second time I had a stock account which had the same disastrous effect. This loan was for $5000. Whenever I sold stock for some reason, I would always put half the proceeds into the loan account to pay it down. Yet, for some reason I did not figure out until the second time I had a stock account with this man, the loan account grew to over $11,000 before I closed the account and sold off the stock to pay for it.
The second time I had an account with him, he acted like he was doing me a favor because he acted as if he made no money from my account. As he was paid for every stock I sold or bought, I did not understand what his issue was. He opened a new account for me but did the same old things with it. After another loan (I had not learned the lesson the first time), he started raising my loan account without new loans and with payments being made. Then it struck me one day what was going on. He was writing up stock sales as loans. The way the process should have worked was this: he would sell the stock for me to get the desired amount of money; he would take half of that and apply it to my loan account, thus reducing my loan balance; and send me the other half in a check. The amount in the check was my money from the stock sale, not a loan.
However, the way it did work was: he sold the amount of stock necessary, applied half of it to the outstanding loan balance, then sent me a loan check for the remainder of the stock sale proceeds which was a loan which I had to pay back. When I noticed the words one day of “loan proceeds” on my check receipt instead of “stock sale proceeds” or something similar, I called to ask him why it said “loan” when I made no new loan. He attempted to explain to me that he sold the stock and placed all the proceeds into the loan account and sent me a new loan check. I asked him where the original amount of one-half of the stock sale proceeds were, as his statement supports the loan account and the loan check but where is the other half of my money. He said the numbers were the same and hung up the phone. I called the national office and had him removed from my account. They could not understand what my complaint was. I had the national office sell off my stock and close my account and will never go back to that company and will never take a loan against stocks or mutual funds. I will always sell them to get the money.
To further illustrate the “new math” he employed, I use the following example. I sell $5000 of stock. $2500 is paid into the loan account of $5000 outstanding balance (ignoring the small interest rate in these examples). The loan balance now should be and is $2500. A check for the rest of the $5000 ($2500 balance) should be mailed to me. This is stock sale proceeds, not a loan. He sold the stock for $5000. He applied the full $5000 to the stock account, which is now $0. He writes a new loan check for $2500. The loan account is now $2500. The $2500 check I have is a loan that must be paid back—a loan I did not ask for and did not authorize. To me it looks shady at the least. The loan paper I originally signed may have authorized this kind of transaction. I cannot say for I have no copy of it. All original papers were lost shortly after I found an old friend who worked for the company in a different location who said he would look into it for me. Whether or not I could get any money back, he could not say. But he could at least explain what happened. He is the one who years after the fact told me of the shady dealings this company uses with its loan accounts.
Before I had to leave the house in November of 2003, I had taken a job transfer and gotten an over-priced apartment two blocks down the street. I was not homeless yet. But, I could not drive my car on the job with no insurance so I worked as an insider making one-third of the money I would have made as a driver. Now I was under-employed. I did not make enough money to pay for my apartment, so was evicted from that, but only after I had left my job when the manager who had hired me as a favor to my manager in Brownsburg, took me out of the system as he did not really need me. I did not realize I was quitting, still, this was the effect of my leaving that one day. So now I was homeless and unemployed and had exhausted all resources available at that time which I knew about and took myself to Wheeler Mission. I had known about Wheeler Mission for years. I had even donated money and clothes to it. Once, I had driven someone there and talked with him until they opened. He called me later and said no one had ever done that for him and thanked me. So, being homeless, I followed my own advice and went into Wheeler Mission.
I am a Christian and do believe in God. One cannot know me and not see this, although I normally do not sit around trying to explain my beliefs or convert others to them. I believe that God knocked me off my pedestal as a friend said one night, out of the blue, while we were closing the Papa John’s Pizza in Brownsburg. Apparently he had a plan for me and I was not listening. I thought he put on me to donate to Wheeler Mission $1000 and eat with the men. I did not do it. The next year I felt the compulsion to donate $500 and eat with the men. I did not do it. The next year I was broke, living in the mission, and eating with the men whether I wanted to or not. In the mission I believe I gave back to God the time I owed by not going to church—when church was two blocks away—for years, and not using my money as God intended. I could have bought a couple houses and repaired them and sold one and used that money to buy more and get some people out of the street. That is one of my dreams now. To buy and repair houses and get homeless families into them and even to sell some of the houses through a rent-to-own program where all rent they pay after they sign a declaration to buy would go to the purchase of the home. The purchase price would be twice what it cost my business to buy and fix, with no interest at all. I would also like to get a large apartment complex (several are empty in Indianapolis) and put in those homeless I know personally, without having to go through Midtown and the like—my version of Partners in Housing which has housed so many homeless for short or long term.
My car had died on the way to the mission and got towed a few days later. I stayed there for six months then moved in with a family who is like family to me. A couple months later, I went back to Wheeler Mission when she found a man online who was moving in with her. I was in the mission for a whole year before I was blessed with a job at the Papa John’s Pizza at 10th Street and Indiana Avenue. That job got me out of the mission. I stayed housed for a year and nine months then lived with family again. After the woman and her man moved to Florida, I lived with her brother who is my foster son. I left there and stayed outside in the summers for two years. Now I am on the verge of getting housed again through Midtown and Partners in Housing. [Update: I am not going the Midtown drug route, so cannot get housed by Partners in Housing.]
Works Cited
Indianapolis Housing Taskforce. Blueprint to End Homelessness in Indianapolis. Indianapolis:
October 2002. Print. [Also available online at http://www.CHIPIndy.org]
CHIP (Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention). Annual Meeting.1 July 2009.
Speeches by several caregivers, case-managers, and organizations serving homeless families.

The Fatal Flaws in the belief “We feel by feeding, giving blankets we are enabling people to stay in the street” -By Michael Schwing, written Monday, November 12, 2012

This is Michael Schwing. Most of you know me as a member of the CHIP Homeless Advocacy Council working with the rest of you (all of you being voices FOR the homeless) as almost the sole voice OF the homeless in the Blueprint 2 work meetings, which I enjoy attending.

 

Just  as Andrea DeMink felt the need today to post the truth about flu shots on Facebook, so I feel the need to address from all sides the concept that I have yet run into again today:

that if we feed the homeless or give them a blanket we are enabling them to remain homeless and they will not come in to access services (read: come into our business and access the services we provide so we can keep getting our grant money to continue providing those services needed or not).

As most of this will just fly past or over the heads of  some of our MSW (Masters of Social Work) case managers or they will be so stuck in their in-the-box-thinking that the offering of explanations and opinions not held by them by someone who is not an MSW will serve no purpose. If you are in that category you can stop reading now. If you are in any other category, please read on till you get annoyed or find one word or comment to harp on then quit reading or harp away. Otherwise if you really want to know some answers read on.

(Remember: Thinking outside the box can be useful, but I am not saying discard that in the box which works. Some issues need another approach; some people need a different approach.)

 

First, homelessness is NOT EASY BY ANY MEANS. So NOTHING you or anyone else does can make it easier. This fallacious comment (“that we are making homelessness easy”, or “we don’t want to make homelessness easy”) has been made in my presence 100% of the time by persons who are not now nor ever have been homeless and probably believe they never could be. It has been said to me by MSW’s, case managers, service providers and the average person on the street.

 

Second, feeding the homeless is enabling them. It is ENABLING THEM TO SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO ACCESS YOUR SERVICES. If they die in the street, they cannot be helped, but then they would not need to be. It may also be enabling them to live long enough to wait till you actually offer the service they need, or till they find the service provider they need. (Remember: One size does not fit all.)

 

Third, until you have shelters or missions with sufficient space  that allow any and every homeless person to come in, not just those who fall under the business mission statement, not just persons with drug dependencies, or victims of domestic abuse and their children, WHERE IS IT YOU EXPECT ME TO COME IN TO? Do you know for instance, the Wheeler building on Delaware St. has three floors and if one floor had 125 beds on it, then the other two floors could also have 125 beds on each therefore housing 250 more men as well as the 175 beds on the one floor of the Lighthouse. The available beds (175 in the entire city if not in a program) are usually full. How is sleeping on a mat in a mission dayroom any different from what I am doing already: sleeping on a cardboard in a park shelter? Well there may be a temperature difference of forty degrees, but at least I CAN SLEEP outside and am not subjected to abuse by the other inmates of the mission for snoring nor treated like an idiot by the staff. I went in the other night for overflow, forgetting to check first to see if it was a weather night (it has been over 3 years since I needed a weather night bed), and the person I spoke to went out of his way to make me feel like an idiot–called the phone number of the weather night line, playing it with a look of satisfaction on his face. Personally speaking, I hope I do freeze to death outside for then I would die happy and this crap would be over. But as the best thing that could ever happen to me while homeless is to die, I know that will not happen. Besides, it is not a good day to die as I am not done using my talents to make the powers that be (read: THE SYSTEM) uncomfortable enough to become more effective and efficient.

 

Fourth, in my head I always have to ask, “What services?” If you are not going to get me into housing you have no services I need. I can wash my clothes or take a shower (or clean up) any of several places including family and friend’s houses, church, IUPUI Science Bldg (for washing clothes), and family bathrooms everywhere. Donuts, milk and coffee? And now there is no reason not to understand why so many homeless are becoming diabetic–sweet treats are the primary and sometimes only thing we are fed. Water? I know most homeless are too lazy to carry around a 20 ounce pop bottle and fill it with tap water as I do. So they need you to donate dozens of cases of water monthly to survive.

(Remember: You need to find out what services are needed and then provide them, bottom to top not top to bottom. If you nonprofits operated in the real world in this same manner you would be bankrupt in the year, or have no customers, or would have driven them off.) Now, I do access IU doctors and now Midtown again (required by HIP case management which I am trying to get into).

 

Fifth, let us cover feedings. Have any of you calculated how many blocks it is to get to three feedings a day? I have, for I no longer have the physical means to walk the 60 blocks a day to get to those feedings. Sixty blocks you ask: Military Park to Central Library–10 blocks. Central Library to what is the former Damien Center but is properly called Cathedral Kitchen–5 blocks there, 5 blocks back. Central Library to Wheeler-Lighthouse–12 1/2 blocks there, 12 1/2 blocks back (although walking on a diagonal as much as possible lessens this). Do this a second time for dinner–25 blocks round-trip again. And you wonder why I would rather make a ten block round trip and buy food or get it from a dumpster and skip most feedings. And as for food. We are tired of peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, and crackers, and sweet treats whose expiration dates are months if not years ago. The homeless are not a living garbage disposal for expired food. We want to and NEED to eat the same quality food those providing food for us would serve their families. So yes, you are NOT enabling us to stay in the street by giving us some pizza or chili, or any other real meal–that one meal did not keep us from accessing services, but allowed us to survive another night and showed us you really care about us to the point that now you have our attention. It is just like at Wheeler Mission Ministries. They feed us a meal first. And give us a place to sleep. In between those two acts of taking care of our basic needs (Maslow’s Hierarchy), they show us they care about us and preach the Word to us and talk to us before shower time, and over time that will reach most people. Then when they have our attention the case manager asks us what do we need, what is our plan out of homelessness, if we even have a plan, and how can they help us achieve that plan. THAT IS THE GOAL OF ALL OUTREACH–GET PEOPLE CONNECTED TO THE SERVICES THEY NEED TO ACCOMPLISH WHAT THEY WANT/NEED. If you are in outreach for any other purpose than to help someone get out of the street, then get out of the outreach now. We will figure out your reason is not in line with our needs and you will fail.  Most of us are not interested in helping other people feel good about themselves, that they did something for the homeless, such as by accepting a PBJ sandwich and water.

 

Sixth, it seems to me that this idea that if you refuse to provide people their needs they will come running in to you to get what they need. There are some people who will do that. They are the ones living off the system and will do whatever you say to get what they want so they do not have to do anything. Along with this group are those who feel entitled to be supplied by you with everything they want without personally having to DO anything but hold out their hand for you to fill. But these are only two groups among the homeless.

I think this idea is a lot like bad parenting. Most of us will only access the people/programs who show they care and will listen to what we want or need. Outreach shows they care by feeding us (just give me another can of Vienna sausage–you better duck fast when I throw it upside your head to open the crappy things, or provide me some hot sauce or salad dressing to cover their taste. Same goes with peanut-butter sandwiches, and peanut-butter crackers). I know I have just hurt some feelings or annoyed greatly some of you–especially churches feeding, or worse, you are thinking, and I have been told this when turning down food I did not like, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” I am not begging from you. I do not need your food or water. There are many others, though, not as resourceful as me and who do not have any support system as I do who absolutely NEED the food and they will be nicer about the same old things being served. There are feedings I will never go back to because I feel they feed to make themselves feel good or they do not feed anything worth eating. It is all about survival, and as such, each person does what he or she thinks is best to survive. We need feedings and soup kitchens as the elders call them. But we also need outreach persons and organizations to get the word out about services and help us connect to services. There are still some people, especially ones new to homelessness, who do not know what is available or do not know how to access it. If this philosophy REALLY WORKED, then all the agencies should cut off the food stamps of EVERYONE in the country because you are enabling them to survive without working. But then you very same case managers who think my food should be cut off so I will come in to get services from you would harp about all the unwed mothers and how they and their bastard children need to eat and it would be inhumane to risk them starving to death because they are going through troublesome times not of their own doing. No, I am not child hateful or advocating this be done. I am using an example of one kind of feeding you support and saying IT IS THE SAME THING as feeding the homeless. Refusing to feed me or give me clothes or a blanket WILL NEVER MAKE ME COME IN FOR SERVICES. And refusing to help me with the basic needs every human is entitled to have means I WILL NEVER,  REPEAT,  NEVER,  COME IN FOR SERVICES FROM YOUR ORGANIZATION. You do not want to help or serve me except by your terms, you are now the enemy. And as a survivalist what will I then do? I will badmouth your organization for lack of caring and competence and I will not stop being inimical till your organization is as DEAD as you obviously want me to be. Tough words? Extreme words? Exactly. If that is what I need to get through to people then that is what I will use.

 

Seventh, and maybe most importantly, we will be homeless whether you outreach to us or not, whether you provide the supplies of food, clothes, and other things needed for survival, whether you care or not, and whether you like it or not. And in SURVIVING we will each do the best we can. If I eat a meal at a church, or eat at the Pourhouse feedings, I do not feel I have been enabled. In fact some feedings you support, some you do not. Support all feedings. They are necessary and important. If our basic needs cannot be met most of us would rather die in the street than come in and kiss certain service provider body parts. ENABLING US, YES. IS THIS KEEPING US OUT IN THE STREET? NO. (Except for that small group that will remain homeless for various personal reasons no matter what you do.) .

 

Last, as for me personally, since I have family, lodge, and church commitments, have hobbies, have service businesses which I can do even while homeless (been self-employed on a small scale for 25 years), have a church family and have never left society (although I do fit the label “chronically homeless”), I may seem to be too comfortable and not want to leave the street. But I do want to leave the street and live in my own place again. The help I need is getting sufficient gainful employment and how to get employed these days when almost all jobs I got hired at were because I knew the manager who offered me a job. HIP has a game-plan for me in this regard and today Horizon House made a good suggestion that may prove helpful to me–going through Opportunity Knocks again. Genealogy is my drug along with playing the online games Runescape and Mahjongg. While I would be doing these things daily anyway, if I were employed I would be working not online 12 hours a day. And in taking care of myself I would be better able to help someone else. I will always be an advocate and also outreach in my own small way, not by going to camps or other places, but by telling those whom I see in the course of my day about the services that are available to aid one out of homelessness, poverty, hunger, and unemployment. I cannot walk past someone I can help and not try. From working with all of you on the Blueprint 2, I know you understand and agree for that is why you are in the various service businesses you are in. I want to encourage the co-operation between us all as together we can accomplish more. But I also want to encourage knowledge. I did not know some of your agencies actually existed, or in some cases had heard of them but did not know what you do, or the persons you help. By working beside all of you and making my small contributions, I have gained much knowledge, of who is out there, what is effective, organizations I never knew existed that I can add to the lists of those I know to recommend persons to, best procedures and the like that make my personal “outreach” more effective, which makes me a happier person, for I love to help people. I surround myself with people who fill the role of brother, sister (I am an only child of parents who are deceased), friend. Those amongst that group of “family” who are homeless share food and resources so we as a group are better off than we would be trying to make it individually. That is the kind of person I am housed/unhoused, employed/unemployed, etc. I have family, be they legally related or not, blood or not. I will survive and this is just for a time. But I need help sometimes to change my situation and asking for that help is difficult as I should be the Helper, not the one helped

 

If you have read this far, Thank you for your time and caring. I do not want outreach to stop nor feedings to stop nor greatly annoy our underpaid over-worked case-managers. I want them to understand several sides of this “enabling” issue from those of us whom you think are being “enabled” by the things we are given to survive.

 

Sincerely,

 

Michael V. Schwing