Dear Mayor Ramsey,
cc: candidate Zwank,

At your "State of the City" address last month, you mentioned an interest in setting up an Affordable Housing Task Force. We applaud that initiative.

This February is designated "Housing Retention And Eviction Prevention Month" by a large group of Dane County clergy and religious leaders. We applaud this initiative, as well. (Contact Steven Schooler, THI Executive Director at 250-0380, for more on this second citywide initiative.) We are encouraged by both developments because homelessness, or the threat of it, is something we deal with every day here at Middleton Outreach Ministry.

All the mayoral candidates, at least in Madison, are staking out positions on homelessness and affordable housing. We challenge the two Middleton mayoral candidates to match their zeal. We hope you both, Dan Ramsey and Doug Zwank, would address this issue at the breakfast forum already set up by the Middleton Optimists for Wednesday, February 12, 7:00am at the Village Green. We invite your response to the following observations, and we ask what Middleton is prepared to do about this growing problem.

With the costs of housing, food, childcare, healthcare and education continually on the increase, and living wage jobs harder to find-many low-income families are just an illness, an accident, or a payless payday away from being homeless.

Tragically, children are the ones who suffer the most. Nationally, 40% of the people living in poverty are children. Indeed, the poverty rate for children is significantly higher than the poverty rate for any other age group. Major metropolitan areas throughout the USA are seeing more families come into shelters than singles, in recent years, according to a TIME magazine survey (January 20, 2003). And, shockingly, the number of children living in poverty in families with a fulltime worker rose in 2000.

At MOM, homeless families outnumber homeless singles, four to one. And we see or hear from fifty families a week.

Poverty-caused by eroding employment opportunities and the declining value and availability of public assistance-contributes to homeless. Declining or stagnant wages have put housing out of reach for many working families. In 2000, one out of every four 4 homeless are employed. Decreasing welfare caseloads do not mean that people are better off financially. It means simply that fewer people are receiving benefits.

Only a small fraction of former welfare recipients are in jobs that pay above poverty-level wages. As for the others, they must make difficult choices between eating that day or paying rent,… between fixing a car needed for work or paying the rent,… buying taking their meds or paying the rent.

Fortunately, there is subsidized housing. However, that is very limited. Fewer than one in four families receiving TANF benefits live in public housing or receive a housing voucher. Both Dane County and the City of Madison have stopped accepting applications for their Section 8 programs.

Why?

Because the waiting lists are too long. Long waiting lists mean families must remain in shelters or inadequate housing longer. Families "double-up," living in dwellings built for only one family. Others live in substandard housing or borrow from Peter to Paul for as long as they can. Is there any wonder why families become homeless or are at risk of homelessness?

What should be done?

Obviously, there must be more affordable housing for people at the low end of the income scale. However, most government money goes to people in the upper fifth. That's because the largest federal housing assistance program is the mortgage interest deduction on your federal income tax. For every dollar spent on low-income housing, the federal treasury loses four dollars to housing-related deductions. The county, the city and faith communities can and should and must do better.

The Mayor's Task Force on Affordable Housing is one place to start. So are the donations that churches and businesses and individuals make to MOM so that we can help families retain housing.

The other day here at MOM, a young mother of three came asking for help. She had recently lost her apartment because her hours of employment were cut. She had been unable to pay her rent and moved out before she was evicted. She had used what money she had to pay a friend and live with her. When her friend's landlord had discovered they were "doubling-up," he threatened her friend with eviction.

What could she do? And how could we help?

Fortunately, she had just begun another job by the time we saw her, so MOM put her up for two nights at a local motel until first pay check arrived and she found another friend to stay with. Still, this mom and two kids had no place of their own to live. Motel vouchers cost $45-60 a night or almost $1400-1800 a month.

Those same funds put into housing subsidies to prevent eviction would have so much more cost effective. But this woman had no time to debate social policy; she and her kids were staring homeless in the face.

In addition to working a job, in addition to getting her children back and forth to school, in addition to finding food for everyone, in addition to searching for an apartment, in addition to not letting the anxiety kill her-she conducted a citywide search for the money to make up what she couldn't afford of the security deposit and the first month's rent.

This inspired woman was driven by the fear of homelessness. She got lucky and hit BINGO: Five different sources of money-a county agency, a church, a relative, her employer, and MOM-all necessary to get into the apartment she found.

This month-long effort is not unusual; it's the norm. For many, it takes up to 90 days of shelter. Which is why the Salvation Army has changed it policy to allow for longer stays, when deemed necessary and to reward good faith efforts.

Where are the good faith efforts that the city of Middleton is willing to make?

Sincerely,

Craig Waggoner and Dietrich Gruen,
Housing counselors at MOM

© 2003 Middleton Outreach Ministry

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