Many indigent refugees to lose federal assistance, By Robert Pear, July 31, 2010, New York Times: “The Social Security Administration is about to terminate cash assistance for thousands of indigent refugees who are severely disabled or over the age of 64. ‘You will lose your Supplemental Security Income on Oct. 1,’ the agency says in letters being mailed to more than 3,800 refugees. All fled persecution or torture. Many are too old or infirm to work and are not yet eligible to become United States citizens. Federal law sets a seven-year limit on payments to refugees. The maximum federal payment is $674 a month for an individual and $1,011 a month for a couple. In 2008, Congress provided a two-year extension of benefits for elderly and disabled refugees, asylum seekers and certain other humanitarian immigrants, including victims of sex trafficking. The extra eligibility period is now ending, and Congress has not taken action to extend it…”
Day: August 3, 2010
Chronic Homelessness and Housing First
- Homes for the hardest of the hard-core homeless, By Christopher Goffard, August 1, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “The searchers carved skid row into quadrants and advanced in small groups, aiming flashlights into the cold. They moved between nylon tents and cardboard lean-tos in the Toy District, where junkies had stripped the streetlights and left whole blocks in darkness. They roused the human bundles scattered around the tumbledown hotels and freshly painted lofts on Main Street, wasted faces blinking into their flashlights. They looked in the eastern section called the Bottoms, around the big missions and flea traps, and around the neighborhood’s forbidding eastern edge, a zone of industrial warehouses and razor wire known as the Low Bottoms, where even now, hours before daylight, the crack trade was brisk. The searchers, a couple dozen volunteers and Los Angeles County workers, had orders: Interview everyone living on these streets. Find out how long they’ve been homeless. Ask about their addictions, their mental and physical health…”
- Dogged efforts hit stubborn patterns of homelessness, By Christopher Goffard, August 3, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “Bobby Livingston couldn’t sleep. The indoor quiet was unnerving, the softness of his mattress all wrong. For weeks after moving into Room 216 at the Senator Hotel, he found comfort only on a hard tile floor that felt reassuringly like the pavement. Horses and dogs flitted across the ceiling of his room, but he described the visions as familiar and untroubling, like the voices in his head. Sometimes the dead visited him full-bodied – long-gone family from the red clay roads of South Carolina – and he asked Jesus why he wasn’t yet among them. To rescue the 50 people deemed most likely to die on the streets in skid row, Los Angeles County had a pragmatic plan: Give them an apartment and all the help they’d accept, requiring little in return – not sobriety, not meetings, not psychiatric drugs. Livingston and a handful of others posed the most extreme test of Project 50’s premise. Merely living among others, with a modicum of structure and social rules, was proving a steep demand, considering what accompanied the hardest cases indoors: untreated mental illness and ferociously solitary habits formed by decades in the city’s dope dens…”
Poverty and Brain Development
Growing up poor can affect brain development, By Mark Roth, August 1, 2010, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “A classic public service ad showed a man holding an egg and saying, ‘This is your brain,’ and then dropping its contents into a sizzling frying pan and saying, ‘This is your brain on drugs.’ Today, it may be time to come up with an image for an even more damaging social time bomb: ‘This is your brain on poverty.’ Studies emerging from around the nation are showing that growing up in a low-income household can have a direct impact on the organization and function of the brain. Living in a poor home has been linked to people having trouble forming memories, difficulty focusing attention, hypersensitivity to stress, problems with delaying gratification and even being stifled in overall intelligence. In the midst of these gloomy reports, however, is a silver lining: It appears that if parents can provide warm, consistent nurturing, they can counteract many of the effects of too little money, too little food and too little safety — the ingredients that often make up an impoverished childhood. But doing that is a challenge…”