No Comebacks | Will Stenberg

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The Streets Are Ours

The new American dream is the dream of the immigrant. It’s about what you been through to stay where you’re at.

—Adrian Davila

I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
—John Steinbeck

A recent study conducted by Ramsey Solutions revealed 36% of Americans have no savings and 19% have less than $1,000 saved. The National Low Income Housing Coalition found that, making minimum wage, I'd have to work 147 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Austin. Other than seasonal and routine maintenance, my place hasn’t been updated and remains in dire need of an exterminator since I moved in almost five years ago. My landlord quotes the market when justifying the yearly rent increase. I’m paying for my apartment’s location. Location is, in other words, the cost of “staying in place” as Davila put it. And that’s just rent.
These studies affirm a reality that any disillusioned working person lives with every day in this country. There isn’t much difference between your writer and anyone out there—on the nickel or row and otherwise only making it to the finish line of bills paid and broke again. Motivation can run low and morale haggard. Pointless as it is though, the fall is steep and the fear is real. It’s no way to live and besides, our shortcomings are internalized and harbored in shame. Never having or being enough is baked into capitalism. If we aren’t the masters of our domain it’s our own fault somehow. We’re deemed useless and without dignity if we’re not “contributing to society—,” on top of the intensely corporeal and demeaning /business of surviving what human rights advocate Henry Rollins called “The America.”

-The right to use public spaces without fear of discrimination or harassment by law enforcement.

-The right to vote on legislation.

-The right to non-obstructively seek shelter, social services, legal aid, and education.

-The right to privacy of property in public spaces.
—Homeless Bill Of Rights

I loaded up my 2009 Honda Element and rode out to the Esperanza Community on Wednesday, to see how things fared for the unhoused folks in the care of The Other Ones Foundation. I suspected there wasn’t much difference between me and anyone on the wrong end of capitalism. I bit down on a bagel in my 14-year-old car, chewing on the left side of my mouth to stave off the cracking of a crown and its inevitable replacement or tooth removal that’d run me anywhere between three hundred and three thousand dollars. “The State of Personal Finance in America” and studies like it aren’t wrong. I’m an auto repair or dental procedure from destitute at all times, and must roll the dice in hopes my health holds out, or else go into debt and fall behind, and it’s a long way down.
Camp Esperanza, with its 200 individual and noncongregate, climate-controlled structures (communal bathrooms and showers separate) was clean and warm. Good thing, too, with temperatures dropping as low as 39º in Austin on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2023. At first glance TOOF’S provisional village is worlds apart from the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH)—with its stale-acrid smell and soaking-wet communal bathrooms. Ultimately I was happy to find exactly what I came for, community, right there and under pavilion two—with coffee, a to-go counter, heat and WiFi.

You want the truth or a lot?
—Red

“Cold out here. Mind if I share your sun?”
Red offered me a chair. He was suited up for the worst—in work overalls, hoodie and knit cap. The lines of his face are strong, as if carved by hard-living and made fine by the wind. Red looked like a stone mason to me, or any laborer you might encounter out there working in the world; but his movements are furtive and guarded, a street-stance I know well and hold myself most of the time. He held court with an unlit Swisher Sweet, occasionally yanking the leash of Charlie Brown, his mastiff-shepherd mix and congenial and earthy-brown sidekick. This was community, the connective-tissue of society, integral and increasingly hard to find in the vanishing American city.

Coffee with Red bore a strong resemblance to hangs at a local coffee stop I frequented on my first days of living in the big city of Philadelphia at the end of the 20th century. I could get picked up there and taken for a day of labor or painting houses. One could find moving help and a home for bulky items too good to throw away. Moms came through for bagels before continuing on their way to work or their kids’ school. For Eddie, the resident schizophrenic, coffee was on the house. We could connect and help each other, with word or favor, and we all met in real time with some seated outside the circle at tables on the fringe, heads buried in a crossword or in this case this morning, their phone. In community we are held and held up, not watched or “made to.” In community we can be perfectly alone together, each member dignified and independent, and the body as a whole moving toward a fulfilled life with meaning, without anyone or anything rushing us on, prying or persuading us. Without anyone trying to kill us.
Absent from Camp Esperanza is the rank authoritarianism and general menace that hangs over life and living at the ARCH. Besides shelter, coffee and WiFi is an abundance of space. Absent here is the foreboding isolation of the city. The sense of togetherness is seemingly inversely proportional to home-size, as the tiny homes here are 22 times smaller than the average house in Austin. But even if you can afford $370 square foot to live in Austin, you must first scale the barriers of finding verifiable employment and have a good credit score or, when renting, make three times your rent per month.
Once in walls it’s on you to find health coverage, resources and services that support your mental health, prescriptions, and transportation (and at least internet access) to get to work, doctor’s appointments and prescriptions filled. With these needs met you’ll have to cough up anywhere from $3-500 for utilities, including said internet and phone coverage.

There’s blood on the streets,
the streets are ours…
—Warriors, The Blitz

“What’s the one thing you need?” I asked Red.
“A job,” he demurred, perhaps still wondering if he could trust me.
Lisa, an older Latina, appeared in a white tracksuit and sneakers, her hair high and tight, and opened the to-go counter. I watched as she set up the fruit and yogurt trays, wiped the counters and doors and made ready stacks of yesterday’s lunch for breakfast this morning. (Brisket-beans-mac & cheese and applesauce). Hippie came through. Red advising me.
“That’s who you wanna talk ta.”
We sat in the warm sun on a brisk morning, with other residents outlying the perimeter, drinking coffee and staring at their phones or listening to The History Of China. Every one of these folks is a living story. The turns their life took that left them unhoused and isolated in the freest country in the world (and ranked 27th or 8th by the Human Development Index and inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, respectively) are perhaps a chapter in the book of humanity’s shame. But none of them showed any sign of it. These folks are our heritage sure but also our future, and securers of a new American reality. In the words Executive Director Chris Baker these are my people and besides that the torchbearers and progenitors of the new American dream.
I hit a wage ceiling of $25 an hour, working privately for clients who can and do end my employment with them, unceremoniously and without recompense. My healthcare premiums ring up to a couple hundred dollars a month, but going without coverage isn’t an option. The average cost for the generic brand of life-saving medication I need to treat my ulcerative colitis is $171.24 for 30 1.2GM tablets—a month’s worth. This last summer I kept my rent paid, my car insured and internet access, albeit blinkering; critical for a writer. (Internet access has become increasingly integral if not encroaching on life and living, and needed for everything from maintaining contact to a news and entertainment source). Then I got derailed, I lost 3 gigs in as many months and fell behind on rent. I’m back on top, that is solvent and healthy knock wood but, besides being terrifying, the dismal longview of just getting by to just keep getting by feels pointless and God help me if I can’t because no one else will.

Other versions are plentiful. In one, the children are led, not into the mountain, but around it and into Transylvania, where they establish a German colony.
—The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace

Red’s hard face, and his direct and piercing gaze reminded me of the river man in Hesse’s Siddhartha. It’s comforting to know Red’s here and that he and others like him will be. This community, community simply being more of us than one, will be holding court and getting by in a camp called Hope, bracing themselves for the day with ritual and conversation or none at all. Be good to get in the weeds with all of them and talk that ish with Red about turning 50 as an unhoused black man in Texas at the bitter end of the American Century. He has his complaints, I was made well aware. It’s not on me to address or repeat them but instead revel in the fact that I can get the word, on the street as it were, straight from the mouth of disenfranchisement so grossly untold by well-meaning white liberals and on NPR. Lisa and Lori, too—who’s been here from the beginning, and had to sleep in truck bays when the city of Austin made it illegal to lay on the ground (rather than inconvenience the citizens of Austin with the sight of her and others like her). Camp Esperanza is a place to hang, sheltered from the elements, with food to eat and a job to do.

The situation here is hardly sad, though the conditions that necessitate its existence are oppressive. It’s a mark on humanity but a note of success for society. What’s happening at Camp Esperanza is the way out, and profoundly I’ve found lead and a positive redirection at The Other Ones Foundation—from its staff, residents and clients alike. The org and its residents and clients are a village and a collective, forging the new American way, providing healthcare and support, case management and an opportunity to make a better wage to each member of the community. Most importantly bestowing them a sense of community and dignity that every human being needs and deserves. The Homeless Bill Of Rights is looking better and better in light of the decline of living standards and disappearing social net in this country. Our own lives are at stake and addressing the problem as such through non-profits like TOOF ensures we’ll do it together and side-by-side. Camp Esperanza is the new American dream—a place to help and get help and to simply and respectfully be together. If that ain’t hope it’ll do until hope gets here.

The Bus Came By And I Got On

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
—Audre Lorde

The architects of the Reagan Revolution weren’t thinking of the working poor. The promises they made were to corporations and the obscenely rich. With the passing of the Citizens United decision in 2010, they were soon rich themselves. The tragic outcome of their agenda was a whittling away of decades of progress, and an erosion of the public good to a husk.

The 23 years of Republican governorship in Texas followed suit. In the years between Bush in ‘95 and Texas’ current governor the median home price has quadrupled while minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009. Governor Abbott, who’d proudly ran in opposition to the Affordable Care Act, was four years into his first term in the fall of 2018. It was a brutish time for working people but there was a fight in the air.
The political backlash to Republican ascendancy provided a glimmer of hope. The 2018 midterms saw the highest voter turnout since 1914. In Austin there was talk of ending a 35-year camping ban. Mayor Adler was sympathetic and pushed for a redevelopment of Austin’s land zoning codes. The city implemented a new-and-improved plan to end homelessness that summer. Discussion of “the homeless problem” was elevated and informed.
The city and Abbott would step up and work together for the common good,

in an unlikely partnership pioneered by a visionary named Chris Baker, that would change the trial-by-error Homeless Response System and countless lives for the better. But in the fall of ‘18 Texas was underwater.

What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff---I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
—J.D. Salinger

The city was flooding.
“It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained.”
Chris Baker tells me about the launch of The Other Ones Foundation’s Workforce First pilot in the rain-soaked fall of 2018. The Other Ones Foundation, or TOOF, grew out of the kernel of an idea of dignity on a tour bus, and its Workforce First program was how it all started. To launch the program, Baker enacted a vision of loving kindness and “radical kinship,” a precursor to a people-first approach to ending homelessness. This was the beginning of a couple years he spent out in the street and field with the working poor.
He was suffering insurmountable grief from the loss of his mother and best friend and relapsed into addiction. He’d lost his mother, “the person who was the most important to me in my life.” He was 100 pounds overweight. He was an alcoholic and an addict, a “disaster” and on the verge of losing his wife Liz and their family if he couldn’t pull it together. It was the last of many wakeup calls for Baker.
“After my mom died, I spiraled out of control. I was a disaster. Slowly but surely, things got better, and going into [TOOF] starting in 2018 was [a] breaking through on the other side of all that.”
Losing his mother devastated Baker. He’d try to end his life. He couldn’t continue living the way he was, but he didn’t want to die—and he didn’t want to live without Liz. Crucially he couldn’t reconcile what his life had become with what his mom always told him and he knew to be true.
“I felt that I was a disappointment. The person who was the most important to me in my life died. I had to walk away with the thought that I owe the world more than I’m giving it.”
So, loaded up with gallons of coffee, cartons of Pell Mell, buckets of socks, Walmart brand snack cakes and water, first aid, reams of notebooks and crucially therein copies of the Mobile Micro Shelter Canvas Questionnaire…he’d make his way to campsites and street corners, anywhere he could find someone in need.

The socks prevented infection. The medical supplies salved bee stings and injury. The information he collected from the people he met would help him forge a compassionate solution for Austin’s working poor; and shake up an entrenched and bureaucratic Homeless Response System. The cigarettes, as any smoker knows, are a universal token of kindness.

He smoked himself, 3 packs of Marlboro Reds a day as he trudged through marshing greenbelts and office building nooks. Stalking the “dark fields of the republic” in a silver 2014 Honda Odyssey, listening to Todd Snider, Townes Van Zandt and classic hip hop. He would talk to the working poor. Feed and smoke them, ask them what they needed and listen to what they had to say.
He hit rock bottom but he was making his way back. He fell forward through his grief. He was suicidal, an alcoholic and an addict with an eating disorder, but he was working. The Other Ones Foundation would be formed that fall. Its plan and vision hatched in those frustrating and active years of trying to catch anyone that fell. The plans for TOOF he made, while working as an aide at Austin’s Safe Haven, the idea of finding shelter and taking refuge on a tour bus and its name taken from a song by The Grateful Dead were working. The Other Ones Foundation was formed that fall.

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