August 5, 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
Are We Making Any Progress?
It’s been a strange week. If you believe in global warming there is circumstantial evidence that sadly you may be right as a continuing drought and high temperatures in the west dry up Lake Mead and foster more than thirty fires that have now burned millions of acres this summer. In Eastern Kentucky where some of the poorest counties in America are located devastating floods have washed away much of many communities and more than thirty people have been lost. This last week in the northeast had been tolerable until midweek, but by week’s end, the region is sweltering under temps that register in the high nineties but feel even hotter. For many Americans, it’s been a summer of shock and awe from mother nature.
Despite our continuing weather worries, this week there were a few positive developments that need comment. These developments need mentioning since they occur against the background of all the worldwide disappointments of COVID that won’t go away, a crazy unjust war in Ukraine, and continuing evidence of global warming while at home we are a nation that is riven by issues that seem to have no possibility of resolution: abortion, gun violence, racism, fossil fuel addiction, and structural inequality that dooms millions to a marginal existence and compromised health. So what gives me some reason to hope?
Three things on the domestic front seem hopeful to me. Beginning with the most mundane development, the cost of gasoline is down about eighty-five cents a gallon in my neighborhood and still falling! I hope that translates into lower-than-expected heating costs this winter because I know of many families that will find it very hard to stay warm if the price of fuel is high.
Next, I was surprised and relieved that Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer were able to negotiate a bill that contained some of the positive changes that were originally in President Biden’s Build Back Better Bill. The agreement is about 20% of the original idea (700 billion v. 3.5 trillion) and many of the very positive programs are missing, but it’s a good bill that will fight global warming and help maintain access to healthcare through the ACA. Manchin got some protections for coal and a pathway out of coal dependence for his state. It is a breakthrough compromise that will help us all and may indicate that all is not lost for Democrats in the November mid-term elections. I don’t care that they changed the name to “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” After Manchin was onboard all that was needed for passage without the help of Republicans was for Kyrsten Sinema to say yes, and yesterday evening she said that she would support the bill! The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) topped off the optimism by reporting that the bill will reduce the deficit by almost 300 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The final positive event that gives me some hope was the amazing vote in Kansas that preserves the state’s constitutional right to abortion in that very “red state” by an amazingly large margin with 59% voting to protect abortion against the will of the Republican majority state legislature and governor! What does that suggest about the midterm elections in November? Each passing week reveals more evidence of the trouble our skewed Supreme Court has wrought on us all with its political decision that forces its out-of-date concepts of states’ rights and morality on a majority of Americans with a more progressive view of personal freedom.
The war in Ukraine rages on but there have been some possible signs that the Russians may be stretched thin and are not making much progress in the east. There is reason to be cautiously optimistic about the agreement to allow Ukrainian grain to flow to the places in the middle east and the horn of Africa where millions are on the brink of starvation. These developments are far from evidence that there is any likelihood of an end to the conflict in the near future, but they do represent developments that suggest it is not crazy to hope that in time “this too shall pass.” Maybe my change in mood is unfounded and is just an illusion created by being down so long that small positives look monumental.
What frustrates me the most is the pain and suffering that so many people endure that is unnecessary. I shake my head in frustration when I think about the great economic evils that persist that we could abolish while simultaneously doing no significant damage to anyone who has a lot of money and helping everyone who does not have enough escape health-destroying poverty. I hope that the little baby steps forward that I have tried to imagine this week will be followed by many huge giant steps of radical change. What makes the situation so frustrating is that poverty does not have to exist.
You may counter that assertion with scripture. Did not Jesus say, “The poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11). One commentary points out that his comments are lifted out of context, and he was referencing Hebrew scripture that his audience would have known:
“There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” —Deuteronomy 15:11
So, there is reason to argue that we should not accept that there always will be those in need. If nothing else we can make poverty the lowest level of “enough.” The most distressing thing about poverty is what it does to “the least of these…(Matthew 25;40)” and how our collective acceptance of poverty in our society injures all of us. One of the transformative events of my life was to go for the first time to the Offices of Health and Human Services in The Hubert Humphery Building in Washington to see Don Berwick when he was the Administrator of CMS as a recess appointment of President Obama. As I sat in a security area in the large lobby waiting to be escorted up to Don’s office I noticed a quote from Hubert Humphrey that was carved into one of the walls of that huge space.
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
The quote doesn’t contain the word poverty, but it describes many of those who suffer most from it: many children, the elderly, the sick, and the handicapped. Collectively they are the needy and they are usually impoverished.
Recently, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has published a lot about the connections between housing evictions, poverty, and health. I love their statement of purpose and objectives. I hope that you will click on the link and read them for yourself. In a recent publication that can be accessed through their website, they had a link to a recent Frontline Production on PBS about evictions. I would urge you to invest an hour to watch it.
If you do watch the Frontline program on evictions, you will hear Emily Benfer talking about evictions and the government’s bans on eviction during COVID that have now expired. She also discusses this subject on a C-Span production, Washington Journal. As I explored who she is, I discovered that she is now among her many other commitments working with Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond is now the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton where he leads the Eviction Lab where he “focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography.”
The Eviction Lab website deserves your inspection. It gives an impressive presentation of the most painful component of our inadequate housing. In a notice from Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, Ms. Benfer’s law school, I found a quote from Ms. Benfer that puts our housing crisis, healthcare injustices, and outcome inequalities associated with race into perspective.
Racial, housing and health justice are inseparable. The effects of our country’s sordid history of racially discriminatory laws and policies continue today and can be seen in disproportionate rates of housing loss among Black and Hispanic families and the lasting poor health outcomes it causes. Justice in any of these areas requires justice in all of them.
Emily Benfer, J.D.
Visiting Professor of Clinical Law, The George Washington University Law School; Visiting Research Collaborator, The Eviction Lab, Princeton University. Former Senior Policy Advisor at the White House, American Rescue Plan Implementation Team, and the Chair in absentia of the American Bar Association Task Force on Eviction, Housing Stability, and Equity.
Researchers like Desmond and advocates like Benfer leave nowhere for the rest of us to hide. Desmond outlined all the benefits of eliminating evictions with public policies in an opinion piece in the New York Times which was precipitated by the Supreme Court’s cancelation of the CDC’s moratorium on evictions in September 2021. In that piece he writes:
A study by researchers at Duke found that eviction-prevention policies reduced the pandemic death rate by 11 percent. If the federal eviction moratorium had been enacted at the start of the pandemic instead of several months into it, it could have lowered the death toll by even more.
Another study, published in July in The American Journal of Epidemiology, found that states that ended their own eviction moratoriums in the months before the federal moratorium went into effect (like Pennsylvania and Texas) experienced significantly higher mortality rates than states that did not (like Minnesota and New York). Nationally, this resulted in an estimated 433,700 excess Covid-19 cases and 10,700 excess deaths.
Evictions and a general lack of adequate housing are foundational barriers to the Triple Aim and the health of the nation. What makes this reality a social sin is that we could do better, and need to look no further than to Europe to see what better looks like. We need politicians who care about eliminating poverty and providing adequate housing for every person as much as we need doctors, nurses, public health professionals, and social workers who are challenged every day by a problem we could collectively solve.
In the “Upper Valley” where I live it is estimated by researchers at Dartmouth that we need an additional 10,000 units of housing by 2030. At the current rate of construction and persistent public resistance to housing projects, it won’t happen. NIMBY, not in my back yard, is an attitude that perpetuates needless suffering. The fear of crime and addiction is not well managed by seclusion and rejection. If we are ever going to have healthy, safe communities we are going to have to start with policies that make good housing available for every individual and family. The shame is that we could, but we don’t.
It is ironic that those who resist housing improvement don’t recognize that much of what worries them could be improved by better housing for the homeless. In a recent publication from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we read:
New research demonstrates that supportive housing interventions can lead to better results for individuals and communities, and is a better use of taxpayer dollars. Providing housing along with supportive services is key to preventing the homelessness-to-jail cycle and reduces:
- Hospital visits by 40%
- Arrests by 40%
- Police contact by 34%
Housing problems must be solved if we are ever going to improve the social determinants of health. Without a home, it is almost impossible to improve diets, improve education, improve employment, better manage mental health issues, and give children the start they need for a healthy life. In his 2016 book decrying public policies that create evictions, Desmond calculates the hundreds of billions of dollars of government support as tax relief that we give to middle-class housing through mortgage deductions, and he speculates about how much better we would all be with an equivalent investment in housing for the poor. If we want to end poverty and make progress toward equality and a greater and healthier America, we need to make adequate housing for everyone a political and moral priority.
A Week of Family Fun
My wife and I have just enjoyed a great week here in New Hampshire. The weather has been spectacular, but what has really made it great is that our West Coast family, our two grandsons ages just recently eight and almost five, were here for the first time since COVID. Their parents have both recently had COVID after my son picked it up on a business trip to Puerto Rico. It was a shame because they had been so careful over the last two and a half years and had not traveled on planes with the boys until the youngest one could get vaccinated. The youngest grandson was the first child under five to be vaccinated at the Scotts Valley Kaiser Medical Offices!
Today’s header was taken on a family hike which we enjoyed last Sunday. It is a picture of Lake Solitude which is in the crater of an old volcano on top of Mount Sunapee which is about ten miles from our home. We got to the top of the mountain the easy way. We rode up to the top of the mountain on the chairlift.
The views from the chairlift of Lake Sunapee are terrific, and on a clear day like we had last Sunday you can see all the way to the White Mountains and Mount Washington to the northeast, and to the northwest, you can see the Green Mountains of Vermont and Killington Peak. From the mountain top lodge at the end of the chairlift, there is a one-mile hike over to the White Cliffs above the lake which you can see if you clicked on the link to Lake Solitude.
The hike is not a simple walk in the woods for an old man with a bum leg. There is a little scrambling and use of your hands in a few steep places and lots of rocks and roots to dance between. The trail is a little more than class one and is easy for energetic children, but in a couple of places for an arthritic old man, it might rise to the level of a solid class two challenge.
Over the week my grandsons caught at least a hundred sunfish with worms, and they each caught a few fish with my fly rods. We spent a lot of time in the water and on the water. They enjoyed riding in our neighbor’s new “Supra” wake boat and when my son from Brooklyn came up on the weekend with a load of furniture to store in our garage as step one in a move to Portland, Maine, he and I took the kids for a great sail in my old sailboat. Both boys had a ball in the kayaks and in my old fishing boat. We did a lot including a trip to pick nine pounds of blueberries!
It’s tough to be so far apart from family for most of the year, but I guess it is sort of generational payback since I took my family out of the South to New England which for many years denied my parents easy access to my boys. It’s been a week of nice events. The only time we had a brief afternoon shower we were rewarded with a double rainbow.
The Concord Monitor published a nice front-page article this last Monday with pictures about the work of Kearsarge Neighborhood Partners. Summertime is just one nice thing after another. In less than two weeks my Miami family will pass through on the way to taking my granddaughter back to college. She will be a sophomore at Bowdoin and I can hardly wait until I get to see her first volleyball game of the season on September 7. I am going to have a busy fall going to volleyball games!
We are down to our last five summer weekends. I hope that you have exciting plans for every one of these weekends. I have high hopes for a summer-like fall.
Be well,
Gene
