Oregon: If working people can’t afford to stay in the housing, it’s not affordable housing

September 27, 2024 by Leave a Comment

Martha Rosler, Housing Is a Human Right, short animation produced by The Public Art Fund, “Messages to the Public,” 1989

What exactly is affordable housing? There’s much discussion these days, and finally, concerning an affordable housing crisis, the lack of affordable housing, the vast and growing numbers of households, families, individuals and communities living and struggling with housing insecurity, paying more than 30% of monthly income on household expenses and/or expecting to be evicted or foreclosed on within the next two months. So, what does affordability actually mean? This question came roaring to the surface in a new study, Eviction in Oregon’s Subsidized Affordable Housing, which looked at eviction filings and evictions from January 2019 to December 2023. On one hand, eviction filings against residents of subsidized affordable housing made up a relatively small fraction of all eviction filings in Oregon. However, once the eviction case was filed, subsidized tenants were more likely to get an eviction judgment. The vast majority of these filings were for non-payment. The vast majority of non- or late payment was because, simply, the tenants, the residents of supposedly affordable housing, could no longer afford the affordable housing. As a concept, policy, and lived reality, what then is affordable housing?

As in most areas, the majority of evictions are filed by a small number of entities. In this instance, as in so many other places, third-party corporate management companies were responsible for a disproportionate number of evictions. As noted in the report, “The difference in eviction filing patterns between third-party managers and internal managers … can be attributed to variations in their lease enforcement strategies …. While third-party managers commonly operate under compliance-oriented lease enforcement policies similar to the private sector, internal managers from the housing authority tend to adopt strategies designed to promote housing stability among low-income households.” In other words, internal managers, managers committed to affordable housing rather than profit, create leases, policies and practices that recognize various difficulties residents might encounter and find or create financial and social services to support those residents.

For many, once the filing occurs, the damage is done. Many algorithms used by landlords, and especially corporate landlords, don’t differentiate between eviction filing and eviction, and so, irrespective of the court’s decision, having an eviction filed can have long-lasting catastrophic impact. Securing “affordable housing” shouldn’t condemn a person and family to a lifetime of trauma.

The word “afford” originally meant to promote the well-being of a person or thing. Affordable meant that which enhanced and promote a person’s well-being. At some point, affordable shifted to mean that which one could reasonably purchase. What if affordable housing meant the enhancement and promotion of people’s and individual’s well-being? At the very least, publicly supported and subsidized affordable housing should be based on the value of dignity and well-being. If working people can’t afford to stay in the housing, it’s not affordable housing.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Martha Rosler / Housing Is a Human Right, March 1989)

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Madaline Christine Pitkin died in agony, screaming and begging for care

April 13, 2016 by 12 Comments

Madaline Christine Pitkin

On April 24, 2014, Madaline Christine Pitkin was found on the floor of her solitary confinement cell in the Washington County Jail, in Oregon: “Her body lay on the cell floor. Her eyes were open. Her mouth moved slightly as if she had to cough, while one of her arms twitched. A brown fluid pooled beneath her.” Women’s bodies keep being “found” in jails across the United States: Sandra Bland, Kindra Chapman, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, Joyce Curnell, Kellsie Green, Natasha McKenna, Christina Tahhahwah. This is only a partial list of women who were “found” dead in jails across the United States in the past year. From sea to shining sea, women’s corpses pile up in jails, as they have been. Madaline Christine Pitkin is just another piece of the rising tide of collateral damage flotsam. #SayHerName … and then move on.

Two years after her death, Madaline Christine Pitkin’s story finally has come to something like light. Like so many, she ended up in jail on a drug charge. In jail, she entered into a detox “program,” which is to say no program whatsoever. She began to suffer from withdrawal symptoms. For seven days, her situation deteriorated visibly and rapidly. On four separate occasions, she sought and filled out forms asking for help to control withdrawal symptoms. The fourth form, filled out the day before she died, read, “This is a 3rd or 4th call for help. I haven’t been able to keep food, liquids, meds down in 6 days … I feel like I am very close to death. Can’t hear, seeing lights, hearing voices. Please help me.” No one ever came to help.

From beginning to end, everything about the treatment of Madaline Christine Pitkin is shrouded in fog. Details were left out of the official story; stories of jail staff and medical staff differ; everything that was done, after Pitkins’ death, was done at a snail’s pace. But this much, from the beginning to now, is clear. There were no “serious breakdowns in the way Pitkin received medical treatment inside the jail.” The State set up a system in which there was “scant accountability” for those assigned to care for women in the jail. Madaline Christine Pitkin said, more than once, that she felt she was dying, and the so-called medical staff shrugged their shoulders and never came to help. That’s not an omission. That’s the plan, and it worked.

Madaline Pitkin was 26 years old when she “passed away unexpectedly.”

 

(Photo Credit: Krystina Wentz-Graff / The Oregonian)

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From Connecticut to Oregon, women fight for domestic workers’ rights and power

May 31, 2015 by Leave a Comment


Across the United States, women are organizing for domestic workers’ rights and power. According to the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance, in the next week, the Illinois Domestic Workers Bill of Rights will hit the Illinois State Senate; the Connecticut Domestic Workers’ Bill will go to the Connecticut House of Representatives; and the Oregon Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights will arrive on the floor of the Oregon State House of Representatives. From sea to shining sea, domestic workers – maids, nannies, and home health care providers – are on the move and winning previously thought impossible battles. Women, overwhelming women of color and largely immigrant women, are transforming a subterranean network into an Overground Railroad of emancipation and enfranchisement. Connecticut, Illinois, and Oregon are stations on that system.

In so doing, women are re-writing history. While every labor victory rewrites history, these particular struggles involve not only State and Civil, or uncivil, Society disrespect and marginalization. They involve the words and texts of law. In Connecticut, for example, domestic workers’ struggle for dignity, rights, power, and better working conditions is aimed at re-writing the State definition of “employer.” Under Connecticut law, “employee” is defined as “any person employed by an employer but shall not include any individual employed by such individual’s parents, spouse or child; or in the domestic service of any person.” The Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights eliminates the last clause: “or in the domestic service of any person.”

On Friday night, the Connecticut Senate passed the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Domestic workers – such as Natalicia Tracy, Iame Manucci, Maria Lima and Nina Siqueira – danced and shouted from the gallery, as the final vote was tallied. But they understand that this is the next step. Not only must the House of Representatives pass the Bill, but domestic workers must then militate further to be included in the State’s minimum wage law. That protection is not guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.

In Illinois and Oregon, it’s the same. Domestic workers are pushing to do much more thatn “come out of the shadows.” They have never been “shadow workers”. They have always been women workers on the move, and now the move has risen and expanded to the next stage.

The exclusion of domestic workers from labor law emerges from the explicitly racist foundations of slavery and Jim Crow. Domestic workers writing and promulgating Domestic Worker Bills of Rights participate in an ongoing Black and Brown Workers’ Liberation Movement. Within and beyond #BlackWomensLivesMatter and #SayHerName, domestic workers are pushing and expanding the terrain of emancipatory struggle. A luta continua! The struggle continues!

(Photo credit: Mark Pazniokas / Connecticut Mirror)

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