I pulled out of a four-book editing contract and moved in with her.  I learned from a social worker that I could receive 20 hours a week of help from home health aides, as well as SNAP benefits and cash assistance to help compensate for my decreased work income.  It was enough for us to get by.

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About a month after I moved in with her, we returned from grocery shopping to find a state trooper standing outside of our front door. He handed me a court summons:  My sister had sued me for custody of our mother.  She wanted to place her in a care facility.

The court denied my sister’s request and named me our mother’s legal guardian, but it appointed my sister as guardian of her property.  In 2009, when my mother passed away, my sister evicted me.

The day I was scheduled to move out, I stood in a convenience store, dazed, as I stared at microwaveable meals.  These would be my new staple when I moved into the motel room.

My phone rang—my sister.  She told me she needed me out of the house in a couple of hours—she was a real estate agent and a client wanted to see the house.

“No hard feelings,” she said.

*            *            *

I was homeless for less than six weeks, a relatively short time compared to most.

The reason I fared better than many suddenly homeless people is because I was already in the social services system in Ocean County, New Jersey due to my mother’s illness.  Social services simply reopened my case and quickly provided temporary emergency housing.

For most people, emergency housing is just a port in the storm, since it only gives you six weeks to find permanent housing. It’s not easy to find a home—most landlords don’t want to accept housing vouchers for rent—but I was fortunate.  The woman who ran my church’s homeless outreach program vouched for me, so I was able to move into an apartment before my placement at the motel expired.

After my housing was stabilized, the trauma of familial conflict, loss, and eviction pummeled me like a tsunami.

I was overcome with anxiety, convinced that things would never go right again.  Every time I heard a noise at night I would jump out of bed to check on my mother—worried that she was trying to get up and go to the bathroom by herself—before I remembered she was gone. In the mornings, depression made getting out of bed a struggle. Confused, I went to my local hospital where I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  For three months, I participated in an intensive outpatient treatment program: three days a week I received cognitive mental health counseling, medication, and group therapy.

I came to understand that being solely responsible for my mother’s care for two years, combined with fighting to prevent her worst nightmare—losing her home and being forced into an institution—had been too much for me.  My brain and nervous system had been denied adequate time to recover from prolonged, severe stress.

It took me a couple of years, but I finally recovered—or at least adjusted to living with PTSD.  And I wanted to use my experience to help others going through the same thing.

*            *            *

At first I thought I could teach people how to successfully navigate the social services system like I had. But I quickly learned that my experience wasn’t necessarily transferrable to them. The fact that I had already been in the social services system, and had a key relationship through my community, made all the difference for me.

For example, someone contacted me to see if I could help find housing for a young man who was living in the woods.  When we sought emergency shelter through county social services, they turned him down because he’d been homeless for too long. They prioritized people who had been homeless for less than two weeks, and he’d been homeless for four months. Then we applied for Emergency Housing Assistance, but he couldn’t get to the mandated weekly career or substance abuse counseling. Those offices were across town, and out of reach of public transportation. Plus, the county requires documentation proving you are not currently receiving unemployment benefits and a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that no relatives are claiming you as a dependent—complete with a mailing address.

That young man spent another year in the woods before he was taken to a county mental health facility. Turned out he was autistic, and therefore eligible for permanent housing in a facility for persons with disabilities.  The county didn’t seem to understand the urgency of getting people housed quickly so they could begin their recovery.  There were too many pre-conditions and not enough affordable housing units to get the job done.

*            *            *

Since people clearly needed much more than the current system could offer, I explored a different avenue: Advocating for a County Homeless Trust Fund that would secure the monies needed for a shelter and real-time emergency housing assistance.

Unfortunately, advocates’ conversations with elected officials weren’t productive. In one meeting, a political representative charged with overseeing social services simply ticked off a series of negative stereotypes: “The homeless have always been here no matter how much money we spend trying to solve the problem… Nothing seems to work… I think many of them prefer to live like that.”

Clearly, she didn’t know any homeless people. In my half-dozen years working with people without homes, I’ve met very few individuals who wouldn’t prefer having a roof over their head, security, privacy, heat, running water, a toilet.  Nevertheless, this mischaracterization of the homeless is common—I’ve heard it from social workers, religious leaders, and agency heads. If you repeat a lie enough times, it gains currency.

Advocating for the Trust Fund reinforced the same feeling I had when I tried to advocate for people navigating social services: Unless policymakers and government employees enlist the involvement of people who have experienced this kind of struggle, they will not understand, support, or implement the solutions we need.

*            *            *

In one sense, I’ve now come full circle.  I’m volunteering at the same homeless outreach center that first helped me when I was evicted. We provide people with necessities like clothing, blankets, tents, heaters, and food, as well as services such as haircuts and laundry.  The center also creates a sense of community where people can lean on each other as they try to recover from trauma and find stability in their lives.

Now I’m also trying to connect our outreach community with opportunities that will help people achieve financial and housing independence.  A couple weeks ago I took a few young men and women to a farm where I used to volunteer, so they can hopefully earn some money and pick up some skills in a growing industry—vertical farming.

It was a diverse group. One woman was living in the woods and “here and there.” Another guy has emergency housing assistance and tons of energy—he skateboards everywhere—but no job. The third guy has been living without housing for more than five years and was looking for work.

They were given a tour of the operation and invited to fill out an application for a 60-hour summer work and training program. The manager also gave them her cell phone number and said to call her anytime to check on job openings.

Before we left town, we stopped at a restaurant where one of them applied for a job.  Then I took them to the beach on the other side of town—none of them had ever been there before.  For a little while at least, they were simply young people enjoying a beach, free from the burden of being labeled “disaffected homeless youths.”

These moments of normalcy—in a culture that constantly treats us as flawed and abnormal—are part of how we find our way again.

*            *            *

My experiences since my mother’s death and my eviction have taught me what we need to do to end homelessness in America.  If we simply invested in affordable housing—and committed to getting people housed quickly so they can begin their recovery—we would immediately see dramatic reductions in homelessness and an increase in people contributing to our communities.  On top of it, we know that this approach would save our nation money.

But it doesn’t matter how many studies demonstrate that this is the direction we need to go.  What is lacking, still, is political will.  And that will only change when our elected representatives begin listening to—and taking seriously—those of us who have lived this struggle.

The fact is that people generally fail to understand homelessness because they don’t ask homeless people what happened to them—how it is that they ended up in the situation they are in and what their needs are.

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I saw the consequences of this failure recently in Ocean County, NJ, where I now live in subsidized housing.  The Jon Bon Jovi (JBJ) Soul Foundation announced it would open a JBJ Soul Kitchen in the county. They will provide quality meals at whatever price a person can afford, or people can do some volunteer work in the café if they can’t afford to pay. If people prove reliable as volunteers they can then enroll in a training program that will teach them skills in the culinary arts and other professions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of access to good meals when it comes to addressing food insecurity, or underestimate the value of good job training that provides marketable skills.   However, a person living in a tent in the woods—and we have more than 600 people in Ocean County living without permanent indoor shelter—does not even have access to a toilet, shower, or a place to wash clothes. What the chronically homeless in Ocean County need, most immediately and urgently, is secure housing.

The money raised to open the JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurant would have been better spent on building a safe, stable, and affordable housing facility for homeless persons in the community.  If the founders had spoken to community members who have experienced homelessness, we would have made that clear.

This communication gap is widespread.  As someone who has experienced homelessness, and spent more than a few nights in hospital emergency rooms because I didn’t know where else to go, I can tell you that when you try to explain to nurses and doctors that you are there because you fear that the continuous uncertainty and anxiety you are enduring might drive you mad, they generally react by giving you a sedative, letting you sleep, and then sending you on your way with breakfast and a few anti-anxiety pills.

I don’t recall anyone—and I mean anyone—ever asking me about my life, and what happened to me that brought me to this moment.

So I was delighted to see a sign of change recently when a professor at New Jersey State College asked me to speak to a graduating class of nursing students so that they could better understand the treatment needs of the increasing number of Americans experiencing homelessness.

I told the class that I originally started thinking about the importance of simply asking people what they are experiencing after reading Healing Neen by Tonier Cain.  Cain experienced severe and extensive abuse during her life: abandonment, rape, physical and emotional violence, and numerous incarcerations. At every turn she was treated in various behavioral modification programs with de rigueur psycho-active medications.  But according to Cain, she did not really begin to heal until someone—a trauma therapist—simply asked, “What happened to you, girl?”

So this is the point I tried to convey to the students: if a person comes to you who has experienced prolonged periods of time without housing, don’t treat their symptoms without asking what happened. Trauma gets resolved by confronting the events that caused it. That takes time and artfulness.

Whether we want to understand the crisis of homelessness in the Bay Area or Ocean County, or a healthcare professional needs to treat a vulnerable patient, it starts with a simple question: what happened?

It is clear from the numbers alone that in communities across America—including where I live in Ocean County, New Jersey—federal, state, and local public housing assistance programs are not reaching nearly enough people.

I’ve experienced homelessness and I also volunteer at a homeless outreach center that provides clothing, blankets, tents, heaters, food, and other items that are essential to our local population of about thirty homeless individuals and couples. We also offer a hot meal and a safe place for people to gather and freely express themselves. Many of the people we serve refer to our center as their “safe house.”

At the end of a recent meeting at the center, a couple in their forties asked me for a ride home. They had blankets, coats, and foodstuffs—I suspected they didn’t want to traipse through the downtown business district and draw attention. I gave them a ride, and they directed me to the end of a large parking lot behind a supermarket. They unloaded their things from my car and then slowly disappeared into the woods.

It occurred to me that if they were stray animals, I could have brought them to a half dozen shelters where they would be taken in and cared for, no questions asked. But in my county, not only is there a shortage of affordable housing, there is not a single emergency shelter for homeless people. This is the reality in too many communities across America. It is not only painful to witness, it is also completely unnecessary.

One unutilized tool that could go a long way towards addressing the problem is the National Housing Trust Fund, established by President George W. Bush and Congress as part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The goal of the Trust Fund is to provide revenue to build, rehabilitate, and preserve affordable housing for the lowest-income families, including people experiencing homelessness. The Trust Fund is unique in its aim to increase and preserve the supply of affordable rental housing for the very low-income, as most of the fund’s money must go to people who make no more than 30 percent of area median income. The Fund also increases homeownership opportunities for these households. While Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently started devoting some of their earnings to the Fund, as the original legislation intended, Congress—perhaps not too shockingly—has complicated and threatened the necessary revenues for the fund.

According to ThinkProgress, a recent example occurred in April 2015, when a House appropriations subcommittee passed legislation that halted funding for the Trust Fund. The legislation instead robbed Peter to pay Paul, diverting monies from the trust fund to another HUD program, HOME, which targets people who make 60 or 50 percent of median family income. The appropriations bill that passed the House ultimately maintained this provision. With its focus on the lowest-income people, the National Housing Trust Fund is a critical resource for fighting homelessness, and these moves to slash its funding imperil people who are on the verge of losing their homes.

In contrast to the Congressional inaction, some states—including Nebraska, Washington State, and Georgia—have created Homeless Trust Funds that allow local civic groups to access monies for emergency shelters and affordable housing.

In 2009, for example, New Jersey passed a law called The County Homelessness Trust Fund Act that authorizes counties to impose a $3.00 surcharge for each document it records. These revenues, administered by a County Homelessness Trust Fund Task Force, are then used to fund housing and supportive services to individuals and families currently experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness.

More than one-third of New Jersey counties have implemented the legislation, raising more than a million dollars for efforts to increase permanent affordable housing; prevent the eviction of Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries, including through payment towards rent, mortgage, or utilities; and provide supportive services for chronically homeless individuals who receive housing vouchers.

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But despite bearing the brunt of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Ocean County has yet to implement such a trust fund. So what can a community like mine do to convince its local political leaders to take action?

Along with other activists and members of the community affected by homelessness—including health care professionals, trauma experts, police officers, clergy, teachers, local politicians, homeless advocates, and small business owners—I am working to get the backing of our community by framing homelessness as both a values and economic issue. The Ocean County Board Freeholders has the final say on whether or not the county enacts a Homeless Trust Fund. They have public meetings twice a month, and we’ve agreed that we won’t leave their next meeting until we get either an acceptance of our proposal or a counter proposal for eliminating homelessness. Our point is that homelessness in our county must end now, and that’s non-negotiable.

With Congress impervious to the reality and needs of its most vulnerable citizens, county trust funds are just one approach we can take towards ensuring that every person finds the stability and shelter they need to survive and thrive.

We need to take this action and many more—because nobody in America should be dropped off to disappear in the woods when we have the resources to end homelessness.

Author’s Note: For more information on how we can capitalize the National Housing Trust Fund, visit NATIONALHOMELESS.org. To see how other states have gone about initiating Homeless Trust Funds, visit the Center for Community Change. If there are members of your community who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, please make sure your local political and civic leaders are aware of these avenues for addressing this issue.

I became homeless in 2009 and out of necessity learned how to make the services administered through the Ocean County New Jersey Board of Social Services work for me. They included housing assistance provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), food assistance (SNAP) through the US Department of Agriculture, and cash assistance through the General Assistance program made available by the State of New Jersey.

I am now in permanent Federal Affordable Housing and no longer need social services myself. So I try to use my own experience to help people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless get the social services they need. Currently, Emergency Housing Assistance offered through the Ocean County Board of Social Services is not easy to qualify for. The bureaucratic process is difficult to comprehend, and negotiating through it when you are facing housing insecurity and are stressed out is exceedingly difficult.

For example, I was contacted by members of a local church in my community after they had encountered a young man who was homeless hanging out in a shopping mall. They had given him some new clothing, and now wanted to arrange for me to meet with him because I have experience in homeless outreach, particularly in Ocean County.

In meeting with the young man, it was immediately clear to me that he was in serious trouble, mentally and emotionally. He could not maintain eye contact, tell me what he did that day, or articulate any plans he had for getting out of his present situation. He was sleeping in the wooded areas at night where he couldn’t be seen, and then wandering around during the day trying not to be seen. In my experience, this isolation is a recipe for serious psychological and emotional damage.

I asked him if he wanted a room in a motel or shelter for the night. He enthusiastically said yes.

I called a 3-digit number for an Ocean County Board of Social Services’ special response unit that is set up to address emergency situations (although the County’s website says, “Funding is limited so assistance is not always available”) . They have teams available to quickly come and pick up people who are homeless, give them shelter, and take them to a social services office in their county the next day to see if they qualify for more permanent assistance.

I called them, but they wanted to talk with the young man, not me.

They ended up turning him down because he told them the truth: he’d been homeless for four months. Special Response “responded” by saying that they only take people who have been homeless for two weeks or less.

So I arranged to pick him up the next day where he was living in the woods and take him to the Ocean County Social Services office myself. There, he applied and qualified for SNAP and General Assistance, which then allowed him to apply for Emergency Housing Assistance.

In order to qualify for Emergency Housing Assistance, however, he was also required to appear once a week at the Ocean County One-Stop Career Center, located on another side of town and outside the reach of public transportation; and a substance abuse counselor who was also located far from the social services office.

I knew that he—and others like him who are chronically homeless—often can’t meet these requirements and therefore don’t receive the emergency housing they desperately need.

This is why we need Housing First.

Housing First uses a simple model that has been proven to work: it first provides people with housing, and then provides supportive wraparound services in mental and physical health, substance abuse, education, and employment. Housing First apartments are scattered throughout a community which helps formerly homeless reintegrate into their communities. Perhaps the most significant innovation is that Housing First doesn’t put preconditions on eligibility. Other approaches exclude people from receiving housing assistance because they suffer from mental illness, including addiction. Finally, Housing First saves taxpayer money over the long haul, reducing costs that are otherwise incurred by the public for stays at shelters, in jail cells, and in hospital emergency rooms.

After our visit to social services, I discussed the young man’s situation with others in my homeless outreach network. We agreed that the best available alternative for him was to enter a 10-day shelter provided by a local faith-based group. From there he would be able to transition into an in-patient behavioral rehabilitation center that would—upon successful completion of their program—hopefully guide him into permanent housing.

The question all of this begs is this: since only one in four low-income renter households receives federal rental assistance—and a lack of affordable housing is a leading cause of homelessness—shouldn’t we be devoting a larger share of our affordable housing dollars towards a nationwide, Housing First model?

It’s the right thing to do and it saves money. What the hell are we waiting for?

The Unites States Interagency Counsel on Homelessness provides funding to states for programs designed to create permanent housing situations for individuals and families in danger of becoming homeless. All of these programs are administered by local Boards of Social Services—often simply called “social services.” Where I live in Ocean County, New Jersey, the Board provides a motel room for emergency housing through a program called Special Response. Motel owners located on the Jersey Shore subsidize their incomes during the winter months by taking in clients of social services through this program.

So I was in a motel room in a seasonally deserted town I was unfamiliar with and told that I have three months to find permanent housing. I was given a W-9 tax form to present to potential landlords. The W-9 would allow the local housing agency to pay landlords as vendors of the state. However, I soon found out that most apartment owners wouldn’t take me in for three purported reasons: One, the owners claimed that if they took me in then they would be legally obligated to take in any other client that social services sent their way; two, they said that the local Housing Office at social services was unreliable and took forever to pay rents; and three, as I would soon learn myself, they said that the Housing Office was notorious for arbitrarily changing its policy regarding housing assistance.

Most people in a situation like I was in give up and return to whatever it is they were trying to get away from – abusive spouses, dysfunctional families, drug-and crime-infested neighborhoods. And then there are those – such as the survivors of natural disasters, and people who lost jobs and had homes foreclosed during the Great Recession, and veterans who were denied benefits – who have no place to return to and all too frequently end up wandering the streets during the day and setting up tents on public land at night. Because these people are no longer enrolled in any housing program, this is a statistical ‘success’ to local officials administering the program, even as the number of homeless people rises. This cynical manipulation of statistics is a betrayal of the public trust given to the local Board of Social Services to provide financial and housing assistance to members of their communities who need it.

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While I was still in my home and recovering from the loss of my mother, I became a member of a small nondenominational church that administered a community homeless outreach program. Local apartment owners utilized the outreach as a way of ‘screening’ prospective renters. They were willing to rent to people who had rent subsidies, but first they wanted to be assured that they are not opening their doors to former rent truants, violent criminals, drug users, or other problematic tenants.

That’s how I secured ‘permanent’ housing within three months. I’m not sure what I would have done without the involvement of this grassroots program that helped me navigate my local housing office’s byzantine process.

But then I received a letter last year informing me that the “permanent” housing program I was in was being terminated by The Board of Social Services in Ocean County. No explanation was given; no recourse offered. Trying to find alternatives before I became homeless, I applied to several federal affordable housing facilities. Miraculously, it seemed, just a few days after being told I no longer had an affordable, permanent place to live, I received a letter informing me that an affordable housing unit was available.

People assume that my local social services board coordinated this move. They didn’t. If you are fortunate enough to find a case worker who assists you with obtaining Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and other basic necessities, as I was, they are still powerless to influence the outcome of your ‘permanent’ housing situation. These types of practices are not only detrimental to the morale of the clients of social services, but to its workforce as well.

We need the people who administer social services at the state and local levels to do a better job of providing programs and policies that work in people’s lives.

When we hear from people who have experienced poverty, we get better policy. For example, no one who has lived in acute financial distress would have ever come up with a solution as inane as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Can you imagine? “Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll make the process of obtaining assistance more complicated and, in the end, provide fewer people with less assistance for a shorter period of time!” Sure, people flew off “the rolls” – and right into the woods, onto subway platforms and, penultimately, into hospital emergency rooms. So many have had their lives cut short as a result of homelessness.

Someone recently asked me what my first priority would be for policy reform, and this is it: lobby to get a member of the community who has experienced programs such as Emergency Housing Assistance, SNAP, or TANF, onto the Local and State Boards of Social Services. This, I feel, is the only way we can begin to get administrators to better understand the needs of their ‘clients’, and to be held more accountable for their policies and actions.

What we need is a movement that empowers individuals who have experienced acute financial distress with the political wherewithal they need to stand on their own. We’ve done this successfully with immigration and marriage equality, why not poverty?

The social problem I am talking about is poverty. Poverty has always been an issue that’s been framed—one way or another—by morality. For those who view the poor with moral indignation, the solution is to enact policies designed to punish; and for those who apply empathy, the goal is to create programs that are geared to empower and uplift the poor.

What I perceive, based on personal experience—I’ve worked with many public and private groups on the issues of homelessness and poverty and I’ve experienced homelessness myself—is that one’s moral perspective on the poverty issue usually defines how one goes about finding and implementing solutions to it.

The dividing line seems to be whether you think poverty is caused by people lacking the basic resources they need in order to have stable families, good educational opportunities, and jobs; or, you think that people do not have these basic resources because they lack the personal attributes and social skills needed to earn them, as was implied by columnist David Brooks in a New York Times editorial last year.

I think it’s unfair to expect that people who don’t have access to basic needs—like adequate food, housing, and health care—should live normal and productive lives. To then punish them on top of that—by denying work and income supports, for example—is not only immoral, it’s irrational as well.

Early on in the battle to end poverty in America, the moral high ground was held by those with an empathic approach to alleviating poverty, in words and actions.

President Roosevelt proclaimed: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.” He followed up those words with the New Deal, giving rise to Social Security and the modern liberal/progressive movement in America.

In his Inaugural Address in 1961, President Kennedy said: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” He then announced a “New Frontier”: policies that extended jobless benefits, aid to children, increased Social Security and the minimum wage, and financed public affordable housing.

After Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ championed the Great Society and the War on Poverty: “… Neither you nor I are willing to accept the tyranny of poverty, nor the dictatorship of ignorance, nor the despotism of ill health, nor the oppression of bias and prejudice and bigotry. We want change. We want progress.” And he backed those words up with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, The Food Stamp Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965.

In 1967, Martin Luther King wrote that “poverty has no justification in our age.” He compared it to “the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned” to produce their own food. “The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” He launched the Poor Peoples Campaign in 1968 to try to “gain economic justice for low-income people in the United States.” He was assassinated that year.

Bobby Kennedy took up the mantle as advocate for the poor and during his presidential campaign declared: “I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.” He, too, was assassinated—just two months after King.

Even President Nixon continued to build on many of these progressive policy reforms. In 1969 he called for “an end to hunger,” expanded the food stamp program, and then created the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in 1972.

I was born in the 1950s and lived through each of these periods of inspiration, hope and optimism; each were followed—inevitably, it came to seem—by death and anguish. The sudden, tragic loss of our most gifted and promising political and moral leaders left many in my generation traumatized and deeply scarred.

In the wake of the political carnage of the 1960s, and the national emotional hangover that only worsened with Vietnam and Watergate, Ronald Reagan came onto the national scene in the 1970s with openly racist disdain for the poor. His stump speeches included references to “welfare queens” taking “government handouts” while driving a “Cadillac”; and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps to buy “T-bone steaks.”

Does anyone think for a moment that if Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X were still alive then that they would have let him get away with that racist vitriol unchallenged? But Reagan did, and he backed up his words with actions.

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He took particular aim at programs and services that were effectively reducing poverty and preventing homelessness prior to his election. In his own version of a perfect storm for the poor, Reagan gutted the budget of Housing and Urban Development  (HUD); discarded the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, and as a result, scores of people suffering from mental illness became displaced, homeless, or incarcerated instead of receiving treatment in community mental health centers; and he changed the political narrative about poverty and homelessness—from one that acknowledged it as a national problem, to one that framed it as a matter of personal choice.

As President Reagan said in a 1984 interview with Good Morning America regarding the unprecedented surge in homelessness: “People who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

It’s a legacy we are still unable to escape more than a quarter century since he left office. How many of us liberal and progressive leaders are willing to take on Ronald Reagan’s view of America that has seeped so deeply into our national psyche?

I’ll start the dance. I’m a writer and David Brooks is a writer. So I’ll call him out. Your editorial in the NY Times that singled out single mothers as being one of the chief causes of poverty in America? The last thing a single mother needs is a lecture from you on the “cultural roots of the problem” of poverty that are “really the inescapable core of the thing.” What she really needs is a job that pays a wage that is sufficient to house and feed herself and her children; affordable quality childcare so she can work; and access to health care is probably a pretty damn good idea too.

If our current busting-at-the-seams economy can’t provide a living wage because it’s so grotesquely skewed to enhance the wealth of the already wealthy, then it’s our responsibility—as proudly empathic liberals and progressives—to force our politicians to enact programs that will protect, serve, and empower ALL of our citizens equally and together.

But what if that’s not true? What if the assumption is false? Should we continue carrying on this corrupted debate?   Or should we look for other means to address the scourge of poverty in America?

Even before we examine the issue more deeply, it seems obvious on the surface that there should not be rampant poverty and homelessness in the wealthiest country in the history of the world that has the ingenuity to put a man on the moon, and computers in peoples’ laps.

Two recent reports – one by The New York Times and the other by the Economic Policy Institute – provide convincing evidence that, in fact, if income distribution trends would have remained as they were prior to 1979, the poverty rate in America would have fallen to 0 percent some 10 to 20 years ago.

So why didn’t that happen?

In a recent post on AlterNet, writer Paul Buchheit argues that the nearly 1 in 2 Americans living in or near poverty are now being treated like expendable and disposable commodities. These are the people whom former presidential candidate Mitch Romney and other financial elites refer to as “the takers” not “the makers.”

If you are a member of the ruling financial elite in this country – and have very little or no contact with people outside of your class and believe that if they are living so poorly it must be their fault – why would you not advocate for disposing of these dregs and drags on your free-market, Machiavellian capitalist aspirations?

That’s not a rhetorical question; it actually seems to be happening.

New York Times columnist David Brooks provided the intellectual rational, such as it is, for the belief that poverty is caused by the poor and not by income inequality when he wrote that we should be focusing on the “interrelated social problems of the poor” rather than the well-documented, siphoning off of the nation’s wealth by the financial elite.

But Buchheit points out some of the ways that the wealthy not only scapegoat the poor in America, but carry out an intentional strategy to exploit them.

These strategies include depleting the wealth of the middle class and working poor. The economic data supports the notion that since the Great Recession in 2008 the amount of wealth owned by the top 1% of Americans has grown exponentially, while the rest of us have gotten less. According to a recent report by the Levy Economics Institute, it’s even worse than that: the richest 10% took 116 percent of the income gains between 2009-2012, with the top 1 percent taking 95 percent. Median wealth, on the other hand, dropped about 40 percent from 2007 to 2013.

Another tactic used to exploit people living on the brink is stripping away their income. According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), nearly three-fifths of the jobs regained during the recovery (2009 to the present) have been low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) – the kind that made up just one-fifth of the jobs before the recession.

Real estate owners are also making housing of any kind unaffordable to most people. As the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports, “In no state can a full-time minimum wage worker afford a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom rental unit at Fair Market Rent.” They also point out that more than one-eighth of the nation’s supply of low-income housing has been permanently lost since 2001. A chilling result of this: more than 600,000 Americans were homeless on any given night in 2013.

What little disposable income a “taker” may have gets fleeced (ironically, taken away) by predatory pay day lenders, rental centers, and assorted fines and fees such as those that bolstered the local economy in Ferguson.

Next, of course, comes criminalization and imprisonment. While no one involved in creating and profiting from the financial crisis – that led to millions of lost jobs and foreclosed homes, and trillions of dollars in lost wealth – went to jail, more low-income Americans are being imprisoned than ever before. And with the privatization of prisons, inmates now often have to pay for their stays (even while awaiting trial).

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Even when you ‘play by the rules’ and manage to get into affordable housing, as I did last year, they find ways to make it more difficult for you to maintain the secure foothold you need to work your way up.

A legislative provision in last year’s Farm Bill excludes people from receiving a portion of their SNAP assistance if they do not pay their own utilities separate from their rent. (I found this out when I demanded a fair hearing with Social Services regarding my SNAP benefits.) When you are in affordable housing—or receive Emergency Housing Assistance—you pay one-third of your income for rent, which helps cover the cost of utilities. But you are not billed directly for those utilities, so this new provision allows the government to cut off or significantly reduce your SNAP benefits.

Well, I could go on and on painting this picture of what it’s really like to be stuck in poverty in America, but here’s the main point: Do we go on debating this problem with good faith that both sides are determined to end this gruesome reality, or do we call people out for not only perpetuating the problem, but doing so in order to exploit and profit from it?

In previous articles for Talk Poverty, I’ve called for a paradigm shift—an intellectually violent revolution in which one conceptual world view is replaced by another. I don’t think we can have that intellectually violent revolution until we realize that all sides of the debate are not equally determined or committed to solving the problem of poverty in America. We have to admit this before we can possibly fix the problem.

What exactly do you want, 1%ers? How many more pounds of flesh will it take before you allow the rest of us in America to exist with a modicum of ease and dignity?

The NGO simply targets places where there is extreme poverty and provides individuals with direct transfers of cash. In order to do this they are utilizing digital technology – providing people with cell phones and then making mobile account payments to them.

Joy Sun, the Chief Operating Officer of Give Directly and a veteran aid worker, said that aid workers in the past acted on two assumptions that proved to be wrong: 1) that the poor were poor because they were uneducated and made bad choices; and 2) that they required educated aid workers to tell them what they needed in order to get out of poverty, and how to do it.

This approach demanded a large and expensive workforce of aid workers, along with huge transfers of materials – food, agricultural equipment, housing, and infrastructure supplies.

According to Sun, a 2011 report from Shapiro & Raj  – an independent investment research and consulting firm – for every $100 in allocated resources, it costs another $99.00 to provide and service them. The report also said that more than 30% of the recipients of aid materials sold them for cash.

In July, in her TED Talk in New York City, Sun confided that many aid workers were skeptical of Give Directly’s new approach.  They feared that the cash recipients would use the money to pay for non-essential personal items – and to not work.  But according to Give Directly the data so far refutes that notion; that in fact the people who received unconditional cash transfers invested better, worked harder and made more substantial gains towards moving out of poverty than those who received more traditional forms of material aid alone.

“Dozens of studies show across the board that people use cash transfers to improve their own lives,” said Sun.

There are critics of this program, including the Stanford Social Innovation Review. They don’t question the merits or effectiveness of unconditional cash transfers; they just caution that it’s too early to tell what the long-term effects of this approach will be.

Fair enough.

But as I wrote in a previous article for Talk Poverty, we clearly need a paradigm shift in how we perceive the poor and treat poverty. I quoted Thomas Kuhn who describes paradigm shifts as points of “intellectually violent revolutions” through which “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.”

I believe that unconditional cash transfers via mobile payments represent the kind of policy change that can indeed contribute to a paradigm shift in our approach to poverty. If the empirical evidence contradicts long-held beliefs about why people are poor, and how to help them work their way out of poverty—how should that inform how we deal with poverty in America?  In real terms, there are more than 46 million Americans living today with daily chronic food and housing insecurity, many of them children. Certainly, no one can claim we are using a winning formula for eliminating poverty in America.

What is the biggest obstacle to changing non-working approaches and adapting more evidence-based ones for eliminating poverty in America?  It’s the same problem plaguing American public policy in general: willful, well-funded ignorance cynically masquerading as political ideology.

If many of our politicians can deny that there is a relation between carbon emissions and climate change; or that an obscene proliferation of guns in this society is not related to the increasing number of senseless killings taking place regularly in our country; they can, and no doubt will, ignore any empirical evidence that proves transferring money directly to people who are poor will help end poverty.

We need that violent intellectual revolution—one that allows us to respond to issues that are so fundamental to the wellbeing of our democracy, including poverty.

I feel that we need a paradigm shift in how we perceive the problems of poverty and homelessness and that it is time, right now, for an intellectually violent revolution.

We can start by no longer calling efforts to address poverty a ‘War on Poverty’. However well-intentioned that phrase might have been in its original use, it has come to mean something else entirely over time. A war on poverty now implies that poverty, and the poor, are enemies we must overcome as a society.

In an article published this week by TalkPoverty called How We Punish People for Being Poor  Rebecca Vallas points out the sundry ways our society blithely exploits the poor.  There are also news reports every day depicting how we harass, fine, incarcerate and abuse people for the ‘crime’ of being poor.

But these articles and reports do not address the underlying issue of why our society feels it has the right to punish people for being poor.

Rather than point out the reasons for that, and analyzing them – we need a paradigm shift away from the attitudes and beliefs that allow these kinds of abuses to take place as a matter of course.

So how do we do this?

We need to start by viewing and treating poverty and homelessness as what they are: human and civil rights issues.

We’ve seen this happen before: Blacks were characterized as inferior to Whites (and treated that way); women were thought of as window dressing for men’s lives (and treated that way); and LGBT people were dismissed as abnormal (and treated that way).

Nothing fundamentally changed in how we viewed these groups of persons until we started recognizing them as fully human, entitled to the same human and constitutional rights as anyone else.

The same has to happen now with the poor.  Here are my specific recommendations:

Decriminalize homelessness. But don’t stop there; let’s make it a criminal offense, a hate crime, for anyone caught abusing the poor and homeless just for being poor or homeless.

A national Housing First mandate. Housing is the humane and dignified solution to homelessness, not isolating, abusing, fining and imprisoning.

Do whatever it takes to force every state to accept Medicaid expansion. Basic healthcare is a human right; not something that should be denied for short-sighted political reasons.

Well, I’d like to stop right there. One of the problems of trying to address poverty and homelessness is there are so many sub-issues one can get lost in them all and end up accomplishing nothing.

This Friday, October 10^th, marks World Homeless Action Day. Let’s observe it by beginning to recognize poverty and homelessness as conditions of human existence—protected by moral and civil law—and not as social abnormalities that need to be warred against psychologically, emotionally and physically.

A few weeks ago they invited me to join them and other groups in Trenton, N.J. for a day of lobbying politicians regarding issues related to housing and jobs. Many voices, many issues.

I asked the director of the NJ Coalition to End Homelessness, Deb Eliis, if there was only one thing The Coalition could accomplish in the next year, what she would want it to be.

She answered: “A Homeless Shelter in Ocean County.”

Ocean County is where I live.  I know that there are seven facilities in Ocean County that house, care for, and try to find permanent living situations for stray animals, but not a single one that provides the same services for humans.  Toms River is the second largest township in Ocean County and one of its most affluent. I lived in Toms River until a month ago before I moved into permanent affordable housing in a nearby town. When I lived in Toms River I worked with the faith-based Homeless Outreach mission, so I also know that on any given night in Toms River there are between 30 and 40 people (that we know of) living scattered throughout its wooded areas. In case you have never been to a homeless encampment – and as someone who used to be homeless – I can tell you this: there is no way anyone – no matter your age – can live that way for very long without developing serious physical and mental ailments. These people will sooner or later end up in an Emergency Room, which is the least efficient and most expensive way of not dealing with this problem of homelessness.

My contribution to the meeting in Trenton was to get agreement on not calling it a “homeless shelter” and instead refer to it as an Emergency Housing Relief Center.  I feel strongly that words such as ‘shelters’ and ‘the projects’ should be dropped from our vocabularies when we are referring to people living in acute financial distress.

Why? Because words matter.

Check out this vintage 1976 ditty from a former B-list actor in California: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

The ‘she’ is the infamous ‘welfare queen’ who in fact didn’t exist, and the person making the lumpen remark, Ronald Reagan, goes on to become President of the United States in 1980.

The remark helped to turn back a decade of progress in eliminating chronic poverty in America, and marked a significant turning point in American attitudes toward their fellow citizens receiving financial aid and/or food assistance from the government.

Once again, we are back to where we were in the 1970s –defining poverty, rather than just tackling it head on.  But this time we have to be ever more vigilant about not letting it be defined by people who are prejudiced and use negative stereotypes.  We need a fresh working definition of poverty that reflects peoples’ real life experiences and portrays their personal and financial struggles with dignity and respect.

First of all, we should stop calling it “poverty”—in political campaigns or otherwise. It is people in “acute financial distress.” When we hear of people in distress we want to help them. When we hear that they are poor we ignore them because of all of the stigmas associated with being poor.  “Acute financial distress” is a more accurate term too—it connotes a temporary predicament shared by many in our “new economy.” Poverty, on the other hand, is misperceived as a permanent condition, even though people slip in and out of being poor.

Having experienced acute financial distress, including being homeless, I think this is the central issue and major roadblock to eliminating poverty—the stigma that goes along with “being poor.” Lately, I feel like a modern day James Brown telling people to shout, “I’m Poor & I’m Proud. Sing it loud, Y’all!”

No joke. When you experience acute financial distress our society looks at you and says, aloud or not, “What did you do wrong?” and/or “What’s wrong with you?”

In my case, I became homeless because I refused to allow my mother, who was terminally ill with Alzheimer’s, to be placed in a nursing home. In the end, I was completely wiped out— physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially. There are many stories like mine.  But people prefer the stereotypes to the real stories—it makes it easier to maintain bad policies.

Bad policies like TANF which Peter Edelman wrote about in a TalkPoverty blog last month. I didn’t know who Edelman was at the time. But I’ve come to learn that he resigned from the Clinton Administration in 1996 after the President signed welfare reform legislation.  I researched why he did that and found out that Edelman was spot on. That legislation had two devastating effects: one, it dramatically reduced the amount of cash assistance that was available (for two years, believe it or not, I lived on a monthly general assistance stipend of $140.00); and secondly, it gave states nearly autonomous control of how and whether they provide cash assistance.

Now, this is where the stigma and these reforms intersect. Many of the people who administer social services (not the people working in the field who know better) also resent “poor people.”  That’s part of the reason why programs are designed in a way that makes it almost impossible for you to get your life back on track after a financial or personal trauma. And it works.  Most people give up and return to whatever situation got them into acute financial distress in the first place.

Case in point: I have been living on housing assistance in New Jersey the last four years or so. The state provides that assistance while a person applies for federally subsidized affordable housing. The understanding is that if you diligently apply for every affordable housing opportunity, they will help fund your housing until you are lucky enough to get one of the few federally-subsidized units.

But when I went to see my case worker in April, I was told that all extensions for the Housing Assistance Program were being terminated June 30th. No explanation; no recourse.

I was fortunate, because four days after meeting with my case worker I got a letter telling me there was an affordable housing unit available for me. This was a coincidence. But I can tell you, honestly, during those three days when I didn’t know where I’d be living in another month—after being a long-term caregiver for my mother, and then losing her and becoming homeless—I  came seriously close to triggering the PTSD that I had worked so very hard for the last two years to deal with.  I know many others, not so fortunate, who right now are totally freaking out. For what? Why do this to people? The point is, without federal regulation and guidelines to oversee how states administer social services, they can pretty much do as they please.

Right now I have SSI, food stamps and subsidized housing. So I’m good, sort of.  My food stamp allowance comes to $6 a day. So I’ll be going to a Food Pantry later. I help them work it and they help me with food.

That’s the last thing I’ll say because I think most people don’t know it: there’s a lot of solidarity out here among people living in acute financial distress. That’s what’s working—in spite of social services that aren’t designed with those of us who are struggling in mind.

Though they were originally.  See Robert Beezat’s excellent article on the Forgotten Lesson of the War on Poverty.