Notes from the Field: Southern Rural Indiana

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Some think that it is hard to reach people experiencing homelessness, especially with the smaller population of people with a mental illness who often refuse shelter or services.  Barb Anderson, working in Jeffersonville, Indiana, has found a way to reach people where they are, not where she wants them to be or where society things they should be. 

Barb talks about her clients as her friends – truly some of the most amazing people she has ever worked with in her career.  Some of her friends’ minds don’t process information in a linear or sequential manner but have a creativity, spontaneity, and unique perspective that is enlightening. The downside is they will often make horrible decisions that are harmful to themselves, and it is so painful to see them suffer unnecessarily.  There is also the issue of looking on in horror when seeing how others react out of fear or hostility when they are face to face with a mentally ill person who lives outside.  Barb takes it all in stride and is able to calm the situation with her quick wit and loud Hazard, Kentucky laugh!

Barb shared a story about a man who traditionally lives outside with mental illness, who she was trying to coax inside this winter.  Anderson was trying to convince him to stay in the hotel designated by the County as the emergency spot for the hardest cases; he refused to follow the rules designed to serve the mainstream paying customers.  This conflict led to being asked to leave the end of the line, hotel of last resort. Barb tried her best with the staff person at 1:00 a.m. to get them to reverse course because she could not let him sleep outside in the middle of a cold winter night as the wind blew through the rural Indiana landscape. She called a neighboring hotel and paid for a room, they fed him, treated him very well and the issue was resolved.  It was a long night with little sleep, and she knew her long time friend appreciated her efforts. He was safe, fed, and sleeping in a warm bed. Her friends deserve nothing less.   

Barb Anderson

Barb began her career in 1979 as a public service employee (sort of like a national service member) and in the local city planning department.  She told me that she had grown up in poverty and had never really planned to work on social justice issues.  In 1985, she worked with many to open the only shelter in a 14 county region in Southern Indiana. In 1996, the shelter became an independent non-profit. In the same year, she joined the Board to the National Coalition for the Homeless. Anderson has been fighting for her friends for decades in rural Indiana with policy work at the national level, twisting the ears of state officials in Indianapolis and confronting the mayors at their favorite hangouts in the region. 

Small town America does not typically have the number of visibly homeless as the big cities like the one just across the Ohio River in Louisville, but that may be changing.  The poverty rate in this area is 9.6% but that hides many who are out of sight and thus out of mind.  Barb reports a sharp increase in street homelessness in the region over the last few years with no new resources to address the issue.  The opening of a walking bridge between Louisville and Jeffersonville has resulted in an increase in street homelessness but is only one  contributing factor in the increase. Louisville also tends to do more sweeps, has a more violent reputation, and homeless people have said that they feel safer on the streets in rural Indiana.  The problem is that the resources in a small community are fewer and friendliness does not keep people safe on a cold night.  

Barb reported that in the initial stages of the pandemic serving homeless people was very productive because of the “crap load of money” that the region received, but NIMBY issues resulted in tearing tents down.  The region has used CARES Act assistance funds to assist with COVID relief,  and used some of those funds to put people up in hotels and motels. The unemployment rate in Southern Indiana is really good at only 3.9%, but they do boast a higher than the national average of medically uninsured.  Haven House, in partnership with other agencies, has worked hard to provide outreach services to those living outside and those who were evicted despite the federal guidelines pushing an eviction moratorium.  But just like everything associated with the pandemic, things have gotten progressively worse as time wore on.  The money was not flowing like it did in the beginning, and people’s patience was wearing as thin as the same face mask being worn for 8 months straight. Anderson traveled to Bloomington recently and worked with activists in South Bend to find solutions to the sweeps being done in their communities.  

The increase in homelessness over the past year is not confined to one population with families, women and young people all on the rise in the region.  Barb and the Haven House volunteers did a get out the vote campaign, but Indiana is one of the state’s with many barriers to voting like mandatory identification.  The reality is that it is extremely difficult to motivate people to vote during a pandemic.  Haven House has a Facebook page and would love your input on ways to better serve people experiencing homelessness living in a rural community. 

According to George Santayana “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world,” which pretty much sums up the world occupied by homeless activist Richard Troxell who currently resides in Union County North Carolina.

Most of Richard’s work was in Austin, Texas, where he caused the most trouble and left his mark with a sculpture he designed called “the Homecoming” at Community First! Village.  Richard can give you an hour’s long narrative about the chance meeting between the elderly woman depicted in the sculpture and the man and her daughter.  He can give you the military background of the dad and how the elderly woman’s journey led to this place.  This 7 year quest to bring this sculpture from concept to learning how to cast sculptures to collaborating with other artists to finally seeing his creation placed in 2019 is a dream realized for any artist, but the grassroots organizing and assistance offered by Richard to those oppressed by society may be his biggest impact on the world. 

The Homecoming

Richard had a day job helping people navigate the legal and social services network in Austin, but he had a side gig as the face of House the Homeless to twist the arms of city officials to stop pushing around people experiencing homelessness.  Pushing people out of the arts areas of Austin; pushing them away from South by Southwest conference; pushing them off park benches, and pushing them out of sight.  While everyone thinks Austin is some liberal oasis in the middle of a right wing fundamentalist state, sometimes the worst people who strip you of your rights are those with so called liberal beliefs.  In the 1990s, nearly every city in the United States led by “progressive-man-of-the-people” mayors were horrible places to live for those experiencing homelessness. Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Seattle all had Mayors who were just cruel and heartless to homeless people.  The City of Austin was no different with police sweeps, selective enforcement of certain laws, and attacks of free speech panhandling like the other liberal bastions. Richard found success fighting the “No Camping” ordinance in the courts after five years and argued his case for more humanity from City Hall in the court of public opinion. He fought disorderly conduct tickets for existing as a person without a home and regular attempts to shut down the shelters. Many cities including Austin pass these laws under the umbrella of “Quality of Life” ordinances.  They are more appropriately called “Quality of Life for Mostly White Visitors to the City” ordinances, but they typically targeted the lowest income members of society.  Richard successfully fought against an ordinance that made it illegal for certain people to rest in public which then began a cascade of other similar laws to fall. 

Richard set up a huge fall event for 18 years to give out long underwear and winter gear to those facing a tough cold winter without regular shelter. The Thermal Underwear that  “winterized them” and threw live music parties serving over 600 people, while his wife, Sylvia served them ham with cakes and pies, cornbread and real butter etc. (This event continues to this day.) He passed out hats during heat waves, emergency whistles to fend off serial assaults, and he worked to get those without a roof, some privacy in our society.

Semi-retired and relocated to North Carolina making personal COVID-19 face masks, Richard is now the national field general for House the Homeless and still on the quest to get the Universal Living Wage to be a part of the national discussion.  Richard joined the National Coalition for the Homeless way back in the early 1990s and has always felt that the key to ending homelessness is giving people enough income to be able to sustain themselves free from shifting winds of benevolence from government or the religious sector. Richard wants to see a second statue in Washington DC to memorialize all the homeless individuals who did not survive without a roof over their head.  He has become very interested in pushing for Social Security to be more equitable and not doom a person to a life of poverty if they are disabled. He would like to see social security income, SSI, assistance paired with a housing subsidy that limits the amount a person pays toward rent to no more than 30% of their income or even better 25% of their income as it was during the Nixon administration. In this way, people who cannot work will be able lift themselves off our streets. He will always bring the discussion back to honoring a person’s labor by paying them a wage that provides them the basic standard of living in a community. If Richard attends the meeting, he is going to bring up the need for a universal living wage in America.  I was always surprised that he did not bring a neon sign with the Universal Living Wage logo so that he could turn on and off at various times during the National Coalition for the Homeless board meeting.  

He moved from the state with the highest number of uninsured people in the United States in Texas to the rural county of Union, North Carolina which boasts a large number of uninsured as well at 12.3%.  So, plenty of work for Richard in North Carolina. Child poverty in Austin was around 13.1% when he left with about 12% of the population living in poverty while only 7.3% of the population of rural North Carolina live below the poverty level.  The unemployment rate in Austin is around 6.3% while it is only 5% in Union County North Carolina.  The semi-blue state of North Carolina has a partial postponement of evictions while the deep red state of Texas only has the federal CDC moratorium on evictions.  All other state and local restrictions on evictions have expired during this pandemic in Texas. Austin is the fastest growing metro area in the United States, but it also boasts the widest income disparity of any community.  

Two other goals for Richard that he has been looking at as the new administration begins in Washington include a federal ban on discharges onto the streets as well as more involvement by the US Department of Transportation under the guidance of newly ratified Transportation Cabinet Member, Mayor Pete Buttigieg to include those sleeping under the highway bridges of America in the plan to improve infrastructure.  It is a sad reality in the United States that many sexually based offenders cannot find housing anywhere after they have served their time and often turn to encampments mostly under the nation’s highways.  This is not to say everyone who lives under bridges are sexually based offenders, but there are a disproportionate number.  This has led to absurd situations where offenders register with the County sheriff a highway bridge as their permanent residence, which is certainly not the safest or most effective way to reduce recidivism. In fact, the current method for tracking offenders is probably the dumbest and worst strategy on the planet to keep society safe.  Richard saw the big plans for investing in roads and bridges out of the Biden administration and wants housing to be a part of that plan that would create a lot of well paying jobs. This is not to reward sexually based offenders, but to keep all society safe by reducing risks.

California passed a law Senate Bill 1152 in 2018 which attempts to eliminate hospitals from dumping patients onto the streets, and sets up a training protocol to prevent people showing up at the shelter in cabs with their hospital gown and an IV bag still attached.  Richard would like to see this law expanded to include alcohol and drug treatment programs as well as mental health institutions; given some teeth for a strong enforcement mechanisms, and expanded to every health care facility that receives Health and Human Services dollars in the United States.  He also has toyed with the idea of seeing the same apply to all federal institutions so that there has to be some thought about where an individual will live after leaving the US military, housing subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Department of Agriculture or even those released from a federal penitentiary. Richard demands that we discharge no one into homelessness (with strong enforcement). After a period of extreme cruelty by the United States government where we caged kids and separated them from their family, reinstated the federal death penalty and banned people from entering the country because of their religion, it is time to bring back a government of compassion and concern for the well being of everyone living within its borders.  

Richard is a published author, Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle for the Living Wage, which carries on through today as he is in the process of publishing his latest book, Short Stories in a Long Journey. He self-published, Striking a Balance (about pending gentrification in East Austin) and Ending Homeless at its Core-Richard’s first e-book. If you are interested in more of his history of activism, you can pick them up on Amazon. He will continue to work toward economic justice as well as civil rights for the most vulnerable in our society albeit in a slightly more compassionate community in North Carolina.  He combines the passions of an artist with the common sense of an advocate and the knowledge of a social worker making him one of the best friends to have if you do not have housing in America.