The Section 8ers Are Coming! The Section 8ers Are Coming!
by Gary Phillips
Several years ago I had a job as the communication director for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA). Then as now a public interest law firm for the working poor and indigent. Not only was I the first person to ever have that function at LAFLA, it was due to that experience I came to write The Underbelly here on FourStory. He’s moved on since then but at the time there was a swinging dude named Rick Little. He was essentially a paralegal representing the rights of veterans—a few of these folks going as far back as World War II up to the Gulf War. Sometimes they were living on Skid Row. Many had been through hard patches with booze, drugs and ongoing injuries and what we now call post traumatic stress disorder. Often denied their full rightful benefits by the bureaucracy that is the Veterans Administration, Rick would go to bat for these men and women, appealing their cases, seeking to get them their just compensation.
Because part of my job was to tell the good work Rick did in print, via the LAFLA website and newsletter, I’d interview the vets he’d helped. Vets like Victor Ayala who the VA had erroneously applied the law to in a 1978 decision denying him the correct level for his disability benefits. Rick looked into this and after informing the VA’s adjudication specialist he would be filing a specific writ challenging their ruling, they rescinded their decision and awarded Mr. Ayala a retroactive check. It was stories like this that inspired me to create Magrady, the semi-homeless Vietnam vet protagonist in The Underbelly. Other clients of LAFLA I interviewed were Section 8 recipients and the attorneys who worked on their cases.
Section 8, as this Wikipedia entry accurately describes, is named after
Section 8 of the United States Housing Act of 1937 (often simply known as Section 8), as repeatedly amended, authorizes the payment of rental housing assistance to private landlords on behalf of approximately 3.1 million low-income households. It operates through several programs, the largest of which, the Housing Choice Voucher program, pays a large portion of the rents and utilities of about 2.1 million households. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development manages the Section 8 programs ...
What that means in reality is there’s a long waiting list for low income, majority single mother headed families to get the Section 8 voucher. I recall hearing about people waiting two, three, five years or more to receive the voucher. Bearing in mind at various steps along the way, there would be some new amendment or addendum or defunding and refunding and the applicant would have to file amendments to their paperwork or files got lost and they’d have to start all over. And even when they did get a voucher, they had to find a landlord who was willing to take it. There’s no sanction, in both senses of the word, to accept or not accept the voucher.
Public Counsel's Catherine Lhamon with Antelope Valley residents Jesse Smith and Emmett Murrell.
In Palmdale and Lancaster in the Antelope Valley, in the northern part of L.A. County, they ain’t about no lazy, crime producing Section 8ers getting a free ride in their cities. No sir. Mayor Rex Parris of Lancaster doesn’t sugarcoat his position. In news reports he’s stated the Section 8 program is “moving the urban poor into the suburbs, which is destroying hard-working family neighborhoods.” Under his watch there have been stepped up inspections of those receiving Section 8 to make sure they’re complying by the rules by which they receive the assistance or they’re reported and kicked out.
He’s gone on to state how the poor breed crime and cited a 2008 article by Hanna Rosin in the liberal Atlantic Monthly to back him up. Only Professor George Galster, a public housing authority cited several times in the American Murder Mystery piece stated there are many factors linking poverty, Section 8 and crime. One of the criteria Galster said is the subsidized housing in a specific area is at 20%. In Lancaster, it’s 2%. According to 2008 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) stats, 70% of Section 8 recipients in Lancaster are black, 14% Latino. In next door Palmdale, it’s 67% and 18% respectively. There are some 20,000 Section 8 recipients in L.A. County with 3,500 of those in the two aforementioned cities. Eighty-six percent of those recipients in the Antelope Valley are black or Latino.
Via the AP last year it was reported that Parris, a trial lawyer by profession, in his state of the city address in 2010 called for Lancaster to grow as a Christian community and sought to have voters support a ballot measure to institute prayer before city council meetings. He was up for reelection then and thereafter won. I guess voters needed him to fulfill his Christian duty and make sure to get all them poor people on the dole out of his town. Parris has claimed a reduction in crime in the double digits since the stepped-up enforcement of the rules against Section 8ers in his city. Though Darren Parker, President of the Antelope Valley Human Relations Task Force on KPCC radio’s Madeleine Brand Show last week posed the counter-argument that crime was down because of a greater presence of Sheriff’s deputies in general.
Mayor James Ledford of Palmdale was also on KPCC this past June on Air Talk. He said his city was merely doing what the Housing Authority should be doing in these inspections. But on that same show, Catherine Lhamon, Director of Impact Litigation at Public Counsel Law Center (an entity similar to LAFLA but covering that part of the county) noted the housing inspectors are often accompanied by 15 Sheriff’s deputies and renters are often handcuffed as the inspector conducts their search. When you get public assistance, there are a lot of restrictions imposed on you. On one of these searches Lhamon noted a woman with Stage 4 cancer lost her voucher, because her grown daughter, an unauthorized person, had spent the night to care for her mother. The termination was overturned on appeal.
Not surprisingly, Public Council has brought suit in federal court against the cities of Palmdale and Lancaster challenging their policies and practices “that have targeted more than 3,600 black and Latino families using federal housing subsidies in the historically white area,” their press release stated. The plaintiffs are the Community Action League, the California State Conference of the NAACP and two individual Section 8 voucher holders.
While Parris’ war on Section 8 voucher holders won’t do anything about the area’s high unemployment and housing foreclosures, it plays well with the yokels. On that segment of the Brand show, they played brief snippets with residents in Lancaster who supported the mayor. Several were of the opinion low-income renters brought gangbangers and drugs with them. Having heard from time to time about outfits like the Nazi Low Riders and meth labs busted out that way, seems to me there’s plenty of anti-social behavior to go around and certainly not confined to low-income black and brown folk.
Recently the TV news in Dallas covered the “chaos” of people descending on the county housing office to fill out the Section 8 application. This was the first time in five years Dallas had opened its rental assistance waiting list—with an estimated 15,000 families looking to get one of 3,500 newly available vouchers. While the reportage on TV station WFAA provided some context mentioning the economy and the unemployed rate, the balance of the segment was weighted to vignettes of applicants who had minor injuries in the scrambling of people to get in line once the gates opened to get in line to get into the office. Some had waited overnight in their cars.
In the coming presidential race, jobs and the economy will be bandied about a lot. Lost in the rhetoric will likely be any mention of innovative incentive programs to build sorely needed clusters of affordable housing. How sad is it that the wrongheaded comments of people like Mayor Parris actually have resonance with the residents of Antelope Valley and beyond? But then, as former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton Robert Reich noted regarding the puissant deal reached on the GOP orchestrated debt ceiling crisis, the right wing has succeeded in centering attention on the crisis, when the discussion should be about jobs and growth. The plutocracy and their toadies win in the end. The rest of us just take it in the shorts.
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