N.J. renters and low-income refugees from Hurricane Sandy find housing help scarce

Newark Star-Ledger, Dec. 22, 2013

KEANSBURG.jpg

Damaged homes still being demolished in Keansburg, one of many Jersey Shore communities where housing advocates say it is difficult to find affordable housing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. (Andre Malok/The Star-Ledger)
KEANSBURG — Lisa and Jerry Lamberson will spend this Christmas with their kids in a cheap motel on a busy highway in West Keansburg, with only one wish for Santa.

They would like a place to call home.


More than a year after Hurricane Sandy hit, the struggling family that lost its apartment to the storm has been unable to find an affordable house to rent, taking refuge in a succession of motels or on the couches of friends and relatives, while depending on the kindness of strangers.
“It’s hard,” said Lisa Lamberson, 38, a mother of six, who has been living out of two cramped motel rooms on Route 36 since September and sees no prospects for leaving anytime soon.
For some New Jerseyans, the Sandy comeback is more myth than reality.
And people who rent may not be seeing any comeback at all.
An analysis by The Star-Ledger of one of the key programs aimed at helping renters find affordable housing concludes that much of the $4.5 million awarded to date did not go to the counties hardest hit by Sandy. Instead, more than $2 million of it went to landlords in Essex County, which was far less affected than towns along the Jersey Shore.
Monmouth County, where the Lambersons live, saw less than a quarter of that. The state program has so far allocated only $47,484 to Ocean County, where whole towns were swept away.
“There is no rational matchup between where there is a housing need because of the storm and where the resources are going,” complained Staci Berger, executive director of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey.
In the race to recover from Sandy, housing advocates complain, the state has directed the bulk of its resources toward homeowners and high-profile boardwalk restoration projects, while largely ignoring renters and low-income residents like the Lamberson family.
This problem, they assert, represents just the latest in a series of spiraling miscues, delays and mistakes in the distribution of federal aid to storm victims.
The state, they say, has been doing too little, too late, shortchanging some of the most vulnerable.
“There is widespread confusion and a sense of being left behind,” said Kevin Walsh, associate director of the Fair Share Housing Center, a Cherry Hill-based organization that litigates for affordable housing in New Jersey that has sharply criticized the administration .
Officials in the state Department of Community Affairs called the advocates’ claims “utterly without merit.”
A department spokeswoman noted that less than seven months after housing recovery funds finally started flowing in New Jersey, 43 percent — or nearly half — of the money was either earmarked for spending, or had already been awarded to people in need. Nearly three-quarters of those funds have been distributed to low- or middle-income people.
“Not only are we allocating considerable funds to rental housing, we are doing so at a greater ratio than the damage assessment indicates,” said the spokeswoman, Lisa Ryan.

Homeowner advantage

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in April approved a state plan to spend about $1.83 billion in the first round of federal Community Development Block Grants for Sandy relief efforts. And most of that money, nearly $1.16 billion, was allocated by the Christie administration to housing assistance programs.
So far, $790.3 million has been spent, and nearly all of that has gone to the nine New Jersey counties hardest by Sandy — Atlantic, Bergen, Cape May, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean and Union.
An examination of that spending shows more than 80 cents of every dollar did go to the counties directly in the eye of the storm. Ocean County received $374.5 million. Monmouth received $164.1 million. Atlantic got $118.9 million.
But much of that money was aimed at homeowners.
Adam Gordon, a staff attorney at Fair Share Housing Center, said the Christie administration has consistently made renters — especially low-income renters impacted by Sandy — a lower priority than homeowners.
Ryan denied that is the case. She said a needs assessment was conducted by the department focusing on primary residences that sustained major or severe storm-related damage. It found that 72 percent were owner-occupied homes and 28 percent were rental properties.
“We used this needs assessment as the basis for allocating the $1.2 billion earmarked for housing recovery programs,” the community affairs spokeswoman said. “In fact, we overallocated funds to renters.”
But the Fair Share Housing Center — which sued the state in September for documents related to the relief effort — says those records show the administration never had clear guidelines for awarding Hurricane Sandy relief funds until after it began paying out the money.
The group also claimed thousands of people affected by Sandy were put on wait lists or rejected from specific aid programs before the formal guidelines were put in place. At the same time, it accused the Christie administration of significantly underfunding rental housing programs from the start.
Gordon said the state initially proposed a plan to allocate less than 25 percent of housing recovery funds to renters.
“HUD fortunately stepped in and required the Christie administration to increase resources serving renters by $75 million, including $15 million for public housing repair — still not enough to fairly reflect the damage, but an improvement,” he said. “HUD also required the Christie administration to target their funds to the most impacted communities — something that they had not proposed in their original plan.”

Where’s the need?

Housing advocates say even after the state added funding to help renters, it dragged its feet and used the money poorly. They specifically point to the Incentives for Landlords program as one of the big failures of the recovery effort.
The $40 million program was aimed at temporarily subsidizing rental rates to provide more affordable housing. It provides rental property owners roughly the difference between 30 percent of a tenant’s monthly income and the fair market rent for a rental unit, during a two-year period.
Under the program, the example state officials give is that a landlord in Monmouth County receiving a fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment of $1,410 would collect $517 from the tenant, with about $893 paid by the state.
The data examined by The Star-Ledger, though, showed much of the money awarded so far has gone to Essex County — far from the areas most ravaged by the storm.
“There is a rental crisis in Essex, but it does not appear that the money from the program is going to where Sandy did the most damage,” remarked Berger of the Housing and Community Development Network, who called the program restrictive and poorly designed.
“It wasn’t the best investment they could have made to help renters,” Berger said.
Ryan conceded the greatest demand for the incentive program grants has come from Essex, but said the department’s hands were tied by federal guidelines. The grants are awarded based on demand, and not specifically on geographical need.
“While we have done substantial outreach of this program in coastal areas, we can’t force rental property owners to apply,” she said.
“We believe this program is a win-win for all involved — the rental property owner, the family in need of affordable housing and the community — and we’ve conveyed this everywhere we’ve done outreach, but it is ultimately up to the property owner to decide if they want to participate.”
Overall, Ryan said that $379 million has been allocated in disaster recovery funds for programs specifically for rental housing, which will result in more than 7,000 new affordable housing units statewide over the next two years.

Waiting to go home

Meanwhile, the Sandy rebuilding effort continues in places like Keansburg, where the Lamberson family children still go to school and their parents are desperate to find a new home.
“We’re slowly plodding along. We are getting homes back in shape,” said Ed Striedl, the borough’s construction official and flood plain manager. He estimated that half of Keansburg’s housing stock was left temporarily uninhabitable by the hurricane and its floodwaters.
About 15 percent to 20 percent of the homes in Keansburg remain vacant, “but it’s better than it was a year ago,” he said.
Lisa Lamberson, who lost her job after the storm and was having financial troubles even before, is grateful for the assistance she has received from Catholic Charities in Monmouth County and other organizations. Now, though, she just wants to leave the motel where she has been staying for the past four months and return with her family to a place she can afford in Keansburg.
“The people here are amazing. They’re really nice people. But I want to be in my own home,” she said. “My house is usually decorated this time of year for Christmas and I’m not going to be able to bake cookies with the kids.”

Christie Administration Ignores Climate Change in New Jersey’s Post-Sandy Rebuild

Solve Climate, Dec. 19, 2013

by Katherine Bagley

Separated by less than a mile, political leaders in New Jersey and New York diverge on the issue of climate change.

By Katherine Bagley

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a series of aggressive rebuilding initiatives to protect New Yorkers from future climate-related threats.

But less than a mile away in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River, political leaders reacted in a much different way.

To them, the October 2012 superstorm was just a rare event, not a preview of what scientists expect global warming to bring to the East Coast in the coming decades.

When asked in May about Sandy’s connection with climate change, Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, said the question was "a distraction" and that global warming was an "esoteric" theory.

That philosophy has permeated New Jersey’s post-Sandy recovery effort.

Hurricane Sandy and New Jersey’s Poor

N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 2013

By the Editorial Board

Civil rights groups in New Jersey filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in April charging that the state plan for distributing Hurricane Sandy recovery aid discriminated against blacks and Hispanics who lost their homes in the storm. In September, the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group, sued the state, alleging that it was withholding public information that would show whether low-income and minority citizens were being discriminated against.

The center now says it has evidence showing that black and Hispanic citizens who seek assistance are being turned away in disproportionate numbers. Its data show that 38.1 percent of African-Americans and 20.4 percent of Hispanics who applied for resettlement grants were rejected, against only 14.5 percent of whites. The group says that it found a similar outcome among people who applied for reconstruction or rehabilitation grants: 35.1 percent of African-Americans and 18.1 percent of Latinos were rejected, compared with 13.6 percent of whites.

The center says that its data show low application rates by minority citizens, which might suggest problems with either the state’s outreach efforts or with the application process itself. Gov. Chris Christie has dismissed the center as a “hack group” that deserves no response. His Department of Community Affairs, which oversees the housing recovery effort, says the charge of discrimination is “outrageously false.”

The numbers by themselves do not prove discrimination. But the Christie administration has a poor record when it comes to supporting housing for the poor. Mr. Christie has tried to undermine the state’s affordable housing laws since he took office and would have dismantled the independent agency that promotes affordable housing had the New Jersey Supreme Court not barred him from doing so earlier this year.

Given that record, federal housing officials need to take a close look to see whether New Jersey is operating in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

© 2013 The New York Times

Interactive Map: Living in the Same State But in Different Worlds

While NJ ranks as second-richest state in nation, gap in household incomes is wide and deep.

The vast differences in wealth in New Jersey become clear on a map showing household income:

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/12/19/median-income/
Most of the richest  residents are clumped together in Morris, Somerset and Hunterdon counties, and those counties have only a few towns where the median household income dips below $100,000, as measured by the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The rest of the state’s wealth is concentrated in northeastern Bergen County, southern Sussex and a “V” configuration of communities in Mercer and Monmouth counties.
On the other hand, the area around Newark and Elizabeth has the lowest incomes, and median household incomes in most of South Jersey fall below $80,000.
The last estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS), released on Tuesday, rank New Jersey as the second-wealthiest state, based on data for a five-year period from 2008-2012. The census uses 5-year estimates when providing data for small geographic areas, such as municipalities, in order to be more accurate. The median income in the state was $71,637, almost $1,400 less than Maryland, which ranked first.
The 2012 estimate is slightly higher than the 2011 estimate of $71,180, but when that is adjusted for inflation to 2012 levels, the 2011 is more than $1,000 higher. The 2011 data dates back to 2007 and so includes some pre-recession estimates. The recession officially started in December 2007 and, while it officially ended in mid-2009, New Jersey’s economy has still not fully recovered.
Still, more than a quarter of municipalities in the state had median household incomes of at least $100,000, with the highest in tiny Tavistock in Camden County, where the median of the three households was estimated at more than $250,000. In Rockleigh in Bergen County, with 63 households, the median income was estimated at $198,125.
At the same time, New Jersey has some areas of great poverty. The city of Camden is estimated to be the state’s poorest municipality, with a median income of just $26,705. The income in Penns Grove in Salem is just slightly higher, at $27,615.
Camden also has the largest proportion of the poorest households in the state: 22 percent have an income of less than $10,000. In 15 communities, there are no households that poor. Meanwhile, there are eight municipalities in which no household had more than $200,000 in income, and nine in which at least 40 percent of the households had at least $200,000 in income.
The ACS data also provides estimates for income by race and ethnicity. New Jersey’s Asians have the highest median income — $102,138. The median income is $80,565 for non-Hispanic white households, $49,401 for Hispanics and $47,714 for black households.
More statistics are available from the Census Bureau’s American the Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder
 

Tackling a Racial Gap in Breast Cancer Survival

MEMPHIS — After her doctor told her two months ago that she had breast cancer, Debrah Reid, a 58-year-old dance teacher, drove straight to a funeral home. She began planning a burial with the funeral director and his wife, even requesting a pink coffin.

Sensing something was amiss, the funeral director, Edmund Ford, paused. “Who is this for?” he asked. Ms. Reid replied quietly, “It’s for me.”

Aghast, Mr. Ford’s wife, Myrna, quickly put a stop to the purchase. “Get on out of here,” she said, urging Ms. Reid to return to her doctor and seek treatment. Despondent, Ms. Reid instead headed to her church to talk to her pastor.

“I was just going to sit down and die,” she says.

Like many other African-American women in Memphis and around the country, Ms. Reid learned about her breast cancer after it had already reached an advanced stage, making it difficult to treat and reducing her odds of survival. Her story reflects one of the most troubling disparities in American health care. Despite 20 years of pink ribbon awareness campaigns and numerous advances in medical treatment that have sharply improved survival rates for women with breast cancer in the United States, the vast majority of those gains have largely bypassed black women.

The cancer divide between black women and white women in the United States is as entrenched as it is startling. In the 1980s, breast cancer survival rates for the two were nearly identical. But since 1991, as improvements in screening and treatment came into use, the gap has widened, with no signs of abating. Although breast cancer is diagnosed in far more white women, black women are far more likely to die of the disease.

And Memphis is the deadliest major American city for African-American women with breast cancer. Black women with the disease here are more than twice as likely to die of it than white women.

“The big change in the 1990s was advances in care that were widely available in early detection and treatment,” said Steven Whitman, director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute in Chicago. “White women gained access to those advances, and black women didn’t.”

Over all, black women with a breast cancer diagnosis will die three years sooner than their white counterparts. While nearly 70 percent of white women live at least five years after diagnosis, only 56 percent of black women do. And some research suggests that institutions providing mammograms mainly to black patients miss as many as half of breast cancers compared with the expected detection rates at academic hospitals.

The gap in cancer survival cannot be explained away by biological differences in cancer between blacks and whites, researchers say. While African-American women are at greater risk of a more aggressive form of cancer known as triple negative, those cancers account for only about 10 percent of diagnoses.

Researchers from the Sinai Institute last year analyzed breast cancer cases in the country’s 25 largest cities and found that African-American women with breast cancer were, on average, 40 percent more likely to die of their disease than white women. In the United States, the disparity in breast cancer survival translates to about 1,700 additional deaths each year — or about five more black women dying every day.

News that Memphis has the widest survival gap between black and white hit the medical community here hard. When the breast cancer disparity study was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology last year, Edward Rafalski was one of the first here to read it. He is senior vice president for strategic planning at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, which operates eight hospitals in the Memphis area.

As it happened, Dr. Rafalski had previously worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago and knew the study’s lead author, Dr. Whitman of the Sinai Institute. As local headlines declared the city’s troubling record, Dr. Rafalski invited Dr. Whitman to the city. Memphis, population 655,000, is more than two-thirds black, and more than a quarter of its residents are poor.

“When you look at any epidemiological study, Memphis is often the epicenter of virtually any disease, be it diabetes, heart failure — there are a lot of health issues here,” Dr. Rafalski said. “But for breast cancer to be as bad as it is — that’s why everyone came to the table and said, ‘We have to do something.’”

Dr. Whitman flew to Memphis for a strategy session. The study’s co-author, Marc Hurlbert of the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade, which funded the research, joined the conference by phone.

The solution, everyone agreed, would not be simple. Doctors and health care researchers say the reasons behind the black-white cancer divide are complex. Economic disparities that disproportionately affect African-Americans explain some of it. Years of racial discrimination and distrust of the medical establishment dating back to the Tuskegee, Ala., syphilis experiments on black men in the 1930s continue to influence health decisions made by African-American families in the South.

Lack of health insurance among low-income and self-employed women was also cited as an obstacle to timely care, a problem that may be eased if some of them gain insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Black women often arrive at the hospital with cancers so advanced, they rival the late-stage disease that doctors see among women in developing nations. A study based on Medicare records published in July in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 20 percent of African-American women with breast cancer did not learn of their disease until it had advanced to Stage 3 or 4. By comparison, only 11 percent of white women learn at late stages.

Doctors in Memphis and in cities around the country tell horrific stories of poor and uneducated patients, black and white, who arrive at the clinics with festering tumors or a breast that has been all but consumed by a growing cancer.

With a grant from the Avon Breast Cancer Foundation, researchers at the Methodist system analyzed their records of breast cancer patients and discovered that even in what is widely viewed as the top hospital system in the region, black patients took on average about a month longer to begin treatment after diagnosis compared with white patients.

“A large percentage of our African-American population is also poor, and poor people don’t have the luxury of being sick,” said Dr. Kurt Tauer, an oncologist with the West Cancer Clinic, which is affiliated with the Methodist system. “They have to take off work, find someone to give them a ride.”

But the larger issue, hospital officials say, is that many black women in Memphis do not seek health care at all. They do not undergo mammograms for screening or see a doctor when the earliest signs of breast cancer develop. Even among women with Medicare coverage, black women were significantly less likely than white women to have seen a primary care doctor in the six to 18 months before diagnosis, and also had far lower rates of breast cancer screening — 23.5 percent in that period, compared with 35.7 percent of white women, the JAMA study found.

The challenge is to get women screened and treated in good time. But how, the Methodist officials asked, do you reach African-American women who have felt excluded from the health care system for most of their lives?

Spreading the Word

It is often said that there is a church on every street corner in Memphis. In a half-mile stretch of Elvis Presley Boulevard, there are six: the Faith Temple Holiness Church, the Holmes Road Church of Christ, the CME Temple Christian Methodist Church, the Lily of the Valley Church of God in Christ, Our Savior Lutheran Church and the Holy Spring Baptist Church. Methodist hospital system officials estimate there are 3,000 to 4,000 churches in the area they serve.

“Our patients are in churches on Sunday,” said the Rev. Bobby Baker, director of faith and community partnerships at Methodist. “If we want to be in their lives when they’re not in our hospital, the church is where to find them.”

In 2005, the hospital system formed the Congregational Health Network. It began with 12 area churches and has grown to more than 500 congregations. Through the network, the hospitals have registered 18,000 people and given them messages promoting prevention, screening and health education. An analysis of hospital records shows that patients in the network fare better, staying out of the hospital four months longer than non-network patients with a similar diagnosis.

Dr. Rafalski and his Methodist colleagues realized that this network would be the best way to reach out to black women on breast cancer issues. With a grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation, they hired Carole Dickens to work with pastors and congregants. During Sunday services, she spreads the word about early screening, gives women her cellphone number and follows up with those who share their contact information. She helps them gain access to public health programs and offers taxi vouchers so they can get to medical appointments.

Many of the women admit to never getting a mammogram and avoiding doctors. Sometimes, it is because they do not have health insurance, so Ms. Dickens refers them to free mammography programs in the area. Others admit they are stopped by fear.

“They have all kinds of reasons for not doing it,” Ms. Dickens said.

She said the women have told her: “I don’t want anybody cutting on me.”

“My mama died, and my aunt died and they suffered so much. I didn’t want to go through that.”

“If I’ve got it, I’ve got it. I’m going to die from something.”

A Daunting Task

Mary Singleton, 57, a Memphis print shop owner, noticed a lump in her breast in July. Because she did not have health insurance, she did not get the lump checked, telling herself that she did not need to worry because she did not have a family history of breast cancer.

One afternoon this fall, the Boulevard Church of Christ hosted a health fair, giving away pink bags that included pink pens, a key chain and a brochure from the American Cancer Society. It prompted Ms. Singleton to seek a free mammogram through the local health department. She learned she had Stage 4 cancer in October.

“It takes a while for the brain to process,” she said. “There’s a difference between what you heard about cancer, and now somebody is telling you that it’s your story.”

After years without health insurance, she was told that her cancer treatment would be covered by Tenncare, the state’s Medicaid program.

“I had to get cancer to get health insurance,” Ms. Singleton said, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I’ve been one of those people waiting for Obamacare, waiting for health insurance. And this is how I finally get it.”

After her diagnosis, her son George moved home from Iowa to help her run her printing business, which she had just opened about a month before learning of her illness. The business, named STBS, for Sisters Together Building Success, is in an office she leased from her church, just off Elvis Presley Boulevard.

On a recent day, she stepped out of her shop to watch a holiday parade move slowly past. She had printed some of the signs being carried in the parade, and she wanted to see them go by. A dance group called the Sassie Seniors strutted by in red Santa jackets. The leader, in a shiny red leotard and boots with faux leopard fur, was none other than Ms. Reid, the dance instructor who began planning her funeral after learning she had breast cancer.

After the funeral home refused her business, Ms. Reid sought counseling from the Rev. Robert J. Matthews of the New Hope Baptist Church of Memphis. He is a 12-year survivor of colon cancer, and their talk was transformative for her.

“I’m not a weak person,” she said. “I decided to be a messenger.”

Ms. Reid, a former member of the Grizzlies Grannies, a dance team for the Memphis Grizzlies, the city’s professional basketball team, said she had avoided a mammogram for eight years because she found them so unpleasant. Last month, she called a meeting of the Sassie Seniors in the dressing room before a performance.

“I revealed my breast so they could see it,” she said. “It was swollen. I made them touch it. It shocked them. Out of 21 people with me that night, 15 have already had mammograms, and others have them scheduled.”

While Ms. Reid, who has Stage 3 cancer, hopes her story will help other women, she knows that education is not enough. “A lot of us don’t have insurance,” she said. “And without insurance, a lot of stuff goes undetected.”

Ms. Reid, like Ms. Singleton, is undergoing treatment at the West Cancer Clinic.

Doctors say it will be months or even years before they know if their efforts to reach out to African-American women will lead to more early diagnoses and begin to narrow the black-and-white divide for breast cancer.

“It’s such a daunting task,” said Dr. Rafalski of Methodist. “It’s almost easier to throw up your hands, but we can’t. We have to fix it, one little step at a time.”

Housing Advocate Claims Sandy Recovery Grants Racially Biased

NJ Spotlight, Dec. 13, 2013

By Tracey Samuelson WHYY/NewsWorks

Controversial — and contested — findings indicate blacks more than twice as likely to be rejected than whites

WHYY Sandy Chart

Black and Latino applicants for Sandy aid in New Jersey are more likely to be rejected for recovery grants than white applicants, according to data released Thursday by a New Jersey housing advocate.
The rejection rate for whites who applied for New Jersey’s two main grants for homeowners affected by Sandy was 13 to 14 percent. For Latinos, it was slightly higher – 18 to 20 percent; African Americans had the highest rejection rates at 35 to 38 percent.
“That is very concerning because we would hope that federal recovery money would be equally available to everyone who was impacted by the storm,” said Adam Gordon, a staff attorney with Fair Share Housing, which received this data as part of a lawsuit against that state seeking access to information about how Sandy grant money has been distributed.
The Christie administration strongly disagreed with the organization’s findings.
“This is an outrageously false implication that exposes a complete lack of credibility and integrity by Fair Share Housing Center,” said Richard Constable, the commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs, in a written statement.
Constable emphasized that criteria for the Sandy programs were approved by the Obama administration and do not take race into account in evaluating applications for assistance. He did not address why there might be higher rejection numbers for blacks and Latinos.
As part of its lawsuit, Fair Share Housing received data on grant awards made through the end of September in the state’s Resettlement Program and its Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, Elevation and Mitigation program – two of its largest grants for homeowners whose property was damaged during Sandy.
While Fair Share cited problems with the quality of information in Spanish-language versions of the grant applications and a lack of advertising about the grants, there’s no way to know what might be causing the disparities from this data alone. Morever, while rejection rates were higher for minorities, a larger share of white applicants were waitlisted than Latino or African American applicants for the RREM program; acceptance rates in that program were also slightly higher for Latinos than Caucasians.
In a news release, the New Jersey State Conference of the NAACP and Latino Action Network joined with Fair Share to say that the racial disparities in the data is worrisome and deserves further investigation.
Disasters can produce challenges for governments seeking to create fast, effective and fair aid distribution programs.
“I would say, in terms of disaster response, it’s the worst time for governments to really try to get [its programs] right,” said Karen O’Neill, a human ecology professor at Rutgers University who’s been following the Sandy response. “Because getting it right with disadvantaged communities is a problem any day of the week for any ongoing programs, [and] these are one-time programs.”
Minority communities tend to have less wealth than their white counterparts and a shorter history of homeownership, according to O’Neill, which means they may be less prepared for disaster such as Sandy – both financially and by stowing important documents in a safety deposit box, for example.
“What this means is that you really need really well-trained case workers,” said O’Neill. “They routinely have to patch together a pretty spotty document trail because, in some cases, people really do lose the documents [during a disaster].”
The state may need to actively seek out qualified applicants as well and help them through the complex application process.
“It’s very confusing to people,” said O’Neill. “So even people who are very highly resourced are confused about the criteria, about the application process.”
Listen to the accompanying podcast.
 

New Film, ‘Out of the Furnace,’ Accused of Stereotyping Ramapough Indians

N.Y. Times, Dec. 11, 2013
By Corey Kilgannon
MAHWAH, N.J. — The past week has been unsettling for the Ramapough Mountain Indians, who live on this northern stretch of the Appalachian Mountains that overlooks the Manhattan skyline and wealthy parts of Bergen County. The new movie “Out of the Furnace,” featuring a star-studded cast that includes Christian Bale and Woody Harrelson, also features numerous negative references to the Ramapoughs. They include a fight-ring subplot.

Dwayne C. Perry, President and Chief, Ramapough Mountain Indians

Keith Van Dunk, 27, a member of the tribe, took a break from feeding the chickens at his father’s house up on Stag Hill here on Sunday morning and gestured at the surrounding woods.
“You see any fight ring up here?” he said. “Absolutely not.”
Tribal leaders and local elected officials held a news conference last week, speaking out against a film that they claim portrays them as trashy backwoods bumpkins involved in drugs and violence. One Ramapough henchman in the movie even bears Mr. Van Dunk’s last name.
The references constitute a “hate crime” that has “stained the community and stirred up animus” by increasing marginalization and stigmatization, said the Ramapoughs’ chief, Dwaine C. Perry, 66, in an interview.
In the past few days, he said, there had been several instances of Ramapough students in local high schools being picked on by classmates who had seen the film, including one case in which a teacher had to intervene.
At a showing of the movie last weekend, someone hurled slurs at a Ramapough woman in the theater, he said. There was also a fight at a local mall that tribal members said was stirred up by the film.
“The film contains ugly stereotypes that stain you for life,” Chief Perry said. “The undertones are racist and personal. It’s a hate crime when you look at the psychological impact on the kids.”
Contacted for comment, the film’s production company, Relativity Media, released a statement saying that the film is “entirely fictional” and not “based upon any particular person or group of people.”
“As is the case with most films, the filmmakers conducted research and drew upon their own personal life experiences in creating an original screenplay, and the story and the characters are entirely fictional,” the statement read.
Scott Cooper, who directed the film and co-wrote the script, was unavailable for comment Wednesday night. But a Relativity Media spokesman said that John Fetterman, mayor of Braddock, Pa. — the other main setting in the film — had nothing but praise for the way the movie portrayed Braddock. Mr. Fetterman called it a respectful depiction that was “eloquent, forceful and honest,” in a guest column he wrote for Variety magazine.
Several characters in the film have last names that are prevalent Ramapough names, including De Groat and Mann. The film was not shot in the area, but the Bergen County Police Department is portrayed as the local authority.
Mr. Van Dunk said he refused to buy a ticket to the film, but he consulted the IMDB website and saw that several cast members were listed as “Jackson White.”
The term “Jackson White” is a slur used by outsiders to deride the Ramapoughs, Mr. Van Dunk said, referencing the tribe’s descent from Native Americans, whites and runaway slaves who settled in the mountains in the late 18th century. The term dredges up decades of a long, ugly history of discrimination and marginalization.
“To me, it’s like calling a black person the N-word, and my father is black,” said Mr. Van Dunk, who works for a moving company in Hackensack. “In high school, kids would call me a Jackson White in the hallway, and if I stuck up for myself, they’d say I’m living up to the stereotype.”
Before the opening of the film, which was the third-grossing film in the country last weekend, The New York Post published an article saying that it depicts the Ramapoughs as “New Jersey hillbillies.” The article characterized tribe members as unsophisticated, intermarrying types who are ridiculed, who hunt and eat squirrels, and who drive all-terrain vehicles on dirt roads.
“After reading in The Post about the Ramapoughs being a bunch of hillbillies eating squirrels, I drove into Manhattan the first night it opened to see the film for myself,” said Mahwah Mayor William C. Laforet. He added that a mine depicted in the film appears to be modeled on the local Abex foundry, now shuttered.
“There are numerous connections, factual and implied, and now the producers are backpedaling and saying it’s fictional,” Mr. Laforet said. “It’s unfair to the folks on the mountain to resurrect those stereotypes. It’s a disgraceful depiction of that community.”
The mayor also said he feared the fight-club element would lead teenagers to test Ramapough children. Local school officials have been “keenly sensitive” to watching for discrimination against students from Ramapough families in the wake of the film, he said, stepping up what has already been a “zero tolerance policy” in recent years regarding discrimination against Ramapough children.
The mayor said he feared the film could add to the longstanding problem of young people driving to Mahwah to take joy rides on the roads of Stag Mountain.
“It’s going to bring outsiders to the mountain looking for some Wild West,” he said. “This isn’t the backwoods of Kentucky — it’s within eyeshot of New York City.”
The Ramapough people trace their roots back thousands of years to the Lenape tribe. Now there are perhaps 5,000 members living in mountainous areas around the border with New York.
For a group long known as “mountain people,” the film is another in a long line of indignities, which include a lack of federal recognition as a tribe, despite gaining official recognition decades ago from New York and New Jersey.
There was the humiliation a few years back of becoming the butt of late-night jokes, after the Ramapoughs’ practice of hunting and eating squirrels drew governmental warnings regarding lead levels in squirrels at a local Superfund site. Then there was the unusually high level of health problems that tribal members connected to toxin dumping by the Ford Motor Company. When the tribe wanted to apply for a casino permit, even Donald Trump joined the fight against it.
Regarding the influx of joy riders, Elmore Wilson, a tribal member who lives on Stag Hill, said they had been on the increase.
“One of them just busted my windshield,” said Mr. Wilson, 54, as he stood on his front lawn on Sunday with his son, Michael Wilson, 24, near the tribal headquarters. Elmore Wilson, a security guard at Ramapo College, said he sat Michael down years ago and gave him the Ramapough facts of life.
“I told him, ‘This is what you’re going to be facing because of where we live,’ ” he recounted. “You’re going to hear we’re a bunch of inbreds, all kinds of stuff. You just got to let it roll off your back.”
Nicole Ginsburg, 21, who works the counter at Jersey Boys pizza parlor at the foot of Stag Hill, said some local residents made fun of the Ramapough members as banjo-playing hillbillies.
“Some of the Mahwah kids call them inbred,” she said. “One kid said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to bump into a Jackson White up there.’ ”
As for Mr. Van Dunk, before returning to his chickens, he said he was rethinking his future.
“Right now, my pride keeps me here, but I guess I’ll have to move as my kids get older,” he said. “I don’t want them growing up with people looking at them funny.”

New Census Data Confirms Real Poverty is Rampant in New Jersey

NJ Spotlight, Nov. 20, 2013
By Raymond Castro
According to the recent Supplemental Poverty Measure, one in seven residents is living in poverty

raymond castro

Despite being the second-wealthiest state in the nation, New Jersey has a higher real poverty rate than 35 other states, with about 1.35 million — or one in seven — residents living in poverty, according to the recent Supplemental Poverty Measure released by the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s 44 percent more than the 930,000 that are living under the official federal poverty level.
The number of additional families falling into poverty using the more accurate measure is frightening: While the official poverty rate for poverty in New Jersey averaged 10.7 percent between 2010 and 2012, the supplemental rate was 15.5 percent. This is the second-largest difference of any of the 50 states (after California); nationally the difference was just one percentage point.
The main reason for the high level of real poverty is New Jersey’s high cost of living, particularly for housing. The new census findings confirm other research from our colleagues at Legal Services of New Jersey and the United Way of Northwest New Jersey, which has consistently shown that real poverty in New Jersey is much higher than what is reported in the official poverty statistics.

The supplemental poverty measure is a much more detailed look at poverty than the more frequently cited Federal Poverty Level, which is a single national rate that looks only at a family’s gross income and compares it to a family’s budget in 1969 adjusted for inflation.
The supplemental measure includes income from all sources — including non-cash benefits like subsidized housing and nutrition assistance — but it also subtracts necessary expenses for critical goods and services like payroll taxes, childcare and work-related expenses, and adjusts for the widely varying costs of living by state.
Under this more accurate measure, poverty rates for children, who have access to a lot of safety-net programs, — decrease, while rates for adults, particularly seniors, increase. Seniors are often thought of as being much better off because of Social Security, but they do have high housing costs and out-of-pocket medical costs. Nevertheless, the poverty rate for children still remains the highest of all age groups under the more accurate measure.
The supplemental measure also highlights the vital importance of the social safety net. Most federal programs that assist low-income Americans reduce poverty. Other than Social Security, the most effective programs are the refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and SNAP (formerly called food stamps). Without the refundable tax credits, for example, the national poverty rate for children would be a third higher.
Yet these are the very programs facing hostile attack in D.C. SNAP benefits were cut across the board this month, forcing millions of families to make do with less food. The ongoing automatic budget cuts known as sequestration have also cut important work supports like childcare for struggling families.
But the threat is far larger, with the House having passed legislation essentially gutting SNAP and making millions like the long-term unemployed ineligible. Efforts by the House to derail the Affordable Care Act, if successful, would force many moderate-income families into bankruptcy because of uncovered catastrophic medical bills.
New Jersey’s leaders — particularly its members of Congress of both parties — should continue to support effective antipoverty measures and oppose federal cuts. Meanwhile, the state’s leaders in Trenton need to step up to the plate and enact state-based measures to stem the dramatic increase in families falling into poverty.
There’s some good news on that front: The recent approval of a minimum wage increase and the state’s decision to expand Medicaid eligibility will bring some real economic relief to hundreds of thousands of low-income New Jerseyans. But there is more to be done. The most important immediate step New Jersey lawmakers can take to help struggling working families is to fully and immediately restore 2010’s 20 percent cut to the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, which resulted in a de facto tax increase of about $150 million for a half-million working families. It is important that the EITC be put on the front burner in 2014 and that it be untethered from broader political fights over larger tax cuts. These hard-working families have suffered long enough.
Policymakers also need to address New Jersey’s unrelenting housing crisis — probably the greatest cause of poverty in the state. When one in four renters spends half of his or her income on rent, and the rate of foreclosure is the second-highest in the nation, there’s clearly something wrong. We need a consistent and fair housing plan for the middle class, the working poor, and the homeless that makes New Jersey an affordable place to live for everyone.
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Raymond Castro is a senior policy analyst at New Jersey Policy Perspective, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization that aims to create a New Jersey with widespread economic opportunity and shared prosperity.

 

For some folks, life is a hill

NY Times, November 29, 2013

By Charles M. Blow

I strongly reject the concept of respectability politics, which postulates that a style of dress or speech justifies injustice, and often violence, against particular groups of people or explains away the ravages of their inequality.

Charles M. Blow
Charles M. Blow

I take enormous exception to arguments about the “breakdown of the family,” particularly the black family, that don’t acknowledge that this country for centuries has endeavored, consciously and not, to break it down. Or that family can be defined only one way.

I don’t buy into the mythology that most poor people are willfully and contentedly poor, happy to live with the help of handouts from a benevolent big government that is equally happy to keep them dependent.

These are all arguments based on shame, meant to distance traditional power structures from emerging ones, to allow for draconian policy arguments from supposedly caring people. These arguments require faith in personal failure as justification for calling our fellow citizens feckless or doctrinally disfavored.

Those who espouse such arguments must root for failures so that they’re proved right. They need their worst convictions to be affirmed: that other people’s woes are due solely to their bad choices and bad behaviors; that there are no systematic suppressors at play; that the way to success is wide open to all those who would only choose it.

Any of us in the country who were born poor, or minority, or female, or otherwise different — particularly in terms of gender or sexual identity — know better.

Misogyny and sexism, racism, income inequality, patriarchy, and homophobia and heteronormative ideals course through the culture like a pathogen in the blood, infecting the whole of the being beneath the surface.

So it is to the people with challenges that I would like to speak today. I know your pains and your struggles. I share them. It is incredibly dispiriting when people are dismissive of the barriers we must overcome simply to make it to equal footing. I know. It is infuriating when people offer insanely naïve solutions to our suffering: “Stop whining and being a victim!” I know.

But I also would like to share with you the way I’ve learned to deal with it, hoping that maybe it will offer you some encouragement.

I decided long ago to achieve as an act of defiance — to define my own destiny and refuse to have it defined for me. I fully understand that trying hard doesn’t always guarantee success. Success is often a fluky thing, dependent as much on luck and favor as on hard work. But while hard work may not guarantee success, not working hard almost always guarantees failure.

I frame the argument to myself this way: If you know that you are under assault, recognize it, and defend yourself.

Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.

When I am asked to give speeches, I often include this analogy:

For some folks, life is a hill. You can either climb or stay at the bottom.

It’s not fair. It’s not right. But it is so. Some folks are born halfway up the hill and others on the top. The rest of us are not. Life doles out favors in differing measures, often as a result of historical injustice and systematic bias. That’s a hurtful fact, one that must be changed. We should all work toward that change.

In the meantime, until that change is real, what to do if life gives you the hill?

You can curse it. You can work hard to erode it. You can try to find a way around it. Those are all understandable endeavors. Staying at the bottom is not.

You may be born at the bottom, but the bottom was not born in you. You have it within you to be better than you were, to make more of your life than was given to you by life.

This is not to say that we can always correct life’s inequities, but simply that we honor ourselves in the trying.

History is cluttered with instances of the downtrodden lifting themselves up. The spirit and endurance that it requires is not a historical artifact but a living thing that abides in each of us, part of the bloodline, written in the tracks of tears and the sweat of toil.

If life for you is a hill, be a world-class climber.

Forgotten and tired, Newark’s Ironbound residents fight through Sandy

Newark Star-Ledger, Nov. 24, 2013
By Barry Carter/Star-Ledger 

Tractor-trailers cross over railroad tracks and pull up to an assortment of industries, some under state investigation for soil contamination. Newark’s Ironbound section by the Passaic River is the ideal place for a paint company, warehouses, businesses that handle lubricants and clean chemical tanks sitting on the ground like watermelons.
There’s no reason to think anyone would live here.
But there are families in this forgotten part of Newark, an island of blue-collar folk barely clinging to a down-home way of life Hurricane Sandy took from them last year.

1 ga1121barcol Sciarrino.JPGJanet Rosero, a resident of Esther Street in Newark, whose home, as well as most of her neighbors, was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy, stands in her gutted home as she reads a water bill from the City of Newark. The little known section of Newark called the island got hammered by the Sandy storm leaving eight homes abandonded. They are frustrated by the state’s red tape in getting funds to fix up damaged homes. The are upset with the city for its incompetence.Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger

They all knew each other on Esther, Joseph and Albert streets. They knew who belonged and who didn’t. Even the stray dog was fed and welcome.
“This isn’t just a regular community,” said Jaime Beja. “On the weekends everybody was outside.”
Now nearly everybody is gone.
It’s like a ghost town, like they don’t exist. Leaders of the Ironbound Community Corp., a grassroots group helping residents cope in Sandy’s aftermath, said eight homes out of 25 are empty because of foreclosure, condemnation and owners walking away from what they can’t fix. When you cross over Raymond Boulevard and turn onto Waydell Street, another 75 homes were damaged but those residents are trying to rebuild.
“People are disgusted with the system and feel abandoned,” said Reina Esteras, a disaster relief case manager for the Ironbound organization. “They’re at the breaking point. They’re bitter and they’re angry.”
Never did they think the Passaic River would swallow the neighborhood and wash away the foundations of homes that some will never live in again.
Janet Rosero has moved twice since Sandy, paying rent for an apartment and the mortgage for her home, which she checks regularly. Her place on Esther Street is gutted and the contractor hasn’t returned. She has a notice from the city to get out, but she’s hoping to start over if she can hang on.
“It’s like no one cares,” Rosero said. “I just want to come home.”
But she can’t, and why should she when residents don’t feel like they’re on the map anymore. Garbage has gone uncollected at times and mail has been disrupted too. What the storm didn’t destroy, some residents are trying rebuild, but navigating the state and local bureaucracy for disaster recovery funds has been painstaking. They say they filled out paperwork for grants but it’s gotten lost, a complaint shared by residents across the state in Shore communities who’ve applied for the Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, Elevation and Mitigation, or RREM, program.
Richard E. Constable III, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Community Affairs, said delays in residents getting construction grants from the RREM program have been due to strict federal guidelines.

People are disgusted with the system and feel abandoned,” said Reina Esteras, a disaster relief case manager for Ironbound Community Corporation.

“Because construction is involved, HUD requires eligible homeowners to jump through numerous federally mandated hoops — much of which we and Governor Christie have felt is unnecessary and redundant given that these are existing homes that cannot be built bigger than what was there before,” Constable said.
In the meantime, Constable said the state’s Homeowner Resettlement Program has been far more successful in assisting residents, because it doesn’t involve construction and high levels of documentation. More than 16,700 homeowners have been approved for a $10,000 resettlement grant and their checks are in the mail.
The Ironbound faithful hope they’re somewhere in the pipeline, because Newark hasn’t been helpful. The organization’s leaders said it took the city four months to issue flood plain letters to residents with more than 50 percent property damage. Having that letter could have expedited their claims for state recovery funds, they said. With help from their councilman, Augusto Amador, some residents got the document but others continue to wait and fight the city over bills they don’t deserve.
Ana Dos Santos said she was fined for placing storm debris in front of her Joseph Street house. Just what she needed after her son, Jaime Beja, renovated the home two months before the storm. Like many of her neighbors, including Rosero, Dos Santos received a water bill even though she wasn’t in the home for months.
“Are you kidding me?” she said.
On limited funds, the Ironbound group has paid rent, mortgages and water bills for residents. In one case, Esteras said they paid a homeowner’s water bill that had grown to $5,344.82 when the person had not been living there. In fact, the homeowner has not returned to this day. She said the city only adjusted his bill to $2,053.75 and refused to reduce it any further.
The only thing the city had to say for itself was this: “Department directors have been notified of the complaints from our residents to The Star-Ledger. The City of Newark will work to expedite the resolution of any issues facing property owners in the Ironbound section as a result of Hurricane Sandy.”
Esteras said residents were struggling to stay in their homes before the storm, but this has wiped them out.
Leizza Salgado is not coming back. Neither is her sister. The city condemned their Esther Street homes and the bank foreclosed, locking them out after two months with their lives in chaos.
“They didn’t give us any notice,” Salgado said. “It was a bad experience.”
She has moved to another section of the Ironbound, but there’s hope for her former neighbors. They learned last week the state Department of Environmental Protection is interested in buying out their homes. DEP spokesman Larry Ragonese said the program has to be explained and the majority of residents would have to participate for it to work.
Who knows how this will shake out. They are beaten down and tired.
“I just can’t take it anymore,” Dos Santos said. “They’ve worn us down. We’re like, just take it. Give me money and I’ll get out.”
Only problem is, this process could take another six months. Residents may not have that long.