Section 8 Housing, Is It a Real Thing?

Last week the San Jose Mercury ran a story about homelessness in Santa Clara County. In a sidebar to the story I found a very disturbing bit of information; 17,000 families are getting federal Section 8 housing assistance while 22,000 families are on the waiting list for this same assistance. And pay attention, these are numbers offamilies, not individuals. What is going on here?

Last week I also wrote a blog post regarding how all of the modern and innovative cost cutting practices and technologies are causing the loss of so many jobs (click hereto view it), and so, how can I be so surprised that so many people are having trouble just providing themselves with the simple basics; food and shelter. This article points out that there are nearly 30,000 families in our county who can not properly shelter themselves and have formally asked the federal government for help. How many more are there who have given up on government help. As many reactionary people might point out, there are a bunch of slackers out there who just don’t want to do what’s required to adequately provide for themselves but, please, of this 30,000 families, how many would refuse a good paying job over living substandard? In the face of increasing use of robots, off-shore labor and imported experts, what about the people who are already here and can’t fend for themselves? Let’s just keep on bringing in more robots and ship more jobs overseas. Something is just not right.

I have a friend who has a disability which restricts how far he can travel from his home. He’s had to deal with this since his early twenties and for a long time, he handled it pretty well, doing a variety of different work right here in Los Gatos. While he’s always lived modestly, he was never anyone you’d call impoverished. He could always afford to party on the weekends, like the rest of us, he could afford to own a car or two and he always paid his bills. However, he could never afford to buy any of the houses he lived in nor did he ever invest in stocks and bonds. He lived from hand to mouth, comfortably but with no frills.

In the past ten years, however, this guy has suffered some pretty nasty luck and has been reduced to sleeping in his car at times, when the under the table jobs run out and his old age keeps him from doing the heavy labor that used to supplement his income. I’ve watched him struggle to get back on his feet but he just can’t really seem to get any good traction. It seems like no matter what he does or who he seeks out to help him get moving, nothing seems to bridge the gap. I’ve looked into a few programs that seem like they might be of assistance to him, but you know what I’m finding, this guy is just not screwed up enough to get any real help. If he was a strung-out disabled veteran or a single mother, or a drug addict or a chronic alcoholic, there are all sorts of agencies that will give him room and board if he will rehabilitate himself and go to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) for the rest of his life. This guy just isn’t there. He just can’t travel very far, he can’t commute across Santa Clara Valley, sometimes, he can’t even get across Los Gatos, but he’s not a drunk and he’s not a druggy.

In fact, what has become more and more clear to me, is that his problem is a common one. There are many experts in the housing assistance community who tell me that this segment of the population, the one that is not optimally employable yet not incapacitated by a disability, they are the ones that do not drop into the bureaucratic safety net. 

(click here to read conclusion)