Janet Hawkins would like to load the state's lawmakers on a bus and send them to downtown Portland. Let them mill about Pioneer Courthouse Square and Old Town, meet the thousands of Portland residents struggling to get health insurance, mental health care or housing - give them some time to actually see what's going on.
They got a glimpse of it from Boyd Owens, who in a state of despair burst into the Oregon Capitol with a knife earlier this year, screaming about being denied housing. He was removed without any injuries, but his cry for help continues to resonate across the expanding low-income population in Oregon. For Hawkins, this was the tolling of the bell.
"It was a scary situation, but there is a much scarier situation," said Hawkins, community action coordinator with the Commission on Children, Families and Community of Multnomah County. "I saw a desperate person. I saw a situation that he's in, a situation many people are in."
Here's the situation: Federal funding reductions are slashing low-income housing programs, including Section 8. The state's Medicaid program has undergone a 50 percent reduction in recent years, and is expected to drop its rolls again by half, and the Bush Administration is proposing significant cuts for Food Stamps, special education and energy and child care assistance, among other services - a total of $770 million from Oregon's budget from 2006 to 2010. It's all conspiring toward a very dismal future for low-income families.
"I think that we can only destabilize people's situation to a certain point and then it all falls to pieces." Hawkins said. "The center won't hold. The situation is so chaotic and awful that people become so desperate. The numbers begin to defy our basic capacity to satisfy people's essential needs."
This year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has allocated The Housing Authority of Portland $3.8 million less than HAP says it needs to meet everyone's rent at the current levels. To avoid dropping people wholesale from the program, HAP is raising the minimum percentage of rent residents pay from 30 to 35 percent, freezing rents to landlords, and reducing the payment standards for most vouchers. By making these changes, HAP says, everyone will pay more, but no one will lose their Section 8.
But housing and low-income advocates fear that in order for low-income families to keep their housing, they might lose something else, such as food, heat, medication, childcare, even custody of their child through welfare services.
Section 8 director Rose Bak said HAP had no choice but to make the cuts and raise the costs to recipients. Now they're hearing about people having to "juggle their necessities."
"Most of our participants have so little discretionary income left after they pay their food and bills and basic expenses," Bak said, "it is going to be difficult and it is going to involve some choices."
And advocates expect that local government, non profits and social services are going to be saddled with the burden dropped from higher levels.
"It's basically trying to manage the idea that we are going to balance our budget on the backs of the poor," said Cassandra Garrison with the Oregon Food Bank. "Cutting and capping and block granting these key federal programs are pretty much going to have a devastating impact on low-income families in the state. Because then it turns to the state and local budgets, which are already stretched too thin, to host all these challenges."
Garrison has no doubt that the lines for emergency and supplemental food boxes through the Oregon Food Bank are only going to get longer as a result of the Section 8 cuts.
"There's no bill collector for food," Garrison said. "People are going to use their food budget to supplement their rent, their heat, their medicine. Our numbers are going to go up."
The demand for housing assistance is so great in Multnomah County that HAP no longer accepts applications. The waiting list is closed, and everyone on that list has been there since the last week of December 2002. In the five days it was open at the end of 2002, 9,000 households applied for assistance. HAP says it could be five more years before people on the list receive vouchers for housing.
"We have a very severe rationing system," said Hawkins. "And I would say only the very lucky, diligent and patient people are able to get the services they need. They should be available to all, but many people are giving up. They will suffer in silence."
Bak said the housing authority is working to make sure local and state legislators understand the impact of these cuts, hoping to ward off any further reductions in the future and preserve housing options for low-income families.
"The ability to be housed, to have a roof over your head, is the foundation of everything in a child's life, let alone an adult's life," said Cynthia Hanna, who accepted Section 8 assistance after her home was destroyed in a disaster. "I'm a little frightened by these changes. More and more I see families that are on the streets. I know there are waiting lists for shelter. The services aren't there to keep people from falling through the cracks. How many more people are going to have to get to the point where they give up hope?"
The $770 million in aid the Bush budget would cut from Oregon includes reductions in the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, Head Start, and rental, child care and energy assistance. All of these cuts are expected to trim thousands to tens of thousands of recipients from the roles over the next five years.
The proposed cuts also include millions in aid for vocational and adult education programs, which have allowed many low-income adults to reenter or improve their status in the workforce.
Adult education was Cassandra Garrison's ticket out of poverty. She was a fully subsidized low-income welfare mom for years. The assistance she received got her into housing, provided daycare and low-income energy assistance, and allowed her to go to school at the same time. She got her masters degree and went to work for the Oregon Food Bank.
Today, however, cash grant welfare recipients are prohibited from attending college at the same time, Garrison said.
"You want people to be able to lift themselves out of poverty and education is the key," she said. "We're not giving them the opportunity to succeed."
If history is any indicator, the Oregon Food Bank Network will be among the first agencies to see the fallout from the budget cuts. The network provides food for about 870 hunger-relief agencies around the state, and last year compiled its latest report on recipients, revealing how intertwined housing assistance, health insurance and hunger are related:
And the ranks of those covered under the Oregon Health Plan are expected to drop yet again. OHP Standard, the plan exclusively for people experiencing poverty, covered nearly 100,000 people in 2002. Nearly 50,000 recipients were dropped from the plan in 2003 as a result of budget cuts, and about 25,000 are expect to lose health-care coverage by 2005.
Coincidentally, the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems reported that charity care increased 66 percent between 2002 and 2003, according to the Oregon Food Bank's report. Bad debt rose 39 percent over the same period.
Hovering in the wings of any entitlement program are attitudes that these subsidies encourage people to stay on welfare. It's an ignorant assumption, according to Linda Ridings, a recipient of Section 8 vouchers and a member of the Poverty Advisory Committee for the Commission on Children, Families and Community of Multnomah County.
"I've worked my entire life since I was 14, and I have made $35,000-$40,000 a year, and then I got spinal meningitis, and I can't work because of the damage that it did to my body," said Ridings. "So I don't have that option. It's not about laziness. I think the legislature and people in general think that people who are on welfare or are low-income are either lazy or stupid, and that is so stupid and that is so wrong.
"The sad part about it is, they're cutting money everywhere. "People could very well become homeless because of this. There's only so much to stretch. What do you do?"
Cynthia Hanna considered the extremes, even suicide. "I've been to the point in my life where I've felt totally helpless," Hanna said. "I would get ahead for awhile, the bottom would drop out and I'd be back in the system again. I contemplated suicide. I just felt so much rage. Luckily, I hooked up with Cassandra (Garrison) and a wonderful network of mentors. How many people aren't going to have those resources?"
Having a home was the one stabilizing factor that Hanna and her two children had, she said. A home, she said, allowed her to take the other steps necessarily to rebuild her life.
"When people get to the point where they're hopeless, where they give up hope that anything is going to get better or change, the rage just drowns you," Hanna said. "If you don't have ways to cope with that, it's going to end up going out into the world. You're not going to be able to contain. There have been cuts in mental health and medical care and so on. The resources that were there when I got to that point aren't going to be there for other people. It's just a very frightening situation, and the churches and the non profits don't have the resources to make up the slack."