DIRECTOR’S DESK | Street Roots is connecting impoverished people with cash assistance, stimulus checks and tax credits, but it’s not enough
These days, I think about money a lot.
Where is it, and how can it get into the pockets of poor folks? An antidote to poverty is, after all, income.
While this is always a focus at Street Roots, the stakes were raised on March 20, when we put the print edition of our newspaper on hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, cutting off a source of income for the 283 people who sell Street Roots. We could sustain our journalism at this critical time with continued online publication, but we needed to come up with new ways for our vendors to earn income.
One way was to provide weekly cash assistance, and we started doing this immediately when we suspended print, determined to not abandon Street Roots vendors.
Now, we are seven weeks into that effort and have raised enough — thanks to all of you — to continue to pay them each a weekly stipend through the end of May.
We also raised money to pay a group of our vendors to do essential work through the Coronavirus Action Team. You can support these efforts – including helping us to extend the stipends we pay vendors beyond May – through our vendor income fund.
But in addition to the dollars we raise, we are alert to any other money that can reach poor folks. Getting people money is about survival.
So, we’ve lasered our focus on the $1,200 stimulus payments available through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
A team of three vendors — all unhoused themselves — bring Sarah Lora from the Low Income Tax Clinic and several law students to assist unhoused people who come to our office in securing these funds, all via Zoom online web conferencing.
Hundreds of unhoused people use the Street Roots address to receive mail, receiving social security correspondence, packages, job notices, election ballots.
Now, that service also includes stimulus checks.
Our collective determination is like a ticker machine: We celebrate the rising number of people we connect to their rightful money. Now, 125 people signed up for those $1,200 Economic Impact Payments at Street Roots — that’s $150,000 in the pockets of poor people!
And, that’s in addition to the low-income tax credits that Lora and her team help people access.
Poor people deserve to be trusted with their own money, and there are too many barriers that keep people in poverty. Many people struggle to survive on social security alone, and yet they will lose benefits if their income rises, keeping them underwater. We need to get more cash to people in a way that allows them to emerge from desperate states, not dwell there.
I was pleased to hear on the May 5 episode of OPB’s Think Out Loud Margaret Morales and Michael Andersen, researchers for the Sightline Institute, argue that the U.S. needs to keep getting cash benefits out to people to maintain their health and housing. Studies of the permanent dividend fund in Alaska – which goes out to everyone in the state based on fossil fuel revenue – has resulted in decrease sin childhood obesity, increases in birth weight, and other measures of public health.
Yes. That one-time $1,200 payment is, at least, a temporary lifeboat for unhoused folks, and so many more whose housing or employment is shaky. There is another one-time payment proposed in the second aid bill proposed by House Democrats. If that passes, we'll be ready to assist. But ongoing cash payments would make a more profound difference.
There are several proposals for monthly $2,000 payments out of both the U.S. Senate and the House. We need this.
Senators Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation to provide $2,000 monthly payment to people who make less than $120,000 annually during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are two pieces of legislation in the House. Representatives Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) also introduced congressional legislation for $2,000 per month to (all U.S. citizens?) Americans. This builds on earlier legislation from Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).
Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) also propose sending $2,000 a month via pre-paid debit cards, which matters for people who don't have bank accounts. As opposed to cutting off at a certain income level, this one is proposed along the lines of a universal basic income program.
As I grapple with how to get cash to people who need it, I often think about Bolsa Família, or family purse, a program that former President Brazilian Lula da Silva launched in 2003 to transfer cash to poor families. Families were required to send their children to school and get them vaccinated. Over the next decade, the program was successful at reducing levels of inequality and hunger, although painfully, President Jair Bolsonaro has since weakened it.
This week, U.N. Executive-Secretary Alecia Bárcena for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean called for immediate cash payments to the poorest people in Latin American and the Caribbean, pointing out a great many more people will plummet into extreme poverty.
We need that urgency in the United States. Based on unemployment rates, Columbia economist Brendan O’Flaherty predicts homelessness could rise 40%–45% next year.
Money certainly won’t trickle down from corporate bailouts to people in tents. We desperately need federal action to get more money directly to people who need it most.
Director's Desk is written by Kaia Sand, the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand
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