Today I awoke to two inches of snow on my car, but its this crazy, fluffy stuff that one can remove simply by briskly waving hands near it. The streets have turned into a marvelous match of auto hockey and I’m glad to be back inside, where I plan on remaining for the rest of the day.
I did get out and about a bit today, as I’d agreed yesterday to transport David to Goodwill for a job interview. Things look brighter for him – they pay $10.88 to $12.35 for a supervisor position and they seemed to like him.
Yesterday I managed to sneak in a ten minute quickie interview the with manager of the homeless shelter here in Iowa City, and I think I can make a sensible diary of the muddle of transportation and shelter issues that face someone trying to get back on their feet.
I had my own personal stranding event about two months ago. I’d been behind on my car payment, I got paid for a good bit of work, overnighted two months worth of payments in the form of a money order, and then I took off to pick up my kids for Christmas. My ex, whom I never, ever miss at all, decided I needed some quality time with the repo man rather than my children. This happened Christmas Eve so my car was impounded to the tune of $510 in repo and storage fees over the holidays and I was stranded in a frigid two hundred square mile urban wasteland.
This happened in a place where I’d lived for thirteen years so I had friends willing to drop everything and come pick me up, provide a place to stay until I got paid again, etc. I wanted to get a story out of it and I was in town for a consulting job as well as picking up kids, so I stuck around and did things the hard way, staying in a cheap hotel, walking to where I wanted to go, and doing the telecommuting thing via the hotel’s wireless. I’d managed to get the site visit part of the job done before trying to pick up the kids, so the customer was not aware of what had happened.
It was a strange feeling to stand and watch the 1999 Nissan Altima I’d given to a former employee during happier times pulling away, and wondering if I’d make it safely across icy streets with six lanes of fast moving traffic to get a pair of long johns at the Crossroads Mall. America’s layout is not meant for humans, but instead grew up around the assumption we’d all be riding in three thousand pound steel boxes. The loss of mobility weighs on one’s psyche. I suggest you all try an experiment – drive your car to a far away place, park it, and take public transport home for the evening, then go retrieve it the next day. You’ll find it enlightening.
Those who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale face horrible transportation barriers. A minimum wage job means a vehicle is a serious financial commitment, and such a position may be three to five miles one direction from affordable housing, while food and other necessities may be three to five miles the other way. If no personal auto is available this means a forty hour a week job may require sixty to seventy hours once public transit is factored into the equation. Iowa City is probably nicer than most given the large student population, but a town without a significant college, like the one where I was stranded, tends to have a token bus service laid out to be most convenient for a city council with other financial priorities.
I got about ten minutes with Leon, the manager of the shelter house, in between his afternoon appointment schedule. I’d noticed ANOTHER person with a University Hospital wrist band in the facility while I was dropping David off, a woman a good bit older than me who seemed to be semiconscious, laying on a couch in the crowded common room on the ground floor. I later learned she’d just had a benign breast tumor removed and had nowhere to go but the shelter – not the most conducive space for following the doctor’s orders of resting quietly after surgery.
What I heard was this: The shelter has a fire marshal imposed limit of 29 overnight residents and they consistently have 31 to 33 people all four seasons. The excess go to overflow shelter provided by local churches around 8:30 in the evening and are returned to the shelter the next morning.
Among these thirty or so folks there are always one or two who are there for treatment. Now I follow bonddad and Jerome a Paris so I know what a mess our housing market is in and I figured it wouldn’t be too hard for the city to purchase a troubled foreclosure and fix it up to handle the small volume of medical cases. Leon promptly stuck pins in that idea.
It turns out that Iowa City’s Shelter House already has a good plan in the works, a plan that would expand the current overloaded 29 bed facility to 70 beds, and relocate the shelter from downtown to an area two blocks south of a large commercial strip, near a Goodwill and several other potential employers. I know the area a little bit and I think it is less than optimal in terms of access to some services, but there is a good bus line through the area and the extra space and employment possibilities would be a very good thing.
Part of the expansion plan would have been funded by the Veterans Administration, who foresee a pending spike in homeless or financially strapped veterans from rural Iowa needing to get to the V.A. hospital, which sits just a few blocks north of the University Hospital. The Iowa Care program is new enough and the University Hospital system is in transition right now so they’ve not stepped up and made a commitment to funding a portion of the build in exchange for some dedicated beds, which the V.A. already did, but this would seem a likely course for them, even if they do take the sensible next step of expanding the number of hospitals covered by Iowa Care, making the service more accessible.
As expected, the neighborhood has turned out to block the construction of the new facility. The case is currently in Iowa State Supreme Court awaiting a decision.
The more I learn about this situation there more concerned I become. How many people have fallen down never to get up, or more correctly how many have been knocked down with a deck that is totally stacked against them?