In partnership with a local bank, Juneau’s Assembly has agreed to lend money to people who are too poor to live in a trailer park, so that they can buy a trailer to park in Juneau for a while.
KTOO’s Clarice Larson recently wrote about the Juneau Assembly’s vote to lend the taxpayer’s money to people who are just too poor to live in trailers without government assistance. We drill down on this ingenious program.
Raven Buttonwood is 28. She and her family can usually be found near Drowning Creek, sleeping in the basement of a neighbor, if they’re lucky, or in their rickety 1998 Dodge Van in the boat ramp parking lot if they’re not lucky. Her own disability application was just approved after its third round of appeals and she and her three children (Billy, 15, who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome, Misty, 13, who’s dealing with her own complicated pregnancy, and Da’Quan, 2, who’s exhibiting early signs of oppositional/defiance disorder) live hand-to-mouth by means of the meager help she receives from a mixture of sources, some of which she can’t count on. “We’re kind of lucky that Billy’s dad had worked enough quarters before he got shot to let Billy get his disability. That $2200 a month doesn’t go far, but it helps. When I get my disability next month, things will get a little easier because that will be another $1,600.” The family also scrapes by on just $1,200 per month in food assistance and another $1,900 in housing assistance while Misty and Da’Quan each receive only $929 per month in SSI payments. If it weren’t for Medicaid, the family would also be saddled with medical bills. That leaves Raven with less than $9,000 per month in reliable income to pay for utilities, transportation and recreation. The rest of the family’s resources are far less reliable. “I have a Section 8 house in Douglas that I usually rent that out for $1,500. When I do, I put the kids in the basement or the van to save money, while I get a hotel room with my boyfriend, but sometimes those meth heads jack me on the rent, so I can’t count on it. A lady down the street sells me her food stamps for 40 cents on the dollar and I know a guy downtown who will pay me 70 cents, so sometimes I get that money. I don’t pay taxes, so I sell Da’Quan’s social security number to the lady who drives the cab, so she can claim him on her taxes – no reason to waste it, right? She gives me $500, but that’s only once a year, so you can’t really count that. For now, our Obamaphones are still working, but the 5G gets throttled half way through the month, so we have to connect to the neighbor’s WiFi, which is awful slow. I sneak my phone into the jail to visit my boyfriend on Tuesdays and I let the other inmates look at porn in the visiting room. They give my boyfriend their commissary for that, so that saves me some money. And our heating assistance grant runs out in June, but I sold the last tank of oil for $400 to a guy who drives a dump truck. Billy works part-time at the dump since he dropped out of school to pay his restitution and his child support, but he can’t earn more than $1,500 a month without losing his disability, so he really has to watch those hours. Other than that, I don’t get much.” Raven estimates that private charities, churches and neighbors combine to contribute only a few thousand more dollars to her monthly budget on average. “The problem is I just can’t count on it” she noted. “They only give me money when they’re ready, not on any schedule or anything. It’s kind of a pain.”
Recently, Raven had the opportunity to buy her own brand new trailer, but she struggled to come up with the $3,000 down payment. “The way prices are, how am I supposed to save that kind of money?” she wondered, with a deflated tone. “Our TV cable bill runs $500 a month and we spend a ton of money on Uber rides to the methadone clinic.” Cigarette and beer prices have skyrocketed in recent years, far outpacing the cost-of-living increases in Raven’s assistance programs. Her twice-weekly girls’ night-out get-togethers usually drain what little remains in the family’s meager coffers.
Enter Juneau’s new trailer purchase assistance program. In partnership with a local bank, taxpayers will lend Raven $1,500 toward her down payment on a brand new trailer. “That makes a huge difference” Raven, said. “I still could never come up with the other $1,500 on my own, but Cindy helped get it for me, so now I’m good!” Cindy Willis, Senior Assistant Underhousingness Prevention Worker for the Juneau Department of Social Service’s Office of Underhousingness Prevention assisted Raven in creating a GoFundMe account to raise the $1,500 she needed to match the taxpayer’s contribution to the trailer loan. “It’s a shame that an underprivileged citizen like Raven needs to resort to charity, just to get access to affordable housing,” Willis said. “But I was happy to help her raise the money.”
Raven’s new trailer promises to be the star of the trailer park. It’s two-tone purple siding and its gold trim shimmered in the sunlight as the truck driver unloaded the new home onto the waiting pad. The trailer is equipped with satellite internet, a hot tub, deep pile carpet and tinted windows. “Look at those jealous, triflin’ bitches!” Raven said, pointing disdainfully to a group of young women that assembled nearby to observe the trailer setting operation. “They think they all that. Now what these dumbass bitches gonna say?” she remarked, a wry smirk of satisfaction crossing her face as the workers installed the dancing pole and and the disco ball in the rumpus room of her new trailer.
Jim Childress, Assistant Deputy Chief Financial Analyst for the Office of the Deputy Assistant Counsel to the Assembly’s Affordable Housing Subcommittee’s Investigative Division, lavished praise on the Assembly for the loan program. “Some people actually ask me ‘Jim, why should we be using tax money to subsidize trailer parks and slums in Juneau?'” he said. “These people have a dated understanding of municipal government. We’re not making ‘slums,’ we’re making ‘affordable housing.’ We’re talking about high-density, low-cost housing in areas where real estate is cheaper.” Childress stated. “When you hear the word ‘slum,’ it comes with such a negative connotation, while ‘affordable housing’ sounds so much better,” Childress noted, even though he agreed that the slums of yesterday and modern affordable housing do in fact share some superficial physical similarities.
Not everyone is as well-informed as Childress. Without evidence, John Sanford, a local machinist, angrily voicing the ignorant far-right sentiment that unfortunately found substantial support among the audience during the Assembly’s latest meeting, rabidly criticized the trailer loan program. “Why on Earth are we doling out tax money to pay for trailers? ” he repeatedly ranted. “We should be encouraging people to build nice homes, not trailer parks! Are you guys crazy?” he raved. Fortunately, he was ejected from the meeting before he could reiterate his hateful questions. A crowd of alt-right supporters protested loudly, but they were eventually placed under control so the meeting could proceed without further irrational hate speech.
The vote was a decisive, bold move on the part of the Assembly. “Spending other people’s money can be stressful, because there’s just never enough of it” said Assemblyman George Gable. “It is job we take seriously – almost as seriously as if we were spending our own money” he added. This case was no-brainer, he said. “Can you think of a better use of taxpayers’ money than than lending it to people who can’t afford to live in a trailer park?” he wondered rhetorically. “Of course, not.”
Juneau’s lending program is ahead of its time. Dr. Rhonda HIssy-Crump, Assistant Professor of Modern American Urban Inequity at Southeastern Alaska University’s Institute for Social Justice and Grant Funding, spoke to us about the changes in housing policy that have taken place in municipal government in recent years. “Within the lifetimes of people still living, a lot of cities labored under the misapprehension that it was better to develop neighborhoods with nice houses and nice yards than to build high-density, low-cost housing developments full of poor people. There was this misguided notion that larger homes would raise property values and property taxes without taxing the local education, law-enforcement and social services costs, while high-density, low-cost housing developments would bring in poor kids that required increased investments in schools, policing, jails, social workers and other government costs.” Dr. Hissy-Crump explained. “This view turned out to be shortsighted for two reasons” she continued. “First, we learned over time that filling a city with nice houses on large, well-kept lots led to an increase in better educated and wealthier citizens who actually resisted municipal spending to the extent that it kept government at bay, thereby thwarting any attempt at meaningful progressive social justice reform. So while the nice houses made for lower expenses, lower crime rates and higher property taxes, it didn’t do any good in the end because the voters wouldn’t let the government expand to use all the money.” Secondly, Dr. Hissy-Crump noted, “the biggest problem is that by reducing the need for services, cities with wealth ran into the problem of actually having to shrink existing governments.” She provided a stark example. “Imagine a city that has a jail that houses 100 people on average and then enacts policies that increase wealth to the point that crime drops and only 50 people on average are incarcerated. This results in unnecessary staffing that could end up in layoffs, reaching perhaps all the way to the management level. Obviously, that is a horrible outcome.”
The delivery truck is gone, and Raven Buttonwood waits for the work-release van to drop her boyfriend off so that he can help her watch the volunteers deliver the brand new furniture a local church donated to her family before he reports back to jail for the evening. “It’s hard when it’s just you” she said. “Mickey has another two months on the robbery charge and six more weeks on the assault charge and until then, it’s all on me.” Although it was her fifth to last can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, she generously offered me the lukewarm beer from the porch of her new home. As a group of elderly ladies carefully hoisted a new sectional sofa from the church van past us to reach the living room, Raven waxed philosophical, gingerly stepping aside of the women to avoid spilling her beer on the new furniture as the ladies struggled with the heavy and awkward load. “I’ve had it so hard in my life and sometimes I forget that those church people aren’t always selfish assholes. I’m gonna see if they’ll give me a ride to the liquor store on the way back. Do you have a few bucks I can borrow?” she asked. Snatching the $20 bill I fished out of my wallet, Raven fell in behind the women, leaving me behind alone to contemplate the outcome.
Was it worth it? $1,500 of taxpayer money was translated into a spirit of cooperation and unity that will make a huge difference in the lives of a needy family for several months before the trailer gets repossessed. A new trailer in the trailer park will keep the police, jails, courts, schools and social workers busy for a while. The uppity bitches in the trailer park got put in their place. Finally, Juneau’s decline into a low-income, lower class town will continue. Win-win-win-win. A quadrafecta of enlightened government intervention that solved a litany of important social problems. We should all be proud of our city government.
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