According to Mendel (653), the phenomenon of homelessness in a affluent society and actions of business leaders in Cleveland to address it provides the starting point of Daniel Kerr’s Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio. Kerr makes immense contribution to aid our understanding on what most of the public and private civic leaders consider as intractable urban residential poverty, discriminatory public housing policy, contribution to Communist Party, urban renewal public planning, and costs to affordable housing.
Molinari et al. (487) and Mendel (653) agree that the homelessness is prevalent in United States and triggers challenge for veterans and other old age adults. Kerr and Christopher (87) say that according to the estimated statistics of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 634,000 are homeless, and the number continues to surge on a daily basis. Among the homeless, older adults bear vulnerabilities that can affect their health and adjustment. Older adults can experience death, separation from family members, dementia, decreasing social network, and loss of independence combined with stressors of homelessness. The study uses focus groups and semi-structured interviews to explore housing program experiences that characterize the older homes as veterans and perceptions of homelessness.
At the height of Depression in 1930s, The Associated Charities Committee on the Homeless considers the setting of rural concentration camps to prevent overcrowding (Kerr 67). The organization set to establish at least ten farming camps that each housed 100 people (Kerr 98). The Committee held that it was not possible to realize the fruits of free labor as the population continued to surge. The rapid increase in the number of people brought a significant demographic change to the resident population. The ethnic and racial composition of the population remained constant as the number of the old people continued to increase.
The Associated Charities held that a Wayfarer’s Lodge was not a perverse for women, and every effort was towards individualized housing plans. For that reason, The Friendly Service Bureau was born as an agency to take care of homeless women. The agency sought to discharge its duty for women such as placing them as domestic workers in private homes. The bureau did not sell women while the placed them in private lodging houses and boarding homes.
YWCA introduced cost beneficial hotels or provided their families with financial support. They managed to retain their support for women confidential to preserve the girl sense of her ability to take care of herself. The Associated Charities held that it was best to maintain morale of the girls by creating a wedge of the white and black women. The intake offices for women had segregation in different sections of the city (Kerr 105). Prostitution became associated with black women, and the Associated Charities sought to protect the innocent homeless white women through segregation.
In early 1930s, the Associated Charities had the determination to permit boys to have close contact with men, and that led to the establishment of a Boys Bureau (Kerr 110). The Cleveland Boys Bureau was born in May 1932 with the aim of keeping boys segregated from grown men in the camps at the Wayfarer’s Lodge. With the leadership of Fred Zappolo, the Associated Charities began the general administration bureau. Zappolo had an ability of identifying con artists among the homeless that supposedly took advantage of the private relief agencies. The registration bureau compiled a database for all men that sought to assist at the lodge and shared any investigative information with the police and other relief agencies.
Herbie creation of Hoover town sought to create a solarium in the vestibule of one-room house. The completion of the shelter reinforced Cleveland’s institutionalization of homelessness that had longstanding notions of distributing reliefs. The federal government established the Federal Transient Program that worked under Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). For a short time, the agency sought to restructure Cleveland relief apparatus and homeless shelter system. Through FERA funding, the federal government was able to subsidize the institutionalization of homelessness.
The Federal Transient Program challenged the core implementation of privatization to promote the scientific charity movement. The implementation of the program prompted the bulk of homeless relief structure to transfer from auspices of the private Associated Charities to the Cuyahoga County Relief Administration (CCRA). Federal funding in funding shelters and public takeover of the Wayfarer’s Lodge produced many noteworthy improvements in shelter conditions in Cleveland. The CCRA’s Central Bureau for Homeless and Transient Men moved away from an emphasis on the Lodge as the central warehouse for single homeless men. Central Bureau placed 700 men in private well-established hotels and 500 in rooming houses to enable them prepare their food or service at restaurants (Kerr 221). Additionally, the Central Bureau assisted in the construction of a Central Hotel that housed two to three men in a room. The policy change motivated the Lodge residents as evidenced by their immense contribution and hard work. As significant changes were made, organizational continuities continued to persist. A large number of the staff from Associated Charities shifted from CCRA.
Strategies for change
Kerr (302) uses a focus session of different groups that spend time thinking concerning the development strategies to change the abusive and exploitive practices rampant in the day-labor industry. All the focus groups come to a similar line of thought the current day-labor agencies should have a replacement with an alternate non-exploitative means that would help place people in jobs. Given the current entrenchment for profit agencies have a significant debate on how realistic it is to forge a future without them. Some people had the fear of reprisal of the agencies in their efforts to transform the industry that would potentially lead to violence. Many believed that the agencies survived through organized crime that runs the agencies. Some of the potential strategies included work slowdowns, strikes, boycotts, coalition building with like-minded groups, and development of non-profit hiring hall, petition to break relationship between social service facilities and day-labor agencies, and legislative remedies.
At first, day labors elected to establish an alternate non-profit community hiring hall. Secondly, they chose to lobby for municipal ordinance that would regulate day-labor agencies. A community hiring hall could succeed and replicate the leasing model for profit companies. Under the plan, money that went to the profit companies would go towards training programs for workers, benefits, and wages. The municipal ordinance proposal based on reasoning that most of the community groups and public officials helped to support the successful passage of living-wage ordinance to regulate day-labor industry in Atlanta and Chicago.
The Low-Wage Workers Union was an organization that helped to publicize and garner support for the hiring hall of social-service agencies, and boost morale by providing an easy to win a mechanism. The strategic planning of LWWU entailed a petition drive in emergency men shelter that sought to establish a code of conduct for all labor agents that recruited workers on the premises. The code of conduct would address grievances of the focus group. The focus group called for the establishment of an alternative community hiring hall that would help secure a successful community hiring hall.
Conclusion
In summary, Cleveland is an archetypical American city since it once the city stood at the apex of the American frontier in the original Northwest Territory. Its early political and cultural influences borrow from Yankee cities such as Connecticut and the Western Reserve during Civil War. Like other cities, Cleveland served as a crucial transportation hub for goods and services. Later on, the city became an important locus for production and manufacturing. The growth of the city is due to economical favorable location of Ohio Canal, railroad rights of way, entrepreneurial class of business owners, and abundant natural resources.
Cleveland stride toward an increase in wealth, population, increased geographical size has an ever-changing significance as a manufacturing center in the decades that precede the Civil War. The positive momentum of the trends slowed while they continued during the Second World War. Other than a leaping growth of Cleveland economy, infrastructure, and burgeoning population, it has negative by-products of homelessness and poverty that grew in equal measure. Most of the citizens living in the city could not celebrate its victories as they languished in poverty and meager wages as elaborated by Kerr. A large-scale economic, political, and social transformation vexes and challenge American cities since early 1900s. According to Kerr, some of the social and economic problems including intractable urban residential poverty, and discriminatory public housing lead to thoughtless and parochial treatment of races and ethnicities.
The 1877 Railroad Strike marks a point in time when leaders began paternalistic control to shape the development and growth of the city. Through Kerr, the audience learns that Cleveland leaders follow heavy-handed and non-subtle methods to care for the city’s vulnerable and impoverished residents. For example, Wayfarers Lodge is the basic institution that managed men entry requirements. The author engages in through research of the primary research sources to depict the creeping suburban poverty and the uncontrolled expansion to undo the dysfunctional leaders. The civil leaders at the time should have offered a greater vision to address contentious issues in the old residential places and the industry.
Works Cited
Kerr, D. R. (2005). Open penitentiaries: Institutionalizing homelessness in Cleveland, Ohio
Kerr, Daniel, and Christopher Dole. "Cracking The Temp Trap: Day Laborers' Grievances And Strategies For Change In Cleveland, Ohio." Labor Studies Journal 29.4 (2005): 87-108.
Mendel, Stuart C. "Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio." Contemporary Sociology 41.5 (2012): 653-4.
Molinari, V. A., PhD., Brown, L. M., PhD., Frahm, K. A., PhD., Schinka, J. A., PhD., & Casey, Roger,PhD., L.C.S.W. (2013). Perceptions of homelessness in older homeless veterans, VA homeless program staff liaisons, and housing intervention providers. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 24(2), 487-98.
