Dateline Houston

How hard is it to be homeless in Houston?

Very, very hard.

In April, Dateline Houston told you about a new city ordinance restricting food sharing with the homeless. (Look for the story of a group defying the ordinance in the September issue.) In subsequent months, local media have covered several disconnected stories about homelessness here. String them together, and they start to build a picture of life, and death, on the streets of Houston.

• Early Saturday morning, a homeless man was walking a woman home from a bar in northeast Harris County. A car ran him over and kept driving. He died at the scene.
• Just the day before, a homeless man in his 60s was also hit by a car. He had fallen asleep on a feeder road curb beside a construction site. The driver crushed both the man’s legs and kept driving. The man is hospitalized in serious but stable condition.
• In July, a 16-year-old girl was certified to stand trial as an adult for her role in the April killing of a homeless man. She and three other teens “left Miguel Ramos, 32, to die in a dark, northwest Houston alley after shooting him and taking everything he had—a single torn dollar bill.”

A July report from the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County said that Houston’s homeless population declined 14 percent from 2011—but this came after a 25 percent increase between 2010 and 2011. That increase triggered the U.S. Department on Housing and Urban Development to name Houston a priority community. The current count is 7,356 homeless, which is a point-in-time count; in other words, it’s the number of homeless that could be located and counted on a single night in January.

But other numbers suggest that far more Houstonians struggle to keep a roof over their heads. This month, the Houston Housing Authority will start accepting applications for housing assistance for the first time in six years. They will accept applications for seven days, August 20 to August 26. As many as 100,000 people are expected to apply during that time, just for a spot in a lottery. The lottery will determine which 20,000 people get a slot on a list, their order determined at random. Of those, about 2,000 households per year will actually get a housing voucher.

With waits for government-assisted housing so lengthy and uncertain, one Houston man got innovative with his plan to find shelter and food. On July 19, Jason Tanner, who is 30 years old and homeless, put a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol in his pants and walked into the Harris County criminal courthouse.

He approached a deputy on duty and said, “I’m carrying concealed weapons and need to be arrested.” And he was.

He spent the rest of the night safely in the Harris County Jail.

Correction: The Houston Chronicle reported the janitors’ agreement Wednesday night. DH apologizes for the error.

Yesterday, Houston’s striking janitors reached a tentative agreement with six of the seven companies who employ them to clean some of the city’s swankiest offices. The agreement, to be ratified on Saturday, ensures them a 12% raise. It ends more than two months of public demonstrations, strikes, and sometimes-risky civil disobedience.

The janitors’ previous contract, which expired at the end of May, gave them $8.35 an hour. The union, Service Employees International Union Local 1, pointed out that Chicago janitors, some employed by the same contractors, made $15.45 an hour, and sought a raise of $1.65 per hour over three years. The contractors called this unreasonable and countered with an offer of $.50 over five years.

Under the new contract, janitors will receive a raise of one dollar per hour installed over the next four years.

As the strike spread to other cities, national media outlets, such as Marketplace and the Huffington Post, paid it significant attention as a component of the larger conversation about the disappearing middle class. Houston media, however, has paid the strike less and less attention. Both the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Press failed to report the janitors’ dramatic shutdown of a crucial intersection last Wednesday (detailed by DH here) and has, as of this writing, not reported yesterday’s agreement, which was announced late last night.

Houston as a whole ought to be rather self-conscious at the moment about its rich-poor divide. Last Wednesday, the Pew Research Center released a national study of income segregation—that is, the prevalence of upper-income households to live in majority upper-income neighborhoods, and low-income households among low-income. Of 30 major U.S. cities ranked by segregation, Houston came in first.

The report states, “These increases are related to the long-term rises in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income.”

In other words, as the gap grows between rich and poor, it also grows more invisible.

Tom Balanoff, President of the SEIU Local 1, said in a statement, “The janitors’ victory brings hope to security officers, airport workers and others trapped by poverty wages. Our economy is broken, and unless we do something to turn low-wage jobs into good jobs, the middle class will be the great disappearing act of the 21st century.”

I’ll admit it: I was scared. The crowd of about 500 had split up, lining the sidewalk on both sides of arboreal Post Oak Boulevard in tony West Houston, in front of the Neiman Marcus. They were waiting. Dozens of cops on horseback and bike and foot and in cars were also waiting. A press release from the Houston janitors’ union, Service Employees International Union Local 1, had announced another wave of civil disobedience, and already that morning several janitors and supporters had been arrested at a smaller protest downtown.

An organizer explained the plan. “They’re already waiting at the Jamba Juice. We have cars involved as well.” Two dozen janitors and supporters would wait until the marching crowds approached, then run into the street and sit down, blocking the intersection of Westheimer and Post Oak.

I had seen similar protests go wrong in my days as an agitator past; people get hurt, cars and police get angry. It was seven—Houston’s rush hour just beginning to ebb—and hot, the temperature 96 degrees and the heat index far more. The janitors wore purple and carried yellow flags and chanted in English and Spanish. Many blew shrill whistles. Faces were sober. These were not college kids. The crowd was largely middle-aged and Hispanic with lined faces, more women than men, some with children in tow. They were people with something to lose.

It was Wednesday, the eve of the janitors’ return to bargaining with the cleaning companies that contract them out to some of the most high-powered offices in the city. The janitors’ contract expired at the end of May, and since then they’ve rallied every day. Workers like Hernan Trujillo, whom we profiled here, were threatened by managers for participating in the rallies, so on July 11 the union announced a citywide strike against unfair labor practices. The following week, janitors in Los Angeles, Chicago, and several other U.S. cities joined the strike in solidarity. Vice President Joe Biden met with strike leaders when he was in Houston for the NAACP convention. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee and Houston’s Catholic Archbishop Emeritus Msgr. Joseph Florenza have spoken out on the janitors’ behalf. And on July 20, Mayor Annise Parker called for the cleaning contractors to return to the bargaining table, saying, “Their unwillingness to talk has left the union with no other choice but civil disobedience. That is not good for the City of Houston or our economy and it is not how we do business in Houston. We work hard, we work together and we treat each other fairly.”

Houston janitors currently make $8.35 an hour, one of the lowest janitor wages in the country, in one of the nation’s most robust economies. Contractors have also saved money by cutting the janitors’ hours to five or six a night while still expecting them to do the work other cities’ janitors do in eight, further depressing wages. The SEIU says the average Houston janitor makes about $9,000 a year, less than the poverty level for one person. The janitors want a $1.65 raise over three years, bringing them to $10 an hour. The seven contractors, all of whom have consistently declined comment, offered a 50-cent raise over five years, which the union calls “insulting.”

On Tuesday, hundreds gathered around seven protesters who scattered paper in a downtown lobby mid-day, then cleaned it up and sat down in a circle and were arrested. The protests, the arrests, the rallies are all to draw attention to the strike and make the contractors, and the businesses who employ them, uncomfortable enough to give ground in negotiations. By the end of the week, they’ll know if it worked.

Late Wednesday, the hour had come. Marchers massed in all four corners of Westheimer and Post Oak, and suddenly the chosen protesters were there, running into the street, tearing off their over-shirts to reveal the purple strike shirts underneath. They circled, sat cross-legged, scooted in close and waited.

Cars honked. Cops ran and rode to surround them. But the disaster I feared never came. Police moved without haste or anger. Some redirected traffic, some applied riot cuffs and read rights. A van backed up to receive the arrested. The striking janitors bore witness, as they’d come to do. Range Rovers were inconvenienced. Some of the lowest-paid, most invisible workers in the city took a stand in front of the Ethan Allen. And everybody was okay.

When police loaded the last of the sitters into the van and drove away, away, organizers directed the strikers down Post Oak to the grassy lawn and fountain beside the Galleria, that swankiest mall in Texas. Cops rode lazily now along with them. People laughed and talked. If this were 20 years ago, cops and protesters alike would have lit up cigarettes.

A car pulled up and unloaded stack after stack of pizzas for the strikers. The sun had dropped behind the skyline and the air was purple and starting to cool. Kids ran across the lawn with yellow flags and one had a kite. Everybody had done what they came to do. And if need be, they’ll do it again.

For a group that loves the Constitution, tea partiers are not super-good at following the rules.

Last night’s debate between Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst, eight days before the Republican run-off for U.S. Senate, was supposed to be, in the words of Catherine Engelbrecht, “a safe zone.”

The debate featured no rebuttals, making it less a debate than an awkward, cranky tag-team speech, and organizers tried to make sure their constituents behaved better than, say, Neil Munro in the Rose Garden.

“We’re not going to applaud or make any outburst of any kind,” urged Engelbrecht, head of King Street Patriots, during her welcome speech. “We’re just going to participate like good, quiet citizens.”

Quiet participation is hardly this group’s M.O. This was a standing-room-only crowd in the cinderblock bunker of the King Street Patriots. The KSP are known for founding “True the Vote,” an effort that purports to fight voter fraud by sending poll watchers to majority black and Latino precincts. The crowd of more than 350 had waited in a snaking line in the clammy Houston afternoon to get a wristband for this freedom rave. As I entered, a woman in front of me asked an usher, “Which side is Cruz?” as if attending a football game. This group had come for a fight.

They got one, sort of, despite Engelbrecht’s pleas.

The short version is this: Cruz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School for crying out loud. The man can talk. Everything he said sounded as slick and confident as the voice over for a political ad. He rarely got cut off by the 90-second time limit. He hit his talking points and got in his digs at Dewhurst like he was checking off a list. When Dewhurst spoke, Cruz gazed up at him with those serene, sympathetic eyes and a little smirk that said, “Coffee’s for closers.”

Dewhurst doddered. If you could get past the fact that he paused every time he said “Medi…caid” or “Medi….care” as if trying to remember which was which, and got a little lost in the middle of sentences, and often didn’t answer the actual question, you could hear that Dewhurst had actually done the very things that his interrogators wanted to know if he would do—slash budgets, disempower Democrats, support the transvaginal probe industry, etc.

It was never an even playing field. The debate began late, and Dewhurst walked quietly from the back of the room to his podium. As a crewmember started affixing his microphone, the crowd noticed him and applauded politely. Thus they were primed for their man Ted, who strode up from behind and hadn’t even gotten to the stage before the crowd was on their feet, cheering and applauding.

In substance, their responses to the audience-and-social-media-generated questions, which all boiled down to asking who was more conservative, were nearly the same. What parts of Obamacare would you keep? Not a tittle. How would you make Texas more business-friendly? Deregulate. And so forth.

Cruz was first, and ultimately the only, to attack directly, bringing up that in the last debate, Dewhurst had made the unfortunately fact-based observation that America’s health care outcomes are not always the best in the world. Cruz reiterated that Dewhurst’s data came from “left-wing studies” (like the World Health Organization) and opined, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to be micromanaging the outcomes” of health care in the U.S.

The fidgety crowd made it almost half an hour before someone yelled, “Liar!” at Cruz, who was describing how Dewhurst had allegedly given a speech advocating “amnesty,” then had the speech removed from his website during the campaign. The moderator, the unfathomably lovely Melinda Spaulding, an anchor for Houston’s Fox affiliate, reminded the crowd to be cool.

Cruz managed to attack Dewhurst fiercely and directly for negative campaigning—at one point pivoting toward him at their awkwardly close side-by-side podiums and asking if he stands by his assaults on Cruz’s patriotism—while making the case that he, Cruz, had stayed issues-based. It was a neat trick.

When Dewhurst said that Cruz had been running not for Senate but against him, an audience member shouted, “It’s not true!” Spaulding again urged “no outbursts,” and then someone started to applaud in support, apparently not understanding what an outburst is.

Not content to leave the naughtiness to the audience, Cruz interrupted Dewhurst three times. The most damaging was in response to a question about gun control (specifically, do we need more? answer: nope) when Cruz listed his endorsements and Dewhurst said, “I’m endorsed by the NRA.”

Cruz, with creepy, lawyerly pleasure, turned and said, “The NRA has not endorsed you.”

“What?” said Dewhurst, startled.

“The NRA has not endorsed you.”

“I stand corrected,” Dewhurst said, on a dime. “You’re absolutely right. The people…” He trailed off. “The local people have…”

This is what the local people had come to see: Cruz, young and snotty, calling out the establishment. Cruz quoted the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. Cruz was Fifty Shades of Jefferson. Dewhurst just kept pointing to his record, unsure why this was not enough.

Dewhurst finally got in a good one during his closing statement. “If Texas were as bad as my opponent keeps saying in these ads,” Dewhurst said, “Texas would look like California. Texas is a good state. I’m proud of Texas.”

But it might have been too late. As the crowd filed out, the women behind me giggled with glee. “When that guy shouted ‘Liar!,’” one told her friend, “that was the best part.”

If you tell people that their basic rights are under attack, that their home is a castle, that liberty means never being told what to do, and that the best way to defend your liberties is with a gun, eventually they will believe you.

Add in some government paranoia and fear of technology, and you’ve got a Thursday in Harris County.

In Houston yesterday, Thelma Taorima pulled a gun on an electric company worker trying to install a smart meter at her house. Smart meters, which count kilowatts digitally, transmit data wirelessly and are supposed to improve efficiency, saving homeowners money. Advocates say they also improve privacy, since no one has to go into your yard to collect data.

But Taormina sees Big Brother.

“Our constitution allows us not to have that kind of intrusion on our personal privacy,” Taormina told KHOU. “They’ll be able to tell if you are running your computer, air conditioner, whatever it is.”

Smart meter paranoia is now part of the tea party platform, mentioned along with health care as a dangerous “government mandate.” Forrest Wilder reported on a petition against them in March, and Railroad Commissioner candidate Greg Parker is now running largely on a promise to make smart meters optional.

But the Taormina story is different.

A few things are weird about it. One is that it happened at all, although with the popularity of vigilantism in Houston, I guess we should be grateful the story didn’t turn out worse. Two is that it’s being reported as a quirky, people-versus-The-Man story, rather than deeply disturbing proof that people have lost track of when it is and is not appropriate to pull a gun.

Third is that yesterday wasn’t the first time Taormina has done this.

In March, FuelFix.com reported on Nick and Thelma Taormina in a story about Houstonian smart meter resistance: “The Taorminas have thwarted the installation so far – once when Thelma Taormina pulled a pistol after she and a meter installer tussled in August over her refusal to let him switch out her old meter.”

“CenterPoint spokesman Floyd LeBlanc wouldn’t comment on the incident but said such resistance is rare and that employees and contractors are trained to disengage and call law enforcement if conversations about smart meters become heated.

The Taormina incident did not result in any legal action.”

But will it this time?

“We are deeply troubled by anyone who would pull a gun on another person performing their job,” a CenterPoint spokesperson said yesterday. “CenterPoint will be taking additional steps – including court actions – because what happened is dangerous, illegal and unwarranted.”

But Taormina isn’t worried. She sees herself as a patriot. The March story reported that she and her husband were collecting signatures to oppose the mandatory smart meters, and current reports say she’s starting a group for the cause called, with desperate originality, “We the People.”

But if the Internet is to be believed, the Taorminas already started “We the People” in February of 2010, full name “We the People Are The 9-12 Association Inc.” The 9-12 Project was an idea of Glenn Beck’s in 2009, which I won’t go into here, as it would require a chalkboard, but suffice it to say it’s all about the tea party and values and 9-11 and not smart meters.

The Taorminas have a photo of themselves with the Beckster on their Meetup page. He, and countless other voices over the last three years, have helped make people like the Taorminos afraid—of the government, of technology, of lots of things. But when the TV goes off and the guns come out, that fearful fantasy can become all too real.