Mailbag

Unlicensed Boarding Houses for the Mentally Ill Are Often
Disgraceful

I read “Slums or Salvation?” (Currents, Aug. 13) with great interest
and am pleased that someone is finally starting to expose the Tucson
boarding-house mess.

But the article covered only the tip of the iceberg. My son is
mentally disabled and gets Supplemental Security Income support. Many
mentally disabled people receive support, because their psychiatric
profile indicates problems so serious that they will never hold a job.
Finding jobs for clients may be a big La Frontera focus, but not for
many mentally disabled clients, who often must live in boarding
homes.

Your article reads as if La Frontera actually finds matches between
clients and homes. In my son’s situation, La Frontera gives him a list
of boarding homes and puts him out on the street. They can’t keep their
list current; as you might suspect, unregulated boarding homes come and
go, or change names, frequently because many are scamming the
disabled.

The homes that my son has been in have been hovels that cram three
or four residents into a single bedroom. Try keeping your cool sharing
a small bathroom with a dozen other residents! Meals are as you
reported: mostly slop, and often irregular. Try setting up a taco cart
without being licensed or inspected! But if you serve food to people in
a boarding home, it’s no problem. And, all of this for only $525 a
month. The last home he tried to live in had 14 residents in a
three-bedroom house—meaning someone was pulling in more than
$7,000 per month from an old, single-family house.

This situation is a disgrace. Homes that assist those with health or
age-related mental problems must be licensed, yet homes with residents
having mental or addiction problems are exempted. The city and state,
by not requiring licenses, are in many cases partners in crime, helping
the unscrupulous among boarding-home owners take advantage of the
disabled.

Name withheld by request

Claim: Olbermann, Maddow Are Modern-Day Fascists

My response to your publication’s “Tom Tomorrow” cartoon from the
Aug. 13 issue, panel one: Gee. I didn’t know that the Keith Olbermann
show even had an audience. Its ratings are so low that they barely
create an arguable blip on the Nielsen radar. This is probably because
most Americans recognize propaganda when they see and hear it.

The Rachel Maddow Show, which follows Herr Olbermann, is even
more smarmy and rife with partisanship. One would have to be a mental
midget to imbue with any value anything she, Herr Olbermann or the
likes of Bill Maher or Al Franken ever have to say.

Why do I use terms sometimes associated with “the right” for these
people—”propagandists” and “herr,” etc.? Because “fascism” is not
the exclusive property of the right; it can come from the left OR the
right. “Fascism” bespeaks any (kind of) society which strives to
create a “homogeneity of thought” among its citizenry, which is what
the Nazis called “Gleichschaltung,” and which is the very aim of
“political correctness” today.

The jack-boots of history are on the march once more. Do you hear
them? Right here, right now, even in the pages of your, uh,
“publication.”

John Gray Wallace

If The Giving Tree Were to Go Away, Many Needy People Would
Suffer

As a longtime reader, I want to thank you for the article “Doing Too
Much?” (Aug. 6), but I ask you to do more. I have lived in the Toumey
Park Neighborhood for 13 years and watched The Giving Tree grow from a
program that feeds the poor into a de facto shelter.

I worked for more than a few years in the child-abuse prevention
field. People frequently asked me how I could stand to work with
parents accused of this crime. I told them that it is easy to love a
child; the real challenge is to love their parents, and you simply are
not doing a child a favor by disrespecting their Mom or Dad. So when
Ms. Herreras (or the editor) chose to depict Libby Wright, The Giving
Tree’s director, as some kind of latter-day Pied Piper, well, it was
just déjà vu all over again. Let’s not forget: The Giving
Tree is not the first residential program in the area to meet up with
legal troubles, either.

You did talk to the neighborhood association president, Bob Bowers.
Good job, but I think you need to put his claim that crime activity
within a one-block area around the shelter increased by 52 percent into
some perspective. What did that mean in real numbers? Speaking of
which, I’m surprised that Jill Rich of Jewish Refugee Resettlement of
Southern Arizona didn’t share some info on the number of “positive
outcomes” from that program. After all, that’s the way the game is
played. As a case manager, I spent at least 50 percent of my time
documenting how I was helping people as opposed to actually helping
them.

Finally, Brian Flagg from the Casa Maria meals program said it best:
“If people are mad at (Libby Wright) because she’s breaking a bunch of
rules, well, that’s probably a good thing.”

I ask you to put a human face on The Giving Tree, because if this
place goes down (the Giving Tree Compassionate Hope Center), I shudder
to think what will happen to all of the people who depend on it. In the
words of a Methodist hymn that inspired me, “Some mother she rocked
him, her little darling to sleep, but they left him to die like a tramp
on the street.” Remember, we need to love Mom and Dad, not just the
baby Jesus.

Sherry Ivester

This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.