Point In Time Count

Last week, we did a community point-in-time count of homeless people here in Orange County. The goal is to count everyone in the county who classifies as homeless by HUD standards. By far the largest portion of our homeless population is covered by the service agencies, but we also had to count those individuals who live on the street and don't use the services. In the past, the street count portion has been handled by the police exclusively. As part of our effort to increase the accuracy of our reporting, we decided to try using volunteers rather than the police this year. Since it was our first time to use volunteers, we decided to start slow and partner volunteers with police officers and then use those volunteers to develop a training program for a summer count. Our goal is to make this an entirely volunteer activity; it's going to take much more training and preparation than I anticipated.

I went out with the Carrboro officer from 9:00 pm - 11:30 pm. It was a very cold and windy night so fortunately we only found two guys, both of whom were willing to talk with us. We began by driving around looking for anyone walking. Next we began checking out a list of places that had been compiled by the other officers on the force (underpasses, abandoned houses, etc.). Fortunately, we only found two guys out that night. They were just walking around trying to keep warm. When we pulled up in the car, they were very hesitant to talk with us at first (no surprise there!), but the the police officer really knew how to talk to them and help them relax their guard. They told us that homelessness, substance abuse, and unemployment are a vicious cycle. If you drink, you can't hold a job; if you can't hold a job, you lose your housing; if you lose your housing, you can't get a new job; if you can't get a new job, you keep on drinking.

It's interesting to see the town late at night from the eyes of a cop. I had no idea that people hangout in the rafters of road overpasses, or that there are small communities of individuals living in tent cities within the urban area. All we saw was the sites that night, but one place we went really scared me. Besides being outside with only industrial plastic covering beds that had been pulled out of dumpsters, the amount of trash spread around the site was just unbelievable. I've lived in cities so I've seen desperate poverty, but this was different. I can't imagine living like that or how it must feel to be so totally cut off from the wealth and prosperity that is this community. It was a very humbling experience.

...homelessness deprives people of far more than shelter. They have no place from which to be productive and giving, to be restored, to be welcomed, to be themselves, to give physical expression to their personalities. The homeless are, quite simply, deprived of their humanity. Restoring that to them requires more than grudging public expenditure and warehouses where they can sleep at night....I don't know the solution for homelessness. What I do know is that it requires more than an impersonal institution that removes the homeless from our sight and our minds. It requires some attention, some engagement from all of us, some willingness to focus on homeless people not as statistics but as individuals, needing care, needing to be welcomed back as full members of the human race.

--Donella Meadows, Being Homeless is More Than Being Without Shelter

Net Neutrality, or Keep the Internet Free

Net neutrality is the basis of the Internet, the assumption that 'all users are entitled to access content and services or run applications and devices of their choice.' A couple of posters to Squeeze the Pulp don't want a municipal network because they fear government would destroy the concept of net neutrality.

But it's really the big businesses are that systematically attempting to destroy free and open access of the Internet. Cable providers (telecomms) and phone companies (telecos) are at each others throats in their attempts to protect their communications turf. On January 11 representatives from Verison, Time-Warner, Bellsouth, and others met withe NC Revenue Laws Committee to try and convince our legislators to regulate use of the Internet. The telecomms want to prevent telecos from offering video services, and the telecos want to prevent the telecomms from offering voice over IP telephony.

The companies that control the pipes want to discriminate in favor of their own applications, while shutting out or slowing down competing services. These companies have a business incentive to create their own affiliates to compete with the most popular applications — like search engines, voice-over-the-Internet, and streaming video archives.

They now seek to pad their pockets further by becoming gatekeepers to all things digital — deciding what content, applications and services we can use. The telco and cable giants — which dominate 98 percent of the broadband market — not only expect consumers to pay to access the Internet, but they want to charge content producers for using their wires to deliver it. (Deadend for the Internet)

Businesses have every right to expect reasonable profits but access to the Internet and other telecommunications services can no longer be considered luxury service. Local news sources do not provide indepth reporting and analysis; more and more businesses will only accept online job applications; schools budgets don't fund print reference books, etc. Without access, living and working in this community is seriously curtailed.

Access has two components. First, is the information available and representative of all views and second, is it available to everyone, regardless of income level. Through a municipal network we can assure access on both levels.

Here's what I believe:

• A municipal networks is the only means of protecting our free and open access to the Internet and all its associated benefits.
• Local government should support the creation of a non-profit organization that would oversee the design, installation, and ultimately the management of the service; but that service should be protected against any interference by local governments in policymaking, etc.
• Local governments should commit to use the service to support their own operations, thus creating a significant market demand from the start and reducing their own municipal expenditures for network access.
  
• The service should be low-cost but not free. It should follow the similar cost of service principles written into the OWASA charter.
  
• Taxes should not be used to fund ongoing operation although municipal funding will be necessary for start up costs.
• Such a service will create new, well-paying jobs to support our local economy and will continue to support economic development by reducing business costs and creating new business opportunities, especially if we can bundle Internet, telephone, and cable services.

Ultimately, I want telecommunications in southern Orange County to be treated as a utility--a basic function necessary to life in the 21st century. Just as I trust OWASA to protect my water supply, I will trust a similarly structured utility to protect my access to a free and open Internet.

The Free Expression Policy Project has put together an excellent "overview of the mass media system and the concerns of the media democracy movement"