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02 April 22
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Taxing unsightly agglomerations of wealth directly is an idea whose time has come.
“President Biden is a capitalist and believes that anyone should be able to become a millionaire or a billionaire,” the White House said in unveiling the proposal. “He also believes that it is wrong for America to have a tax code that results in America’s wealthiest households paying a lower tax rate than working families.” The economic and political logic of this argument, which the über billionaire and would-be tax reformer Warren Buffett first made almost twenty years ago, is unimpeachable. In 2021, according to the White House’s calculations, America’s seven hundred billionaires will likely pay federal tax, on average, of just eight per cent of their total income, including unrealized capital gains. Thanks to a leak of Internal Revenue Service data to ProPublica last spring, we also know that, in some years, billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and George Soros have paid no federal taxes at all. By contrast, the average tax rate for all taxpayers in 2019 was 13.3 per cent, according to the Washington-based Tax Foundation.
Presumably for marketing reasons, the Administration didn’t label its new plan a wealth tax, instead calling it a “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax.” But if the White House believed that this wordplay would improve the proposal’s chances of being enacted on Capitol Hill, it was quickly disappointed. On Tuesday, barely twenty-four hours after the proposal was unveiled, Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, shot it down, telling The Hill, “You can’t tax something that’s not earned. Earned income is what we’re based on.” In terms of history and economics, this assertion made no sense. Taxes on wealth, not earned income, go back at least as far as ancient Greece. More recently, some countries, such as France, have run into difficulties successfully implementing such taxes, but other countries still have them, including Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. Still, even if Manchin’s logic is faulty, his political power is secure. Given the implacable opposition of elected Republicans to anything resembling higher taxes on the rich, Manchin effectively exercises a veto in the Senate. Now that he has spoken, the Biden proposal to target plutocratic wealth appears dead in the chamber, even though opinion polls consistently suggest that a large majority of Americans, and even most Republican voters, support the idea.
It’s all too easy (and justifiable) to rage at Manchin, who, as a Times investigation reminded us earlier this week, has made a fortune of his own—albeit a small one compared with those of the Buffetts and Musks of the world—through a coal company he founded with his brother, in 1988. The West Virginian has repeatedly suggested that he would support some sort of new tax on the über wealthy, and he said the same thing again this week. But every time someone comes up with an actual proposal, he finds a reason not to support it. However, Manchin hasn’t been the only Democratic roadblock. Until recently, he was far from the only member of his party who resisted the idea of taxing wealth on a direct basis, year by year, rather than relying on traditional tools like the capital-gains tax and the estate tax, which have lots of loopholes. During the 2020 election campaign, when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both made the introduction of a new annual wealth tax a central element of their candidacies, many moderate Democrats—Biden included—failed to support the idea. Last fall, during the abortive Build Back Better negotiations, Senator Ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, revived the idea of taxing the unrealized capital gains of billionaires. The White House expressed interest in Wyden’s proposal but dropped it after it ran into internal Party opposition, including from Manchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Washington Post reported.
The good news is that the idea of directly taxing unsightly agglomerations of wealth continues to gain momentum, and it now has the support of the President of the United States. In a political system that was partly designed to prevent encroachments on the wealth of well-to-do white property owners, and which, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, is currently even more hostage than it used to be to vested interests, this is a notable development. Even if Manchin and the Republicans can block a wealth tax this time, it seems unlikely that they will be able to hold out forever. The public supports it, and opponents’ arguments are growing increasingly threadbare.
Rather than claiming that the current tax system is efficient, or equitable, opponents of a wealth tax tend to argue that such a tax would be impractical to implement and easy to evade. In designing the new plan, however, the Biden Administration went to some lengths to address these problems. For example, its proposal says that the tax payments due could be spread out over close to ten years, which would give the affected parties more time to pay, while also alleviating the potential problem of people facing large liabilities for spikes in the stock market that are subsequently reversed. Another potential pitfall with any wealth tax based on market valuations is that rich people will transfer some of their fortunes into illiquid assets, such as art work or certain types of real estate, which are difficult to value, and again evade paying taxes. To discourage this type of avoidance, the Administration is proposing an additional “deferral” charge upon the eventual sale of illiquid assets. A final notable feature of the Biden plan: it is smaller in scope than previous proposals, such as the ones that Warren and Sanders put forward in 2020. According to the White House, the new tax would raise about three hundred and sixty billion dollars over ten years. That sounds like a huge sum, but at thirty-six billion dollars a year it is only 0.3 per cent of the U.S.’s current G.D.P.
One observer who recognized the political importance of this moment was the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who helped create the Warren proposal. Writing on Twitter, Zucman described the Biden plan as “a landmark proposal.” He also posted a table estimating the impact it would have on the richest ten individuals on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. According to Zucman’s calculations, Musk would owe the I.R.S. fifty billion dollars; Bezos would owe thirty-five billion; Buffett, twenty-six billion; Larry Page, twenty-two billion; Sergey Brin, twenty-one billion; Larry Ellison, seventeen billion; Mark Zuckerberg, sixteen billion; Bill Gates, eleven billion; Steve Ballmer, ten billion; and Jim Walton, seven billion. Since these figures are based solely on publicly available information, they should be regarded as illustrative rather than as hard estimates. But they do make the point that the new tax would be heavily concentrated on the folks at the very, very top of the income distribution. Since they are the ones who have benefitted the most from the new Gilded Age, and from the current tax system, this seems eminently fair.
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, center, walks before a meeting with President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, April 1, 2022. (photo: AP)
ALSO SEE: Hundreds of Ukrainians ‘Forced to Dig Trenches’
for Russian Troops, Rights Group Claims
Ukraine and its Western allies reported mounting evidence of Russia withdrawing its forces from around Kyiv and building up troop strength in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian fighters reclaimed several areas near the capital after forcing the Russians out or moving in after them, officials said.
The visible shift did not mean the country faced a reprieve from more than five weeks of war or that the more than 4 million refugees who have fled Ukraine will return soon. Zelenskyy said he expects departed towns to receive airstrikes and shelling from afar and for the battle in the east to be intense.
“It’s still not possible to return to normal life, as it used to be, even at the territories that we are taking back after the fighting,” the president told his nation in a nightly video message. "We need wait until our land is demined, wait till we are able to assure you that there won’t be new shelling.”
Moscow's focus on eastern Ukraine also kept the besieged southern city of Mariupol in the crosshairs. The port city on the Sea of Azoz is located in the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region, where Russia-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian troops for eight years and military analysts think Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to expand control after his forces failed to secure Kyiv and other major cities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross planned to try Saturday to get emergency supplies into Mariupol and to evacuate residents. The Red Cross said it was unable to carry out the operation Friday because it did not receive assurances the route was safe. City authorities said the Russians blocked access to the city.
Mariupol, which was surrounded by Russian forces a month ago, has been the scene of some of the war’s worst attacks, including on a maternity hospital and a theater sheltering civilians. Around 100,000 people are believed to remain in the city, down from a prewar population of 430,000, and facing dire shortages of water, food, fuel and medicine.
The city's capture would give Moscow an unbroken land bridge from Russia to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, but also has taken on symbolic significance during Russia's invasion, said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Ukrainian think-tank Penta.
“Mariupol has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, and without its conquest, Putin cannot sit down at the negotiating table,” Fesenko said.
The Mariupol city council said Saturday that 10 empty buses were headed to Berdyansk, a city 84 kilometers west of Mariupol, to pick up people who can get there on their own. Some 2,000 made it out of Mariupol on Friday, some on buses and some in their own vehicles, city officials said.
An adviser to Zelenskyy, Oleksiy Arestovych, said in an interview with a Russian lawyer and activist, Mark Feygin, that Russia and Ukraine had reached an agreement to allow 45 buses to drive to Mariupol to evacuate residents “in coming days.”
Such agreements have been reached before, only to be breached. On Thursday, Russian forces blocked a 45-bus convoy attempting to evacuate people from Mariupol and seized 14 tons of food and medical supplies bound for the city, Ukrainian authorities said.
Zelenskyy said he discussed the humanitarian disaster in Mariupol with French President Emmanuel Macron by telephone and with the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, during her visit to Kyiv on Friday.
“Europe doesn’t have the right to be silent about what is happening in our Mariupol,” Zelenskyy said. “The whole world should respond to this humanitarian catastrophe.”
On the outskirts of Kyiv, signs of fierce fighting were everywhere in the wake of the Russian redeployment. Destroyed armored vehicles from both armies left in streets and fields and scattered military gear covered the ground next to an abandoned Russian tank.
Ukrainian forces recaptured the city of Brovary, 20 kilometers east of the capital, Mayor Ihor Sapozhko said in a televised Friday night address. Shops were reopening and residents were returning but “still stand ready to defend” their city, he added.
“Russian occupants have now left practically all of the Brovary district,” Sapozhko said. “Tonight, (Ukrainian) armed forces will work to clear settlements of (remaining) occupants, military hardware, and possibly from mines.”
Elsewhere, at least three Russian ballistic missiles were fired late Friday at the Odesa region on the Black Sea, regional leader Maksim Marchenko said. The Ukrainian military said the Iskander missiles did not hit the critical infrastructure they targeted.
Odesa is Ukraine’s largest port and the headquarters of its navy.
As the war dragged on, the U.S. Defense Department said Friday night it is providing an additional $300 million in arms to Ukrainian forces.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in a statement that the gear in the new package includes laser-guided rocket systems, unmanned aircraft, armored vehicles, night vision devices and ammunition. Also included are medical supplies, field equipment and spare parts.
There was no immediate word Saturday on the latest round of talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, which took place Friday by video. During a round of talks earlier in the week, Ukraine said it would be willing to abandon a bid to join NATO and declare itself neutral — Moscow’s chief demand — in return for security guarantees from several other countries.
On Friday, the Kremlin accused Ukraine of launching a helicopter attack on a fuel depot on Russian soil.
Ukraine denied responsibility for the fiery blast at the civilian oil storage facility on the outskirts of the city of Belgorod, about 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the Ukraine border. If Moscow’s claim is confirmed, it would be the war’s first known attack in which Ukrainian aircraft penetrated Russian airspace.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, said on Ukrainian television: “For some reason they say that we did it, but in fact this does not correspond with reality.”
Later, in an interview with American TV channel Fox News, Zelenskyy refused to say whether Ukraine was behind the attack.
President Joe Biden. (photo: Getty Images)
Joe Biden has been betraying his campaign promise to allow borrowers to discharge their student debts through bankruptcy. In a new letter, 27 Democratic senators are demanding the administration stop trying to overturn court rulings that help student debtors.
“Over the past several decades, Congress and the courts have together nearly eliminated bankruptcy as a viable path towards financial recovery for most Americans struggling with student loan debt,” twenty-seven Democratic senators wrote in a letter to the Education Department and Justice Department on March 31, the Washington Post reported. “The federal government’s aggressive litigation challenges against students who pursue undue hardship claims further exacerbates this situation,” the letter added.
The letter comes days before a scheduled protest at the Department of Education to press the Biden administration to cancel student debt.
As a senator, Biden was a prominent advocate of initiatives that have made it difficult for Americans to reduce their student debts in bankruptcy court. Borrowers are forced to undergo a separate proceeding to handle their student loans, known as an “adversary proceeding,” where they must prove that the debt is causing them “undue hardship.”
During the 2020 campaign, Biden pivoted on the issue, endorsing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) plan to allow borrowers to discharge their student debt through the bankruptcy process like other types of consumer debt. Unfortunately, the rhetorical change from Biden hasn’t translated into a policy change, and Biden officials have continued to fight student loan debtors in bankruptcy proceedings.
Key Case Ignited Public Outcry
In February, we first reported that Biden administration lawyers were trying to overturn a court ruling allowing Ryan Wolfson, a thirty-five-year-old epipleptic man saddled with $100,000 of student debt, to have the loans discharged in bankruptcy court. After our story about Wolfson went viral, the Biden administration abruptly withdrew the appeal.
As we have reported, the case was no anomaly. On the contrary, the administration has been systematically pursuing much the same legal strategy against the most financially beleaguered student debtors across the country. (The Education Department withdrew an appeal in a similar case after our follow-up story.)
In response to that reporting, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer told The Lever that he “absolutely” supported demands by activists that the Education Department stop opposing borrowers seeking student loan relief in bankruptcy cases. “It’s outrageous that other people get to declare bankruptcy but students can’t,” he said at the time.
Now, twenty-seven Senate Democrats, led by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, are echoing that declaration in a letter to the administration.
“We are pleased that [the Education Department] changed course in the Wolfson case and decided not to spend taxpayer dollars attempting to force this individual to continue shouldering crushing debt,” the senators wrote in their letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“Unfortunately, this case has been an exception to the standard practice,” the senators’ letter said, referring to the administration dropping the Wolfson case.
The letter calls upon the Biden administration to update its guidance on how it handles federal student debt bankruptcy cases, including by identifying cases where the borrower faces “undue hardship” in repaying their debt as a result of disability or financial circumstances.
Chris Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, takes part in an interview at the Amazon distribution center in the Staten Island borough of New York on Oct. 25, 2021, after earlier delivering "Authorization of Representation" forms to the National Labor Relations Board in New York. (photo: Craig Ruttle/AP)
ALSO SEE: A Stunning New Chapter Begins
for Amazon Warehouse Workers
Those were the words used by a top Amazon lawyer to describe former warehouse worker Chris Smalls.
Smalls had led a walkout at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to protest working conditions at the Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse where he worked. He was fired the same day.
The memo that contained those biting words was leaked just a few days later. But the words would stay with Smalls. They became the fuel that would drive him to lead one of the most dramatic and successful grassroots union drives in recent history.
"When I read that memo, that motivated me to start an organization," said Smalls, celebrating the historic victory of the Amazon Labor Union on Friday, making the warehouse Amazon's first unionized workplace in the U.S.
Friday's triumph would come almost two years to the day of his firing.
At the time, Amazon said Smalls had violated quarantine and safety measures. But Smalls said he was fired in retaliation for his activism. The New York attorney general followed with an investigation and sued Amazon for the incident and even sought to get Smalls his job back.
Smalls didn't sit still after being fired, and formed the Amazon Labor Union soon after.
Meetings at a bus stop, barbecue and funding through GoFundMe
Smalls had zero union background, nor did he rely on any established labor groups for funding and organizing power.
Instead he raised money for the operation through GoFundMe. Smalls and his co-founder Derrick Palmer — who's still working at the warehouse — reached out to their coworkers.
The bus stop used by workers became their gathering place. They'd wait there to talk to workers who were heading home from their shifts. They'd have a bonfire going, with s'mores, and get people talking. They invited workers to cookouts.
"We had over 20 some barbecues, giving out food every single week, every single day, whether it was pizza, chicken, pasta," Smalls said. He even brought home-cooked food from his aunt to some of these gatherings.
They talked to workers about fighting for their rights, about the grueling toll of the job, how you're on your feet, doing very repetitive, very physically demanding work, for hours. About the breaks that are few and too short.
No one expected this scrappy grassroots campaign to emerge victorious against the behemoth company. Indeed, a first attempt failed. But Smalls persevered, eventually meeting the 30% threshold necessary to hold a vote.
Amazon got Smalls arrested for trespassing
Amazon, meanwhile, spent millions of dollars on labor consultants to fight the union campaigns. The company held mandatory meetings with workers in the warehouse, urging them to vote No.
Amazon even had Smalls and a couple other organizers arrested for trespassing while they were delivering food and union materials to the warehouse parking lot earlier this year.
Amazon's argument to workers is that it is already a great place to work, without a union. It offers competitive pay, and generous benefits like health care coverage for full time employees and full tuition for college.
But Smalls' efforts clearly bore fruit.
Almost 5,000 workers cast their ballots and the votes to form a union were won by a significant margin — more than 500 votes.
Amazon had wanted to belittle the union drive two years ago, when as part of its PR strategy the company said it would make Smalls "the face of the entire union/organizing movement."
And that's exactly what happened. Except today, Smalls has become the face of one of the most successful union drives in recent history.
And Amazon has suffered an embarrassing defeat.
"Amazon doesn't become Amazon without the people," Smalls said. "And we make Amazon what it is."
Student employees at the Viking Vault, where students facing economic hardships are provided with housing, transportation services, food and hygiene products.(photo: Pablo Unzueta/Guardian UK)
In a state marked by inequality and staggering housing prices, nearly 20% of community college students report experiencing homelessness
The college parking garage, which has a security guard, wifi, and bathrooms nearby, is seen as a safer alternative to students sleeping in their cars on the street, where fears of being robbed or written up by the police make it even more difficult for them to succeed at school. At least 98 students enrolled at the school are known to be experiencing homelessness this semester, according to the college’s basic needs program manager, with at least 25 of them living in their cars.
Housing insecurity is a problem on college campuses across the US, but it’s particularly problematic in California, a state marked by extreme inequality and a staggering housing crisis.
The rising cost of rent is a struggle for students in every part of California’s educational system, including at public universities with multibillion-dollar endowments: in a 2017 survey conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, about 10% of students, including 20% of post-doctoral students, said they had experienced homelessness.
But the crisis hits hardest at California’s community colleges, which enroll nearly 2 million students each year, making them the largest system of higher education in the country. Community colleges offer themselves as the pathway to higher-paying, more stable careers, particularly for students who come from families without many financial resources. But the latest statewide survey, published in 2019, found that 19% of California community college students had experienced homelessness in the past year, and 60% had experienced some kind of housing insecurity. Black students, indigenous students, and LGBTQ students, especially transgender students, were at higher risk of housing insecurity than their peers.
When Majeedah Wesley was LBCC’s student body vice-president in 2014, she was living in a youth homeless shelter in Hollywood, about two hours away from campus by public transit.
Many of the people she told about her living situation were astonished. “You’re homeless? A really high-functioning college student?” Wesley recalled.
It was clear, she said, that many people believed homelessness “was something that only people who didn’t have potential would experience.”
Wesley knew that was not true: especially in California, simple “bad luck, bad timing”, could leave students unable to pay for a room. When family members she had been staying with in the Los Angeles area told her she could no longer live with them, she had “a little bit of money in the bank, not enough to get an apartment”, she said. If she went home to the Bay Area, where she did have a place to stay, she would not be able to go to class, and she would fail her courses.
Moving into a youth shelter allowed her to finish the semester. Wesley, who had been voted “most likely to be a millionaire” by her high school classmates, worked hard to appear as if nothing had changed.
But once she experienced homelessness herself, she “started to see the signs” in other students. “A big backpack was a sign. It tells me that somebody is carrying more than what they need for the day,” Wesley said. “Somebody really tired all the time was another thing. People would come into the student lounge and they would go to sleep and it wasn’t an ‘I’ve been in classes all day today,’ type of tired. They’d be sleeping for hours.”
Leeann, 21, an LBCC student, said that some of her friends have only told her after the fact that they had been dealing with homelessness. “Students struggle with it, just asking for help,” she said. That’s especially true of people who “grew up in families where you don’t talk about your feelings, you don’t talk about what’s wrong.” Many people have the attitude, “I have to fix it myself,” she said. (The Guardian is identifying current college students who have experienced homelessness only by their first names.)
In Leeann’s family, children were expected to start paying their own way after they turned 18, she said. For her first two years at LBCC, she was able to work full-time while going to school and afford a monthly $800 in rent. Then she got accepted to LBCC’s nursing program. Her medical coursework was more challenging, and she went from getting all As to barely passing. In order to have more time for schoolwork, she had to work less, and she moved in with friends to save on rent. When her first roommate situation didn’t work out, she started sleeping on other friends’ couches. Dropping out of her program temporarily was not an option: she saw a nursing degree as her way out of the cycle of financial instability and stress she had experienced as a child.
Leeann said her friends and their families were generous, some allowing her to stay with them for weeks at a time. But living without her own space was “hard”, particularly while enrolled in a challenging academic program. “It was already a family with a crammed house,” she said. “There wasn’t really a quiet area to do my work.
“I would always see myself as a burden for being up late at night with the lamp on.
“Homelessness has so many different faces to it,” Leeann said. “Someone sitting next to you, just because they look clean, and all that, doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing it.”
‘A paycheck away from homelessness’
For years, in part because of the stigma, homelessness among college students was “a hidden crisis”, said Rashida Crutchfield, an assistant professor at California State University Long Beach and a leading researcher on the issue. As late as 2017, Crutchfield said, she would interview students who had no place to live, and they would tell her, “I thought I was the only one.”
A 2020 survey of 195,000 college students across the US still enrolled during the pandemic found that 14% had experienced homelessness in the past year, though only about 3% self-identified as homeless. Most described what they had been through as “couch-surfing” or staying with friends.
People are often reluctant to apply the label “homeless” to themselves, Crutchfield said.
“I still hear students say, ‘I’m living in my car, but I’m not homeless, because my car is my home.’”
Over the past decade, academic research documenting the extent of hunger and homelessness among college students has driven a transformation in how schools approach the problem, as researchers have highlighted how “hunger and homelessness routinely undermine students’ very ability to learn”.
Today, virtually every public college in California has some kind of food pantry for students, according to Debbie Raucher, the director of education at John Burton Advocates for Youth, a California non-profit. Last year, she said, the California legislature approved $30m to fund “basic needs” programs at all community colleges, as well as a one-time grant of $100m to address food and housing insecurity.
On a recent Wednesday at LBCC’s “Viking Vault”, Patricia, 35, was hauling boxes of fruit donated by a local grocery store and welcoming the students who had dropped by to pick up basic groceries, diapers or free children’s clothing. Students scan a QR code at the door, and then can take as much as they need. The goal is to create an atmosphere that is friendly and without stigma, like a Trader Joe’s or a Jamba Juice, said Justin Mendez, the school’s basic needs coordinator.
Patricia has a 12-year-old daughter, and has relied on the school’s basic needs program herself. Before Long Beach, she said, she had attended at least four other colleges across the Los Angeles area, but she always struggled, and never finished a degree. “I didn’t feel supported,” she said.
In late 2020, after years of unstable housing, she and her daughter became “homeless homeless”, living in a car, then in a friend’s RV, which did not have electricity or running water. Long Beach’s expanding basic needs program reached out to her in ways previous colleges had not: not just with free groceries, but with mental health support, resources to help her as she recovered from surgery, a transitional apartment for her and her daughter.
Today, Patricia is part of a federal work study program, and is months away from completing an associate’s degree in drug and alcohol counseling, which she plans to follow with a master’s in social work.
Many people have an “outdated” image of struggling college students as people barely out of their teens who “have to eat Top Ramen sometimes”, Raucher said. A more accurate image is someone like Patricia: “A single mom with two small children who’s trying to go to school to better her economic circumstances while managing childcare and transportation and employment and parenting.”
Christine, 49, an LBCC business administration major, said the “cutthroat” rental market in California had left her unable to find a new apartment after her landlord sold her building. Rents in her Long Beach neighborhood were already soaring as new luxury buildings rose by the beach: she said her old apartment, which cost her $1,200, now rents for more than $2,000 a month. With bad credit and a recent job loss, Christine said, she could not get approved for a new apartment anywhere. She and her young daughter ended up moving into a motel.
“It’s almost like our economy has pushed people out of their homes,” she said. “I remember years ago reading an article that said, ‘Most families are a paycheck away from homelessness,’ and I remember thinking, ‘Oh that seems extreme.’ And then you find yourself in that position.”
While college students experience homelessness for many different reasons, “it is still predominantly an economic challenge,” said Eric Hubbard, a development director at Jovenes, a non-profit whose program for getting students into housing has become a model across the state. “Housing is just so expensive.”
Advocates said the pandemic has brought even more of the problem out into the open.
“Students could live in their cars, and they could go to the gym and different restaurants and wash up and act like it was a normal day,” said Colette Redden, a program coordinator at Jovenes. But when the pandemic hit and businesses shut down, “They didn’t have a place to go.”
Even before the pandemic, California had already made big strides in changing the kind of resources they offer to help keep students from dropping out of school.
“This movement – addressing student basic needs in terms of higher education – has gone at light speed in many ways,” Crutchfield said.
“Most of the credit goes to our students,” Crutchfield said. “They have held our feet to the fire and done a lot of activism.”
But Crutchfield and others say that the cultural belief that college students are inherently worthy of help has also made a difference in the speed of the response, a marked contrast to efforts to help people dealing with other kinds of homelessness.
‘Safe for now’
LBCC’s announcement last November that it would allow students to sleep in the parking lot sparked a wave of media attention, including news vans outside the parking garage, and colleges across the country reached out for more information about how they might replicate the program. In Long Beach, the local community response was overwhelmingly supportive, Mendez said. Community members asked if they could bring sandwiches, and one person donated $100 gift cards to the students.
One student who has been sleeping in the parking garage since November still managed to make the dean’s list, Mendez said. Other students are maintaining 4.0 averages while living in an RV.
For some of the students sleeping in the safe parking program, the level of public attention has been distressing, Mendez said, and none of them were interested in talking to journalists.
But several LBCC students who previously lived in their cars said they thought allowing students to sleep in the campus parking lot was a positive step. Christine, the business administration student, slept in her car for parts of 2019 and 2020, and said that before she experienced it herself, she had thought living in a car would be “like camping”.
What she hadn’t anticipated, she said, was the amount of work and anxiety that came with trying to find a place to park every night: how to locate a parking spot that was safe, but not in a neighborhood where someone would call the police. How difficult it was to find anywhere to park if she had to work until 10pm, as she often did with gig work. Where to use the bathroom, or brush her teeth, and worrying about what would happen to her teeth if she didn’t brush them enough.
“I know some people will probably look at [the safe parking program] and say, ‘Why don’t you try to find these student homes?’ But it’s not that easy,” she said. It was helpful for students like her, she said, “just to have that stepping stone: ‘You’re safe for now.’”
Two of the students approved for the safe parking program have since moved into transitional housing, Mendez said. More than 30 LBCC students have found transitional housing through a partnership with Jovenes.
Connecting students with transitional housing costs roughly $10,000 for each student per year, Hubbard said. While not cheap, that investment made financial sense, he said: giving students financial aid to go to college, but then letting them struggle and fail out of class because they were sleeping in their cars, was not productive, he said.
Jovenes’s program, now being replicated across the state, does not have enough funding to help every LBCC student who has no place to live, or even the majority of them.
Last semester, 1,200 LBCC students requested housing support from the school because of struggles to pay rent or keep up with bills, and 225 students were identified as “literally homeless”, Mendez said. So far this semester, the school has received 500 requests for housing support.
Raucher, the education budget expert, said even the limited amount of housing resources available to students at LBCC “unfortunately is not the norm”. In 2019 the state legislature approved $19m for a first-of-its-kind program to support college students dealing with homelessness in every part of the state’s education system. Fourteen of the state’s community colleges, including LBCC, got grants from this program, Raucher said, but “the other 102 colleges out there don’t have access,” she said.
California’s community colleges also got a disproportionately small slice of the new homelessness prevention funding, she said: the state legislature gave them slightly less than the $10m given to the state college and university systems, even though community colleges serve more than three times as many students, and have higher documented rates of student homelessness.
LBCC students who have been able to get transitional housing said it has been transformative. Leeann, the nursing student, was one of them. Last July, after three months of couch-surfing and academic struggle, Jovenes helped her move into a shared apartment not far from campus with three other students who had all been surviving without a stable place to live.
The apartment came with basic furniture: a couch, table, beds and desks. For Leeann, that was a big deal. “When I still lived with my family, it was a really crammed home. I shared a room with four other people,” she said. “I never had my own desk. There was never room for one.”
The effect on her classwork has been dramatic, Leeann said. She said she sees Jovenes as serving in a kind of parental role, providing for her what many of her classmates get from their families: the financial support to focus full-time on school.
Yemeni police inspect a site of Saudi-led air raids targeting two houses in Sanaa, Yemen. (photo: Hani Mohammed/AP)
The last coordinated cessation of hostilities nationwide was during peace talks in 2016.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed the truce, which he said has "fueled one of the world's worst humanitarian crises."
The war has killed tens of thousands of people and has left millions on the brink of starvation.
On Friday, Guterres commended "the Government of Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis for agreeing on a two-month truce in Yemen, including cross-border attacks."
"The parties accepted to halt all offensive military air, ground and maritime operations inside Yemen and across its borders; they also agreed for fuel ships to enter into Hudaydah ports and commercial flights to operate in and out of Sana'a airport to predetermined destinations in the region; they further agreed to meet under my auspices to open roads in Taiz and other governorates in Yemen," UN special envoy to Yemen Hans Grundberg said in a statement.
The truce can be renewed past the two-month period with the consent of the parties, Grundberg added.
The foreign minister for Yemen's Saudi-backed internationally recognized government said Friday that he would be taking steps to release prisoners, open Sana'a airport and allow oil ships through Hodeidah port.
"I received clear directives from President Hadi to take (the) necessary steps to facilitate all the arrangements for the release of all prisoners, opening Sana'a airport, releasing oil ships via Hodeidah, opening roads in the besieged Taiz, to alleviate the suffering caused by Houthi," Ahmed bin Mubarak said on Twitter.
"We immediately announce the release of the first two fuel ships through the port of Hodeidah," he added.
Guterres underlined the importance of the truce in his statement, saying: "For more than seven years, war has devastated the lives of millions of Yemeni women, children and men. It is difficult to imagine the extent of their suffering, which has mainly taken place far from the media spotlight. The war has fueled one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, brought state institutions to the verge of collapse, reversed human development by two decades, and threatened regional peace and security.
"Today must be the start of a better future for the people of Yemen," he said.
New Zealand's Ivory Glacier. (photo: Gregor Macara/NIWA)
But now, scientists are warning that these icy behemoths could be lost to the climate crisis. After an annual survey, a team of New Zealand scientists reported that more than 50 South Island glaciers were continuing to lose snow and ice.
“What we’re seeing is a clear retreat, which is no doubt thanks to climate change,” National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) principal scientist Dr. Andrew Lorrey said in a press release. “In a decade, we predict that many of our beloved and important glaciers will be gone. This will have far reaching impacts, such as altering our beautiful landscape, affecting the livelihoods of people who rely on these natural wonders for tourism, and flow on effects from decreased meltwater during periods of drought.”
Every year since 1977, NIWA has conducted aerial surveys of several glaciers to see how much snow from the year before has remained covering the glaciers. This year, scientists from NIWA, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Department of Conservation took thousands of photographs of more than 50 glaciers at the end of New Zealand’s summer. Since the surveys began, global temperatures have risen by around 1.1 degree Celsius, and NIWA estimates that New Zealand’s Southern Alps have lost more than a third of their ice volume. Lorrey told Stuff that he thought as many as 40 percent of the surveyed glaciers would be gone in 10 years.
This particular survey came after a warm summer, including a marine heat wave, so the scientists expected to see snow loss.
“From what we saw on the snowline survey, most glaciers had reasonably high snowlines, showing that they lost mass this year,” Dr. Lauren Vargo from Victoria University of Wellington said in the press release. “But what was more striking to me is how much smaller and more skeletal so many of the glaciers are becoming.”
However, the retreat of the glaciers is an ongoing trend. New Zealand’s glaciers have long been a favorite with tourists because they are some of the most accessible on Earth, according to Yale Climate Connections. However, this is already changing. In 2012, it was deemed too dangerous to access the famous Franz Josef and Fox glaciers by foot, and they can now only be reached by air, according to Stuff. While Lorrey said these glaciers are high enough to survive, they will become even harder to reach.
“It will impact tourism in a number of ways. Access to the glaciers will get more remote, and you will have to go further and further up to see the glacier,” he said.
New Zealand experienced its warmest year on record in 2021, The Guardian reported. It is also weathering temperatures four to five times more extreme than they would have been without the climate crisis.
The survey, Lorrey said in the press release, “emphasizes the urgency of slowing climate change because the impacts are going to become increasingly costly and hard to avoid.”
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