The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Detroit Homeless Denied Government Aid

Jun 28, 2010

The federal Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program is anything but “rapid” and certainly hasn’t prevented homelessness.

Eight months ago 38,000 people applied for aid in Detroit. Even then, the program was a joke–since it promised aid to only 3,400 families. In fact, it’s given aid to only 330.

Delphia Simmons, program director at the Coalition on Temporary Shelters said, “When they were at Cobo, they were facing eviction. By the time we got to them, they had been evicted.”

City officials blame the “delay” on having to carefully “vet” the applicants to comply with federal rules.

The federal government never “vetted” the banks it doled out trillions of dollars of bailout money to! The city never “vetted” the people responsible for handing fire and police pension funds over to the cronies of a corrupt mayor.

To government officials used to treating public money as their own cash cow, it may be just a “delay.” To the unemployed and now homeless, this “delay” meant disaster.