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I have lived most of my adult life in Seattle, Washington. I have experienced life as a stable, working member of the community, and I have also fallen on times so hard that I had to live in my car and depend upon food banks to feed myself. If you visit food banks and emergency homeless shelters enough, eventually you will meet some very interesting people. I once met a brilliant young man who was an Oregon State University law-school drop out. He told me (as we sat on the sidewalk eating turkey sandwiches we had just scored from a homeless shelter) that he dropped out of law school in his 3rd year because he couldn’t stay focused, and could not get help to treat his ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) condition. I remember thinking what a waste of a good mind. If only he could have gotten the medical attention he needed, he could have finished law school. I don't know what he would have been doing had he finished law school, but I 'd bet he would not have been sitting on a corner eating a food-bank sandwich with me!
I’ve met a wide variety of people who exists as virtual ghosts, living in the underbelly of Seattle; they live under bridges, in alleys, in abandoned or foreclosed homes. ”Ordinary” people see the homeless but rarely acknowledge them - as if they exist on some other time-plane that makes their presence not quite physical. If you do take a minute and speak to a homeless person, or someone at a food-bank you will immediately notice that they are quite real, and as the Pemco Insurance commercial says, “a lot like you- a little different.”
Another thing I have noticed is Seattle has a large number of homeless persons who aren’t natives of Washington State. I am amazed by the number of people who have casually told me they came to Seattle because they heard the social, and low-income services administered by non-profit organizations were the best in the country. I don’t know this to be true from experience, as I have never needed to access social welfare programs in any state other than Washington, but I am convinced that Seattle has some pretty awesome low-income social service organizations here. I have featured two such agencies in this blog-post.
Below is a link to a video I found at the ‘Solid Ground’ website - a great non-profit organization in Seattle Washington, on how zombie debt is increasingly being used by collection agencies to unlawfully collect time-barred debts from consumers, and how it disproportionately affects the lives of low- income persons. The video is part a campaign to get our state legislators to pass HB 1069. Poverty Action says HB 1069 is being considered by the legislature right now. This legislation would prevent debt buyers from:
The Poverty Action Network is more focused upon building grass-roots campaigns that address issues such as consumer protections, basic needs, racial equity, and Immigration and Refugee justice. Poverty Action was founded in 1996 as a response to the federal government’s passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act or “welfare reform.”
Poverty Action says they are Washington state’s largest anti-poverty organization.
I have lived most of my adult life in Seattle, Washington. I have experienced life as a stable, working member of the community, and I have also fallen on times so hard that I had to live in my car and depend upon food banks to feed myself. If you visit food banks and emergency homeless shelters enough, eventually you will meet some very interesting people. I once met a brilliant young man who was an Oregon State University law-school drop out. He told me (as we sat on the sidewalk eating turkey sandwiches we had just scored from a homeless shelter) that he dropped out of law school in his 3rd year because he couldn’t stay focused, and could not get help to treat his ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) condition. I remember thinking what a waste of a good mind. If only he could have gotten the medical attention he needed, he could have finished law school. I don't know what he would have been doing had he finished law school, but I 'd bet he would not have been sitting on a corner eating a food-bank sandwich with me!
I’ve met a wide variety of people who exists as virtual ghosts, living in the underbelly of Seattle; they live under bridges, in alleys, in abandoned or foreclosed homes. ”Ordinary” people see the homeless but rarely acknowledge them - as if they exist on some other time-plane that makes their presence not quite physical. If you do take a minute and speak to a homeless person, or someone at a food-bank you will immediately notice that they are quite real, and as the Pemco Insurance commercial says, “a lot like you- a little different.”
Another thing I have noticed is Seattle has a large number of homeless persons who aren’t natives of Washington State. I am amazed by the number of people who have casually told me they came to Seattle because they heard the social, and low-income services administered by non-profit organizations were the best in the country. I don’t know this to be true from experience, as I have never needed to access social welfare programs in any state other than Washington, but I am convinced that Seattle has some pretty awesome low-income social service organizations here. I have featured two such agencies in this blog-post.
Below is a link to a video I found at the ‘Solid Ground’ website - a great non-profit organization in Seattle Washington, on how zombie debt is increasingly being used by collection agencies to unlawfully collect time-barred debts from consumers, and how it disproportionately affects the lives of low- income persons. The video is part a campaign to get our state legislators to pass HB 1069. Poverty Action says HB 1069 is being considered by the legislature right now. This legislation would prevent debt buyers from:
- Suing debtors for time-barred debt (outside the statute of limitations);
- Suing debtors without sufficient proof that the debt buyer actually owns the debt;
- Not having proof of assignments of the debt to indicate a chain of title for the debt.
The Poverty Action Network is more focused upon building grass-roots campaigns that address issues such as consumer protections, basic needs, racial equity, and Immigration and Refugee justice. Poverty Action was founded in 1996 as a response to the federal government’s passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act or “welfare reform.”
Poverty Action says they are Washington state’s largest anti-poverty organization.
Related articles
- 7 steps to avoiding zombie debt (thewiseme.com)
- Zombie Foreclosures: Reanimated Mortgage Debts (sgtreport.com)
- Old debt, uncollectable and not taxable (dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com)
- The Walking Debt……Zombie Mortgage Appocalpse (kswiggins.wordpress.com)
- The Worst Part of Being Homeless: ‘No One Sees Me’ (alternet.org)
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