We are a country that cheerfully permits over one million of its children to experience in any year the terror, the existential fear, the insecurity, the permanent scars that must of necessity flow from forced eviction from their homes.

Given our collective assent to the nightmare into which these, our children, are plunged, it should, perhaps, not surprize that  when we also, as a society, declare it our firm and considered intention to intervene with a housing program so that the childrens' time of shelter living will be kept to a minimum, we run the program as if it were designed by Franz Kafka.

To which end, Section 8 Housing Vouchers.

Intended as the Republican answer to public housing tenements, it was touted to provide the poor with access to the wider rental market and with less state owned and operated dwellings than exemplified by the NYC Housing Authority.  

Which brings us to the happy story of Samantha Garvey

On New Year's Eve her family was evicted from their home in Brentwood N.Y.

Since then, they spent a week in a hotel, and the second in the Suffok County homeless shelter, where Samantha was living when news came that she was a semi-finalist (300 in the nation) for the Intel Science Talent Search.

She achieved this despite the stresses of homelessness, which had impacted her life once in the past, not counting periods where "home" was a hotel room.

With news of her win, the county welfare officials used their emergency case discretion to get her family a 3 bedroom home in her same high school district, under the Section 8 Voucher plan , where the family pays 30% of their income, and HUD makes up the rest.

Because we as a people, care about our children, and because we as a people, value the talent that we know is sprinkled unpredictably throughout them, we as a people sprang into action, and kept Samantha's shelter visit down to a week. By the way, we as a people in this instance used a*foreclosed property that had passed into county hands for rehabilitation as the vehicle for this thoughtful intervention.

That is how a civilized society vindicates the simple principle:

THE WELFARE OF ANY YOUNG OF THE SPECIES IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ALL ADULTS OF THE SPECIES.

For millions of other children, however, who are exactly as deserving under the stringent income requirements that we as a people have collectively decided will be the limit of our charity, there is a less heart warming story.

If, for instance, they lived in one of the 9 counties that make up the affluent San Francisco Bay area (Contra Costa County) they would wait seven years from the onset of their financial distress eligibility to place their names into contention for the waiting list LOTTERY!

The 6000 lucky names would then begin waiting for vouchers to become funded available, generally a 2-3 year wait.  

The 30,000 plus who did not win the lottery, go back to waiting for the next window to open after 7 years.

So by the time we as a people effectively intervene in the homelessness of these particular children, they will no longer be part of the "child" homeless population.

Problem solved!

This is obscene.

To maintain a program of public housing  support intervention the recipients of which are largely families with children, and then knowingly, intentionally, and repeatedly underfund it so grossly as to vitiate its fundamental purpose is a stench in the nostrils of the Lord, and an abomination unto the nations.

*(Of course, you might wonder if there are no empty foreclosed properties in Contra Costa County...)

/a