Seth Kaper-Dale
ANNOTATIONS
Learn More [2}: Ted Robbins, “Little-Known Immigration Mandate Keeps Detention Beds Full,” NPR.org, November 19, 2013.
Learn More [3]: Dawy Rkasnuam and Conchita Garcia, “Banking on Detention: 2016 Update” (Detention Watch Network, 2016).
Learn More [4}: “Detention by the Numbers,” Freedom for Immigrants, 2018.
Learn More [2}: Jonathan D. Salant, “N.J. Has More Immigrant Detainees with the Coronavirus than Any Other State,” nj.com, April 10, 2020.
Learn More [3]: Eric Klefer, “Prison Hunger Strikes Continue in NJ as ICE Detainees Fear COVID,” NJ Patch, January 6, 2021, sec. Politics & Government.
Learn More [4}: Matt Katz, “ICE Releases Hundreds of Immigrants as Coronavirus Spreads in Detention Centers,” NPR.org, April 16, 2020.
Learn More [5]: “Immigration Detention and Covid-19,” Brennan Center for Justice, March 27, 2020.
Learn More: “Renting with a Criminal Conviction or Arrest Record,” Tenant Resource Center, accessed May 20, 2021.
Learn More [2}: “Fair Housing for People with a Criminal History,” Fair Housing Center for Rights and Research, accessed May 20, 2021.
Learn More [3]: Colleen O’Dea, “Pending Legislation Would Curtail Criminal Background Checks for Renters,” NJ Spotlight News, April 28, 2021.
Learn More [4}: “Fair Share Housing Center Hails Landmark ‘Ban the Box’ Housing Bill,” Insider NJ, July 16, 2020.
Learn More [5]: Ashley Balcerzak, “Former Inmates Face Housing Hurdles. NJ Looks to Change That and Reduce Recidivism.,” northjersey.com, January 15, 2021.
TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by Emma Young
Conducted Remotely
September 18th, 2020
Transcription by Rutgers Oral History Archive
0:00
Austin: Testing, testing, okay, you guys are good to go.
Can you hear me?
Yep.
Alright.
Seth, if you just want to let me know when you're done, I'll come back and put everything away.
Thank you so much.
Okay, you're welcome. Bye Emma, I'll talk to you soon.
Bye.
Bye, have a good weekend.
Hi Emma.
Hi, nice to meet you.
You as well.
How much time do you have today for this interview?
I have to be on an interview for somebody else whose hiring, or potentially hiring, at one o'clock. So, I've got forty-three minutes. Is that enough to get a start?
No, no, we'll just keep it to the crucial burning questions then. This might be a little redundant but we usually collect baseline data at the beginning of the interview. So, if it's alright, we'll go through very basic questions. So, your name?
Reverend Seth Kaper-Dale.
Okay, and then your age, if you're comfortable with that.
Forty-five. Forty-five years old.
Okay, sex and gender? Also, if you're comfortable with sharing.
Male.
Okay. Race and ethnicity?
White.
Okay. Religion?
Christian.
Place of birth?
Vermont.
And then place of residence right now?
Highland Park, New Jersey.
Okay. Also, this is just curiosity that I have also, do you work with the Reformed Church of Highland Park, the Affordable Housing Corporation?
So, I am the pastor of the Reformed Church of Highland Park. I've been here nineteen years and I started the Affordable Housing Corporation in 2005.
Okay.
We incorporated in 2006. We now have one hundred buildings. Twenty-one that we own and operate and seventy-nine that we rent and sublease, and of those seventy-nine, seventeen were added, or so, during the loose grant cycle that we were able to get in June, July, August.
That's great.
Yes.
Yes, I read an article about you but it didn't say anything about affordable housing. So, I wasn't quite sure exactly.
Yes.
2:17
But that's great. Okay, so we're done with that, and now it can be a bit more interesting. Okay, so some opener questions. How do you envision the role of your organization during a crisis like COVID right now?
So, our organization exists to meet the needs of victims of the world's abuses, and COVID has exacerbated victimization and so therefore it has heightened the level of commitment we need to make to vulnerable and victimized people. So, we've been doing far more work and being far more engaged, physically engaged, than we ever have been before. Yes, we believe in masks. Yes, we believe in social distancing but we also believe in people having a roof over their head and poor people not being crowded together into unsafe spaces, and if that means being out and about, that's what that means. So, we did– that's kind of the direction of how things went for us.
Okay, so you were saying some interesting things just then about how, yes, masks are very important, but also if we needed to do this work by being out and about, that's what we're going to do, because this work still needs to be done. Talk a little bit about restrictions you faced in COVID because you need (??) but there are still restrictions in place on the pandemic.
Yes, I mean, what we found is actually, I mean, for years we've been housing people who are homeless, but usually we've been going much slower. We acquire a property. We renovate a property. We try to get vouchers associated with that property, or we structure the financing in such a way that we can keep it very affordable and then we get a client in. But with COVID, it was like– there was suddenly a tremendous, as always, a tremendous level of need but now way fewer partners, and it felt like the need was way higher, so we were renting places right and left. I mean, many apartments per week for June, July and August, we were renting and collecting furniture from folks who, during COVID, were cleaning out their homes because they were all home. I think I saw more people clean out their furniture they didn't want than I've ever seen in my life. It was so serious that we bought a moving van in the middle of this all because we had so much stuff to move. We had a nice big moving truck after the summer of COVID because of this. We just, you know, we were going into homes. We were sterilizing the homes as best we could before we took people's furniture. We were sterilizing new apartments as we went in to start getting them set up. We'd have people drive in their own vehicles to meet up at these apartments, but then we'd go in and work on them because they needed to be worked on in order for people to move out of their cars or out of hotels or out of overcrowded halfway houses. I mean, a lot of the people we resettled with the Luce Foundation funding, were coming out of halfway houses, and we knew New Jersey had the highest rate of death in the country in terms of Department of Corrections clients, and so we really felt strongly that we needed to be ready for that crowd in particular.
Yes, when you expanded like this, how do you make new connections with your network? Are you usually enforcing the ones that you have? What is that web of networks that you have to do this work?
So, we went to all the networks that we already had and said, "Listen, now we have extra resources right now." And they said, "Great, because we've got a higher need than normal and less resources than normal." So, it changed the relationship. Instead of them calling and saying, "Hey Seth, can you put up a homeless family for a few nights in a Sunday school room?" It was me calling [REDACTED] at the Path program of UBHC and saying, "Hey [REDACTED], tell me the top three families that need housing right now. We can rent them apartments." And he would say, "Alright, let me make sure I don't give you anyone who has a chance of getting financial support through some other avenue, because we didn't want to undo somebody's opportunity for a long-term financial fix like with a voucher or something. So, let me find somebody who's not going to qualify for any of that and then I'll send them your way and he would call through the different scenarios and send us families. So, it was wonderful for us to go through partners that we've had for years and this time go with new dollars and new energy.
7:21
So, was that abnormal, then, to have this amount of money? Was this something you got because of COVID? Or, did you not always have resources for?
We had far more money during COVID than we ever had before to serve poor people. Now, that's not true in terms of our new construction and long terms in kind of our normal model but in terms of what I would call emergency funding, this is the most emergency funding that we've ever had.
Do you think the need for this amount of emergency funding was there but because of COVID, it's sort of like, gave them, not an excuse but a reason to give you this much money for stuff?
I think people nickel and dime their way towards serving the poor, almost always. So we suffer from lack of commitment to fixing situations that are fixable all the time and I think that there were more resources available in order for us to do this work right now. Now, are those resources sufficient? Absolutely not and we're able to get people into units but I can tell you in twelve months if we're still struggling through a slowdown of the economy and all of this, I'm going to be in trouble because we went and rented seventeen houses with eighty thousand dollars. The average amount that we were putting toward a house was, we were committing minimally, five thousand dollars to each project that we took on. So, five thousand times seventeen, there goes all the money, and in some cases we are giving far more. So, we actually, thankfully, we came up with another 57,000 dollars in addition to the eighty that we could direct toward housing and we were able to stretch it a little further and do a bit more but yes, it's really– it's going to be interesting in a few months to see what this looks like.
Yes, it sounds like your laying the tracks down as the train is going. It's just, like, you're trying to find well– why is this happening?
Absolutely, yes, and I mean, that's why, I guess, why this worked for us. We're sort of– we are not at all risk averse as an organization. We believe we were called to serve those who are last in society and this moment was a particularly clear moment of who needed to be served and how. So, we did it and who– and I trust that the funds will come in to continue to do the work well, and I think partly they'll come in because the best way to be supported is to actually do stuff. People want to support things that are happening. They don't want to support things that aren't happening and we've got an awful lot to show right now.
Okay, you were also saying this, like, call to help people during this time which leads into another question I had was what do you think the role of religion or religious organizations are in situations of crisis or injustice?
For me, anything that is good and beautiful and anything that pushes for justice is faith work. So, for example, like my church, we worship with about three hundred people a week on Sundays. We have three thousand to 3,500 people a week in the building for a plethora of programs that are all about beauty. If God is in all and created all and is redeeming and renewing all, then anything that is good and beautiful and working toward a more profound loving kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, that's church work. So, churches aught to be in a heightened state of commitment during a pandemic. If you look at, I mean historically, the reason Christianity exploded in Europe, and there's incredible history out of Italy, or in the 300s, but horrific pandemics and people, who without fear, rushed towards service instead of away from service. In those cases, lots of people, they survived because they became– they had antibodies, and they could serve their neighbors and people thought, "Wow, this is miraculous and these people aren't getting sick." But they had been sick but they'd been sick and not forgotten or left alone and therefore had had a better chance of recovering when they'd been sick and now, they're like super human because they've got the immunities. So, in some ways I fought back on that, like Christianity grew because of the lack of fear and a commitment to love. Faith is about kind of putting out radical commitment to love and seeing it in the heart of not fearing for whatever reason. That stuff goes together in terms of doing the right thing during moments like this.
Yes. You spoke briefly about your background and your interest in Christianity. Was that something you've always done or did you develop that? I read briefly about your life but I didn't always connect to the work you're doing now, sorry. Not to be (??).
So, I grew up going to church and I grew up in a household where people cared about the helping professions. My dad was the head of the Department of Children and Families for the state of Vermont when I was growing up. Like, there was the commitment to justice and mercy. Those two things didn't kind of come together. They were two good things that I was a part of but I didn't theologically understand and that really occurred in college where I came to understand that theology is reflection on praxis. Praxis means action. There is no theology. There is no reflecting on who God is and who we are if it's not in response to real action in the world. So, there's a tradition called liberation theology that comes out of Central and South America that stretches that. They say theology is the second act and that's how I see it. So, there’s nothing to talk about unless you’re doing. So, there's nothing to pray about unless you're doing. So, we do and we do, kind of, in the spirit of love and what we think is right and then we stop and reflect on that, but action comes first.
14:15
That's great, thank you. To go back to the actual work part of it, how do you identify, select and work with the service recipients? Like what is that process like?
It was beautifully helter skelter this summer. It was so amazing to have money and to have a mandate to spend it quickly. I loved it. I loved every second of that process. So, every Thursday morning at 10 a.m. we would have a Zoom call with two different case workers from Path which is one of the programs of UBHC. One case worker from Catholic Charities who is on sometimes. The Director of Neighbor Corps Reentry, who is [REDACTED]. The Director of Interfaith-RISE, which is a refugee settlement program, a couple of representatives from a company Now, which is our program for unaccompanied minors. The woman who runs our anti-trafficking program. We'd all be on this call together plus a few interns who were working with us full time from Princeton Seminary, and people would bring names to the table. [REDACTED] would say, Hey, a guy named [REDACTED] who's in a halfway house called and he can't get out unless he has an address, but he has a criminal record and no one– he can't get a lease anywhere because of his criminal record." We'd say, "Alright, let's put him in whatever street." I would put together a lease, and we'd give it to the halfway house, and before you know it, [REDACTED]'s released, right. So, we just did that over and over. People would say names, they'd say what the hinderance is for people moving from some form of detention to some level of freedom and we would write the letter. We'd give it to the judge or we'd give it to the caseworker or to the police department, whoever needed it, and next thing you know, folks are released. We're doing this a lot with Essex County Jail and Elizabeth Detention Center as well with immigrants. So, we have a number of people who we got released over the summer who have ankle monitors on their legs and aren't allowed to leave because ICE is tracking them but they're not in detention anymore. So, that's something I'm used to because I'm working in this work for years but it was kind of amazing during COVID to have some people who I never thought would see the light of day until they were deported to Colombia or El Salvador. You know, seeing the light of day in our housing.
Yes, this is a little derailing, I don't want to distract us too much but I am super interested in what you were just saying about people being released from jails and detention centers with ICE. What is your opinion on the conditions of those jails, specifically in this time of crisis and what do you think should be happening at this point?
So, this is always a dicey question for me.
Sorry.
No, it's good. I have had groups that I've been a part of and that I care about who fight for years for a thicker pillow at the Elizabeth Detention Center and who just cry out how unjust it is that the pillows are so thin. I'm not kidding. That was an argument that this one group worked on for months and months and months one year. I don't– I do care that people have a more comfortable place to lay their head, but I in no way want to justify that folks are locked up at all. There's 32,000 beds a year and 34,000 that are a part of the bed mandate that is a Democratic driven thing, not a Republican driven thing, of a deterrent to coming here undocumented is that we lock up 34,000 people a night. There's no reason for those people to be locked up. The non-detained docket in Newark is three times that size. It's like almost a hundred thousand people. In New Jersey, there's just a few thousand detained, a few thousand too many but those, it could be endlessly refilled with a currently non-detained docket whose perfectly safe outside. There's no different between somebody inside and outside. So, to fight for pillow thickness questions when we should be fighting to burn the whole place down, it's a frustrating conversation for me. In terms of COVID, I think that detention centers should've released a tremendous number of people, which they did. I think Elizabeth is down to eighty people for a facility that usually has five hundred, but the Department of Corrections should be brought up on charges, as should the current governor, for the deaths in this state in prisons. There's a million ways, including a bill that the Assembly just failed to pass that would call for the release of 3,700 people who are in the jails just by giving them a COVID credit, like extra time for time served during COVID. If those folks were released, as they should've been about a week ago, if the Assembly had passed a bill, then you would've had the ability to socially distance the remaining folks who are still incarcerated, but because they weren't released, it's impossible to maintain anything that resembles the percentages that the Governor says that are appropriate in any other spot within society. So, it's horrible and more people should be released, and we're trying every way we can on the reentry side to make it easy for people to land well but we can't pull the trigger on getting folks out. We just, we can only help once they're out.
20:09
Yes, no, thank you for that answer. We don't have so much time, so I'm going to go on to the next one.
Yes, we're good.
But what are the common threads that you think are affecting the people you work with. Like you say pre-COVID or post-COVID, I don't know if it’s different now, but common threads of these people that you work with?
So, there's a few common threads. One common thread, is the high cost of rent across New Jersey. That's a common thread. It's very, very hard. If you're making fifteen dollars an hour which everybody's always pushing for. If you're making fifteen an hour, you can hardly pay for your rent, that's the truth. So, the high cost of rent is a problem. The second thing is, in a huge percentage of the cases that we resettled with the Luce Foundation funding, there's some sort of disability within the family that makes it hard for there to be the full wage engagement of the adults in the family. So, either it's children with disabilities who then leave one of the parents not be able to work or it's the adult, him or herself, whose got some sort of disabilities that hinder the amount of work that can be done, so those make people– It's extremely hard when you can't show that you have paystubs that would pay the rent and you don't have good credit history and you got somebody with a debilitating condition and you're making too little every hour and you don't have health insurance. I mean, all those things added together make it darn near impossible to convince a landlord that you're going to be a tenant that they can trust, right. So, the hinderance is all those very real things. The only way people are getting through it, with us, is the landlord accepts our commitment that they will be paid on the first of the month, every month, even if the client doesn't come through. So, then the onus of responsibility has been shifted from the tenant to us and our hope, every time, is that when we surround people with real forms of love which come in the shape of employment services, ESL, a doctor here whose helpful to people, volunteers to help you get to appointments, job leads from people in the network. Yet, our hope is always that when these sorts of services come around people, their situation might change and they can become a worthy tenant in the eyes of the world. They're already worthy to us.
So, you were just saying that what you really contributed is shifting the responsibility of who pays so these people can lift themselves up without that burden. Do you think that, not to say you're not doing wonderful work, it's just, do you think that your organization is really enough to have sustainable long-term effects and change, like, can you be in a system that will be in place for a long time or does there need to be greater systemic change or there seems to be long lasting?
So, we've been at this now for, since 2000. Our first tenants moved in, in February of 2008. So, I can tell you endless stories of lives turned around. A woman moves into Arena Court which is housing for women, Adriana Foster Care, and four years later leaves with fifty thousand dollars in the bank that she saves up and a four-year degree. Now, and can now rent her own apartment in the same town where she lived with affordable housing. Like those things really happen here. We have real examples of that. We also have examples of people who make absolutely no visible forward strides while they're here and leave seemingly as screwed up as with their situations as they came in and sometimes, I'm totally wrong about that. Like I've learned to not judge what is success– that sort of being stable in four years in one location, even though all outward signs say that one's statistically a failure, four or five years down the road, as they're making decisions about who to love and how to be loved, like they remember being loved here and those things play into your future or that course that they didn't complete, when they were here. They're kicking themselves for that now but the next time they go through it, they take it a little more seriously. So, you know victories come in all sorts of forms and shapes. We try hard to not be an organization that is unsustainable. Our model is we have some projects that are, I'll call them cash cows. We do really well on some, because we have vouchers that cover the entire amount of the rent for the unit, the tenant pays thirty percent of what they make. I mean, thirty percent of their income regardless of if that's fifty dollars a month or five hundred a month and then the state pays the rest. We do really well on those projects. We do enough projects like that, that do really well, that then we can take on a whole ton of projects where we get creamed and that's what happens with the model. If the only thing we were doing was signing master leases with people who aren't economically able to pay the rent, like we'd be toast. But we're not toast because we can have losses and we do have losses on some of those where frankly some of the loose cases will be losses. We've moved somebody in and there's a family next door that we moved in. A single mom with four daughters, they've been living in a hotel since January and the mom is on dialysis three days a week and she only has custody of one of the four kids. Until she gets custody, she has almost no money from general assistance. Once she gets custody, she'll get more general assistance. We're paying 1,750 a month for her right now, for rent. She can't pay eight hundred a month, so we're eating that. But I could tell you, we're going to make sure she gets that custody case done and we're going to make sure, in time, she's able to pay. So, those are the ways, we can accept losses for a time and sometimes by accepting losses, it also lights a fire under our rear ends to stay at it with somebody, to help them get everything that they're able to get because, at the end of the day, like we do have to be sustainable. We can't operate at huge losses forever but we juggle all these things and it allows us to serve more people.
27:36
Yes. So, that brings up something I read about you. (??) I read a NewJersey.com article about you, and you were talking about that during this time you just have to trust your gut and, if things go wrong, you just readjust to it and back off and find a different angle of approach. What experiences have you had in this line of work that you have been challenged and readjust what you knew, and how you were doing things to fix the route you were taking?
Yes. One of the things that I've had to rethink, and I'm still rethinking it, we sometimes will make the choice to put people in a unit that is more affordable but where the dynamics are less likely to succeed in the long run. So, for example, two-bedroom apartments in this town, on average are sixteen hundred. So, I put four guys in a two bedroom at four hundred each, okay. That sounds good. These are four guys coming out of detention or out of jail, single men, and I tell them upfront, "Look, you got to share a bedroom and I don't expect you to be here forever, because I don't want to share a bedroom when I'm fifty with some other guy that I don't know, but you can only afford four hundred bucks and I'm not carrying this for you. You've got to be able to do this." Often, those end up being a flop, you know. I've put the focus on the money and thinking that the thing that will be most important to people is that they can afford it. Whereas, what is often better, is to say, having your own room matters and it's going to cost you eight hundred dollars but either you bring in your own roommate, who you trust is the one you want to be in there, or you paid eight hundred bucks and give that to one person. That's like a rethinking, but the odds of me mixing and matching people for compatibility in a bedroom just not– it doesn't work. So, I've had to balance these factors. We end up losing a lot more money when we share the rooms because we'll go a few months where we can't find the right person to move in with somebody and I can't either. I'm like, "I know that wouldn't work for me either," yes.
For these personal factors that are maybe unseen, or you don't realize the problems until they are– Have you done any work within your organization, to enrich the creativity of people and things like that? I think I heard briefly from Austin that there were classes that you're interacting with the organization.
You're talking about for clients?
Yes, for clients, sorry, for them.
Yes, yes. So, I mean, to us, one of the things we really believe is that the whole idea of first tier needs and second tier needs is just not– like the world isn't that clear. Yes, if you don't have a good night's sleep, you can't do anything, so for me, housing is the most important thing. If you can't think about going to class if you're exhausted to the point of delusions. So, housing is first about housing. But art and music and cooking and these things are also essentials in life, they're not somehow secondary things on the pyramid of what's important in life. So, a lot of what we emphasize is getting people involved in stuff that's beautiful or listening to them to hear what they care about and connecting to the right thing. So, we try to do a lot of those beautiful opportunities here. One, we have employment services where we pay for people for career development. It's called Career Pathways. And so, when we meet with people and they're interested in going into a given field, we'll figure out how we can pay for different courses that give them a chance to enter that line of work and then we have a bunch of ventures ourselves. So, we have Global Grace Café which is a refugee run café, and every day of the week there's a chef from a different country who creates a beautiful meal and that becomes the meal that we serve. So, there's lots of creative opportunities for that kind of stuff. We have tutors for anybody who wants to tutor. That started with our refugee program but we've expanded it to– for others as well. We also have our ELL, our English Language Learning program is really super strong. So yes, there's a lot of opportunities for things that are educational and just like about joy, so that's what I would say.
33:00
That's very, very nice. I think I'm only going to ask you two more questions.
Okay.
Because I don't want to keep you right up till one.
Thank you.
I also read a bit about, well more of what I read about that you were doing was primarily immigration work.
Yes.
Like being a (??) for immigrants, Indonesian ones in Highland Park. So, I just was very curious about your opinion on ICE, if it's capable of reform and, if it is, what should that reform look like?
Okay, so racial and ethnic cleansing has been carried out under the guise of immigration reform, like, for sure, by the Trump Administration. I would argue that racial and ethnic cleansing had been carried out under the guise of immigration reform under Barack Obama as well. He was the deporter and chief: by far the worst President we've had on immigration. In terms of the number of people deported. Did he want to be that? I don't think so. I think he was trying to show a strong arm to somehow hopefully win over people on the right and he failed miserably and instead just acted brutal and didn't get the bang for the buck that he hoped for in terms of somehow– the political capital he was hoping to gain, he didn't get it at all. So, I hold Bill Clinton responsible for NAFTA and what NAFTA did to drive farmers out of Mexico and into the United States and devastated all sorts of things. I hold Hillary Clinton accountable for Honduras and for the fact that forty-five percent of the land– a whole region was sold off to multinational corporations for the exploitation of land, therefore driving people in ridiculous numbers into urban ghettos where you had incredible violence and people scratching for what they needed and then this, the influx of people. I always said that unaccompanied minors is the result of our miners mining the lands of Honduras. These things are all related. The poverty in other places is driven by our misappropriated behaviors. So, ICE is horrible but far more than ICE, the whole federal government and the way that it pillages the earth, mainly the earth of other countries, is a disaster and ICE is just, it's the result of what you get if you pillage. You end up with this thing that grows out of it and so ICE is bad but, if we're going to get really judgmental, we got to go way up the pole and we have to go after the Democrats. I frankly, I am furious with Democrats far more than I am with Republicans than I have been for years. I actually ran for Governor as the Green Party candidate a few years ago because I was so furious at the serpent like behavior of the Democratic Party that comes off as liberal, and in the meantime, just cozies up with big time capital and does all things constructive. So anyway, you just got a whole lot from me. But yes, ICE, I can't stand ICE and I have gotten myself pretty hated by ICE. I mean, in some very direct ways. John Tsoukaris, the leader of ICE in New Jersey, has let his people know that any letter that I sign, calling for somebody's release, saying that we'll provide housing, is to be automatically denied. That was leaked to the press this summer. So, I went from writing letters to offer housing– this was during COVID. I went from writing letters offering housing to people from all over the world to not writing letters at all, because it had been a whistle blower had let us know that John Tsoukaris said, "Any letter Seth signs is to be denied." Just because he hates me. I've made him look ridiculous over the years and he holds a grudge. But that's– so now we just have other people write the letters from other organizations and then they give me their released detainees because we're the only ones who've kind of figured out the housing side, so yes.
37:50
Yes, so just a bit after that, that's fine. Okay, so last question then. Now that, I don't know what an end to COVID is like, but going into the rest of the future, what are you hoping to see change in your work, whether COVID stays longer or even after COVID?
So, what I'd like to see change in New Jersey, is who it is that gets EA dollars. Emergency assistance dollars go to a handful of hotels on Route 130 and Route 1 so that people can live in hotels, and they live there for an insane amount of time and they're living there for about sixty-five dollars a day. So, we're spending two thousand dollars a month to house homeless families in a hotel room with no kitchen facility. Where folks are eating like crap. Are not accessible to hospitals or anywhere else, have no support services whatsoever. Those hotels don't have a hotel social worker. Where somebody's making a lot of money to provide subpar housing that isn't helpful to poor people all around central New Jersey– and that's the state in the county that let that happen. I want EA to start going to groups like ours where we can use EA dollars for permanent housing. The strange distinction or restriction around EA dollars is it has to go for temporary housing. So we get punished for providing permanent supportive housing to people and instead the big money goes to temporary crummy solutions. And so, that's something I would really like to see change. If we were to change how EA works in New Jersey, we could dramatically reduce the number of people who are living in hotels for endless periods of time, and yes. That's something that I worked on, and during COVID I spoke with numerous people who I hoped to be drivers for this. Made no progress. They just– it's like they couldn't think, the county folks in particular, just can't think outside the box. So, I'm not sure what to do with that, but that's what should happen and that's what isn't going to happen yet.
Well, I mean, I hope that it changes and thank you for your time today, this was great.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you, Emma and hopefully we'll be able to get you a few more names for this project.
Yes, I hope so, these have been really fun and interesting and great.
Excellent.
Okay, so you are good with the button, right, and then I can just check out?
Yes, I'll just. Want me to hit stop?
All right.
All right, take care.