Reporter discovers corruption and dishonesty and businesses taking advantage of people. Maybe the Washington Post could hire Mr. Ashford, and send him on another assignment, investigating what happened to our country?
WSJ.com - Homeless Reporter Gets Job, and Story, Evicting Others Early one morning this spring, Jake Ashford woke up, as usual, in an alley behind a downtown office building. He might have taken his schizophrenia medicine, or perhaps not. Sometimes, he says, he skips a dose.Next, the 43-year-old Mr. Ashford headed to the headquarters of a nearby charity for a shower and breakfast. Then he joined a group of men getting into one of several unmarked vans cruising the neighborhood and began his career as an undercover reporter for Street Sense, the city's newspaper for the homeless.
Mr. Ashford's work that day helped the paper break the biggest story in its three-year history, an exposé of businesses that allegedly recruit the homeless to evict people from rental homes -- and allegedly pay them less than the legal minimum wage to do so. In light of the article, the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group, and a team of attorneys from the Washington office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton say they are investigating whether to sue the eviction firms.
...Street Sense was founded in 2003 by Ted Henson, then 23, and Laura Thompson Osuri, then a 26-year-old reporter for American Banker, an industry daily. Both were troubled by the plight of the homeless and together they raised money from friends, family and foundations to launch the paper. Mr. Henson, who bussed tables at night so he could put in days at Street Sense, now works as a labor-union researcher and volunteers on the paper's board. Ms. Osuri left mainstream journalism and works as Street Sense's only salaried employee, earning $40,000 annually.
The monthly paper, run out of a rented room at the downtown Church of the Epiphany, follows the general business plan set by many of the 24 publications in the North American Street Newspaper Association, a trade group of papers focused on homelessness. Street Sense is sold by a roving crew of 45 vendors, most of them homeless, who pay 25 cents a copy and sell the paper on the street for a dollar. A diligent vendor with good curb appeal can make $60 a day, Ms. Osuri says. Last month, the vendors sold 11,500 copies out of a run of 13,000.
Born in Lumberton, N.C., he says he served in the U.S. Army in Germany in the 1980s and married a German woman. After a divorce, he returned to the U.S., beset by schizophrenia, he says. An African-American with flecks of gray in his black beard, Mr. Ashford says he was hired off the sidewalk by All American Eviction, a Washington company, and paid $15 for six hours of work -- well below the $7-an-hour legal minimum wage in the District of Columbia.
First, he and others, escorted by U.S. marshals who accompany eviction crews, emptied a rowhouse, Mr. Ashford says. As the crew worked, he says, the tenants -- a woman and five children -- arrived home to find their furniture on the curb. Next, the crew emptied a one-bedroom apartment while the tenant was away. Afterward, Mr. Ashford borrowed a cellphone, called Ms. Osuri and pretended to order pizza, his coded way of informing her where she could photograph the evictee's belongings piled along the sidewalk.
Ms. Osuri's article accused All American Eviction and East Coast Express Eviction, also based in Washington, of recruiting and underpaying the homeless to carry out evictions. Accompanying it was a first-person account by vendor James Davis, describing life on an eviction crew. “As I approached the little girl's room, she was standing inside clutching her dolls,” he wrote. “Right there and then I walked out and decided this would be my last eviction. I just couldn't do it. Here I was homeless myself at the time about to make two more people homeless.”
When the issue hit the streets, Cleary Gottlieb attorney Lee Berger picked up a copy from a homeless vendor and read it on the subway ride to work. By the time he arrived, he says he was so angry about the allegations that he rounded up fellow lawyers and called the homeless coalition's Mr. Stoops, who also sits on the Street Sense board.
...
Nelson Terry, chief executive of East Coast Express Eviction, told Street Sense that he hired workers through a temp service, not off the street, according to the article. Street Sense noted that the rates charged by the temp service he named are several times higher than what East Coast Express Eviction charges clients.East Coast Express Eviction managers didn't return calls from The Wall Street Journal. A man who answered one call said the firm had stopped doing evictions. On another call, a different man quoted a $200 price for a two-bedroom eviction.
Joking aside, these companies are scum. How low can you go? I realize property is sacrosanct, and the Repo Man is a folk hero (ahem), but still, would it really destroy these businesses to pay a livable wage for such crappy, emotionally draining work? Or at least minimum wage? Who do they think they are? Wal-Mart?
Tags: media
