Service Dogs, Veterans and the Housing Crisis

I know, from the time I’ve spent looking for housing here, that if you have a dog, you are more likely to find a dead body, D B Cooper’s money, and bigfoot than you are to find a place to live in Humboldt County. If you’ve ever wondered why so many homeless people have dogs, that’s why. Unless you own your own home, in Humboldt County, you have a choice between having a landlord, and having a dog. Having had a few landlords, I can understand why a lot of people would prefer to have a dog.

Some people, however, NEED their dogs, and everyone needs a place to live. I got this letter from a homeless reader recently, and it should remind people of the kind of people our housing shortage really hurts.

Hi, my name is Lori and my wife Kate and I are new here in this area. Kate is a disabled veteran–she served two tours in Iraq as an Army medic. On her last tour, she was severely injured and then eventually medically discharged from the military. As she recovered back in the US, she dealt with PTSD and was unable to leave her house for months. She then got a Great Dane named Chief who would become her service dog and save her life.

With Chief, Kate was able to go back to school and finish her bachelors degree, then she went to nursing school and graduated with her RN. Chief passed away young, just before Kate graduated from nursing school. Luckily, Kate had Ozzy, our other Great Dane who became her next service dog. With Ozzy’s help, Kate was able to begin her career as an ICU nurse. In the meantime, we rescued another Great Dane named Gilbert, who would then start training to be her service dog (to take over for Ozzy when Ozzy was on break).

Kate blossomed with the help of these two amazing dogs. Kate was deemed disabled enough that she does not technically have to work, she could be collecting a check from taxpayers every month. Instead, she busted her butt and worked hard in a career field that would enable her to give back to society instead of being dependent. Almost 2 years ago, Kate decided to take a job as a travel nurse. We’ve been traveling the country since then with her two service dogs and we’ve had wonderful adventures with them. Kate worked in Crescent City last winter and we both fell in love with the North Coast. We decided we wanted to put down roots here, so when an opportunity came for Kate to work at Mad River Community Hospital, we were elated.

We decided to come to Humboldt County and were hopeful that we could get involved in the community here and stay for a long time. Kate loves her work at Mad River–from her supervisors to her coworkers to the folks she serves–Mad River has been her favorite place out of all the hospitals she’s traveled to. Sadly, we have been unable to find housing here in Humboldt due to Kate’s service dogs and we are officially HOMELESS as of this week.

We’ve stayed in an Airbnb and a VRBO, but we must be out of our VRBO (which is costing us just under $5,000/month) on Thursday as it’s booked with vacationers for the rest of the summer. We’ve spent weeks calling, emailing, answering every ad on Craigslist, even trying to find a clean used camper to live in while we are here. We have been turned down on the phone and in person by multiple landlords here because of the service dogs. Even when they meet us and see the Disabled Veteran license plates on our car, they’ve still illegally turned us down.

We’ve been turned down for housing because of “new carpet” and “new furniture” and just because landlords prefer not to rent to people with dogs—even a disabled veteran who depends on her dogs for functioning in daily life. Landlords here don’t seem to care that it’s illegal to turn away someone because of their service dog. We do understand that there are many people who try to pass off untrained animals as service animals, but we are not those people and we have proof. I’ve reached out to some veterans organizations in the area and I had a great conversation with Ryan from North Coast Veterans Resource Center, who says that this is a HUGE problem in Humboldt County and there are many disabled veterans suffering because local landlords are illegally refusing legitimate service dogs.

I think this would make a good story and speaking out about these issues might help others in the same situation. Maybe drawing some attention to our plight would help us find some housing as well. Kate earns a solid middle-class income, so we shouldn’t be HOMELESS, but we sure are, thanks to the slumlords of Humboldt County.

Sincerely, Lori Ann

Thank you Kate for your service, and for bringing your talents to the Lost Coast. Thank you Lori Ann for sharing your story, and thanks to Ozzy and Gilbert for making it all possible. To be a good story, it needs a happy ending. As it stands, it’s an important story, that reminds us of the continuing crisis that our Board of Supervisors refuses to address because greedy landlords pull their strings. I wonder how many of those landlord’s lives Kate has saved since she started working at Mad River Hospital. Welcome to the Lost Coast, Kate, Lori Ann Ozzy and Gilbert. I hope you find your “Happily ever after” home, soon.

Red-Tagging Gavin Newsom’s Blue Ribbon Panel

Gavin Newsome’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Marijuana Legalization reminded me just how far politicians will go to thwart the will of the people. Lawmakers in Sacramento are still working to undermine Prop 215, almost 20 years after the voters demanded legal access to medical marijuana.

For decades, corrupt politicians, like Gavin Newsom, have used marijuana prohibition as the iron fist of American fascism at home, because it gives them the green light to use violence against American people with impunity, and allows them to turn American citizens into cheap prison labor. Cannabis prohibition has given a corrupt few, unfair, unreasonable, and unconscionable power over the many, and they’ll only give that power up when we pry it out of their cold dead fingers.

They expect that the voters will finally take matters into their own hands in November of 2016, and by initiative, legalize “recreational” use of cannabis for all adults, regardless of their medical “need.” Who knows what this initiative will look like, but everyone knows it’s coming, because the people want their weed, dammit, and we are sick and tired of the oppression. Cannabis prohibition is wrong, and its long history in the US is nothing short of shameful.

If lawmakers in Sacramento actually worked for the people, cannabis prohibition would have ended decades ago, but they don’t. Politicians work for money. Money can do anything it wants in California. Money can kill people or keep them locked-up for decades for no good reason. Money can destroy habitat and poison the environment. Money can kick poor people in the ribs while they sleep. That’s what money does. Lawmakers in Sacramento get paid to make sure that money has what it needs to get the job done, and for the last three decades, marijuana prohibition has done that job well.

So, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom convened a Blue Ribbon Panel to figure our how to preserve as much of the injustice of prohibition as possible, even in the face of overwhelming public support for complete legalization. Now they’ve issued their recommendations.

I didn’t read the report, but I did hear Gavin Newsom himself explaining his panel’s recommendations, and I could hardly believe he could keep a straight face as he read them. He explained that the best way to keep pot out of the hands of children is to keep the price high. He told us that kids don’t have very much money, so if pot is expensive, they’ll be less likely to try it, and they won’t be able to afford as much of it.

I guess toy manufacturers, who spend millions of dollars marketing expensive video game consoles to children, didn’t get the memo about kids not having money. I’ll bet there isn’t a single kid an America with a $500 dollar phone and a $100 dollar a month phone plan to go with it. Oh, wait, there’s one. …and another… I suppose adults could be buying all of those rap CDs that glorify violence and drug abuse, but I somehow doubt it, and let’s not forget what a great job high, prohibition-era, marijuana prices did at keeping marijuana out of our schools. How stupid do you think we are, Gavin?

Imagine if we applied Newsom’s logic to alcohol. As an adult, you would pay $60 for a beer, because no kid would be stupid enough to waste that kind of money on it. Does that sound fair? We don’t price products higher for adults in order to keep them out of the hands of children; we allow licensed retailers to sell the products at fair and competitive prices. That eliminates the unregulated black market, and then we prohibit licensed retailers from selling them to minors. It works for alcohol. It works for tobacco, and it will work for marijuana too.

Then Newsom tells us that he wants to keep the legal marijuana industry in the hands of the same people who have been selling weed to your kids, at $10 a gram or more, in every high school and Jr. high in America for the last 30 years. Why on Earth would we want to do that, Gavin?

You might think that the black-market marijuana industry is a paragon of ethical business practices. I don’t know why you would think that, except perhaps if you lived on another planet, and got all of your information about Planet Earth from listening to KMUD, but let me tell you, as a lifelong marijuana consumer, who has lived in the heart of the Emerald Triangle for the last 15 years or so, drug dealers lie.

They’ll say anything. You never find out what a drug dealer is really up to until they get busted. That’s when they find the stream diversions, the soil erosion, the thousands of spent butane canisters, the stolen guns, the rat poison, and the banned pesticides. I guess Newsom picked up quite a few campaign checks when he made his visit to Garberville a few months ago. Like I said before, politicians work for money, not people. People should remember, however, that half of the reason to legalize marijuana is to put drug dealers out of business. Here’s why:

Another body turned up last week in Whitethorn. This happens so often that we don’t even blink anymore. In any other rural town of this size, a dead body would be a big deal. Everyone would want to know: Who was he? What happened to him? And especially, Could there be a murderer among us? This would shock most small towns to their core.

Not us. We’re like: “Eh, it was just another kid, from out of the area. Somebody killed him, probably over a pot deal, and yeah, there are murderers among us. What do you expect? We’re fucking drug dealers! Do you want us to drive the economy or what?”

Sure, marijuana is safe and effective, but drug dealers are dangerous, dishonest criminals who don’t care how many people people get killed, how much habitat gets destroyed or whose hands their product ends up in, so long as they get paid. They’re a lot like politicians in that way. They warn us that unless we protect their interests, the legal marijuana industry could end up in the hands of big tobacco companies. Honestly, could tobacco company executives really be any more callous? I don’t think so.

Despite the murders, despite the fact that dope yuppies are rapidly turning the last wild habitat in the continental US into industrial wasteland, Gavin Newsome, and his dope yuppie supporters here in Humboldt County tell us that we, as pot smokers, who have done the work to legalize marijuana, without any help at all from the legislature, or drug dealers, for that matter, should now be forced to pay a premium price to subsidize the greedy drug dealers who have ripped us off for decades.

I guess Humboldt’s dope yuppies are some of the few people left who have enough money to buy politicians these days, but still, watching Gavin Newsom suck-up to Humboldt County’s Drug War profiteers shows us just how craven he really is. Maybe California needs a Republican governor in this next election. I’m really sick of Big Government wedging itself between me and my marijuana. If greedy, drug dealing, forest raping dope yuppies can buy Newsom, I don’t see how a Republican could do any worse.