“I lost my job and just wasn’t able to sustain my apartment,” she explained. It was 2007, and she found refuge at Lucy’s Hearth. While the staff was excellent, D’Ambra said, “the building was so gloomy and scary.”

Not so with Lucy’s Hearth’s new facility on Valley Road, which was unveiled to great fanfare on Thursday. Tara and Olivia D’Ambra were featured guests.

The newly renovated 9,300 square foot building has 14 bedrooms, each with a private bathroom and two, two-bedroom suites for families. There’s a brand new kitchen, a computer lab and two laundry rooms. It has 60 percent more capacity than the old space.

“This building will change the way we design services for moms and kids,” said Jennifer Barrera, the director of Lucy’s Hearth. The old facility, said Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed, “just wasn’t designed for kids.”

The new facility is. There are play rooms for young children, as well as a teen lounge. The rooms are colorful, and adorned with quotations such as “The greatest thing in this world is not so much where you stand as in what direction you are moving” and “The secret to getting ahead is getting started.” There are two different playgrounds on the 2.2 acre campus.

“I’m so happy for all the families who get to move into this top notch facility,” said D’Ambra, “happy not because they are homeless but happy because I know they will get the help they need here to transition back into housing, back to thir life, back to their community.”

Lucy’s Hearth has been around since 1984 as a night-to-night shelter for women and children. It “delivers holistic wrap-around services for resident mothers and their children including case management, daily nutritional meals, mental health treatment, referral and advocacy, early intervention for children 0-3 years of age, life skill training, financial literacy education, on-site GED education and more,” according to a press release.

This year alone, Lucy’s Hearth has provided services to 74 women and 79 children. It has served more than 25,000 meals in 2016 and provided close to 5,000 transitional bed nights.

Barbara Fields, the executive director of Rhode Island Housing, said, “this new building enables Lucy’s Hearth to expand its support services for families who may not know where else to turn.” She also used the event to campaign for question 7 on the ballot, which would direct $50 million to create affordable housing and repair blighted neighborhoods. Senator Jack Reed, long a supporter of Lucy’s Hearth, also attended the opening.

“We are excited to be starting construction,” said Wendy Nicholas, the executive director of ONE Neighborhood Builders, formerly known as the Olneyville Housing Corporation. “Amherst Gardens has been in the works for several years, and we are delighted that all of the pieces – the properties, the designs, the construction crew, and the funding – are now all in place.

The project, Nicholas said, is part of ONE Neighborhood Builders “campaign to improve the neighborhood, block-by-block, making it a better place for families to live, to raise their children and to find employment.”

ONE Neighborhood Builders described the project as a “scattered site housing development, with the new or rehabilitated homes scattered throughout the residential core of Olneyville, primarily along the Amherst Street corridor.  The development will reinforce the small residential scale of the neighborhood, provide much-needed affordable housing, and resolve long-standing areas of blight.”

Cynthia Langlykke, of ONE Neighborhood Builders, said the scattered site design of the project allows for many properties, encompassing 10 blocks of Olneyville, to be improved. “The acquisition process for a project like this never easy,” she said. “But we think it has the biggest benefit to the community.”

Nicholas added, “In addition to creating much-needed affordable housing, our goal also is to improve the whole neighborhood as a good place for everyone to live, to raise their families and to work.  We tackle the deteriorated or otherwise troubled properties scattered in our community.”

The apartments will be rented to people who earn annually less than about $30,000 a year, depending on family size. The two commercial properties do not have affordability restrictions. “Neighborhood businesses will be encouraged to apply,” Langlykke said.

“On behalf of the Olneyville community, I’d like to thank ONE Neighborhood Builders for rebuilding and reimagining Amherst Street,” said City Councilwoman Sabina Matos, who represents the Olneyville neighborhood. “Quality affordable housing is paramount to a thriving urban community. This development expands our housing options, creates a safer, more vibrant neighborhood for Olneyville families, and further improves the area around one of our most important assets—William D’Abate Elementary School—and directly benefits the students who learn and play there.”

The Amherst Gardens development, slated to break ground in January and be complete by August, “will reinvigorate blighted properties into vibrant, much-needed housing for families,” said Barbara Fields, the executive director of Rhode Island Housing, which contributed more than $700,000 to the project plus an $800,000 loan. “The Amherst Gardens initiative builds upon other investments in housing, commercial development, parks and the arts – all of which are enhancing the quality of life in the Olneyville neighborhood. Amherst Gardens is a great example of the kind of transformational development that the proposed $50 million Housing Bond will support.”

The grand opening of the new 29,000 square foot operations center for Amos House – Rhode Island’s largest social service agency and soup kitchen – was a gala affair for South Providence. Pine Street was temporarily closed to accommodate the large crowd. Senator Jack Reed, a slew of state legislators, Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements and many other local dignitaries were on hand. There were several congratulatory speeches and then tours of the new facility, complete with refreshments and lunch. State Senator Harold Metts donned a dashiki, a traditional West African shirt, for the occasion.

Senator Jack Reed, who was a pro bono lawyer for Amos House as a young man, said “Amos House provides an extraordinary service to the community. It represents, really, the best of Rhode Island. And now they have the facilities to help them do it much better.”

The new $6 million facility was paid for, in part, by a $1 million gift from Rhode Island Housing and a federal money secured by Senator Reed. Employees of Amos House, half of whom are former clients, contributed $45,000 of their own money.

“When we embarked on this project seven, eight years ago, many people said we would not do it,” said Eileen Hayes, the popular CEO of Amos House. “We could not possibly raise $5 million for a community center on the south side of Providence. But guess what, we did it!”

The facility has a large dining hall and a kitchen on the first floor. On the second floor there are classrooms, group meeting spaces and a state-of-the-art computer lab. Staff offices are on the third floor.

Today’s lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island Superior Court by ACLU of RI cooperating attorneys Jeffrey L. Levy and Charles D. Blackman, is on behalf of the owner and tenants – four Johnson & Wales undergraduate students – of a house in the Elmhurst section of Providence. The City ordinance, enacted in September, makes this arrangement illegal by prohibiting more than three “college students” from living together in a non-owner-occupied single family home in certain residential areas. The suit argues that the ordinance violates the plaintiffs’ rights to due process and equal protection of the law.

The lawsuit claims that “there is absolutely no reason to believe that restricting the number of student tenants in a small subset of available rental housing (i.e., single-family homes) will make the affected neighborhoods any quieter, safer or cleaner. On the contrary, the ordinance is an unconstitutional intrusion into the rights of college and graduate students to choose with whom they wish to live, and the rights of property owners to rent their homes to tenants of their choice.”

The suit notes that there are already multiple ordinances in place to address noise, parties, traffic, and other possible nuisances. In challenging the ordinance’s discrimination against students “based solely on their occupation and/or educational status,” the suit further points out that “college student” is so broadly defined that it includes anyone enrolled in a college or university, whether they are a full-time undergraduate student, a PhD candidate, or a professional taking classes part-time.

The ACLU of RI raised these concerns before the Providence City Council approved, and Mayor Jorge Elorza signed, the ordinance into law in September.

Attorney Levy said today: “The City and State already have laws in place that regulate overcrowding, loud parties and underage drinking. This ordinance goes too far by attempting to legislate who can live together in the same house. Ultimately, it will have its most significant impact on students from low-income and middle-income families who can’t afford to cover a larger share of the rent in a single-family home.”

ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown added: “The ordinance’s unfair stigmatization of Providence’s students is contrary to the City’s reputation as a welcome host to the local colleges and universities. More vigorous enforcement of laws already on the books, along with increased collaboration with the educational institutions, would be a more productive method to deal with the legitimate concerns that some residents have raised.”

The lawsuit seeks to halt all enforcement of the ordinance and have it declared unconstitutional.

A copy of the complaint is available here: http://riaclu.org/images/uploads/FHC_v._Providence_Complaint.pdf

Time for a pop quiz question. Ready? In what year did the U.S. end slavery?

Most agree it’s 1865. Some historians disagree. Their answer: 1942.

True, the Triangle Trade’s enrichment of slave shippers ended with the Civil War. Tragically, however, legally coerced work continued. Some southern states were sly. Police falsely imprisoned blacks, and judges ordered lengthy sentences at hard labor.

“Convict leasing” was legalized. Douglas Blackmon describes this practice as “a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.”

The penal system became the new slavery.

Still, the answer to our black-history-month query may not be 1942. Ready for a shocker? Enslavement of blacks exists today.

The War on Drugs intensified in the 1980s. In just two decades, those jailed for drug offenses increased ninefold. The Director for National Drug Control Policy, retired General Barry McCaffrey, referred to this imprisonment system as a “drug gulag.”

Mass incarceration is aggressively focused on communities of color. Despite blacks and whites having similar drug usage rates, a 1999 Human Rights Watch report states, “Black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men.” Indeed, black men imprisoned, on parole and probation now exceed all men enslaved in 1850.

Bondage for drug offenses is inflicted almost exclusively on black and brown men. Whites are usually ‘off the hook.’ Even when arrested, whites are more often given alternatives to jail. When jailed, whites’ average sentences are 16.3 percent shorter than blacks.

Enormous numbers of black bodies are placed in bondage, their prison labor extracted, for non-violent drug offenses. Isn’t this a new system of slavery? Isn’t this massive discrimination also subjecting prisoners’ families—parents, spouses and children—to excruciating emotional and financial bondage?

As a permanent undercaste, the black community also suffers wage slavery. Whites’ average household income is 68.5 percent higher than blacks—and the black unemployment rate is twice that of whites. This severely depressed income continually increases economic inequality: Average white families now have thirteen times the assets of average black families.

It gets worse: Black prisoners’ sentences continue after release.

Imagine leaving prison. Determined to lead a good life, you plan to go to college—but you’re barred from getting a federal loan. Or you need a job but, if a black man, only five percent of employers will even grant you an interview. You may be desperate for public housing assistance. You can’t get it. By law, you probably can’t receive any public benefits—including food stamps if your kids are hungry. With all these cruel barriers, what choices remain? Can we see why ex-cons often return to prison?

Again, this discrimination primarily decimates blacks.

So who should correct these many forms of racialized financial rape? Why not the white community which perpetrates and often benefits from black bondage?

The first step is education: More fact-packed articles detailing the destructive impacts of racism can be found at www.quoflections.org\race.

Second, share these injustices with friends and family.

Third, let’s seek legislation ending the War on Drugs (really, the War on Black Men). Let’s eradicate laws discriminating against ex-felons. Let’s legalize a living wage. Also, our nation has the wealthiest white community in history, primarily due to centuries of labor stolen or cheated from African Americans. In the name of justice, we who are white can advocate for long-overdue reparations to be invested in neglected black communities.

Oh, and our pop quiz answer: Even in 2016, slavery continues on a massive scale.

Mayor Elorza did not meet with the activists.

Roline Burgison, Tenant and Homeowner Association leader and member of DARE’s Board of Directors, began the speaking program. Burgison explained that she was forced to move in with family after a two-year fight to stay in her South Providence apartment following a foreclosure. She wants to return to the city’s Southside neighborhood, where she raised her children, but the rent is un-affordable, and low-income developments have long waiting lists.

“I went to a local Community Development Corporation the other day and was told that I could qualify for housing based on my income,” said Burgison in a statement, “but that I might have to wait two years or more. There is a housing crisis in this city, and the Mayor and the Everyhome program need to deal with that.”

Burgison explained that the group was there to “break-up” with the Mayor, because he had ignored their proposals to make the Everyhome program better, and denied their request for a Community Advisory Board to oversee the program. According to DARE and the THA, she said, community members’ hearts are broken over the gentrification and displacement occurring in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods of color.

Malchus Mills, THA member-leader, outlined the group’s major concerns about the way the program is being conducted. “Right now, there are no standards for the quality of the homes once they’re renovated, the city is not being transparent about which properties are being targeted and why, and they are not addressing the desperate need for affordable housing in our city.” Mills went on to share statistics from Housing Works RI’s recent Housing Fact Book, including that 57 percent (over 18,000 households) of Providence renters pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent and the city currently has 10,500 units of affordable housing. “You need to make 43,000 dollars a year to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Providence now. How many people here make that?” he asked.

Joe Buchanan, DARE Board member and life-long Southside resident, outlined the group’s demands for changes to the Everyhome initiative. “We want the Mayor to announce the creation of a community advisory board for Everyhome and hold the first meeting in March. We want to see 50 percent of the properties targeted by the program set aside for very-low income housing, and we want a list of all the contractors hired for receivership jobs. We want this set-aside and the list by Tuesday.”

As the Providence home of Charles and Mary Fortune was being auctioned off Tuesday morning, activists from the Tenant Homeowners  Association (THA), a committee of Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), stood in the sub freezing cold carrying signs that read, “Housing is a Human Right” and “Don’t Evict, Negotiate!” hoping to deter investors and speculators from bidding.

As Charles Fortune and the THA members looked on, the auctioneer opened the bidding. Only one bid, for $45 thousand, was entered. At this point, according to DARE staff organizer Christopher Rotondo, a representative from the bank bid $100 thousand, effectively buying the property from themselves.

The Fortunes owe over $200 thousand on the property, where they have lived for twenty years. The Fortunes have been unsuccessful in attempts to negotiate affordable modification to their mortgage. They want the opportunity to buy their home at it’s current assessed value, estimated to be about $130 thousand, not including needed repairs.

The Fortunes are currently working with a non-profit lender, Boston Community Capital (BCC), to buy their home back at its current value. Though it may sound weird to people not familiar with foreclosures, the bank buying the property back from themselves may redound to the Fortunes’ favor, as the bank will now be motivated to sell the property at a reduced price.

In a statement Fortune said, “This home is my family’s roots. We raised our children here and do not want to leave. The bank should have made our payments affordable, but instead wanted to continue to foreclosure, where they will actually lose money! No we have the chance to get our home back with BCC, we just don’t want some investor buying it today and putting us out just to make money.”

The THA is made up of owners and tenants who have faced foreclosure and eviction. They are working to prevent “mass evictions being carried out by the banks” and “until suffering to thousands of people… dragging down our communities.”

For the eighth year the Rhode Island Interfaith Coalition to Reduce Poverty held a vigil at the State House near the beginning of the legislative season to, in the words of House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, “remind all of us in the General Assembly of how important it is to keep the issues related to poverty at the forefront of our agenda.”

The vigil was attended by representatives from a multitude of faiths. Governor Gina Raimondo, Speaker Mattiello and Senate President M Teresa Paiva-Weed all spoke briefly to the crowd. The keynote was delivered by Bishop Herson Gonzalez of the Calvary Worship Center in Woonsocket.

Maxine Richman, co-chair of the RI Interfaith Coalition to Reduce Poverty (Coalition) spoke first, outlining the 2016 Advocacy Platform for the group. She began with a sobering statistic. 14.3 percent of Rhode Islanders live in poverty. That rate climbs to 19.8 percent when we talk about children specifically.

“A 14.3 percent poverty rate is the story for this year,” said Richman, “but it need not be the story for next year.”

The coalition believes that all Rhode Islanders are entitled to affordable housing, nutritious food, accessible healthcare, equitable education and work with decent wages.

Though the General Assembly raised the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) last session, something both Paiva-Weed and Mattiello touted as a great success in their opening remarks Tuesday, RI’s present 12.5 percent rate is a far cry from Connecticut’s EITC of 27.5 percent or Massachusetts’ 23 percent. The Coalition is asking the General Assembly raise the RI EITC to 20 percent.

Channeling yesterday’s loud rally, and on the day that Governor Raimondo has officially broken her campaign promise to issue an executive order allowing undocumented workers to obtain driver’s licenses, the Coalition asked state leaders to take this important step.

Right now low and no income Rhode Island families with children are eligible to receive cash assistance for a maximum of up to 24 months within a five year window. A mother with two children is eligible to receive $554 a month for up to 24 months.  When the 24 months are done, the family is cut off, leaving children to live in crushing poverty. The coalition would like to end the 24 month limit.

Also, as they have asked nearly every year and to no avail, the Coalition would like the General Assembly to take action to reform PayDay loans. This is unlikely as long as Speaker Mattiello continues to pretend that “arguments against PayDay lending tend to be ideological in nature.”

The coalition would also like to see an expansion of Child Care Assistance and Early Childhood Education. as of Fall, 2014, for instance, only 34 percent of eligible children were enrolled in Head Start, “with many centers maintaining long waiting lists.”

The Coalition further wants to reduce out-of-school detentions which predominantly target students of color and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. They would also like to expand opportunities for workforce foundational skills and occupational training.

The RI Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) needs adequate funding to implement Opening Doors RI, and would like state leaders to seek a $100 million affordable housing bond.

The Coalition also backs efforts to prevent domestic abusers from accessing guns, a bill that died in committee last year to the consternation of supporters and the embarrassment of the General Assembly.

The Coalition would like to see adequate funding for Senior Centers and lastly, the Coalition wants the General Assembly to maintain the current RIPTA Senior/Disbabled Fare Program, recognizing that balancing the budget of public transit of the backs of the most vulnerable is simply cruel. Paiva-Weed was the only state leader to state that she would work to make this happen. Raimondo vowed to make RIPTA “affordable” which is apparently a number other than free.

“These all sound good, but where do we find the money?” asked Raimondo.

“I am very concerned about imposing a fee on elderly and disabled RIPTA passengers,” said Paiva-Weed, “and I am committed to looking at alternative funding.”

Attempting to explain his statement at last years Interfaith Poverty Vigil where he said that he wants to eliminate the social safety net, Speaker Mattiello spun a vision of a Utopian future world. “When we get the economy to a point where everybody’s thriving,” said the Speaker, “every single family has a wage earner that is successfully feeding the family, and everybody is doing well and is well fed… families are happy… that will be the day we don’t need a safety net. And at that time our safety net will justifiably be smaller.”

Here’s Bishop Herson Gonzalez’s keynote address.

Note: I was fortunate today to get permission from Rachel Simon to run her pictures of the event. So all these pictures are under her 2016 copyright.

And here’s the full vigil.

Rhode Island’s Democratic Speaker on race: “I don’t think anybody in society views any particular nationality as having any privilege over any other.”

This denies the experiences of many minorities. They know whites have greater privileges in education, employment, housing, banking and criminal justice.

Hardships perpetuate one another: Poor education leads to poor job prospects—and these impoverish housing opportunities. Payday lenders scam often poor minorities who also suffer increased arrests, bail, sentences and fines.

Rhode Island’s fourth-grade reading proficiency is 48 percent for whites; 18 percent for blacks; 17 percent for Latinos. Should we blame minority kids? No, students from low-income families score 19 percent, so poor minorities rank far lower than students from white families with better schools.

Financial health varies widely by race: The Census Bureau reports black median income for 2013 is $34,600; Latino, $41,000; white, $58,300. Lasting low income affects resources: Pew Research Center reports 2013 median household wealth for blacks is $11,000; Latinos, $13,700; whites, $141,900. The wealth of one white family equals ten Latino or thirteen black families.

White privilege is powerful. Minority disadvantages are painful—and keep accumulating.

Consider housing. Poor neighborhoods are often minority while upscale neighborhoods are overwhelmingly white. Public housing projects built in poor areas preserve segregation.

Also, mortgage discrimination continues long after redlining. For example, though whites had similar credit ratings, Wells Fargo steered 4,000 blacks and Latinos into subprime mortgages and charged 30,000 minorities increased fees averaging more than $2,500. Predatory mortgage brokers often targeted minorities and schemed foreclosing quickly on the first late payment.

The cycle of poverty is vicious: Poor housing reflects poor income, and these deficits lead to children’s destitute education. Mass incarceration often penalizes offenders’ families with costly travel expenses, bail, attorney’s fees, and phone surcharges. Payday lenders’ outrageous tactics intensify poverty. Thus, poor communities remain perpetually impoverished.

Mattiello affirms the adage, “high tide lifts all boats,” but this comparison fails: While the rich get richer, everyone else’s economic boat has not lifted for 30 years. Indeed, Financial Times reports income distribution so favors the wealthy that, if 1979 levels held, the bottom 80 percent of families would now earn another $11,000 a year.

Could your family use another $11,000 each year? Now consider the even greater loss to many minorities who, compared to whites, already have immense disparities in income and wealth.

Mattiello states, “To a certain extent we have to give particular attention to the minority community,” but also asserts some don’t “take advantage” of opportunities—“and that’s something that I quite frankly don’t understand.” But the disadvantage is understandable: Equal opportunity is a fiction.

It’s not that only some minorities take advantage of opportunities. Instead of implying victims of systemic discrimination are callous or lazy, we must accept that opportunities available to whites are often unavailable to minorities. Need more convincing?

A 2002 Harvard study found whites and blacks, controlled for similar qualifications, had vastly different employment prospects. The callback rate from job applications for whites was 34 percent; blacks, 14 percent. Moreover, whites with criminal records received callbacks 17 percent of the time; blacks, 5 percent.

This is shocking: Whites with criminal records received more callbacks than blacks who committed no crimes.

The Harvard study confirmed 1994 results by Sociologist Marc Bendick, Jr., et al.—but the disparity between blacks and whites without a record was 24 points, not 20.

Many arrested—but not convicted—are also treated as criminals. Harvard study authors indicate these unjust employment denials afflict millions of low-income Americans, especially people of color.

Blacks and Latinos need more than a high tide of nearly nonexistent opportunity: Mass incarceration must be remedied; banking scams need reform; and enormous gaps in income, wealth, education and housing require ‘affirmative action.’

Let’s hope Speaker Mattiello opens his eyes: The evidence for white privilege is overwhelming.

Rev. Harry Rix has 60 articles on spirituality and ethics, stunning photos, and 1200 quotations for reflection available at www.quoflections.org. ©2015 Harry Rix. All rights reserved.