Posted on 08/30/2017 10:09:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A professor teaching at San Jose State University who cant afford a place to live in the South Bay tells KPIX 5 she is spending most nights sleeping in her car.
Ellen Tara James-Penney is adjunct professor at San Jose State.
She teaches four classes of English 1-A and has both a bachelors and masters degree.
That has not kept her from becoming another member of San Joses homeless population.
With what I make at San Jose State, I cant pay $2,000 a month rent. Cant do it, said James-Penney.
Her take home pay is about $2,500 a month. Her usual routine is nearly constant motion.
After classes she parks in library or Walmart parking lots where she grades papers.
I sit there until it gets dark. Then I sneak into a neighborhood, park there, then go to sleep, explained James-Penney.
She says when people find out they are shocked.
Because there is a stereotype, and that stereotype is drug addict, alcoholic, lazy, said James-Penney. I just asked my students, and thats what they answered.
Glen Peterson works with the San Jose branch of the Christian nonprofit organization CityTeam. He calls it the changing face of homelessness.
Not everybody is in a position to have jobs that pay them enough to keep up, said Peterson.
When CityTeam first started helping the homeless 60 years ago, clients tended to be mostly men with those stereotypical addictions.
That is not the case anymore.
People in this situation are now right alongside us, said Peterson. They could be in the next cubicle or teaching your children. Its a tremendous challenge for us.
James-Penney used to be an admin in high tech, but was laid off in the dot-com bust and was forced to live on her savings.
She went back to school and paid tuition with student loans.
Im $143,000 in debt. And Im in my 50s. But I pay that loan back every month, said James-Penney. That is mandatory for me. But that chunk I pay also affects how much I can afford in rent.
She also supporting her husband who is unemployed and their two dogs.
I fight to stay positive in my thinking. Doing my job, caring about my students. But it wears on me, she said.
She keeps her car neat and her belongings are minimal to avoid being detected.
But deep inside her roof rack cargo carrier is a cast-iron frying pan she doesnt use, at least for now.
Just like my mom and my grandma used to have, said James-Penney. I hold on to this because its the hope that someday Ill have a home again.
Wrong. The standard pc answer is you must be a drunk or dtug addict. Nobody is homeless based on merit.
“Oh, for heavens sake, get a roommate.”
Yeah, and where exactly are the husband and dogs living? Are they in the car too?
Look, I feel for this lady, I’m in that age range too and nobody wants anything to do with you once you’re past 30 it seems these days. But I agree, there’s more to this story.
HOMELESS = DRUG ADDICT
All Homeless are Drunks.
Didn’t you get the memo?
Don’t get poked by all those sharp drug needles strewn inside your van. That is the only answer people know.
Which begs the question, Why not move to teach in Memphis where a nice place is $100k and there are plenty of colleges? Cost of living is solved with your feet.
A half hour in San Jose traffic is about 5 miles - no cheap rent there. ;-)
Any layoff from a high tech position will include a severance package, even if minimal. Once both were unemployed, they have at least 6 months of unemployment income. Why get student loans, when Pell Grants will pay most of their expenses. That's a grant not a loan, though it is complicated by the previous years’ income.
The second thought is that the UC system is extremely stressed financially. All of the payroll is concentrated in 20% of the personnel. Most chancellors seem to have taken advantage of the adjunct system to keep costs down, and have for many years. In CA it is complicated by high capital costs, such as land acquisition. At some point Napolitano needs to cut her salary and the top 1000 by 25% - as if they really cared about anyone else.
Maybe CA needs to finish the train so the esteemed adjunct professor can live in Fresno and commute into work...
best way to reduce housing costs is let the free market solve, archaisch zoning laws are root cause therefore;
1) eliminate all parking mandates, let private property owners determine how many parking spots to offer.
2) Allow mixed uses ( commercial, retail, and office ) in any zone.
let the free market solve the high cost of housing
I barely survived the time of the wun myself.
The words simply don’t exist to describe how much I hate him, his fellow travelers, and the blind fools that follow.
Ain’t Californy the place to be. Socialism, high taxes, regulated, its all there
“She is living out of a car because her husband can’t be bothered to walk down to the local fast food joint and take a job.”
My mechanic is slammed. I asked him why he didn’t hire a helper and he said, “I’ve had several. They don’t want to work.” I asked the manager of my local lumber supply why he always had different guys working there. He said, “They don’t want to work. If somebody makes it two weeks it’s a miracle.” I think the problem is there are too many alternatives, like disability, EBT and special programs to “help” the “poor.”
Since they're obviously not living in the car with her, maybe she should move in with them.......
From what I’ve seen of “professors” most of them deserve to be sleeping in their cars or under a bridge.
San Jose is the heart of silicon valley and fairly expensive, but there are options. My son had a short term job out there recently and rented a room in a nice house for under $1000/month. The roomates were other young professionals. Because of schedules, my son usually had the place to himself when he was home. The location would have even been a short bus ride or reasonable walking distance to her place of work.
As others have pointed out, there are lots of options that apparently this woman hasn’t explored.
mental illness
She's an adjunct, which means that she's getting paid market rate, as opposed to the politically fixed royalty rate that is paid to the tenured profs. As an adjunct, she is almost certainly doing real, full-time teaching and is likelier to be teaching a recognizable, traditional course. The purpose of adjuncts is to relieve tenured faculty of teaching obligations so they can concentrate full-time on whatever rings their chimes, which for many does not translate into useful work.
Perhaps if she registered as a “displaced immigrant” student she could get a free dorm room, keep her job and attend classed when she’s not teaching. Plan ahead! (sarc)
My junior year as an undergrad I lived in my car. Wasn’t bad. I was studying and working most of the time anyway.
That is what I was thinking too.
Yep, wants to live in high rent district, not in something affordable in a less desirable part of town.
Tons of people live in trailer parks, for a fraction of $2k a month. In fact my 2 sons have to. They live with in their means. Both work, and work all the OT they can get. 1 has a soon to be 16 yr old, the other is expecting any day now. Small town, yet not with out crime, as the PD busted a Meth lab a few trailers down from him.
But neither can afford a house or a fancy apartment.
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