Bernie Sanders Has Encounter with a Homeless Citizen

[Armstead]

34. Another Bernie tale

THis is from an article in the 80's by someone who tagged along one nightwhile Mayor Sanders and an alderman were out visiting constituents, just to talk to them to see if they had any problems or concerns....


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/bernie-sanders-mayor/407413/

An elderly woman answers Sanders’ knock this time. When he asks if she’s got any complaints, she answers precisely in French-accented English. The recent state reappraisal of real estate values has increased her taxes over a thousand dollars a year, she points out, but her income has remained the same. She owns the house and lets her granddaughter and her children live next door for nothing, so it doesn’t help that the state says that the apartment can be rented on the open market for $300-$500 a month. “I can’t put my great-grandchildren out in the street, just to get the rent money to pay the taxes,” she explains. “I’m a widow, my husband died, so all I have is my social security. My granddaughter can’t work. She has problems.”

The Mayor shakes his head and bites his lower lip. He is listening.

The alderman speaks up. He reminds the woman of Vermont’s property tax rebate program, which surely she must qualify for. Sanders seems to have drifted into a melancholy that deepens as the woman explains how hard it is for her to heat her house in winter, how frightened she is of the effect the new condominiums going up on the other side of the park will have on her taxes, how worried she is about tripping on the sections of the sidewalk ripped up for the new gas main....

Thabault stands by the door, clipboard in hand, taking notes. “I’ll get that rebate information for you,” he assures her in a low voice.

She murmurs, “I don’t take welfare.”

The mayor says, “It’s not welfare. It’s money that never should have been taken from you in the first place, for God’s sake.”
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Sanders finally ended his tour at the St. John’s Club. It’s an old-fashioned neighborhood political clubhouse...Sanders sat down at a table, sipped at a bottle of beer and explained to a small group of voters from the neighborhood, men and women of various ages, all of them working people, how the state property-tax rebate works, assuring them that if their annual income is below $35,000, they can quality for a rebate. These folks are householders barely holding on to their houses, and they need to know what Sanders is telling them, so they listen intently.

It’s more a private than a public occasion, but Sanders’s intensity, heating up as he speaks, is unmodulated and is almost inappropriate.