Congresswoman sleeps in a homeless shelter

Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier is gearing up for what she hopes is the next big fight in Congress — balancing out the growing economic inequality that has ravaged the middle class for years — so she reckoned she’d do a bit of ground-level research first.

And since you can’t get much more ground level than a homeless shelter, that’s where she went last Friday — to spend the night.

The Maple Street Shelter in Redwood City was the destination. Speier had actually been there a week before to chat with the residents, and the fact that a well-off Hillsborough member of the Washington power structure was hanging out with the penniless was lost on nobody, least of all the member herself. That was the point, she said.

“I’m still kind of reeling from the experience. Every member of Congress should be required to do what I did,” Speier said this week. “It would help us appreciate who we are talking about. We rattle off numbers, but it doesn’t speak about the people themselves.”

This wasn’t Speier’s first run at experiencing life on the other end of the scale. She spent a week last year eating only what she could buy on food stamps — “Not a lot of fresh produce on that budget,” she said — and when she was a state legislator she bunked down for a night in the state women’s prison in Chowchil

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2014/02/06/congresswoman-sleeps-in-a-homeless-shelter/