A Deeper Look at Homelessness

Episode Notes

Transcript

Carolyn Perez:

We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but we’re not seeing the iceberg itself. And that’s because most people who are experiencing homelessness are not visible. Most people who are experiencing homelessness are hidden away.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice and An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ron Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today we’re talking about homelessness. How do our neighbors experience homelessness? How do civil legal problems relate to homelessness? And how do legal aid providers serve this community? Our guest today is Carolyn Perez. I’m lucky to work with Carolyn at LSC where she works as program counsel directly with the many legal aid organizations LSC funds. Before joining us at LSC, Carolyn was an attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the homeless. Recently, she gave a powerful presentation to our board of directors about homelessness, and we wanted to share her perspective with a wider audience. So I’m very excited to have Carolyn on the podcast today. Carolyn, part of your presentation that has stuck with me in the several weeks since you made it is a video you showed where a woman named Jean, a mother who was living in a week to week hotel with her fiance and five children is interviewed.

Jean describes how she and her fiance had lost their jobs in quick succession, resulting in the loss of their home. Her fiance was unable to work full-time because of a disabling injury. Jean found full-time work at a fast food restaurant making minimum wage. Jean said if she missed even one shift, things would start to fall apart because they wouldn’t have enough money to cover the cost of the hotel room and feeding the family. It’s a very moving three and a half minute video that you can find on YouTube under the title Homeless Family with five kids living in a hotel room that’s homeless family with five kids living in a hotel room. Carolyn, I think if you ask most people to describe homelessness, Jean’s story is not what would necessarily come to mind considering that Jean had a job and a roof over her head. Could you talk about in your experience how homelessness today does or does not align with common stereotypes?

Carolyn Perez:

Well, Ron, thank you so much for having me. It’s really great to be here with you to discuss this important topic. You’re right, there’s so many misperceptions about what it means to be homeless in America today. When we imagine someone who’s experiencing homelessness, we might picture an older man on a sidewalk holding a sign begging for money, but we should also be picturing children and families. There are over 1 million children in the United States who experience homelessness. Ron, 1 million children in the United States experience homelessness. So yes, children like the ones in the video that you described are homeless too. Another misperception is that homelessness is just what we actually see on the street, but the frightening part of homelessness is not just what we see on the street. The frightening part of homelessness is what we don’t see on the street. Sure, we notice the tents, we notice the encampments, we notice the person in the sleeping bag sleeping in the doorway or on a heat grate, but what we don’t see is the iceberg below the surface.

We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but we’re not seeing the iceberg itself. And that’s because most people who are experiencing homelessness are not visible. Most people who are experiencing homelessness are hidden away. Perhaps they’re living out of their car. Perhaps they’re scraping enough money together to pay for a cheap motel for that night, like the mother in the video, and then she’s scraping enough money together to pay for that cheap motel the next night, or they’re temporarily sleeping on the floor or the couch of a relative or a friend, or they’re staying with multiple families in a small apartment in overcrowded housing, or perhaps they’re staying in an abandoned building and just deplorable conditions. So yes, homelessness is not just what you see on the street. There’s another misperception that people struggling with homelessness are primarily mentally ill or they’re struggling with addiction.

And certainly it is true that many people who are homeless do also struggle with mental illness or addiction, but those people are often the most visible people living on the street. But the vast majority of those who experiencing homelessness do not actually struggle with addiction or mental illness. In fact, when we look at the numbers in DC for example, it breaks down to only about a third of people struggle with addiction or homelessness or mental illness if they’re homeless. So that actually means that two thirds do not, and it’s not just that mental illness can actually lead to homelessness. The experience of homelessness itself can actually cause or worsen mental illness. I, let’s think about it. When someone’s living on the street, they’re constantly exposed to extreme stress. They’re constantly exposed to trauma and uncertainty of where am I going to sleep? If I close my eyes while I’m sleeping, is somebody going to hurt me?

Where am I going to go to the bathroom? Where am I going to shower? Where am I going to get food? How am I going to launder my clothes? And if you have children, the trauma and the stress is even more. And so often what we see is that the instability of living without a home can actually trigger depression. It can trigger anxiety, it can trigger addiction. So it’s not just that people with mental illness are more likely to become homeless, it’s also that being homeless itself can create or exacerbate mental health or addiction problems. And it just traps people in this really vicious cycle that’s incredibly hard to break. And so finally, there’s a misperception that people struggling with homelessness just must not be working. They must not have a job. The mom in the video worked and working wasn’t enough to prevent her from becoming homeless.

And most of the clients that I worked with actually worked one, actually two jobs and still weren’t able to afford the cost of rent. So yes, you can work and still experience homelessness, and this is because the cost of living is just so high. I mean, we know this, the cost of housing has just skyrocketed in the last half a century, and income has not kept pace. Income has just stagnated. So this has led to a growing gap between what people can afford and what’s available on the housing market. Let’s look at an example. Ron. We were just in Minneapolis for the board meeting and we were talking about homelessness. So let’s take Minnesota for an example. In Minnesota, someone working a minimum wage job, they make about $11 an hour, but they’d have to make over $27 an hour in order to afford the cost of a two bedroom apartment.

So they make 11, but they’d have to make over 27 in order to rent a two bedroom apartment. So that means that someone making minimum wage in Minnesota, they’d have to work 101 hours a week in order to afford the cost of a two bedroom apartment. And that’s just in Minnesota, right? I mean, think about someone living in New York or California. They would have to make over $40 an hour in order to afford a two bedroom apartment, but the minimum wage there is only 15 or $16 an hour. So it’s just a huge misperception that employment prevents homelessness.

Ron Flagg:

Well, Carolyn, thank you for painting a much richer picture of the reality of people experiencing homelessness. Again, I think you’re exactly right. All of us, whether we’re living in urban areas, west coast, east coast, Midwest, have a picture of people experiencing homeless. And naturally it’s the picture of the people we see on the streets and the back stories that we imagine associated with those people. And we don’t see the people you described, and we don’t imagine the circumstances that Jean described in the video. Is there anything else that you think may surprise people about the homeless population in America?

Carolyn Perez:

Yes, I’ve heard people say that homelessness is a choice. What do we do about people who choose to be homeless? And homelessness is just not a choice. It’s just not. I have yet to meet one client on the street who would choose to live on the street over choosing to live in an apartment if an apartment was offered to them. I mean, the last place that anybody wants to go if you find yourself homeless is to live on the street or to go to a homeless shelter. If we found ourselves evicted from our apartment, where would we go? We go to our friends, we go to our families, and we’d exhaust all of our friends and family and stay there as long as we can. But eventually, you’re exhausting your network and you can’t stay there any longer. So then you turn to a shelter or then you turn to going to the street.

But that’s the last place that people want to go. So people don’t choose to live on the street. And again, I’ve never come across a client that’s actually said, no, if you give me an apartment, I don’t want that. I’d rather live here on the street. What I have seen is I have seen people actually turn down offers to stay in a homeless shelter. But it’s important to note that homeless shelters are not places to actually live. Homeless shelters are just places to stay. And actually they’re really just places to temporarily sleep just for that night. And shelters, they differ a lot across the United States, but generally they’re communal. Generally they’re barrack style. Generally it’s people who are sleeping on cots or in bunk beds in a large room and they’re sharing bathrooms and they’re sharing cafeterias. And you’re only allowed to stay there for the night.

You actually have to be out early the next morning, and you have to take all your belongings with you. Also, shelters are generally separated by gender for individuals. So if you’re a couple, even a married couple, if you don’t have children, you can’t stay together in a homeless shelter. And also you can’t bring your pets. I know people love their pets, but you can’t bring a pet to a homeless shelter, and it’s actually really hard to get into shelter. We don’t make it easy for people to get into shelter. In order to access shelter, you have to stand outside the shelter in a line, and it’s literally first come first serve. And so because of that, people actually often start lining up really early in the afternoon, like around two o’clock in the afternoon, but the doors don’t open until 7:00 PM and so they’re standing in this line in order to get a spot to sleep for the night.

And if you’re standing in line and they run out of beds, you’re out of luck. And there’s really strict rules in shelters like curfews, which make it really difficult for people to work a night shift. And the last thing I would note is that there actually is no right to shelter in most jurisdictions in DC we have a right to shelter, but most states across the United States don’t have a right to shelter. And so I’m not talking about a right to housing. I’m really just talking about shelter, a place to have a roof over your head to get out of the elements. So this means that governments don’t have to provide people a place to sleep if they have nowhere to go. And oftentimes shelters are run over capacity, and so people have no choice but to turn to living on the street.

Ron Flagg:

Well, Carolyn, again, thank you for painting such a rich picture and providing the details that most of us don’t think about or have never heard about. So I’d like to pivot a bit, an additional aspect of homelessness that doesn’t get much recognition is how it is connected to legal problems. And both in your prior role and your current work with legal aid providers that LSC funds, what civil legal problems have you observed that lead people to lose stable housing?

Carolyn Perez:

Well, certainly eviction is the most obvious, right? Evictions lead people to lose stable housing and become homeless. And it’s worth noting that eviction proceedings, they’re really complicated and they’re designed by nature to have lawyers involved. The process itself is designed so that lawyers are representing both sides, representing both the tenant and the landlord. But we know unfortunately, that’s just not happening, at least on the tenant side. In eviction cases, while 80% of landlords have a lawyer, less than 5% of tenants actually have a lawyer to represent them. So we have tenants who stand to lose everything. They stand to lose their very home, and they’re forced to represent themselves in court, and they’re often representing themselves against the landlord who has an attorney. And we know that having a lawyer makes a significant difference in the outcome of these cases. So because of that, many jurisdictions have started to adopt a right to counsel and eviction proceedings, and we’ve seen that it just makes a tremendous difference.

In fact, it makes all the difference in whether someone gets to keep their house or not. In New York City, 84% of tenants who a lawyer got to keep their home in Cleveland, when a tenant had a lawyer in 94% of the cases, they got to keep their home and prevent that eviction. So in my role as program counsel at the Legal Services Corporation, we’re seeing that our LSC funded organizations are just leveling the playing field by providing attorneys for tenants in these eviction cases. And our grantees are making a huge difference in preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place. But beyond eviction, actually, we see several other legal issues that actually lead to homelessness like debt, consumer and medical debt, like domestic violence, like legal issues in the aftermath of natural disasters. So looking at debt, consumer and medical debt, many people become homeless because of consumer and medical debt.

To give you an example, in Denver, a nonprofit asked people experiencing homelessness if they had medical debt, do you have medical debt? And the majority of people experiencing homelessness said, yes, I have medical debt. And not only did they say, yes, I have medical debt, but they also said that that medical debt is the reason I became homeless in the first place. MPR ran a story last year about a young man who had a heart attack and he had a heart attack as a result of an undiagnosed condition, and he wrapped up over $50,000 in medical debt. And as a result of that, it just devastated his credit score. And because his credit score was so poor, he couldn’t rent an apartment. So he do, he did what we talked about earlier. He spent years sleeping on friends and family’s couches, and he ultimately declared bankruptcy.

And he said in this article, I just always felt like I couldn’t get a leg up. And so I’ve seen our legal aid organizations that are funded by LSC make a huge difference in the debt and medical cases and why? It’s because we know that these clients are living below the poverty line. And so that actually automatically makes them eligible for charity care from nonprofit hospitals that would eliminate their debt. But it takes a lawyer often getting involved for the hospital to back away. And we’ve seen that often when a lawyer just simply enters their appearance in a medical debt case that the case can be dismissed entirely. So medical debt certainly plays a role in people becoming homeless. And then we have domestic violence. 60% of unhoused women report fleeing domestic violence as the immediate cause of their homelessness.

Ron Flagg:

Can you say that again please? What you just said is really important.

Carolyn Perez:

Thank you, Ron. Yeah, 60% of women who are homeless report that actually fleeing domestic violence was the reason that they became homeless. And I had a client whose story I will never forget. She was a mom living in dc. She had a 2-year-old son and her husband became abusive, and she remembers the night she left that night he choked her and he did it in front of her 2-year-old son, and he choked her and he dragged her across the floor and she decided to just flee on foot in the middle of the night. And it actually was in the middle of a snow storm, and she had literally nowhere to go. And she said to me, I left and I had no idea where I was going to go. So in addition to her trying to navigate where she’s going to sleep with her 2-year-old son, she was also facing a host of civil legal issues.

She was going to have to obtain a protective order against her abusive husband. She was going to have to file for divorce, she was going to have to seek custody and visitation of her minor son. She was going to have to file for child support. All of these are legal proceedings. All of them require a lawyer’s assistance. And many of our LSD funded legal aid providers make a difference by reducing repeated incidents of domestic violence. So domestic violence plays a huge role in causing people to become homeless. And our legal aid organizations make a huge difference in being able to reduce that repeated incident of violence. Finally, oftentimes people lose their homes and become homeless as a result of a natural disaster. I work with organizations in the South, our legal aid, LSC funded organizations in the South. And when a natural disaster hits, we think of what the immediate needs are, right?

People need food, they need water, they need shelter. That’s critical in those first chaotic days. But there’s something that people don’t always cross people’s minds, and that’s that they also need a lawyer. Why would you need a lawyer following a natural disaster? Well, you need a lawyer to help you appeal a denial of FEMA assistance and to navigate the FEMA application process, you need a lawyer to help with insurance claims. You need a lawyer to help with wrongful evictions and habitability concerns. Also, title clearing, resolving issues if there’s an unclear or missing property title. And then unfortunately, there’s a lot of fraudulent contractors that take advantage of disaster survivors. And so you need lawyers to help with consumer fraud and contractor scams, and then there’s employment issues addressing job loss or wage theft due to a disaster. So attorneys make a big difference in preventing people who have survived a natural disaster from becoming homeless.

Ron Flagg:

Well, Carolyn, you just described a wide array of legal issues associated with homelessness, and I know at the beginning of your career you devoted a lot of time to providing direct services to people experiencing homelessness. I’d love to hear more about your time with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, a terrific legal aid program here in dc Practically, how did the program operate? And personally, what do you carry with you from that experience?

Carolyn Perez:

Thank you so much for letting me talk about the Washington Legal Clinic for the homeless because it’s an organization that’s dear to my heart, and I loved my time there and really appreciate the good work that my former colleagues are doing. So the legal clinic for the homeless, they have a combination of direct representation, systemic advocacy, client education with the goal of achieving housing justice for our unhoused clients. And when I worked at the legal clinic, I used to call myself a street lawyer, and that’s because we took to the streets to go out and do intakes at soup kitchens, at day centers, at medical clinics. And I borrowed the term street lawyer from John Grisham. I mean, we know John Grisham. He’s a huge supporter of LSD, and he also wrote the book Affirm and a Time to Kill. So he also wrote this book called Street Lawyer, and it’s a thriller about a big firm attorney who went to work at the legal clinic.

And when John Grisham was writing this book, he actually shadowed my colleagues at the Washington Legal Clinic for the homeless. And the organization intentionally doesn’t accept government funding, and that’s so we could be as low barriers as possible. So we didn’t have to start our intake sessions by asking, are you eligible for services and making people prove that they were homeless. We could just say, how can I help you today? And that went a long way in being able to establish trust in terms of what I carry from my experience, it’s definitely the resilience of the clients that I worked with. The mothers like the one you described in the video are just so strong. And when I first entered this field, I really started this work because I wanted to make a difference in individual lives, and a lot of it was informed by my faith, and I really viewed it through a charity lens.

I believed that homelessness was primarily a personal issue and that my role was to help individuals kind of overcome their immediate challenges, help individuals get back on their feet. And so my focus was often providing support to the individual, but over time, I really learned the brokenness of the systems that our clients interact with. And so I really evolved to have much more of a social justice lens than a charity lens to this work. And I started to understand that homelessness really isn’t just about an individual’s struggles. It’s rooted in systemic issues like inequality, like lack of affordable housing, like inadequate social services. And so now I really see these broader structural problems as essential to create meaningful and lasting change.

Ron Flagg:

Carolyn, our funding recipients often describe the challenges of delivering legal services to low income clients. No, no matter their housing situations, things like transportation, lack of transportation, lack of internet access, language barriers, the fact that many people do not often recognize their problems are legal in nature. If you take housing, somebody could say, well, I don’t have money for rent. It’s not a legal problem, it’s a financial problem. So all of these circumstances create obstacles. What are the barriers to providing legal services for people experiencing homelessness? Presumably on top of the factors I just mentioned?

Carolyn Perez:

Well, they all are. All of that, the very same issues that you just described, and actually it even more so affects unhoused clients. Barriers even more so affect unhoused clients. And so as a legal aid lawyer, it’s always important to meet our clients where they are, but it’s especially important for our unhoused clients. So at the legal clinic, we physically met our clients where they are by going to where they’re already receiving services like soup kitchens and shelters. And so many of our LSC funded organizations do the same thing. They meet our clients where they are physically by going to where our clients are receiving services, they meet our clients where they are with respect to their language by making sure they have proper interpreters, they meet our clients where they are with respect to if they don’t have internet access, making it easier to be in touch with the lawyer if they don’t have a phone.

And so our legal aid lawyers are going out of their way to reduce barriers. And that’s so important, especially with the unhoused community and establishing trust. Unfortunately, those who experience homelessness have often been treated really poorly, and they are often expected that people are going to continue to treat them poorly, not going to return their phone call, not going to send them the email or the paperwork that someone promised. And so it means so much when the civil legal aid attorney on the other end says, I am actually going to do what I say I’m going to do, and I’m going to call you when I say I’m going to call you and I’m going to go out of my way to meet you where you need to be met instead of making you come to me in my office.

Ron Flagg:

Carolyn, let’s pivot a bit. I’d like to talk about people who are trying affirmatively, proactively transition out of being unhoused. For those who are working to regain housing stability, what sort of legal problems or barriers stand in their way?

Carolyn Perez:

The most common issues include prior evictions, past criminal records, lack of essential documents like ID and birth certificates, and just struggling to access the government benefits that they’re already entitled to. Any one of these issues can be enough to keep someone stuck in homelessness. So take past evictions, for example. A past eviction can be a major obstacle to finding stable housing because landlords will look at the application and they’ll see that someone has an eviction on their record and they’ll automatically reject that application based on their eviction history even if the person’s personal circumstances have completely changed since the eviction. And so civil legal aid is crucial in these cases because our lawyers can help expunge eviction records, they can correct inaccuracies and they can advocate for fair rental opportunities. Similarly, in criminal record cases, that can be a significant barrier to employment. And when you have a barrier to employment, you have a barrier to housing stability.

Many employers reject candidates for employment application based solely on the fact that they have past convictions, even if they’re old convictions or even if they’re minor convictions. And so legal aid lawyers can step in to expunge or steal these records and challenge the employment discrimination, really giving people a fair shot to break this cycle of poverty and homelessness. Another often overlooked issue is the lack of personal documentation like IDs or birth certificates. Often this paperwork you can imagine when you’re living on the streets and you’re homeless, it’s really hard. You don’t have your file cabinet with you that you’re carrying around with all your paperwork. And so it’s really hard to maintain the proper documentation. And these documents are needed to actually be able to apply for housing and access benefits or be able to secure a job. So without these documents, people often remain trapped in homelessness and civil legal aid Lawyers can help clients obtain these documents and open the door to stability.

And finally, many of our clients who are experiencing homelessness are also denied basic essential benefits that they’re already entitled to, like Social Security Disability, like Medicaid, like snap. And this can push people even deeper into poverty and homelessness and legal aid lawyers can appeal these denials and secure these benefits. Take Social Security Disability, for example. Those who are living on the streets often again are the visible homeless. And the people who are visibly homeless living on the streets often have the most severe mental illness or the most severe physical disabilities, and yet they are denied Social Security disability. And it often takes a lawyer getting involved in their case to fight the appeal in order to get benefits that clients are already entitled to. It shouldn’t take a lawyer, but it does, and lawyers can make a huge difference in those cases. So all of these legal services make a tremendous difference in helping people get back on their feet and rebuild their lives.

Ron Flagg:

Carolyn, you’ve described the enormous impact having a lawyer can have to anybody, and particularly people experiencing homelessness. You also mentioned that pro bono attorneys played a large role in providing legal services at Washington Legal Clinic for the homeless, and that’s the case with the legal aid programs that we fund across the country. What would you say to encourage attorneys to take on this kind of pro bono work in their communities, particularly on the assumption that most of the time they’re not working in housing matters?

Carolyn Perez:

Do it. Just do it. Don’t be afraid because it will be the most meaningful work you’ll ever do with your law degree. When we see people who are experiencing homelessness on the street, we often look away because it’s uncomfortable and it’s uncomfortable for a reason, because it’s inhumane for someone to be forced to live on the street. And so I would say don’t look away. Look at the eyes of the person who’s standing there, and you’ll see the humanity of people who are experiencing homelessness. And you have an opportunity to make a tangible difference in someone’s life. For somebody that’s on the brink of losing everything, having a lawyer in their corner could be the key to keeping a roof over their head or accessing critical benefits or clearing up that record that’s holding them back. It’s not just about the legal work. It’s actually about giving someone a fighting chance at stability and dignity.

I had a client who was being kicked out of shelter and she was being kicked out of shelter because she had a job, believe it or not, she worked in the evening. So she kept breaking the curfew rules at the shelter because she was working. She got there late and she tried on her own for a really long time to work with the shelter, and she just wasn’t able to break through. And we got involved. And I remember her saying to you, it was you by my side that made the difference in how they talked to me. It was having you by my side that made the difference in how they treated me. And so I would say to a pro bono lawyer, look in the eyes of someone experiencing homelessness and stand by their side because you’ll make a huge difference in how people are being treated.

Ron Flagg:

And also recall that the alternative to your representing that person whose eyes Carolyn just asked to look into, the alternative is not Clarence Darrow. They’re not going to get Perry Mason or any other well-known lawyer. They’re going to represent themselves, and I can guarantee you in 99 cases out of a hundred, they’re going to be much better off with you at their side than trying to figure out the rules, regulations, and processes on their own.

Carolyn Perez:

That’s such an important point. Thank you for making that.

Ron Flagg:

Carolyn. This has been a tremendously illuminating and moving presentation as I expected. I want to give you an opportunity to ask yourself your own last question or to cover anything else you think our listeners should know about the topic of homelessness.

Carolyn Perez:

Homelessness. It often is seen as overwhelming and that this is an unsolvable crisis. But the truth is, Ron, this is a fixable problem. The solution to homelessness is housing. It’s not that complicated. We know what works. We know that investing in affordable housing, providing supportive services and ensuring access to legal aid for those at risk of losing the home, that’s what works. When we give people stable housing, they then have the foundation to address all the other challenges in their lives. If we give people housing first, then they can get that job. When we give people housing first, then they can address treating their anxiety or depression. When we give people housing first, then they can have a place to launch to address their addiction issues. So what we’ve seen in communities make real progress by focusing on housing first approaches and reducing barriers to support.

And the key here is viewing homelessness not as a personal failure. It’s a policy choice that we can change, and with the right resources, with political will, and with a commitment to equity, we can drastically reduce and even end homelessness. And Ron, this is not just my hope. It’s actually with the entirely within our reach, if we prioritize the solutions that have been proven to work, the mom that you talked about in the video that’s working a job and riding her bike every five miles every day in the rain, in order to be able to just scrape enough money to get in a motel, that doesn’t have to be our truth. We can prioritize solutions that we know work, and we can make a difference towards ending homelessness.

Ron Flagg:

That’s a great point, Carolyn. And it’s borne out by recent history during the pandemic, when people were focused on not allowing people to be evicted unless they end up not only being unhoused, but facing horrible health issues and causing others health issues. As a result, we created emergency rental assistance and allocated 46 billion to emergency rental assistance, and eviction rates went down substantially. So you’re right. What we do with regard to people who are unhoused and homeless is ultimately a choice, a policy choice. Thank you, Carolyn Perez for joining me today and sharing your experiences and expertise about homelessness, one of America’s most pressing problems. And thanks to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Stay well.

Announcer:

Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporation’s views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decisions based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.

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