By the League National Housing and Homelessness Committee
Alongside the Trump mass deportation plan, a broader campaign to vilify and attack low-income tenants and unhoused people is being carried out by both Republicans and pro-corporate Democrats. It is yet another pillar in the fascist dictatorship currently under construction. Like the anti-immigrant raids, the anti-housing crusade is running into a rock of resistance. People are uniting in defense of their humanity, worthiness and human rights.
The unhoused are the spearhead of the housing movement. Their resistance against repression by Democratic governors and mayors is every bit as important to the anti-fascist cause as the mass rallies against Trump and Musk.
UNHOUSED INSURGENCY
In 2023, the city of Oakland, California swept the Wood Street Commons community, claiming that the alternative “Wood Street Cabins” shelter would lead to permanent housing. But now, after two years of living with broken bathrooms and kitchens, mold, an abusive staff and little opportunity to transition to permanent housing, the city is moving to close down the cabins. It is pushing people back out onto the street.
The Wood Street Commons community, Oakland Homeless Union and POOR Magazine are battling back by fighting for a “self-governed sanctuary community in which residents will be granted security of tenure with wraparound services” until they receive permanent supportive housing. Organizing broad working-class support for concrete demands like these by Wood Street Commons, is one important path forward for the resistance to authoritarianism.
In nearby San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan recently introduced a budget that would eliminate future city-funded affordable housing and arrest any unhoused person who turns down an offer of shelter three times, even though San Jose has a shortage of over 3,000 shelter spaces. Allegedly, the idea is to force people to accept mental health and/or substance abuse services. In reality, these services either do not exist or are soon to be cut. The real purpose is to shift blame away from the city’s refusal to provide housing. Unhoused people and their supporters spoke up in fierce resistance on March 18, organizing hundreds of people to rally and testify against the proposal.
SOLUTIONS NOT PUNISHMENT
“Stop all sweep activity,” demanded a member of URG (the Unhoused Response Group) in San Jose. “Designate areas for public use, with basic survival services (access to water, hygiene, food, transportation, etc.). Cleanups can be done without sweeping people. Moving people around, taking their gear and destroying their makeshift shelters is dangerous and leaves them more vulnerable to dying from exposure, exhaustion or overdosing in despair.
“I refused housing because it did not fit my situation,” said the member of URG. “Forcing me into jail or rehab is wildly inappropriate for me and many others who refuse unworkable offers for shelter or housing. … Many unhoused have taken time away from daily survival, made efforts to get birth certificates or IDs, got interrogated with invasive personal questions, filled out lengthy paperwork, left their encampments to stand in lines for services, got on wait-lists that are months to years long, accepted help, went to shelters with terrible management and racist staff and ultimately still got left unhoused after falling for false hopes and promises.”
While state and local governments collaborate by criminalizing people, DOGE in Washington is moving to attack and abolish affordable housing altogether, as part of its drive to purge every aspect of government that does not serve corporate profit. According to a CBSNews.com report, the Trump administration is preparing a new approach to getting homeless people off the streets by forcibly moving those living outside into large camps while mandating mental health and addiction treatment.
If this is not stopped, there will be no affordable housing available for houseless people. The private for-profit housing industry simply stops building housing unless and until it can continue raising rents. Unhoused people will be sent to prisons or crude, permanent, Japanese-American-style internment-style camps. Although the U.S. government has always served the working class poorly, the escalating elimination of democracy is an attempt to prevent the working class from organizing to make it serve workers at all. The poor have no choice but to fight.
MEETING HUMAN NEEDS
None of these ruling class horrors is inevitable. The resistance to Oakland evictions, San Jose arrests and the DOGE attack is already building. There are hundreds of millions more of us than there are of them. As we fight, we begin to understand that the housing system based on corporate profit can and must be replaced with social housing based on meeting human needs instead of investor financial gain. The housing crisis is one aspect of the overall crisis in the private property system. What is needed is the working-class political power necessary to overturn it and build a new one, dedicated to providing life, food, water, housing, education, work, health and security for all.
The movement demanding housing as a human right will be instrumental in building that power. It can change the whole narrative around the solution to homelessness (the answer is housing, not punishment). It can build power when it creates unity between unhoused, tenants, cost-burdened homeowners, communities and people of conscience – including unity across lines of color and immigration status. Unity around basic needs is the foundation for the broader unity necessary to defeat the dictatorship.
Leadership by the unhoused and formerly unhoused is essential to the strength of the housing movement. Their stories and their truth are powerful weapons in the sea of lies that is flooding our political discourse. As one leader from San Jose said, “I am not who you say I am. I have no criminal background. I am a former preschool teacher. I don’t belong in jail just because I can’t afford a place to live. And I am not an anomaly. There are thousands like me out here.”
