From the beginning of the pandemic, our class has fought to stop evictions, find safe housing for those without and provide basic needs for one another. By contrast, the ruling class has failed to distribute more than 6.5 percent of at least 45 billion dollars allotted to landlords to prevent evictions. Instead of providing for those without, our rulers have aggressively advanced efforts to criminalize homelessness. Since last winter, sweeps of homeless encampments took place in every major city across the country. Now, despite a three-month extension of the national moratorium, evictions continue, and the moratorium’s expiration in October promises millions more homeless.
Our class fights on. In Portland, Oregon, the homeless have filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of those whose possessions were confiscated by the city and tossed in the dump. After months of struggle and the loss of hotel housing, Kansas City Homeless Union leader Qadhafi told The Star: “Everything [the city] said was a lie.” In New York, organizers protested the city’s decision to move homeless residents from relatively safe housing to hotels without refrigerators or working elevators. A diabetic resident without his medical needs being met, Alvin Murray told The New York Daily News, “I feel like I’m in prison.” Another resident named Bo said, “They dumped us here.”
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia base of the national Poor People’s Army is housing over thirty different families in abandoned HUD housing and suing HUD, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, and the Philadelphia Housing Authority. The lawsuit seeks protections for those living in public properties as well as needed improvements for such properties under both the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the state of Pennsylvania. This ruling would declare housing as a human right under the U.S. Constitution, consistent with the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In an interview with Fred Hampton Leftists, Artist and Media Coordinator for the Poor People’s Army Shamako Donae Noble explained the ruling class mindset: “If they were to acknowledge housing as a human right, it undermines the fundamental basis of capitalism . . .. [They] hold our basic needs to keep us spinning in the hamster wheel.” National coordinator Cheri Honkala elaborated, “They stole those houses from the beginning through discrimination, through land grabs, through only caring about developers and speculators.”
In an era when labor-replacing technology has undercut the basis on which capitalist exchange rests, the ruling class must defend the system that gives it power—creating homelessness while catering to speculative capital. According to the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate, the U.S. is the #1 country in the world for such investment. In a country founded by people seeking a new home, the ruling class hoards property. Americans hurled into a dispossessed new class go homeless every night, and their numbers will explode in the coming months. We must face this challenge with a vision of a new America, where society’s wealth is owned in common, so everyone has a right to a safe, secure home.
Published: August 27, 2021
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