By the League National Housing and Homelessness Committee
Wealthy West Coast real estate speculators and their supporters in state and local governments are stepping up their attacks on poor and unhoused people in our communities. They are petitioning the Trump-appointed U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit Court’s 2019 Martin vs. Boise decision, which blocks them from imposing cruel and unusual punishments on people who have nowhere to sleep.
Addressing homelessness requires understanding exactly what it is about homelessness that is problematic, and problematic to whom. For realtors and investors – the special interests fighting Martin vs. Boise – homelessness is a problem because they think the visibility of unhoused people will lower property values and discourage “business as usual.” For them, the housing system is not the problem, because it continues to enrich them every day. And since they believe nothing is wrong with the system, they necessarily believe the problem is bad behavior by unhoused people themselves. Their proposed solution is to punish the poor.
THE TRUTH ABOUT UNHOUSED PEOPLE
However, for the working class – the vast majority of society – homelessness is a problem because it causes untold stress, misery, destruction of families, ruination of health, and early death. Even for those who live “one paycheck away,” the threat that they, too, could lose their homes is a constant source of anxiety and dread. It deters their participation in democracy and resistance to employer oppression. Contrary to the self-serving opinions of the wealthy, objective scientific studies have proven over and over again that the cause of homelessness is unaffordable rents – rents that are too expensive for people working for low-income wages to afford, not to mention for families with children, the elderly, or people with disabilities.
A woman living in a car in southern Alabama explained the reality of her situation. “I can’t even get disability,” she said. “I’m homeless in a state with no programs and no Medicaid. I have a $10,000 hospital bill. Housing First took me off the housing list because I stayed in a hotel for 14 consecutive days trying to recuperate. The hospital tried to help me get SSI, but was told I can’t get it because I had a GoFundMe page. I started the GoFundMe because I had no income, because I was too sick to work!
“My husband died unexpectedly in February. I have been trying to get his SSDI widow’s benefits, but was denied and didn’t get an appeal in on time. I pawned my car title and now could lose my car! There are no shelters here for me to go to, no help from any organizations or churches. No food banks near me. Thank God I’m getting food stamps. I’m blown away that I can’t get any help. I can barely walk or drive.”
Max from San Jose, California, described what it is like to be unhoused: “The last two years living out of a van with my husband were pretty horrific. Deep within the pandemic and immunocompromised, we were stalked almost nightly by a black Dodge Charger, very likely an off-duty cop. He would show up anywhere we parked within that town, and we had to stay in that town for medical disability reasons. People would look into our windows day and night while we were inside, and walk around our van threateningly. Two years of this, of having to be ready to defend ourselves 24/7, or having to move our van because a cop happened by at 2 a.m., disrupted my sleep permanently and gave me severe PTSD. I have been unstably housed for the past two years and I still cannot get a full night’s sleep.”
MARTIN VS. BOISE
The strategy of addressing homelessness with coercion is bipartisan (although there are still important differences between the parties that need to be considered when voting). According to Vice, the petitioners against Martin vs. Boise are mostly Democrats, but also include Republicans: California governor Gavin Newsom, the city of Portland, the League of Oregon Cities, Republican officials in Arizona, district attorneys in Sacramento and San Diego, the state of Idaho, the city of San Francisco, cities of Los Angeles and Phoenix, and the Goldwater Institute.
Wannabe Democratic presidential candidate Newsom championed a CARE Court bill that forces some unhoused people into mental health treatment, even though California’s mental health issues are caused by the shortage of voluntary treatment beds and facilities, not by people who refuse to access them. The leading Republican presidential candidate has called for setting up internment camps for unhoused people at the edges of large cities, similar to the detention camps for migrants he also wants to establish.
The specific ruling being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court is City of Grants Pass, Oregon vs. Johnson, which said that Grants Pass could not enact an ordinance banning the use of blankets and sleeping bags by people who sleep outside (this was their attempt to work around the Martin vs. Boise decision). The petitioners not only want to be allowed to ban blankets in the winter, but also want the entire Martin vs. Boise decision overturned, to allow them to persecute and punish unhoused people without any limits or restrictions.
Newsom claims that police sweeps of encampments actually help people by connecting them with services, but the opposite is the truth. When encampments are dispersed, people lose contact with case workers, health services and mental health providers. And when people are arrested for simply using a blanket, it only makes it more difficult for them to later obtain employment and/or housing.
UNITY, TRUTH AND VISION
The real reason so many Democrats and Republicans are fighting to remove encampments is to appease their supporters in the real estate and financial sector who believe that this will preserve the billions in profits they are accustomed to receiving. The rest of us have to ask: Is this the kind of society we want to live in, where the poor and working class are punished for the benefit of the wealthy few?
Unhoused people are answering with an emphatic NO! Javier (aka Harvey) Franco, an unhoused resident of Los Angeles’s Chinatown, weighed in: “I had a feeling Martin vs. Boise was going to be brought up again. The politicians didn’t like that the Ninth Circuit Court ruled against them, because their intentions are to change the laws to criminalize people for being homeless. … I never thought that people that I voted into office will go this route with people who need help, but apparently I was big-time wrong! So I hope that the lawyers defending homeless people in the U.S. will win again and shut these bastards up!”
“What we really need to do, is to get in touch with all homeless people here in the state of California and push back as hard as we can against our government. Make them give us that housing that we need in order for them to get their streets back. … Seems like our government doesn’t give a shit about people who are struggling in paying their rents and whatever other bills they have, like utilities, because it seems like they’re only after the money and nothing more!”
A person from Florida chimed in: “What if homeless people, unhoused people, car, van and RV people all united? Wrote and published our own articles, started a podcast? Took our grievances public and exposed the system and all these corrupt nonprofits? Let homeless people wear body cams and expose the horrible shelter conditions. Show the trauma we are faced with just to exist. Get advocates from the health care field and mental health field to talk about how being housing insecure causes premature death. Because the industrial ruling class controls the narrative, by funding and fueling the propaganda that dehumanizes homelessness, like Jesse Watters on Fox.”
These leaders have the right idea. What is needed is unity – unity of the unhoused, together with the millions at risk of homelessness, and the millions of people of conscience that are out there. This means resisting divisive attacks by special interests on those among us who are people of color, migrants, women, youth, or part of the LGBTQ community. The ongoing spread of destitution from primarily migrants and people of color to the working class at large is making unity more possible today than it has ever been before.
There is no reason, except for our own lack of vision, why we cannot treat housing as the human right that it was always meant to be, instead of the vehicle for investment and profit-making that it has become. There is no reason we cannot work for decommodification of housing – taking it off the speculative market and preserving it as permanently affordable for people who want to use it to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer. This would be a giant step toward a thriving, new society that values life, health, and human happiness over misery and death.
Published on January 22, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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