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THE IMMORAL US HOUSING CRISIS IS A SHAME WE MUST CORRECT—NOW  
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Cedar Monroe; Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
September 10, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ While the United States might indeed be the richest country in
history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. _

A homeless man sleeps on the sidewalk in Downtown Los Angeles on
November 22, 2023., Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

 

In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of
land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into
Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the
state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless
encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city
to court [[link removed]],
because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case
by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since,
the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of
_Martin v. Boise_ that a city without sufficient shelter beds to
accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close
the encampment.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one
defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In _Martin v. Boise_,
it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was
indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of
homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved
from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all
the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them,
overturning _Martin v. Boise_ and finding that punishing homeless
people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor
unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that
it had become commonplace.

Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around _Grants Pass v. Johnson_
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the court briefs against the city’s case. The Kairos Center
[[link removed]] for Religions, Rights & Social Justice
(to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted
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one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious
denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks.
The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith
institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the
Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives
on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused.

One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised,
very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom
who argued
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that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which
reportedly kills
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800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous,
“Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme
Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing
the dwellings and communities of the unhoused.

Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the
homeless from encampments. In Palm Springs
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for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments
and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them
just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In
the state capital of Sacramento, an encampment
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disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are
now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to
connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents
fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining
order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an
executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court
refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have
spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the
Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places
ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington,
Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the
communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing
against the erasure of their lives.

CRUEL BUT NOT UNUSUAL

However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices
who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of seventeenth-century
English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel
and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly
grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling
unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have
realized. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
peasants in England lost their rights to land they had lived on and
farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major
landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool
and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their
lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in
turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for
begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English
workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often
under the supervision of the church.

To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the
choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with
religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice
Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion
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in the _Grants Pass _case, seemed incredulous that the lower court
ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue
Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious
requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private
shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious
practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or
gay people, and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities
indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people
to accept the services already offered. In addition to such
insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how
clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since
600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission
only had 138 beds.

Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs
submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors
across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a
review of _Martin v. Boise_. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also
left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor,
revealed in her fiery dissent
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the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and
many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible
to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple
enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to
address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather
than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down,
attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply
drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words
typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make
it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they
will want to move on down the road.”

THE UNITED STATES OF DISPOSSESSION

This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go
from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the
transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very
founding of the United States, as the government encountered
Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial,
they forced them off those very lands. They also subjected generations
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of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English
workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to
destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and
shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the highest rates
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of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such
homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where
Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions
of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, 1%
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of the American population now owns two thirds of the private land in
the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!

In _Trash: A Poor White Journey_
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(a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the
homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those
relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who
have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed
periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the
War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public
housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the
number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely
stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing
services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money
funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of
people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass
case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be
arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for
covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the
case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for
the crime of sleeping outdoors.

The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping
outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant
is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on
vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in
protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the
French poet and novelist, said so eloquently
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ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their
bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from
occupying space they don’t own.

After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no
economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest
country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in
generosity. Even though there are far more empty homes
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than homeless people (28
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for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night
annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers
looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have
been bad for all too many of us.

In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed.
While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they
wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the
repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place.
The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that
people will just go down the road and essentially disappear —
ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.

The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts
(required for county funding for homeless services) that identified
more than 650,000
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homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is,
however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington
State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a
study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the
annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved
to be 184,865, or eight times
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the number used for funding services.

A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this
country is closer to 8 to 11 million
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nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the
subsequent loss of Covid era benefits, and crippling inflation and
housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise
substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and
affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable
possibility.

Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, 45%
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of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after
authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution
was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land
ownership. Afro-Brazilians
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were given the right to own land for the first time, although many
barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and
natural owners of the land” were affirmed
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themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those rights
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And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to
fulfill a social function, be productive, and respect labor and
environmental rights. The state has the right to expropriate
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landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must
compensate the owner,” according
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to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute
for Social Research.

That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements
of landless peasants that had formed an organization called _Movimento
dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra_ (MST), or the Landless Workers
Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing
small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant
land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could
even sue for legal tenure. To date, 450,000 families
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have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics.

IF NOT HERE, WHERE?

Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking:
“Where do we go?” In Aberdeen
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Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30
days to leave or face fines and arrests.

Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the
unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences
for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and
tribal nations fight for their sovereignty
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and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the
tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider
places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to
ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of
the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are
finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost
this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find
justice sooner or later.

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Cedar Monroe is a chaplain, organizer, and author. They are the author
of Trash: A Poor White Journey
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and served as a chaplain alongside people experiencing homelessness
for 13 years. They are a PhD student at University College Cork and
blog at cedarmonroe.substack.com [[link removed]].

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. She
is the author of "Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the
Poor" (2017).

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* Homelessness; Grants Pass v. Johnson; Housing; Criminalization of
Homelessness;
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