The Homeless are not Alone
I just saw another video of Gavin Newsom personally stealing the possessions of homeless people and throwing them out. In addition to a reflexive horror at seeing a Democratic Governor personally hurt and dehumanize people who are already suffering so much, there’s the fact that getting rid of people’s belongings so often makes it much, much harder for people to get help. Without ID, without a wallet, without a cellphone accessing both government services and the day-to-day necessities of life becomes much, much harder. Getting a job becomes much harder, getting housing, getting further paperwork – life itself becomes massively more difficult. And these are people already bearing the full brunt of a society that makes life increasingly unlivable for anyone in poverty, anyone poor, anyone within striking distance of financial struggles.
Demonizing the homeless is, of course, not new. There’s a long history of attacking people who can’t afford housing, folks unable to work, or anyone experiencing financial crises. These people are blamed instead of the bosses who pay poverty wages, a system that doesn’t care about people who can’t contribute to the profit engine, and a government that doesn’t provide for its citizens. But, when the overt criminalization of homelessness was first attempted decades ago, the courts relied on the 1962 Supreme Court precedent of Robinson v. California. They said that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting or sleeping outside by people experiencing homelessness who do not have access to shelter. The Robinson precedent says, in short, that punishing people for a status they hold involuntarily, like addiction or homelessness, is cruel and unusual, and therefore illegal.
Astute observers will note that this precedent largely relies on the idea that homelessness is involuntary, not simply the result of a series of bad choices on the part of people without housing. But on June 28th, 2024 the Supreme Court decided to sidestep that entire discussion, and enable the criminalization of homelessness through a cheap workaround, arguing that the ordinances they were permitting simply bar everyone from camping on public property, not just the homeless, and therefore do not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Like 90% of what has come out of the Supreme Court in the last several years, that explanation is bullshit. From the very beginning this landmark homelessness case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, was about the ability of homeless people to exist, to live. As you may know, it started in Grants Pass, Oregon, a small town that chose to ban all camping (sleeping in any form) on all public land in direct response to homeless people sleeping. One woman, Debra Blake, initially brought the case. In a needed discussion of this landmark case, Tracy Rosenthal says that neighbors described Debra as “motherly,” “selfless,” and “a force to be reckoned with.”
Debra had lived in Grants Pass for 15 years, seven of them without housing, by the time she filed her case against the town. She was 59 years old and thousands of dollars in debt from her years of homelessness when she filed the case, after being hit with violations, “for sleeping, sitting, camping, and trespassing” which resulted from “a mix of civil and criminal charges that accrued late fees, bench warrants, and jail stints, wrecked her credit and job prospects, and made her a known entity to police.” Debra died before her case reached the Supreme Court.
Debra argued from the very beginning that the Grants Pass ordinance banning camping and sleeping on public land was specifically targeting the homeless, and she knew from experience that it was passed as a direct response to homeless people like her who didn’t qualify for shelter beds sleeping outdoors. The spineless lie of the Supreme Court’s logic is also belied by the immediate response to their ruling. Last week Gavin Newsom responded to the court’s ruling by sending a clear, disturbing message to local governments: “Clean up homeless encampments now or lose out on state funding next year.” Then, as we know, he immediately took it upon himself to have a photo shoot where he took part in destroying an encampment himself.
That distinction between “clean up” and “destroy” is crucial here. There’s been an alarmingly successful push to frame stealing the extremely limited belongings of people without housing as merely “sweeping” or “cleaning up” an area. We can look at the sinister semantic play here, where removing people and destroying their possessions is equated to tidying up a space, and immediately see how the adoption of this language requires us to see the human beings who are being displaced and hurt and less than, subhuman, undserving and more. This rhetoric and these thought processes are part of the paradigm we need to reject.
Unfortunately, this summer the country crossed a line. The United States crossed over from normalizing this practice of talking about people as debris into enabling governments to criminalize these human beings simply for not being able to afford a home. That’s just the first effect of the Grants Pass case, and while it’ll affect people without housing most of all, making it increasingly untenable to exist as a person who can’t pay for shelter, the rest of us will suffer too.
The phrase “you’re closer to being homeless than you are to being a billionaire” has proliferated in recent years. It’s been made into signs and posters and graffitied in an effort to get us all to see that millions and millions of us are one workplace accident, one car wreck, one firing away from losing our housing, while only 800 people, or less than .0003% of the population, are billionaires. The math is clear. The average person is far closer to losing housing, especially given how its cost has skyrocketed in recent years, than they are to immense wealth.
But the ruling class knows that reality too. They know housing is too expensive, they’re the ones raking in the profits from high rents. They’re also the people behind the institutions buying up an increasing share of the housing stock. Groups like BlackRock and other large investors now buy 1 out of every 4 single-family homes sold in the United States. And people are starting to take note of that, and get rightfully pissed off. At the exact same time, however, disgust with the unhoused is being whipped up to a fever pitch that I haven’t seen at any other point in my life. As we see more and more homeless people on the streets, people are understandably upset, afraid, and concerned. Yet where we should be disgusted at the system, at a society with so much wealth leaving people to sleep in cardboard boxes and tents, the ruling class has all too effectively directed our anger at the victims of the system rather than the system itself.
I don’t want to pretend that I’ve never felt uncomfortable around an unhoused person. In New York I’ve seen countless people who are unwell, suffering, talking or shouting to themselves, and plenty more. I’m not immune to my conditioning, immune to the rhetoric that blames people for the conditions they find themselves in. But our first thought does not need to be our last thought. When feelings that seem instinctual, but are likely a reaction to the sustained campaign against the homeless, come up, I don’t allow them to have the last say. I push back when these thoughts come up, bringing myself to practice compassion and to remember what I know to be true. Organizing among and with our homeless neighbors can go a long way toward unlearning some of the propaganda that’s come our way too. In doing mutual aid in New York, primarily with unhoused people, I’ve gotten to meet homeless and formerly homeless people who have allowed me to get to know them. And the propaganda has fallen away in the face of the truth, in the face of people’s struggles and stories.
I need that, I need to view each person, housed or not, as deeply human. If I don’t I risk falling into a trap that both dehumanizes others and dehumanizes myself. Each time any of us fully succumbs to rhetoric and ideas that dehumanize other people, we ourselves lose some bit of our humanity, at least temporarily. We see how that plays out in every colonial project, with the colonizers being increasingly barbaric as they dehumanize the colonized in the name of furthering civilization. But it can happen in more seemingly mundane circumstances too. When I walk by someone living on the street and struggling, closing my heart to them means cutting off my empathy, which I believe is our instinctual response to the suffering of other people. If I instead reach out my hand, extend a kind word, help monetarily, or otherwise embrace the empahty and compassion we natrually exhibit instead of shutting it down, I humanize myself as well as the person I’m interacting with.
This goes far beyond what happens in the human heart — what we permit to happen within us is, in many ways, what becomes permissable in society at large. When we indulge in the dehumanization of others, whether it's to make ourselves feel superior or to avoid questioning the system and blame individuals, we permit society to take a different shape. We see it all around us in the form of hostile architecture right now. One of the more famous examples is New York’s Penn Station, a bustling train station with people coming from Jersey and Long Island and up and down the East Coast. As of 2020, approximately 500,000 passengers passed through there every day. But in 2021 a new and ‘improved’ design was completed and opened to the public. Among the first things people noticed was the absence of seating. The vast majority of the new hall, shiny though it may be, has no chairs, no benches, nowhere to sit but the floor. In the name of discouraging homeless people from spending time there, the new Penn Station is less usable for all of us. This same thing happens with park benches and beneath bridges and in public spaces of all kinds. Society is being reshaped in the wake of the homeless being demonized and dehumanized.
This is what we give up — always so much more than we think — in agreeing to scapegoat, to sacrifice the homeless everyone else gives up public space. An ordinance that says no camping or sleeping in public quickly becomes no loitering in public. Stories are already emerging in the wake of the Grants Pass ruling of random people being told that they cannot sit, cannot eat, cannot exist in public space. Often these people aren’t homeless, but how can they prove that? This ruling furthers the trend, one which is not new, of the privatization of public space and the need to be a consumer to exist out in the world. And this is just one way that abandoning the unhoused hurts us all. Equally significant is that in abandoning those who cannot afford housing we agree to frame shelter as something you must earn, rather than a basic need that we all must be granted in this world. That cannot stand.
What we need, now more than ever, is solidarity across all forms of division. We cannot allow the dehuamnization or that criminalization of homelessness, of poverty, of those struggling to get by in this system, both because it is unjust and because it hurts each and every one of us. Anything that targets struggling individuals instead of the system they struggle under reinforces the oppressive mechanisms of the system and takes us a step further from liberation, from freedom, and from the world we need.
I knew someone once who taught me to always keep cash on me, in case I encounter someone who asks me for money so I can always give them something. That’s stuck with me, and is a simple practice that helps me be available for service at any moment to the unhoused population. Thought I’d share in case that is helpful for any readers here!
Thank you for continuing to write about this, every point you make is so correct, especially "the privatization of public space and the need to be a consumer to exist out in the world". As a liberal who lives in California, my disgust for Newsom increases day by day. Don't even get me started on the fascist Supreme Court. Criminalizing and punishing people experiencing poverty and homelessness in a system who actively creates these issues is just next level evil.