Add to that something else: this eviction crisis is happening at a moment when there's already an existing population of 8 to 11 million homeless Americans who have only been thrown into a deeper set of crises during this seemingly never-ending pandemic. Although some homeless families received relief during the pandemic, homeless assistance funding was based on a count of only half a million homeless Americans and so, was woefully inadequate. Worse yet, sweeps and evictions of homeless encampments continued even during this crisis, while the limited protections won by housing activists including, in some places, hotel rooms for those previously living on the street or in shelters have, in many cases, been rolled back.
To put the eviction moratorium in perspective: Initially, it was instituted as part of the CARES Act that Congress passed in March 2020. Although limited in its reach and scope, it did indeed protect hundreds of thousands of people from homelessness at a moment when, in some places, landlords were flocking to eviction court in the middle of a pandemic to get rid of tenants. The CARES moratorium expired in July 2020. That September, in the absence of any further Congressional action, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stepped in to extend the moratorium to December 31st as a public-health measure to prevent an even greater spread of the virus. Then, in January of this year, the moratorium was extended by the new Congress until July when the CDC again intervened to extend it through October 3rd at least in areas where pandemic cases were high.
Many are familiar with the stand Congresswoman Cori Bush took in early August when the congressional moratorium expired. As someone who had experienced homelessness herself, she camped out on the steps of the Capitol to call attention to the looming housing disaster. Her actions, combined with powerful organizing by grassroots groups, called attention to the eviction crisis, but more is now needed.
The average household debt burden has only grown during the pandemic and no legislative action has been taken to relieve such a rent or housing crisis. The stimulus payments, unemployment insurance, and an expanded child tax credit were simply not enough. As a result, more than 10 million households are now estimated to be behind on their rent. Rather than bailing out renters and homeowners by canceling such debts or even efficiently distributing the $45 billion in rental assistance that has largely languished in a bureaucratic hell, Congress failed to extend the eviction moratorium, paving the way for disaster.
Homeless, Not Helpless
Over more than 40 years, while a crisis of homelessness has exploded, a narrative has been popularized that sees it largely through stereotypes. For a wealthy elite that's advanced a generation of neoliberal reforms, it's been critical to cast homelessness in this way as an aberration on the margins of an otherwise healthy society, rather than as a startlingly visible indictment of a political and economic order in which homelessness and poverty are at the very core of society.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, major structural shifts in the global economy were accompanied by deep tax cuts, the deregulation of banking and the financial markets, the privatization of public utilities and services, and anti-labor measures. In the midst of all this, homelessness grew, as the government demolished public housing while investing in private urban development projects that fueled gentrification and pushed poor families from their homes.
Up from the streets and out of the shelters, poor and homeless people began organizing themselves into communities of mutual-aid and solidarity. In just a few years, the National Union of the Homeless (NUH) broke into the national narrative, challenging the prevailing notion that its members were poor and homeless because of bad personal decisions and moral failures in their family lives. Instead, they targeted the systems and structures that produced their poverty.
Recently, images of the flooding of Tompkins Square Park when what was left of Hurricane Ida hit downtown New York City received significant attention. Over the summer, the number of homeless people living in that park increased strikingly and neighbors began organizing mutual-aid projects to help the unhoused. Such conditions and projects of survival connect this particular moment to the past specifically to a time decades ago when homeless and formerly homeless organizers from Tompkins Square first helped form the National Union of the Homeless. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH would organize 25 chapters in cities across the United States representing thousands of homeless people. Its slogans then included "Tompkins Square Everywhere," "No housing, no peace," and "You only get what you're organized to take" and they still resonate today.
The NUH was known for coordinating housing takeovers: those lacking housing moved into abandoned, government-owned dwellings in a politicized and organized way. The spectacle of homeless people directly challenging public property in the name of survival was striking. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold actions resulted in the union winning the right of the homeless to vote, setting up housing programs run by the un-housed themselves in nearly a dozen cities, and so shifting the national narrative on poverty and homelessness.
In the midst of the present pandemic and the eviction crisis that now goes with it, the National Union of the Homeless is taking to the streets again. Indeed, its leaders know that it will take the concerted action of the poor and dispossessed continually putting pressure on the powers that be for the legislature and courts to do what's right.
After all, history shows that social transformation happens when those most impacted by injustice band together with people from all walks of life and build the political will to push through change. Perhaps this is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, "Public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish almost everything. Without it, practically nothing." It's what the Reverend Martin Luther King emphasized in 1968 shortly before his death. "Power for poor people," he said, "will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no."
How Congress Must Act
I started working with the National Union of the Homeless and other organizations led by the poor in the early 1990s. It was about the time that spell check became commonplace on personal computers. I remember then writing papers and articles on homelessness, which was growing rapidly at the time. But as the word wasn't yet in the spell-check dictionary, my computer tried endlessly to correct me. One reason for that: economic homelessness people being downsized from their jobs or paid too little to pay their rent was then a relatively new phenomenon in this country. In the last three decades, however, it's grown so commonplace that most of us consider it both age-old and inevitable.
So, it's worth saying what should be but isn't obvious: that poverty, eviction, and homelessness are not eternal, that life truly does not have to be this way. Although in the recent eviction-moratorium debacle the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House have all tried to shift the blame elsewhere, solutions do exist to address deep-seated, as well as emergency-induced, poverty and deprivation. After all, the very existence of a moratorium on evictions proves that ending them is possible.
The Supreme Court rationalized its decision by claiming that the CDC had overstepped its authority and that it was up to Congress to resolve the eviction crisis through legislative action. In its majority opinion, the judges highlighted the "irreparable harm" suffered not by the poor but by the association of realtors that brought the case. They wrote, "As harm to the [realtor's association] has increased, the Government's interests [in maintaining the moratorium] have decreased."
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