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Keep in mind that the man who first made his reputation -- The Apprentice aside -- and his fortune as a real estate developer has remarkably few plans to develop anything (housing included) that would help most Americans. Count on one thing, though: he'll continue the major tax cuts he passed in his first term for -- of course! -- the distinctly more than well-to-do, while he has his eye on freeing Wall Street from further financial regulation. No surprise there. And this in a country where, as TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe (author of the new memoir Trash: A Poor White Journey) suggest today, housing space of every sort is desperately needed and the unhoused are both growing in numbers and about to suffer ever more painful fates. (That's thanks, at least in significant part, to the recent decision of the six conservative Supreme Court justices in Grants Pass v. Johnson essentially making it a crime to simply sleep outside when you have no place else to go.)
In that context, give Kamala Harris some credit, since she's put a spotlight on this country's housing crisis -- and yes, there is one! -- and is talking about acting to "end America's housing shortage" by pouring government money into new housing in a country where the median home price now tops $400,000. She hopes to spur the construction of at least three million new homes, while offering some genuine help in buying (or renting) that housing at reasonable prices (even if not ones most of the homeless in this country could possibly afford).
Talk about a nightmare and a half, just check out Theoharis and Monroe today on the ever more horrifying homeless crisis in this country, which few politicians of any party care to truly face, and what to make of it. Tom
Where Can We Live?
The Homeless Crisis in America
By Cedar Monroe and Liz Theoharis
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, 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, including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city's case. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted 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 that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly kills 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, 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 of mostly 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 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.
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