In the last several years, the total rate of those lacking safe, clean,
and stable shelter in the United States has increased by double-digitpercentages year-over-year. This 'crisis', as it is often called, is an
increasingly extreme manifestation of the degradations built-in to the
structures of a capitalist housing market maintained and protected by
the state. ---- The state has shown itself unable and unwilling to
muster the resources necessary to confront the growing scale of human
degradation and misery on the housing front. Instead, at the behest of
the real estate, land owning, and landlord interests it is ultimately
beholden to, the state is mobilizing its punitive and carceral
capacities to 'deal' with this issue.
As Neil B. argues in this analysis of one area in the housing
conjuncture, anything resembling a humane social response to this crisis
will require fighting social movements to wrench concessions from the
state. Without independent combative movements applying pressure through
direct action, the state and the various fractions of the capitalist
class that hold sway over it will reach first for police, violence, and
prisons to 'solve' social problems.
by Neil B.
For those of us who have been working and organizing with unhoused
communities for a long time, the Supreme Court's recent decision in City
of Grants Pass v. Johnson came as little surprise. The much anticipated
decision ruled that, contrary to the findings in a 2018 ruling by the
9th Circuit Court of Appeals, fining and criminalizing sleeping in
public is not a violation of the 8th Amendment's clause against cruel
and unusual punishment. While cities and states across the country have
been finding ways to criminalize poverty anyway, this ruling effectively
gave them a green light to open the floodgates.
The 2018 ruling by the 9th Circuit did not start the housing crisis, nor
did it really stop cities from punishing unhoused people. What it did do
was give them a perfect scapegoat. Los Angeles City Council, for
instance, passed 41.18, its flagship ordinance that bans sitting, lying
and sleeping in August of 2022. This ordinance had not just been
declared unconstitutional twice before, it had been declared
unconstitutional by the 2018 9th Circuit ruling. In short, the city of
LA was making sleeping outside illegal just after the worst peak of
deaths in the COVID pandemic, and at the same time blaming the increase
in visible homelessness on the 9th Circuit and blatantly flouting their
decision. Rather than encouraging cities to declare housing a human
right and create socialized housing for everyone, municipal lawmakers
simply chose to get creative about the ways they punished unhoused people.
Still, as is obvious to everyone, the crisis has only gotten worse.
In addition to blaming the 9th Circuit, people blamed the "soft on
crime" policies of Democrats, others pointed to addiction, bad choices
and mental health issues as the reason why people wind up on the street.
However, housed people have addiction issues, make bad choices, and
suffer from debilitating mental illnesses yet often don't wind up on the
street, and oftentimes people develop both mental health issues and
addiction problems because they are on the street.
The reality is this situation is getting worse because the overwhelming
crises of capitalism have made life precarious and untenable for many,
many people. Landlords need to charge more and more to pay mortgages or
keep up with insurance costs, and bosses need to pay less and less or
risk going out of business. It's a vice grip, squeezing many beyond
their breaking point. The gap between rhetoric and reality, whether the
willful misrepresentation on the part of frustrated government officials
who are sick and tired of getting phone calls from angry 'not in my back
yard' (NIMBY) groups or the sincere ignorance of people too burdened by
their own troubles to think critically about the origins of poverty
under capitalist exploitation, will have troubling potential
consequences in the wake of this ruling: if people are under the
impression that the current problem is primarily due to a lack of law
enforcement options, they are going to push for increased carceral
solutions.
We have already seen this in anticipation of the ruling. In California,
since the CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Act went
into effect on January 1st, 2024, the government has been building an
infrastructure of CARE courts. These courts, under the guise of the
insidious euphemism of "care," exist as a tool to force
"service-resistant" unhoused people into mental health treatment, which
can strip them of their autonomy and force them to take "stabilization
medications" against their will. If a person doesn't comply, the court
can force them into conservatorship. We all saw how difficult it was for
Britney Spears to get out of her conservatorship - and she's a wealthy,
internationally famous blonde white woman. What do we think is going to
happen to people who are already stigmatized and despised by most people
just on the basis that they are poor in public?
California Governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) participates personally in
the clearing of an encampment in Los Angeles on August 8, 2024.
The most bewildering aspect of this deepening crisis is that
Californians and Angelenos in particular have voted in favor of taxes to
pay for low-income housing. The problem is, 50+ years ago Californians,
and Angelenos in particular panicked in response to the Fair Housing
Act, and in a racist effort to stave off what they feared would be a
rapid influx Latinx families, worked to change city codes to make
multi-family low-income housing extremely difficult to build. Still,
given the general logic and structure of capitalism the idea that
building more housing will somehow bring rents down runs counter to
reality. Banks, which often finance development and hold mortgages on
other properties, aren't going to finance at a rate that would threaten
lowering property values enough to make rent relief through increased
supply truly possible. Landlords aren't going to lower your rent. Put
more simply, no matter how much we build, rent goes up, not down.
Even well-meaning politicians are usually powerless to change this
dynamic. Without a huge mass of people knocking down their doors and
threatening or carrying out disruptive escalation, any effort to impose
a serious rent decrease through city ordinance or law, would meet a
swift and massive backlash from landlords, developers, and banks. As
Black Rose/Rosa Negra states in our Program, the state is the
administrative arm of the capitalist class. It is a tool designed to
work in one direction. As such, their true function is to participate in
the constant cycle of gentrification as the enforcers and janitors-
sweeping up the mess. The state is a hammer constantly in search of a
nail, and over and over again the nails it strikes are "undesirable"
communities: poor, Black, urban, trans, queer, immigrant, brown,
Indigenous, unhoused - whoever the undesirable community they target is,
they have one tool: identify an activity, make it illegal, throw them in
jail.
And why would they stop? Prisons are a big business in the United
States. We have more prisoners than any other country on Earth. Prison
labor, i.e. slave labor, keeps many household-name American companies
profitable. Prisons are one strategy American lawmakers use to
revitalize the economy of communities where their core industry - be it
coal, gas, mining, manufacturing, or something else - has collapsed for
any number of reasons, be it offshoring labor to "developing" countries
that are more easily exploitable, or "greenwashing" industry, or simply
resource depletion. Since prisons are an economic revitalization
strategy, then the administrative class has to find ways to provide a
steady supply of bodies to keep the prison running. Never mind the fact
that, in the case of unhoused people, it would be far cheaper to pay a
person's rent in an apartment than it is to imprison them or force them
into managed "care" via a CARE court. That's because housing people
isn't the point: perpetuating the status quo is. Without a stick to
threaten would-be revolutionaries or troublemakers, it would be much
harder for the state to maintain a steady labor supply for the
capitalist class.
The GEO Group is one of the United States' largest private prison
corporations.
Moreover, lucrative cottage industries within the nonprofit industrial
complex have developed to manage the so-called "homelessness crisis."
There are non-profits who specialize in street medicine that accompany
the sanitation department to sweeps; city departments, like the LA
sanitation department, and others have teams of people trained to clean
and manage encampments; there are Homeless Outreach workers, and
caseworkers, mental health care workers; and city council districts have
homelessness teams. Teams of experts get lucrative consulting fees
giving this opinion or that on how to fix the problem. If we were to
house everyone through a robust socialized housing program, all of these
people would lose their jobs. It is a cruel irony that the organizations
established to help unhoused people need the crisis to survive.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling, circumstances in LA are a
powder keg. Despite the fact that LA's mayor Karen Bass declared a state
of emergency on homelessness, in February the city council ended its
COVID eviction moratorium. In anticipation of this, LA landlords filed
more than 70,000 evictions in 2023. The hypocrisy of calling
homelessness a crisis while processing over 70,000 evictions to go
through is mind boggling. Meanwhile, through the use of 41.18 special
enforcement zones, the city has created a swiss cheese of areas where it
is possible for unhoused people to put their tents. Unfortunately, most
of those are near residential areas where people are particularly
hostile to encampments. Residents call the police and their council
people who then turn around and order sweeps of the encampments. LA city
council is pitting housed and unhoused Angelenos against one another,
while blaming the problem on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Even when people mean well, their reliance on the existing
infrastructure corrupts their intention.
Case in point: the mayor of Los Angeles's core campaign issue was
addressing houselessness. A week after declaring the aforementioned
state of emergency she launched her flagship Inside Safe program;
"building the plane while flying," as she said. Surely, a plane that is
being built while flying is destined to crash, and Inside Safe has been
a monumentally expensive wreck.
In short, Inside Safe uses the city's 41.18 ordinance (colloquially
called the "no sit, sleep, or lie" law) to target particularly unpopular
encampments for removal. They tell participants that entering Inside
Safe is voluntary, but if they don't join they have to move somewhere
else or they will be ticketed daily. If participants agree to go in they
have to give up their tent and all of their belongings beyond what fits
in two duffel bags. They are not told where they are going or for how
long they can expect to be there. They are told they will receive
services like mental health treatment, ID vouchers, help finding
employment, etc. They are also promised entry into permanent housing
within ninety days of entering. Then, they are taken to one of about a
dozen or so roach motels around the city, sometimes within the vicinity
of where they were staying, sometimes not, and left to their own devices.
Anti-sweep demonstration outside of Los Angeles courthouse.
Don't get me wrong; many people are excited to enter Inside Safe because
they believe the mayor's promises. For the vast majority of the people,
though, nothing materializes except prison-like conditions of boredom,
isolation, and increasing hopelessness.
According to a report written by Los Angeles' Abolition Coalition, of
which I am a member through LA Street Care, the Inside Safe program has
spent $341 Million dollars on 1,265 participants across 16 locations
since it began 18 months ago. It has "permanently housed" 539 people,
236 of whom are back on the streets because they could not afford the
$2,200/mo market-rate housing they were assigned after their temporary
subsidies ran out. It has also kicked 842 people out and had 44
participants die with some from overdoses and at least one was murdered.
That is a cost of approximately $126,765.80 per person. If the city
would have just housed them in market rate apartments for those 18
months, they could have paid $7,042.54 per month in rent for each of the
participants for 18 months. More crucially, the city could have taken
that $341 Million dollars and built socialized housing instead. It feels
more and more like housing people is not the point.
In late July, the Rand Corporation published a report that came to the
same basic conclusions our report did: sweeps of encampments do
absolutely nothing to change the number of people sleeping on the
street. They are little more than a cruel game of whack-a-mole. And yet,
the housed NIMBYs keep demanding them, the politicians keep scheduling
them, and the vicious cycle continues.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision Mayor Bass issued a
statement condemning it and saying that the city of LA was going to
continue approaching the problem with compassion. To anyone with their
eyes open the knee-jerk response was "what compassion?" Seven City
Council members and the LA County Board of Supervisors ordered a review
of their legal options in the wake of the ruling. Not to be outdone by
the Supreme Court, Governor Newsom on July 25th ordered the removal of
all encampments in the state of California, though he bewilderingly
claimed it was optional for municipalities to participate.
So long as we continue to rely on the structures of capitalism and the
state for solutions to this and other crises we will remain trapped in
an escalating cycle of management, or better yet, mis-management. As
people continue to push "solutions" and those solutions fail an
increasingly frustrated public is going to demand that the government
find real solutions, and those solutions will lead to more and more use
of force. That is what the Supreme Court gave the green light to.
Things are not all doom and gloom, however. There are reasons for
optimism. In Los Angeles, a network of autonomous organizations have
assembled the Abolition Coalition. Our work uses outreach as a
foundation for community building, but our aims is to fight the city and
politicians head on. Under the banner "Inside Starving," many of these
groups wrote the scathing report on Inside Safe cited above that centers
the experiences of the people impacted by the program. This is part of a
deliberate strategy to pressure the city to come up with real solutions
by getting real, reliable information directly from the people who are
most impacted. And we have seen some early results. We managed to get a
meeting with the Mayor wherein we made a simple request: put in writing
what services the participants can expect, and where they are going.
Though she refused, our resolve only deepened.
One of the encampments we worked very closely with, the Juanita
encampment, was brought into an Inside Safe location. While there they
organized themselves as Housing for Juanita. They held a press
conference and demanded the dignified treatment they deserved. The city
retaliated by making it impossible for anyone from the broader community
to enter the location.
Another group associated with the Abolition Coalition, Aetna Street
Solidarity, was a long-standing, highly organized encampment that
created a thriving community. It partnered with the UCLA Luskin School
of Public Affairs to create various educational and practical projects
aimed at reframing public space and life in a way that includes unhoused
people in the broader concept of "community." Though they were targeted
for removal and swept, the community has remained strong and continues
to fight the city's cruel and repressive policies.
During the pandemic, several people moved into homes that the California
Department of Transportation bought through eminent domain decades ago
when they proposed an expansion of the 710 freeway. After the proposal
was defeated by the community, the houses sat empty. When faced with
losing their homes, these folks decided to take matters into their own
hands and moved into the abandoned houses. They call themselves the
Reclaimers, and they have been fighting the city and state to stay in
these homes for years. So far, they have raised the money they need to
buy the homes, and have so far staved off eviction as their cases wind
their ways through the courts.
Over the last 15 years we have repeatedly seen the rise of mass protests
mobilized over pressing problems like Wall Street corruption, racist
police violence, and bodily autonomy, growing larger and more frequent
over time. The overlapping crises the United States finds itself in are
beginning to tear apart the seams of what has been one of the most
disastrous empires in human history. This is not to say that we are as
organized as we need to be-we are not-but we have ample opportunity to
continue to push against institutional weak points, growing the capacity
to initiate a social revolution to produce a reorganized society that
actually centers human needs, and the needs of all life on the planet.
The Grants Pass ruling offers plenty of opportunities to connect
struggles - over pay, cost of living, policing, and more. This is an
issue for housed people as well, after all. History teaches us that the
violence the state imposes on the most marginalized will eventually be
imposed on us all - unless we organize and fight to stop them.
For a first hand account of what the reality on the ground will be in
the wake of the Grant's Pass, check out Birdie, an unhoused Angeleno,
telling his story here.
https://x.com/lastreetcare/status/1820845914329882812
If you enjoyed this article, we recommend our national scale
conjunctural analysis, published in the 2023 edition of our
organization's program Turning the Tide.
https://blackrosefed.org/grants-pass-and-the-carceral-conjuncture/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten