The current insatiable appetite to see homeless people disappear from our parks, streets, business districts and tourist areas requires us all to go back to one of the very first lessons we are taught as infants.
Just because you can no longer see it, doesn’t mean it no longer exists. Think of this the next time you play peek-a-boo with a toddler. Now you see the homeless.
Now you don’t. But either way, we’re still here. Peek-a-boo!!
From Los Angeles to Seattle, the clear trend is toward growing inequality and heightened repression of people who are poor. In L.A., homeless people are routinely arrested and jailed for such poverty crimes as camping and sleeping on the sidewalk. In San Francisco, Portland, and Berkeley, sweeps of homeless encampments have become routine, where people lose their meager belongings and sometimes end up in jail. In Seattle, where low-income housing development has been trumped by runaway gentrification, city government is about to codify the confiscation and disposal of homeless people’s last possessions.
When city governments do this, we often hear the phrase, “This is not about homelessness. It’s about the parks.” While this phrase is a great tagline, it is also blatantly untrue. Sweeps, police outreach teams, and the busting up of encampments along I-5 from Lake Union in Seattle to China Basin in San Francisco has everything to do with homelessness!
Our parks, our freeway underpasses, and our streets have been around a hell of a lot longer than the very recent advent of closing, fencing, and privatizing them has. In fact, a direct correlation can be made between the massive increases in homelessness in the early 1980’s and the park closures, police programs with both old and new vagrancy laws, and the fencing off of open space.
Prior to the federal cuts to affordable housing programs — from $83 billion in 1978 to $18 billion in 1983 — contemporary homelessness did not exist. Public parks were open for stargazing (and necking) and panhandling was around but not that big a deal. After the housing cuts, Disney moves into Times Square and Union Square, million-dollar lofts are built on Skid Rows, the parks are all closed at night, and practically every storefront has a “no trespassing” sign in its window. For homeless people, the end result is that most everything other than walking and breathing can get you a ticket, which then lands you in jail.
We need to rediscover what we learned when we were infants: People still exist even if we don’t see them. It’s called object permanence. Maybe if we remembered this lesson, we would choose to do something about the increasing number of families and individuals living without housing in the United States and begin to refund affordable
housing programs. Maybe we could find a unified community voice for restoring public money for mental health care instead of constantly reading about the potential dangers those scary, crazy homeless people impose on the rest of us.
When local government is allowed to play peek-a-boo with people’s lives, when it is given the authority to make people disappear, the result is inevitable. Incarceration.
After all, removing people’s presence from society pretty much requires
that you put them somewhere.
As the federal and state governments abandoned all pretense of responsibility
for the health and housing needs of people who may be poor and/or disabled, local governments increasingly turned to laws and policing programs to mitigate the damage.
In response, jails are overflowing and Municipal Courts have established “special courts” along social, as opposed to criminal, lines. Drug courts, mental health courts, and homeless or community
courts are all, at their core, manifestations
of a criminal justice system overwhelmed by a society that attempts to rid itself of poor people rather than attempting to rid itself of poverty.
Just as sweeping dirt under the rug doesn’t really clean the floor, sweeping disabled and homeless people from public view or into jail doesn’t really address homelessness. They are still disabled and homeless when they are released. It is ineffective as hell, but local governments keep sweeping and we keep letting them.
It has been 25 years since the re-emergence of massive homelessness in America.
It is time we stop trying to recreate Jim Crow and start trying to recreate the New Deal. After all, the New Deal didn’t build prisons. It created jobs building hospitals, schools, and homes. |
