The Re-Invention of Homeless Advocacy

People often ask what drew me to homelessness. My first involvement was as a student in 1984. Mitch Snyder’s Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) was engaged in a life and death fight in Washington DC to adequately shelter that city’s homeless during a decade where the need for emergency shelter tripled and quadrupled in most American Cities. Thousands of people turned out from around the nation to protest at the Capitol. More than one-hundred were arrested. Ten of us drove there from Amherst to be hosted for three days in DC’s Central Cellblock. Shortly after, the city capitulated to Snyder’s demand for $5 million to make the CCNV shelter for that City’s homeless liveable.

It was the forty-ninth day of Snyder’s fast. The nation’s most famous and militant homeless advocate had lost fifty-seven pounds. When a reporter asked if he was afraid to die, Snyder said “No. It's painful, but I have a greater fear of allowing people to languish like animals, and sometimes I'm afraid I'm not doing enough."

I have been inspired by the moral clarity and extraordinary heroism of those, like Snyder, who have come before me. Those who — in building the civil rights, labor, and poor people’s movements — placed their lives on the line when the cause was just and the situation dire.

The second part of the answer has to do with respect. Over more than two decades of engagement in the survival struggles of the very poor, my regard for those who, each day, place one foot in front of the other to simply keep going in the face of troubles that would break many of us has steadily deepened.

Extreme poverty sucks. Nobody should have to endure the deprivation, loss of identity, and dehumanization that homelessness entails.

And yet, there is another side to this. While most homeless people would be happy as the next person to have a comfortable home with a flat-screen TV, the trivial desires of our consumer culture often become a distant concern. Life is reduced to bare essentials. Humor becomes a survival skill. People become strong or they break.

These are the folks I want to be around. Our brokenness, for me, is a reality to be embraced as part of what it means to be whole. In witnessing and, in my small way, participating in the everyday heroism of those who have nothing, I have grown more than I can measure.

This, for me, is an enormous privilege. My activism doesn’t flow from a sense of charity. It springs from a deep respect for the struggles of the poor and a sure knowledge that, in pursuing this work, I gain far more than I surrender.

Beyond inspiration and respect, my commitment flows from a deep, systemic, appreciation for what mass homelessness in the midst of extreme affluence means. The economic restructuring of globalization has brought thirty-five years of growing inequality. This widening of polar extremes will only deepen. If one wants to understand where this leads, they need only look to the horror show of the urban mega-slums of the southern hemisphere.

Mass homelessness grows out of an economic system that blithely accepts the abandonment of the most vulnerable. Anyone who’s paying attention knows that multiple systems are deeply and profoundly broken. Homelessness, however, is often defined as a matter of broken people; not as evidence of a broken system in which some of us are regarded as “less than.”

This, finally, leads to an intolerable acceptance of the logic of dehumanization, and this, I believe, is the core issue of our time. We have come to accept the existence of a large and growing class of throwaway people. The homeless, too often, are defined as an expensive, dirty, and inconvenient problem to be managed. One in ninety-nine Americans has disappeared behind bars to exist as the out-of-sight and out-of-mind casualties of an economic system that has embraced human expendability.

In the face of this, homeless advocacy is in dire need of re-invention.

• To regard homelessness as a largely depoliticized social services issue — divorced in practice from the realities of growing poverty and inequality — is to fight an unending rear-guard action in an ever-expanding theater of war on the poor.
• To engage in forms of advocacy that privilege inside politics and value narrowly technocratic forms of expertise over movement building is to miss the point: this is about power. If we’re not building power, we’re not even in the game.
• To treat opposing the dehumanization and criminalization of the very poor as a leftist distraction from the more important work of “ending homelessness” is to collaborate in the inhuman oppression of the least among us.
• To narrowly pursue the empowerment of a handful of homeless people at the expense of building for power across class is to misunderstand our mutual interest in broad system change. Our movement needs to amplify the realities of the street through the respectful power and clout of our allies.
• To organize around “issues” without taking the time and effort to build relationships that value our mutual humanity, life experience, and self-interest is to embrace an empty, bloodless politics that surrenders movement building to short-term expedience.

The Real Change Organizing Project is reinventing homeless advocacy and changing the rules of the game. Our cross-class, relationship-based organizing model reaches beyond the “usual suspects” to engage, involve, and inspire. We have rejected co-opted, bureaucratic, insider strategies for “ending homelessness” to engage in the impassioned business of building for power.

Watch our seven-minute video of our recent Camp4Unity at City Hall. Understand what’s at stake in the fight against homelessness. Get involved and support Real Change’s work however you are able.

Organizing takes resources. Since May Day, we have raised nearly $63,260 toward our critical summer fund drive goal of $85,000. Our capacity to sustain the work we have started depends upon your support to reach our goal. Make a secure on-line gift at our website, or send your tax-deductible gift to Real Change at 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle, WA 98121. We’re counting on your support to reach our goal by June 30th. Thank you.

The Street Years: Part Three

The Davis Square Street Magazine house was a second story apartment in a house where the landlord, Larry, lived downstairs with his wife. She was nice enough, but Larry was a boozer. He soon decided, given the traffic through our apartment, that we must be dealing drugs. It was a tense relationship.

Every few months or so we'd get an issue together. Between Jon's manic-depression and perfectionism, our poverty, and my own chronic distraction, it's a wonder we published at all. Every once in a while though, a truck would come, and we'd get ink all over our fingers as we carried the precious bundles upstairs.

The times of no money continued. I remember standing near a Burger King in the Northeastern University student union. A volunteer was driving me around to drop papers at the distribution points. I was starving. Literally. I smelled the greasy food and longed for a dollar to buy french fries. I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger that year, and knew just how he must have felt.

I would later come to think of this as my boiled potatoes and shoplifted cheese period. Jon was the thief. I'd lost my nerve for that sort of thing by thirteen. He specialized in string cheese and cigarettes, reserving most of his actual money for 12-packs of Rolling Rock. At least we kept the rent paid.

I lived upstairs in a roughly finished attic room across the stairwell from our photographer David, who converted a closet into a darkroom. Jon was downstairs with two of my friends that I knew from college. Doug and Claudia were Central America activists and ran a teeny non-profit called the Student Central America Network. I was hired to run their phone bank.

This was, without question, the most pathetic fund raising operation in the history of half-assed non-profits. We'd cold call from the phonebook, and anyone unfortunate enough to pick up would be treated to an "update." This would begin with the latest atrocity of that blood-soaked time and end with an earnest plea to support student organizing to change U.S. foreign policy.

It's amazing that anyone ever gave us anything. A strong night would bring in around $100. Doug weaved and dodged every time I asked to get paid. The three of us would sometimes visit Al Sais, a friend of Doug's in Cambridge, who would cook a nice dinner and get us high. By this point, eating a real meal was a rare treat.

During one especially desperate week, where I had no money even for bus tokens, Al wrote each of us a check for $100. Mine bounced.

Al Sais would later be fired from his long time job as book keeper for the Central America Solidarity Association in Cambridge. It turned out that at least some of the much discussed string of "FBI break ins" that plagued Old Cambridge Baptist Church during the sanctuary movement were really just Al covering his tracks.

Doug eventually skipped out on his rent and we confiscated his guitar and amp in retaliation. Jon got good at surfer licks, and could slay me every time with his cover of Sargent Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Berets. The irony thing was very in.

By then, my focus was turning more and more toward homelessness. It was 1988, and Bennett and Harrison's The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America offered a framework for understanding the incredible growth in visible poverty that occurred over that decade. Homelessness in American cities had tripled or quadrupled, and a politicized grassroots movement had arisen along with a still nascent sheltering industry.

Boston's Kip Tiernan was running around quoting Walter Bruggeman, talking liberation theology, and asking qui bono? "Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency," she would say. A bag lady doll went on the market and Kip went ballistic. I found this irresistible.

A few years before, a chapter of the Union of the Homeless was founded in Boston. While there were a few radicals running around acting like this was a real organization, it was clear that there wasn't much there. The happening place was First Church Cambridge, where Jim Stewart and Stuart Guernsey were leading the direct action revolution.

Jim was a cynical divinity school grad who dressed in black, wore James Joyce glasses, and read Adorno and Horkheimer. He was a CD junkie, and ran a small shelter in the church basement. Guernsey was a soft-spoken southern minister who'd somehow come north to run another small shelter in Dorchester. They acted as Northeast lieutenants for Mitch Snyder, and would regularly go on some sort of extreme fast in solidarity with their hero.

Around them were a mixture of politicized homeless people, church folk, and shelter line staff who were down for the revolution. I found myself in the First Church function room more and more often, drawn in by the drama and the people. At the conclusion of every meeting, Guernsey would offer a little benediction. After awhile, Jim took pity and gave me a job doing overnights.

The summer of 1988 brought the CCNV's "Take off the Boards" demonstrations. Mitch Snyder had a genius for mobilizing coordinated direct-action events that kept homelessness in the papers and turned up the heat for action. Take off the Boards was a week of housing takeovers in cities throughout the east coast. There was a boarded up house in Boston's South End that Jim and Stuart chose as a target. A group of around 60 met up at Boston's City Hall for a brief rally, and marched toward our destination.

"What do we want?"
"Housing"
"When do we want it!"
"NOW!!"

This chant would be good for at least another 20 years. My favorite variation would come at the 1989 Housing Now! march more than a year later. My Boston affinity group came up with "Hey you's guys! How's about a house!"

Much better.

Only a few leaders actually knew where the house was. We came to a stop at a boarded-up Victorian, and a half dozen guys raced up the steps with crowbars to pry at the plywood. An advance contingent was to have taken care of this. They were there and inside, but hadn't managed to loosen the nails.

Within a minute there were about ten cop cars on the street and a couple of horses. These were Boston cops. They don't fuck around.

The plywood came off just as the police swarmed the house. The crowd lost it as cops started throwing bodies down the stairs. No one was prepared for a police riot, and things escalated within seconds to full-on pandemonium, which only made the police more aggressive. They pushed us back to the street, and then to the sidewalk on the other side.

I was stalking back and forth on the street and sidewalk, alternately screaming chants and yelling at cops. I saw one near by catch another's eye, point to me, and say, "him." They closed in.

For me, nothing brings on hyper-focus and a sense of calm like the prospect of getting my ass kicked. I locked eyes with the lead cop, raised my hands loosely over my shoulders, and slowly backed away.

Suddenly, they turned and ran. My scrawny hippy ass was saved by dumb luck and distraction.

The media had arrived, and several cameras were trained on a police horse as it trotted straight down a crowded sidewalk to bowl over a septuagenarian former nun. The cops seemed to know this was the end. The de-escalation was immediate. An ambulance arrived, and she was taken away for treatment of minor injuries. A few arrests were made, but most of us just huddled for awhile in small groups and walked away.

The story played the same way in nearly all of the media. Peaceful protest turns violent. The violence was blamed on the cops, and the TV stations found their footage of the horse running over the old lady irresistible.

This, I decided, was the revolution I was looking for. I'd found my people.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two
The Street Years: Part Three

What Would Mitch Do?

On July 5, 1990, I was holding together a homeless protest encampment at Boston's Federal Building when I got the news that Mitch Snyder had hung himself in his CCNV shelter.

Just six years earlier, in 1984, I'd met Snyder for the first time. About ten of us drove a van from Amherst, MA to Washington, DC to get arrested during the culmination of CCNV's Harvest of Shame campaign. Snyder took his 51-day fast right to the brink and, with the help of people like us who had been mobilized to put our bodies on the line, won the building that would become the massive CCNV shelter.

Our affinity group refused to post bail for ourselves and spent three days in DC Central Cell Block on a diet of baloney sandwiches, donuts, and coffee before a judge dismissed our charges.

After college, I found my way into homeless activism through various encampments and other direct action style protests. By 1990, I'd walked across Massachusetts in a homeless march, organized buses to two Housing Now! mobilizations, and participated in a street brawl with Boston cops during a CCNV-inspired "Tear Down The Boards" housing takeover. I'd mastered the logistics of street feeds, makeshift encampments, and security.

Mitch Snyder, for all his P.T. Barnum qualities, knew how to get people to put their bodies on the line for a cause that mattered. He understood the dynamics of movement building. While Snyder was often accused of being too simplistic, in his hands this was a virtue. Homelessness wasn't a specialized social services issue. It was an unacceptable moral travesty of radical inequality in a land of plenty. His was an accessible language of outrage that asked for your commitment.

I remember that 4th of July weekend encampment for many things. Robert, a cross-dressing homeless Vietnam vet, insisted on doing security. I was sure he was going to get his ass kicked. As it turned out, nobody cared. Robert had a gentle air of authority, even while wearing hot pants and a halter.

There was also a hard drinking wheelchair-bound Marxist who lived in poverty about a block away and kept dropping in. He had a way of talking in camp meetings that fired people up. I thought he might develop into a leader but he turned out to be too far gone. There were a few good hours of vodka equilibrium — when he found his optimal balance between the shakes and oblivion — but his window of effectiveness was just too narrow.

But mostly, I remember that camp and the news of Mitch's suicide as the symbolic end of an era. The 1989 Housing Now! movement had failed to cohere and maintain momentum, and had dissolved into infighting among national groups over leadership and tactics. Meanwhile, homelessness was still growing, and the phrase "compassion fatigue" started to be heard for the first time.

There was a moment when the movement against homelessness could have combined direct services sophistication with direct action militancy, but instead, our moral outrage turned into complacency. As a movement, we lost our nerve.

A week or two after his death, we held a memorial across the street from the Boston Common at Park Street Church. There were all the predictable eulogies and reminiscences of poignant or revealing moments. Then my friend Lisa Kuneman — a line-worker at Pine Street Inn and an activist with our Homes not Bombs group — walked up to the pulpit.

She broke down as she talked about how much we needed Mitch, and how angry she was that he’d done something so selfish. Hers is the only speech I remember. She was right. She still is.

But I'm not angry at Mitch Snyder anymore. I'm mad at the rest of us.

Tonight I see that the Port Authority is hell bent on demolishing 162 apartments for low-income families in Burien, thus canceling out much of the progress that's been made in recent years to increase affordable housing stock in King County. It's the latest in a long line of outrages.

I wonder what Mitch would do?