Valentines Day, Boston, 1987

I recently came across this transcript of a Union of the Homeless speak-out in front of Boston City Hall on February 14, 1987. During my visit to Boston last November, Jim Stewart at First Church Shelter in Cambridge let me go through his files to see what history I could find. There wasn't much, but this made it worthwhile. The last time I'd laid hands on these speeches was more than fifteen years prior, and it was a bit of a thrill to find another copy.

As homelessness tripled and quadrupled in American cities over the 80s, the Union of the Homeless formed as the militant voice of the new dispossessed. They aggressively asserted the principle that homeless people needed to be in charge of their own movement and were briefly a presence in Boston. By the time I was working as a homeless organizer, the Union wasn't much more than their president Savina Martin, pictured above, and a handful of others. A few years later, the Union had pretty much flamed out entirely.

The transcript of homeless people haranguing a panel of their supporters was produced by Jill Nelson, the millionaire lawyer with Communist Labor Party connections who was founder and President of National Jobs with Peace. I've discussed the CLP's role in the Union elsewhere. Dan Satinsky, who pipes up toward the middle to give the background on the Union and praise their militancy, is a friend of Jill's and, I think, a lawyer as well. Mel King, who aptly quotes Frederick Douglas and is the only panelist identified, is a legendary Boston community organizer who even by then was a revered griot cum elder statesman of the Boston left. The photo here is of me introducing King to another activist I no longer remember at a 1989 Jobs with Peace event.

The Union of the Homeless had demanded that the City deed a house to them for use as an organizing center. The Flynn administration was smart enough to not say no, but they never really said yes either. This 1986 article from the New York Times gives the back story. Much of the testimony of the more than twenty homeless who spoke focused on their demands for the house and their frustration with the City's dilatory tactics.

Needless to say, they never got the house.

Homefront 88, the roving self-managed encampment that formed a year later. would make a house their central demand as well, and were managed just as deftly.

As I read the transcript, the pain of those who have lost so much, if they ever had anything in the first place, comes across loud and clear, but the downside of the identity politics that the Union of the Homeless adopted comes across just as strongly. The blustery rhetoric had little to back it up in terms of organized power, and the city knew it. The Union treated its allies like the enemy even as they sought their support. Homeless pride flips over to become a defensive shield, and some speeches inspire less than complete sympathy.

Yet, their militancy, if things had gone differently, could have lit a fire underneath the whole top down and often co-opted homeless advocacy movement. If their closest allies hadn't chosen to park their common sense at the door of "homeless empowerment," and had offered real resources and authentic partnership, things would look very different now.

Now, the boarded up homes they speak of have mostly been renovated or purchased as tear-downs, but the condos kept coming for the next twenty years. Again, you can download the thirteen-page transcript here.

When "Empowerment" Ain't About Power

Tonight I was thinking of all the reasons I moved away from the "homeless empowerment" model of organizing that prizes homeless leadership above all other values. Over the late 80s and early 90s, I organized one empowerment project after another, and witnessed numerous other attempts, and time and again the same sorts of things happened.

But the dream died hard. As late as May, 1993, after I had learned the hard way that this sort of organizing doesn't work, I was still insisting to a reporter from the Boston Globe that it did:

Q: Are you still convinced that the homeless have to lead their own political movement?

A: Absolutely. A homeless person speaking for himself or herself is far more compelling than any advocate speaking on their behalf. Because they have a direct interest in seeing that something is done about the housing crisis and about rights in the shelters, they're willing to be more militant than the advocates. The advocates have a vested and institutional interest in maintaining the status quo. For example, at the Statehouse they have to protect their access to politicians. The homeless don't have access to begin with. The only way to organize the homeless into a powerful political force is if they're in charge. Otherwise, they just see it as someone else's show.

What a load of crap. I could spend the next 1,000 words on why this is all ideological drivel. But at this point, it would just bore me to fucking tears, so I won't. The funny thing was that by the time I did this interview, I knew better. It was just that I'd been saying the words for so long, I didn't know how to change.

I'd turned homelessness into an essentialist category, meaning, that this was for me their defining characteristic. It wasn't a crappy thing that happened to people. It was what they were. This isn't a good thing for anyone.

Not surprisingly, the people to whom this appealed were generally those who sensed there was some level of power to be had in the deal. This power usually came at the expense of building broad internal leadership or cultivating allies.

This mistake gets made all the time. It's a natural reaction to want to assert pride and power against dehumanization and social control. But obviously, not every homeless person is honorable and brave and not every advocate is a craven sell-out. And regular people just disappear here altogether.

I'd seen one homeless run organization after another — the Union of the Homeless, Spare Change, The Homeless Civil Rights Project, Homefront 88, the list goes on — fall into the same shortcomings:

• leadership who hold power by creating fear and distrust
• insufficient expertise to build strong, thriving organizations
• stagnant thinking brought about by a reluctance to challenge leaders
• failure to build real alliances or work in coalition with others
• insufficient resources to offer long-term stability
• various vulnerabilities such as addiction undermining organizational stability
  
• entrenched leadership that never develops a real following
• elevation of homelessness into an identity that limits personal growth
• a focus on bogus external enemies to deflect attention from internal problems

I'd like to think that the past thirty years of applying the identity politics rhetoric of various separatist movements to the situation of homeless people has revealed itself as an organizing dead end. But it hasn't. The mistake keeps getting made. It's really time to learn and move on. No one benefits from a romanticized idea of homeless leadership. What we need is leadership, built across class, that doesn't define anyone as "less than" or hold anyone down. That's a pretty good pace to start

Various Communists I Have Known

A few days ago I ran across this 1986 article on the Union of the Homeless and their pressure campaign to get the City of Boston to deed them an abandoned building. The National Union of the Homeless was founded that same year, and claimed 15,000 homeless members. This was, of course, total bullshit, but they had locals in LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, and Boston.

I wasn't around for the Boston campaign, but heard about it when I moved there the next year. The Union of the Homeless had held an organizing conference and claimed to have signed up over a thousand homeless members.

"Membership" meant little more than signing a card, but still, it was an impressive feat. They held a high-profile City Hall speak-out before things fizzled. I would see Boston chapter President Savina Martin at various meetings representing the Union of the Homeless, but there was no evidence she had an organization behind her.

Chris Sprowal, the charismatic President and organizer of the National Union of the homeless, flamed out by the late 80s when his coke addiction went out of control. I didn't know him, but I did get to know Savina. She was a smart, committed, effective leader, but wrestled with similar issues. This was a secret to be kept within the family. She later formed another organization for homeless women, the Women's Institute for New Growth and Support (WINGS). Her habit and the pressures of leadership got the better of her in the end, and the organization collapsed.

The National Union of the Homeless was vehement that only the poor, the homeless in particular, could build a movement of homeless people. It was, perhaps, an inevitable reaction to the dehumanization people often undergo within the emergency shelter system and the condescension of middle-class advocates. Over the 80s, the emergency shelter system tripled and quadrupled in size.

I worked at an organization called Boston Jobs with Peace, which was tucked into a small room in their National Office at 76 Summer Street, about four blocks east of the Boston Common and four blocks north of the "combat zone." My days were spent in organizing homeless people to take various forms of direct action while making connections to federal budget priorities. We excelled at getting in the papers, which made us look much bigger than we actually were.

There was some relationship between JwP, the Communist Labor Party (CLP), and the Union of the Homeless that was very unclear. The CLP had its strength in California and Chicago, and believed that the lumpen-proletariat was the revolutionary vanguard. There was a Boston contingent, and they found me.

I was in my mid-20s, naive, and largely oblivious, and, since their members were only out to various degrees, was never really clear on who was CLP and who was not. I had between two and four of them on my 11 person board.

Their theoretician Bruce Parry, who wrote for the People's Tribune, would always show up at the national conferences with dense papers describing how fallout from increased technology was the core problem poor people faced.

I found an online People's Tribune archive where he calls for 95% taxation on incomes of over $100,000. Amazing.

As Boston Jobs with Peace went into crisis over the problems of homeless empowerment organizing going sideways, the CLP folks formed a bloc. They didn't have enough people to prevail, but they definitely made things a lot harder. When CLP influence on the National became an issue during a nightmare strategic planning process in around 1991, Parry delivered a position paper describing the CLP's role in holding JwP accountable. It wasn't well received.

With the Union of the Homeless, it was equally unclear where the CLP fell on the initiator-supporter-co-opter continuum. You would just notice a lot of the same folks being involved. There was more than 80% overlap in cities with Union of the Homeless chapters and Jobs with Peace chapters. They had a role the National Welfare Rights Union too, which was active in the same cities.

The CLP dissolved in 1993 to eventally reform as the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, which backed Nader in 2000 to their detriment. Apparently there isn't much left.

The NWRU and the Union of the Homeless were pretty much ground zero for the once dominant idea that the anti-poverty movement needs to be exclusively of and by the poor. While this idea has lost some of its shine, it still persists, despite the limited evidence that this movement building model actually works.

Neutralizing Homelessness

Several weeks ago, I posted some thoughts on an article by Columbia University's radical urban planner Peter Marcuse that ran in Christianity and Crisis in 1988. This was an abbreviated version of the influential Neutralizing Homelessness, which was published in Socialist Review in January, 1988. Finding the original took awhile, but the interlibrary copy service eventually came through, and a PDF is now posted here at my streetpaper class wiki.

Given that most people are too lazy to read a 25-page article from a socialist academic journal, however accessible, brilliant, and completely relevant that article might be, even nearly 20 years after its publication (Yes, I am taunting you to read it. DO IT NOW!) I will summarize the highlights.

Marcuse says that the widespread existence of homelessness in a society as affluent as our own is a moral outrage that challenges the legitimacy of the social and economic order itself. Homelessness, therefore, must be ideologically neutralized.

Homeless people, then, are both physically isolated from mainstream daily life and contact, and politically isolated from the larger economic context. We have the odd phenomena, therefore, of talking a great deal about homelessness, while taking no effective action to actually solve the problem.

To address the root causes of homelessness — a profit driven housing system where "those who cannot provide others with profit get no housing," a deindustrialized global economy wherein homeless people are "the surplus of the surplus" within a system based on the existence of surplus people, and a neo-conservative free-market ideology that still insists that supply side economics is in the best interest of all of us — would be, well, revolutionary.

Revolutionaries being in short supply these days, what we get instead are neo-liberal palliatives that do more to mask the problem than to solve it.

I asked my class to consider the Bush administration's advocacy for Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness even as they continue to wage war on the social programs that alleviate poverty as a zen koan: a seemingly absurd, irresolvable dilemma that, considered long enough, may offer a breakthrough to some form of enlightenment.

I feel like I'm finally beginning to understand,

"If government does not deal with homelessness," says Marcuse, "it appears illegitimate and unjust; if it does try seriously to alleviate homelessness, it breaks the link between work and reward that legitimizes wage labor. Neither horn of the dilemma is a comfortable resting place."

Solutions, therefore, are "aimed more at dealing with ordinary (housed) people's reactions to homelessness than with homelessness itself." Again, isolate the problem intellectually. Isolate the people physically.

We've seen all of the techniques Marcuse outlines:

DENY: Find creative ways to low ball the numbers. Narrow the definition so as to exclude. Minimize.

BLAME THE VICTIM: Focus public attention on the most stigmatized members of the homeless (mentally ill, addicted, alcoholic) and place the blame on character defects, as opposed to, oh, structural unemployment and unaffordable housing.

SPECIALIZE: Data and subpopulations. Baffle us with bullshit. Marcuse quotes neo-conservative Thomas Mann saying solutions to homelessness should be in the form of "separate policies for separate subpopulations" rather than focusing on universals such as housing, wages, and access to social services.

ISOLATE: Ghettoizing homeless people outside of mainstream society in shelters and such while criminalizing public displays of extreme poverty with no-sitting ordinances, forbidding public feeding, criminalizing park sleeping, etcetera, all of which are on the rise nationwide.

Sadly, his prescriptive solutions of twenty years ago didn't really take. The militant Union of the Homeless that so inspired him in 1988 pretty much flamed out within a few years. A direct-action based demand for housing mostly ended with the 1990 suicide of Mitch Snyder. The National Coalition for the Homeless, which once carried the torch for a more structural approach to homelessness, is a shadow of its former self, and has been entirely eclipsed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which operates hand in glove with the Bush administration's United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

It's time for homeless advocates, housing activists, and everyone else who is talking so much about ending homelessness these days to seriously re-examine our work. The good news is that expectations have been raised. Everyone's talking about ending homelessness. The bad news is that the strategies we've been offered won't work.

For those of us who are in the game, it's time to seriously up the ante.