The Betrayal of Christ

Somewhere along the last few weeks, the Ten Year Plan paradigm for ending homelessness sort of fell apart for me. The resources aren't there, and we don't live in some static bizarro world where 600 units of low-income housing means 600 more needy people housed, pure and simple.

We're being told that we've got homelessness on the run, and that it's not about poverty or inequality. Not really. It's about fucked-up dysfunctional people, and charity. It's about those who are the biggest drain on society. And our spiritual obligation to help the needy.

Apparently, the Bush administration gives a crap about these poor people, mainly because they cost so much. Most other poor people are pretty much on their own.

Homeless families, kids, and working-poor homeless have disappeared. The rural homeless are gone. No one sees them anymore.

There has been an odd convergence of focus on chronic homelessness and increased surveillance and repression of street homeless. Cities are passing tougher laws and exploring new strategies to aggressively encourage some people to go away.

It's all about getting them off the street, one way or another.

We've come to accept that homelessness is a technical and complicated issue, and few non-professionals can even understand it. And to half-believe that it's not about power.

It feels like we're in one of those creative moments where homeless advocacy needs to be re-invented and reunited with poverty — and everyone knows it — and we're not really sure what's next. But a lot of people are talking, and something is happening.

Some people maybe in Kansas might think the Bush administration is ending homelessness, but nobody here does. So what now?

Our very own Anitra Freeman gave the keynote last week at the State Coalition for the Homeless conference, opposite Nan Roman. She kicked ass.

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.

Ending Homelessness, Reconsidered

As our Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness nears the end of its second year, many of us feel a great need to reassess. While the rhetoric of no longer managing homelessness — of working instead toward its demise — is enormously attractive, there is great fear that the federal strategy may be a diversion from the real issues.

Here in Seattle, the Plan has clearly created additional support for housing and services at all levels of government. While many fear that this commitment comes at the expense of support for emergency shelter, what we've seen so far looks mostly like progress.

Here’s the problem. Local resources are finite, and the issue is national. While Democrats have more power in D.C. now than has been the case for 12 years, the reality there is complicated, and action on housing can be measured in baby steps.

This means, basically, that all progress is local. In the absence of a strong grassroots lobby for increased housing and services for the poor, further gains in support are likely to stall with the next economic downturn.

This is the problem with policies that are driven from the top. At some point, people turn around, and no one is behind them.

A United Way King County poll reveals homelessness to be the number three concern of local residents, behind schools and traffic. This is good. Too bad nobody’s organizing them.

Missing the point
Real solutions to homelessness begin with true recognition of the causes.

Over the late-70s and the 80s, the numbers of homeless people across America tripled and quadrupled. In the last decade alone, despite Seattle’s strong commitment to putting people first, we’ve seen the local numbers double.

Globalization and other changes in the economy made large numbers of people who lack technical skills superfluous to the workforce. Wages declined, along with the bargaining power of labor.

A variety of policies turned housing into a speculative commodity that more and more of us can no longer afford. Meanwhile, the Federal government spends three times as much on housing-related tax breaks for homeowners as is does on Section 8 vouchers and public housing combined.

Finally, the policy of bankrupting government with a permanent war economy and tax breaks to the wealthy has been very effective in undermining whatever will exists to mitigate the harsh realities of the marketplace. The “safety net” is in shreds, and more so all the time.

And this has become normal. Homelessness and poverty in America is allowed to exist because we have been convinced that poor people are responsible for their own degradation. They are seen as lazy, irresponsible, dangerous, and undeserving. And that lets us off the hook.

Given this, the fact that few people seem keen on welcoming the poor and homeless as their neighbors should surprise no one.

Yet, weirdly, our discussion takes place mostly within the parameters that have been deemed acceptable to the Bush administration. This, perhaps, is Philip Mangano’s greatest achievement. The colossal failure of moral and political imagination that is federal housing policy has been successfully reframed as a local issue.

Homelessness has been demoted, and is no longer discussed as an issue of social and economic justice. It is merely a matter of technocratic legerdemain.

Toward a Reality-based Solution
There are many parts of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness that are easy to support. The needs of many homeless people are more humanely and cost-effectively met by housing with services than through a patchwork of shelters, jails, and emergency rooms. This is an old idea that has fresh currency, and broad political backing.

Additionally, we need to stop the use of shelters as a convenient dumping ground for every other system: hospital recovery rooms, jails and prisons, foster care, and mental health systems. It will take resources to fix what’s broken there, but we need to start.

We can all get behind these priorities, but we must go beyond them as well. We can create the space for a broader vision of what is possible as we build grassroots support for these goals.

We need to find the courage and clarity of vision to organize for deeper solutions.

Meanwhile, the criminalization of behaviors associated with extreme poverty — panhandling, sleeping and eating outdoors, public urination — is on the upswing. So is homelessness.