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Yves here. It is hard to wrap one’s mind around the insanity and cruelty of the recent Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allows governments to not merely evict the homeless from sleeping places but even fine or incarcerate them. The previous, long-standing precedent of Martin v. Boise had concluded that if a jurisdiction could not provide enough or adequate shelter for the homeless, it could not clear encampments.
Six members of the Supreme Court concluded that persecuting, now prosecuting, the homeless was not cruel or unusual. It’s too bad they can’t be subjected to at least a night of sleeping rough plus one in a shelter. But it’s too late for that now, in terms of the state of the law.
This piece does not consider self-serving/community reasons to want to address, rather than criminalize homelessness, such as preventing the spread of disease (the effect of trying to break up encampments will be the homeless moving about regularly and/or to not well policed or patrolled areas), the fact that further attacks on the homeless via denying them a place to live makes it pretty much impossible for them to work (surveys have found that about 40% are employed), and harms their children even more (how do they go to school if they don’t have even an encampment as a base?)
So the next question is: when will we see Dickensian workhouses?
By Cedar Monroe and Liz Theoharis. Originally published at TomDispatch
In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.
Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace.
Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around Grants Pass v. Johnson, including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city’s case. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused.
One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised, very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom who argued that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly kills 800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous, “Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing the dwellings and communities of the unhoused.
Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the homeless from encampments. In Palm Springs, for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In the state capital of Sacramento, an encampment of mostly disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington, Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing against the erasure of their lives.
Cruel but Not Unusual
However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of seventeenth-century English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have realized. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasants in England lost their rights to land they had lived on and farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often under the supervision of the church.
To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion in the Grants Pass case, seemed incredulous that the lower court ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or gay people, and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered. In addition to such insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since 600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission only had 138 beds.
Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a review of Martin v. Boise. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, revealed in her fiery dissent: the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down, attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they will want to move on down the road.”
The United States of Dispossession
This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very founding of the United States, as the government encountered Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial, they forced them off those very lands. They also subjected generations of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the highest rates of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, 1% of the American population now owns two thirds of the private land in the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!
In Trash: A Poor White Journey (a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for the crime of sleeping outdoors.
The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the French poet and novelist, said so eloquently long ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from occupying space they don’t own.
After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. Even though there are far more empty homes than homeless people (28 for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have been bad for all too many of us.
In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed. While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place. The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that people will just go down the road and essentially disappear — ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.
The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts (required for county funding for homeless services) that identified more than 650,000 homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is, however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved to be 184,865, or eight times the number used for funding services.
A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this country is closer to 8 to 11 million nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the subsequent loss of Covid era benefits, and crippling inflation and housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable possibility.
Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, 45% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land ownership. Afro-Brazilians were given the right to own land for the first time, although many barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and natural owners of the land” were affirmed, although they continue to find themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those rights. And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to fulfill a social function, be productive, and respect labor and environmental rights. The state has the right to expropriate landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must compensate the owner,” according to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute for Social Research.
That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements of landless peasants that had formed an organization called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could even sue for legal tenure. To date, 450,000 families have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics.
If Not Here, Where?
Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking: “Where do we go?” In Aberdeen, Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30 days to leave or face fines and arrests.
Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and tribal nations fight for their sovereignty and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find justice sooner or later.
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I rent an apartment in a SC working class town. My rent has increased 60% in 4 years. I think they’re using AI to fix rents. Adam Bell, an executive at Bonaventure is also the CEO of a telecom company. All tenants must now pay $85 for his ISP, no choice. It’s garbage, nobody wants it. Bonaventure is also saying they’ll not renew leases for those late on rent but will “help” by offering flex loans. People are afraid of going homeless. It’s like a company store racket. Hitting people from all angles. I’ve not seen anything like it, ruthless and predatory. Bullying people who can’t fight back
“It’s like a company store racket…”
Precisely so, unfortunately, and South Carolina has either the lowest or among the lowest private company union membership rates.
South Carolina private company union membership rate in 2023 was a mere 2.3%:
https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab5.htm
I owe my soul to the company store.
If you look at the top ten states for the homeless, except for Alaska, you see they all are blue and largely desirable places to live. (I do not consider Washington particularly desirable but I am not an attorney or lobbyist whose income overrides muggy weather.)
1 DC 94 (all homeless per 10,000 population)
2 New York 47
3 Hawaii 46
4 California 38
5 Oregon 35
6 Washington 29
7 Alaska 26
8 Massachusetts 25
9 Nevada 23
10 Vermont 22
To a large degree the rest of the country has affordable housing. And having lived in Mississippi and Washington DC I can say the weather is just about the same…..hot and sweaty most of the year.
If you look at the homeless population you find that many of them cannot work and have some sort of medical issue be it addiction, emphysema from smoking, hepatitis C with liver failure, HIV, dementia, mental retardation, alcoholism etc. That group is legally defined as medically unemployable and eligible for SSI and Medicare. I happen to be familiar with that group because I now run a facility that takes care of unemployable homeless. For what SS pays (1500 per month more or less) we and many other facilities provide housing, maid service, air conditioning, laundry, medical transportation, a private room, medication administration and Medicare provided psychiatry, podiatry, and general medical care. (SSI comes with Medicare.)
I think a partial solution would be to increase SSI payments to people that go to areas with low housing costs. Perhaps pay 1500 in California but 3000 in Jackson Mississippi or Detroit and develop a mechanism to verify that the recipients are in the area they claim. 3000 per month and Medicare/Medicaid is a comfortable living in Mississippi. In Venice, Santa Monica, San Luis Obispo, Carmel or even Berkeley or Oakland that will not go far.
Another group are those that are working but cannot afford the rents in the area due to low wages. Like many others I am familiar with that as well. I lived in my RV for three years because the rents were too high and I was working in a low wage job. There were many others living along the same road for the same reason. Here we might change the laws and allow people to park RVs and trailers and live in them. Given the fact that owning a vehicle is essential to being able to work in the US we should allow people to live in their vehicles. Government policy has been to subsidize private vehicles and defund public transportation for decades. People prioritizing having a vehicle over a fixed home is a consequence of that policy.
This is all wrong and leads me to disbelieve you and that you do not work with the homeless. And your comment about “blue states” leads me to believe you are a red vs blue person and live in the red mental space.
SSi does not pay $1500 a month.
And you do not automatically get Medicare on SSI. Read that same page. Even if you are disabled, like I am, it takes 25 months to get Medicare. And I have no idea about that magical place you say you run, maybe you can send a link, because I am one of the unemployable homeless and I never saw one of these in my life, and I am sure I would have heard about it. Maid service???!!
And then you think it is a good idea to force people to leave the areas where they probably have family, familiarity, and medical support.
I have been homeless for five years now. No one cares about us, not red, not blue, everyone is greedy. God is dead and they all choose Mammon.
if I am born and raised in a place that becomes to expensive for me to live, it is cruel to create a system that forces me to leave for lack of ability to pay.
The housing crisis is not confined, to those states, neither is the health care crisis – these are nation-wide problems that are more acute in high-income areas (asset price inflation). The basic necessities for human life: housing, health, food, energy are used as a means of extortion and price gouging. Neither the “blue’ team, nor the “red” team have any solutions.
https://nlihc.org/resource/nlihc-releases-out-reach-2024
Fortunately CA Governor Newsom has the answer.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/09/08/california-governor-generative-ai-will-fix-homelessness-based-on-a-2023-sales-pitch/
The tragic humor is written for us, thanks for that – starting the day with laughter is healthy, also the Cheech and Chong clip from mrsyk is classic.
Double that thanks. I imagine we’ll be hearing more “fix it with AI” strategies. I particularly like this bullet point and commentary from the article,
“Find insights and predict key outcomes — like making stuff up off the top of your head, but you can blame the machine if it gets it wrong!”
The “you can blame the machine” part has got legs.
when will we see Dickensian workhouses? My black heart approves. Do privately operated prisons count? Or “military school”? (Cheech and Chong, strong language).
I’m occasionally homeless by choice for stretches of a week, when out backpacking, and it seems to me as if the edict if enforced would force homeless into the wilderness, or at least to towns in the forlorn hinterlands which have given up, it’d be kismet.
What do you do for food in the middle of nowhere though?
The homeless crisis has no doubt been greatly worsened by importing homeless 3d worlders and giving them priority on everything…The Founding Fathers would never have fought a long and bitter revolution if they had seen this abomination coming…
Yeah, the oligarchy suffers so much, while the illegals get everything for free and live a luxurious lifestyle. But then who is going to be the servant class? Who is going to work in the slaughterhouses, work in 100 degree heat to pick fruit and veg. Millions of US citizens are not in good physical health, obese, and too lazy or unable to do hard work. The military can’t find enough recruits, so “illegals” are recruited to give them a “path to citizenship”. And the “illegals” are a great distraction: blame the powerless and worship your overlords. It’s like Medieval times around here where we are told to bow down to the neo-aristocratic oligarchy
Sure, immigration policy needs to be fixed, but the oligarchy need cheap labor, cannon fodder and keep wages low. Neither party, despite the blah blah is going to fix it.
The financialization of the economy, institutional corruption, private equity buying up housing, asset price inflation, have nothing to do with it right?
Given the u.s. propensity for growing the u.s. population with immigrants as many natives and previous immigrants are pushed to the curb, I believe we need an emigration policy to complement our immigration policies.
But this is the great age of Globalism! The u.s. shipped its Industry and jobs far far away to profit its Elites. Just as the u.s. outsourced its Industry, Workhouses could be outsourced to accommodating u.s. controlled Hinterlands. The u.s. government could pour treasury money on contractors building the Workhouses and with the standard side-agreements, much of that money could be funneled back into u.s. politics to assure the growth and expansion of the Workhouse ‘final’ solution to homelessness. As I recall, the Germans even had a fitting epigram they could lend us as a label and trademark for u.s. Workhouses.
There are probably clever ways to adapt a ‘final’ solution to homelessness to also save the u.s. Social security from bankruptcy and obviate the need for Medicare, Medicaid, and other Social Welfare systems. \sarc
Workhouses?! What work? And what will the Prison Industrial Complex do?
More like the same treatment the Israeli settlers are dishing on the West Bank (to start with)…
Around here, we don’t _arrest_ unhoused people, but after the SC decision, the city stepped up its already cruel encampment sweep whack-a-mole, so people get driven out from one vacant lot to another, then driven out again the next day, often with no warning and with police theft of their belongings, including tents and also meds, clothing, food, paperwork, etc. It is an exterminationist logic. Semi- or unconsciously, I think a lot of people hope that these sweeps will actually kill many unhoused people (which does happen).
The constant sweeps also make it harder to help people. Official helpers like social workers can’t find their clients from one day to the next. Mutual aid orgs like mine simply don’t have the money to replace everyone’s everything twice a week. And of course, when people lose paperwork, meds and IDs over and over, it gets harder and harder for them to access what help is available. I’ve also started seeing people who are sleeping on the street with almost no possessions, which says to me that their stuff is getting trashed faster than they can replace it, and this really worries me with winter coming.
The obvious normal thing to do would be to spend the money that now goes on sweeps on housing instead, which would improve everyone’s quality of life. But then the money wouldn’t go to the cops for overtime and the mayor’s crooked developer cronies for fencing off public spaces. (There’s a spot I used to walk by all the time where there’s a bench with a nice little view into a meadow – a great place to pause midway between home and the grocery store, or to stop if you’re out on a walk with little kids. Because from time to time unhoused people camped in that meadow, the whole thing is fenced off. The bench is right by the path, just a step away – behind a six foot wall of chainlink.)
My sense is that probably the majority of unhoused people I meet could manage on their own if they had six months or so of secure housing, meds and food (and ideally sliding scale housing to move into later). A sizeable chunk need more support to deal with addiction, illness and trauma, a smaller percentage will probably always need supported housing and a very small percentage simply don’t want to be housed.
People talk as though somehow encampments are dirty and noisy because unhoused people are willfully making them so, when of course if you cram thirty or forty people into a vacant lot with no running water and no garbage pick-up and make them eat only food that comes in individual servings wrapped in plastic and use only disposable items AND have no place to wash clothes, of course you’re going to have a messy, trash-filled space. Cities are designed for people to live in buildings, not in tents.
It drives me up the wall that we are talking about probably five or six hundred street-level unhoused people in this city, and instead of just converting some small buildings and hotels to triage people into semi-permanent housing, we spend all this time and money chasing them from pillar to post, making things worse. This is such a trivial problem! We can throw money at it and get it about 90% solved! But we’d rather give that money to the cops.
~~
On another note, it is a serious moral injury to everyone to have to walk by unhoused people and ignore them because there’s no help you can provide. I carry some money, extra water and snacks, narcan and some resource information, but there are many times when I have to just walk on by because I simply don’t have the resources to do what is needed. We create a society made up of people who have learned not to help others, and then we’re astonished when things go further off the rails.
I live on the edge of downtown PDX. The West Hills start two blocks to my west, pimpled over with mansions that put “In our America love wins” signs right next to “Protected by XFINITY Home” signs. Don’t take our stuff (cuz we’re good people) meets don’t take our stuff (or tough guys will make your life hell).
Ten blocks to the east where downtown proper starts is the mess you’ve all heard about.
Right in between is my apartment, a five story pile of rubble in the middle of a posh shopping / date night walking district. There’s been a dramatic falloff in business and foot traffic since covid, and a lot of homeless walking through, but only a few have set up camp in the immediate area.
One who has, a tall slender black fellow in his mid-fifties, planted his flag on a wide sidewalk corner where the sidewalk ends at overgrowth. Kept his camp clean, trash always neatly in bags, even had a little barbeque grill (I don’t have one of those). I walk past him on the sidewalk and he looks at me with crazy eyes but never says anything to me. Sometimes I hear him yelling angry things at other people in the distance, I get my pocketknife ready, nothing happens.
Eventually they kick him out, because of course they do. He comes and builds right back same as before. They kick him out again, and salt the earth with giant boulders on the corner. Takes a month, but he moves the bolders, and builds back bigger and prouder than ever. He managed to get a large E-Z up in between the boulders. Big BBQ grill this time. They rip that all down, now he’s back to a tent. Looks like the google street view car has come by recently, you can see one of his later permutations right here:
https://earth.google.com/web/@45.52540869,-122.70041362,61.19089767a,0d,90y,252.54896754h,68.01245179t,0r/data=CgRCAggBIhoKFlRBNnlaa0tuMDJnbTZ1MG9Mall0T2cQAjoDCgEw
You hear that the homeless ranks are filled with people who have given up on life, which is terribly sad, but this is even worse. Here is someone who has definitely *not* given up, a man who clearly has so much fight and pride and stubbornness still in him. And this is the best we can do with someone like that?
I’m old enough to remember when seeing what were called “bums” or even actual hobos was extremely unusual. I grew up working class in urban Milwaukee and spent summers with grandparents in California. The difference in the cityscapes between now and then, in all the places I knew, is stark. It’s an economic distribution issue, at the root. Jobs that pay enough so that people can live a decent life, near family and community they know and trust. It’s a horrific situation. I’ve seen entire families living on the street in California. The only other places I’ve seen that are in very poor parts of large Indian cities.
“Gorsuch…wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered.”
— Cedar Monore and Liz Theoharis
“It’s instructive to have the poor suffering, it helps us to appreciate the fortitude with which others bear cold and hunger.”
— Pecksniff
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
— Anatole France
The government is the main cause of homelessness.
Tax laws make housing in America expensive. The capital gains exemption of $500,000 per couple, $250,000 per individual promotes speculation. The mortgage interest deduction is a giveaway to homeowners as a class. Local zoning rules restrict home construction while the federal government’s open borders policy supercharges housing demand. Taxpayer-funded urban renewal demolishes low cost housing. Loose monetary policy fuels asset appreciation and rising rents. Inadequate banking regulation allows vulture capitalists to prey on renters. Our debt-based monetary system limits the normal business cycle for homes (prices mainly go up). The 2008 Great Financial Crash and subsequent Quantitative Easing (QE) has furthered fueled inflation (the beneficiaries being asset owners, i.e. homeowners). The Federal Reserve stepped in to protect the balance sheets of private banks threatened by credit default swaps, debasing the dollar, to protect the reserve status of the dollar. At the very bottom of this mess of a pile-on is the homeless. Now to criminalize them is itself criminal.
The government is the main cause of homelessness.
Tax laws make housing in America expensive. The capital gains exemption of $500,000 per couple, $250,000 per individual promotes speculation. The mortgage interest deduction is a giveaway to homeowners as a class. Local zoning rules restrict home construction while the federal government’s open borders policy supercharges housing demand. Taxpayer-funded urban renewal demolishes cheap hotels and promotes gentrification. Loose monetary policy fuels asset appreciation and rising rents. Inadequate banking regulation allows vulture capitalists to prey on renters. Our debt-based monetary system limits the normal business cycle for homes (prices mainly go up). The 2008 Great Financial Crash and subsequent Quantitative Easing (QE) furthered fueled inflation (the beneficiaries being asset owners, i.e. homeowners). The Federal Reserve protects the balance sheets of private banks but not private citizens. The reserve status of the dollar is dependent on a healthy US banking system which is allowed to gamble on credit default swaps. At the very bottom of this mess is the homeless. It’s all his fault for being an eye sore and bringing down the neighborhood. Now, to criminalize them is immoral. But that’s capitalism, for which we are fighting Russia and China.
Sorry for the double post. I thought I had deleted the first one.
You did, but gremlins brought it back.
:-)