On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom passed an executive order that would call on state officials to begin dismantling houseless encampments. The displacement of unhoused people is nothing new and the eviction of encampments from public parks and under freeways and bridges happens all of the time. But this new attack is made possible by the recent Supreme Court decision which ruled that local municipalities could ticket houseless people for sleeping outside, which gives the authorities much more leverage to threaten them with massive fines that they will never be able to pay back. Cities across the state have begun to evict houseless people.
Where are people supposed to go? In cities like San Francisco, there are thousands of people on waitlists to get into shelters.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on any given night, it is estimated that more than 653,000 people in the United States are experiencing houselessness. That’s an increase of 12% from 2022 to 2023. In California, it is estimated that 181,399 people experience houselessness, which is more than a quarter of the houseless people throughout the United States.
Due to the deep racism of this society, not surprisingly, Black and brown people are greatly overrepresented in the houseless population and will be heavily impacted by these raids.
As we face a future of greater polarization of wealth, the gap between “winners” and “losers” within this economy gets wider and wider. More and more people are pushed to the margins of society. We all feel it. Housing prices have gone up 80% nationwide over the past four years, with California being one of the most unaffordable places in the world. For many working-class people, any cut in hours or an unexpected medical emergency can mean the difference between having a roof over their heads or not.
It’s true that many unhoused people have substance abuse and serious mental health problems, which is often used as a pretext to criminalize them. But when we look at all of the various pressures that they have and imagine ourselves in their shoes, how could they not have such serious challenges?
Even for those of us who have stable jobs and comfortable places to sleep at night, this should be a wake-up call. None of us are safe. As much as the people in power would like for us to see ourselves as “winners” in their economy, we will never be a part of their club. As much as they want us to look down on and dehumanize the houseless population as “a nuisance,” an “eye-sore” or anything like that, we can see that we have far more in common with them than we do with the people who run the banks and corporations profiting off of all of our hardships.
Policies such as this executive order have nothing to do with ending houselessness, at most they are an attempt to hide houselessness. These policies are all about getting houseless people out of sight and out of mind, even if it means inflicting cruelty on some of the most vulnerable among us.
This should be an indictment of our entire society. The supposed “liberal” political forces that manage this system, Gavin Newsom and the Democrats, preside over an economy that pushes hundreds of thousands of people into poverty and onto the streets, then criminalizes them for being poor.
Make no mistake, this is not a war on poverty. It is a war on the poor!
