Homelessness - a racial justice issue

In 2023, more than 650,000 people in America were identified as being without permanent shelters, and that’s a record number, the most since counts were started in 2007, and a 12 percent increase over 2022. 

Oregon has double what would be the national average of people without a permanent place to call home. 

In this episode, Tawnya Layne explores why so many are homeless, and possible short-term and long-term solutions,  in her home state of Oregon.

Human Rights Magazine is produced by The Upstream Journal magazine. The host, Derek MacCuish, is editor of both. If you agree that informed reporting on human rights and social justice issues is important, your support would be welcome. Please rate the podcast wherever you listen to it, and tell your friends about episodes that you find interesting. Why not consider making a financial contribution to help us cover costs?  You are always welcome to email with your comments.

Transcript

Derek MacCuish:

In 2023, more than 650,000 people in America were identified as being without permanent shelters, and that’s a record number, the most since counts were started in 2007, and a 12 percent increase over 2022. 

Oregon has double what would be the national average of people without a permanent place to call home. 

In this episode, Tawnya Layne explores why so many are homeless, and possible short-term and long-term solutions.

Tawnya Layne:

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement that has housed people experiencing homelessness for over 90 years, told us to pull people out of the river and then give hell to the ones who pushed them in.  In today’s episode, I’ll take a close look at the current epidemic of homelessness in the United States and walk upstream to find out who’s pushing these folks in the river and why.  

As a person who’s volunteered with mutual aid groups to assist homeless individuals, I sought to understand the social and economic dynamics that have resulted in the exponential growth of our homeless population and why a disproportionate percentage of those folks are people of color.  I answer these questions and more in the following episode of Human Rights Magazine.

The number of homeless people has increased steadily since the 1980’s as a result of federal policy decisions affecting the availability of affordable housing.  653,000 Americans were counted in HUD’s 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report which is a record high and an increase of 12% from 2022. In the United States, people of color make up a much larger share of the homeless population than they do of the general population.  Indigenous people, especially, are far more likely to experience homelessness.  

The Willow Creek homeless camp in Madras, Oregon, is on the north end of town closest to the Warm Springs Reservation.  The creek runs most of the year and the willows screen the camp from the bustle of town.  Safeway is across the street.  As far as homeless encampments go, it’s ideal, and this one has been home to a rotating cast of indigenous folks for the better part of a decade.  

On June 11, 2024, the city of Madras began a sweep of the camp, an eviction of sorts.  On the day of the sweep, I parked nearby to observe.  There were several police vehicles and a city official in a crisp white dress shirt and tie.  At 9:00 AM they made their way down to the camp to officially begin the sweep.  After a few minutes, residents of the camp began making their way up the hill to the parking lot.  

I caught up with an older indigenous gentleman who was slowly making his way up the hill.  

That's Gibson's first name and Mitchell's last. Can I use your name or do you want me to change it? No, it's all right. Use it? Okay. Yeah, I'm not ashamed of it. No, you shouldn't be. I'm proud. You shouldn't be. I lived this long with it, so I can keep on going until I die. Yeah, how old are you Gibson? 69, I believe. I was thinking... Is that what that says? Yeah. When were you in the hospital recently? You are 69. Not very long ago. Yeah, 69. So how long has this camp been here? It's been a long time. Oh, yeah. Like how long do you think? Well, first it was way over there underneath the trestle. Yep, I remember. And then we moved this way and it was on the hillside. Yep. And then the railroad company made us move out of there. Oh my God. That's why we're down here in Willow Creek now. So has it been 10, 20 years? Yeah, we're going to have to move from there too, I guess.

I've got a tent. I know. You've got your place. Yeah. I've got, well, actually, it's two tents. One tent inside of another. And then a tarp over the front for my porch.        Well, it's a little bit hard for moving because there's some that's got bigger tents than I got. Like my sister, she's got a couch in there. Wow. And then her tent was a big queen-sized bed. Oh, she's such. Yeah, and then there's another fold-out bed. Oh, yeah. You know, and we're in the outside of her tent, but it's still covered like a tent.

What the city viewed as a nuisance was, for him, home.  The city would rather have him stay at 

a 27-bed homeless shelter which was recently built near the encampment by Jefferson County Faith Based Network (JCFBN) at a cost of 4.3 million dollars which amounts to $160,000 per bed.   The local churches involved seek to assist marginalized, disadvantaged, and vulnerable populations. The shelter provides dinner and a warm bed from 6 pm to 7 am, breakfast, and a sack lunch.  When asked if he would sleep in the shelter that night, Gibson said no. He told me he’d spent a night there once before and was vague about why he wouldn’t go back.  He’ll set up his home somewhere else.  

I spoke with Tony Mitchell, Executive Director of the Jefferson County Faith Based Network, who was instrumental in building the new emergency shelter. Faith based groups provide most of the emergency shelter beds in the United States. I wanted to learn why 75% of people who access his shelter are indigenous when the indigenous population of the city is only 10%.  

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Tony Mitchell, JCFBN: Well, I think some of the what I described Tonya without being pejorative at all, of kind of the light, the life besetting, you know barriers and challenges. You know that we have folks that are within the reservation is within, or tell me, and there's a lot of services and a lot of opportunities on the reservation. But sometimes due to challenges, let's say, with drug and alcohol usage and that sort of thing. It's not consistent with what is allowed or or permitted on the reservation. So you find people making their way by choice. I'll be honest with you out of the reservation, into homelessness. So you have a combination quite honestly of people who are houseless by choice and those that are houseless by need and circumstances.

Tawnya: To say that there are a lot of services and opportunities on the Warm Springs Reservation is in stark contrast to the reality faced by people living there.  According to the Warm Springs Community Action Team, challenges facing people on the reservation include a lack of affordable housing, poor infrastructure, the absence of living wage jobs, the poor state of the local economy, the virtual absence of thriving small businesses, low educational attainment, and wide-ranging public health and public safety issues.  The poverty rate is twice that in the rest of Oregon, and a third of families live on less than $25,000 per year.

To learn more spoke with Sarah Saadian, the Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Field Organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group focusing on the needs of extremely low income people. 

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Sarah Saadian: Certainly it's clear that starting in about the eighties, Huds budget was dramatically cut, and we've just never recovered and that really corresponds to the increase in homelessness. This modern phenomena of homelessness that we see, and that's because for decades now the Federal Government hasn't been investing the resources that it needs to in building housing that's affordable to those households that are most at risk of homelessness. So it's very easy for people to when you make such low incomes. It's very easy to fall behind on your rent, and maybe you miss a couple of days of work. Maybe your car breaks down, and all of a sudden you're evicted from your home, and in worst cases you're experiencing homelessness.

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Tawnya Layne: Right. So that brings me to something I've been wondering.  That drop in the Federal investment in public housing occurred. you know, within a decade of the Civil rights movement and part of me wonders. Was it a push back a racial pushback? That's when we started hearing all you know, Ray, the Reagan year. Talk about welfare queens, etc. I wonder how much of it, consciously or subconsciously, was a push back against the civil rights movement. 

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Sarah Saadian: I definitely think there's a connection there to racial discrimination and systemic racism. In our housing markets and other markets. There are a lot of those factors happening at the same time. Where you saw. for example, the Federal Government around that time was through the Gi bill and through other bills was helping white families become homeowners in the suburbs, leaving behind, you know, a highly concentrated poverty among people of color.You're also seeing, you know, over that same time period, this racialized stigma against people who are in in need of Federal assistance or receiving Federal assistance like this trope of the Welfare Queen is is heavily saturated in racial stereotypes and biases. and that turns the public and also elected officials against the the sort of funding increases, and the and the funding that's needed.

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Sarah Saadian: It's reframing, trying to reframe the issue so that it's about people's individual bad choices or moral failings that people have made bad decisions. And this is a consequence of those bad decisions. But we do know that the what drives homelessness is high housing costs and that and then there are some people who have substance use disorders who need assistance. But the best way to help those people is to make sure that they have a stable home to live in while they're getting the treatment and and supportive services that they need. Right? So even if even if there are people with substance use disorders. The solution is still access to an affordable place to live, and the support of services that they might need.

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Sarah Saadian: We sort of hit on it before, I think it's always worth pointing out that because of.you know, historic and ongoing discrimination in the housing, market and employment markets and other sort of sectors, we see disproportionate harm to black and indigenous, indigenous, and other people of color in the rental market, and they are vastly over represented when it comes to people experiencing homelessness. And so, if we, you know, care deeply about advancing racial equity, we have to recognize how important affordable housing is to that goal.

Tawnya: I began to wonder about the impact of the Victorian notion of the deserving and undeserving poor on homeless response, so I spoke with Mary Frances Kenion, Vice President of Training and Technical Assistance at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.  How does meritocracy factor in to our unwillingness to fund care for folks who need it? 

Mary Francis: It is an issue, but I think it's 1 of deflection. I think that that is an intentional approach that we've adopted as a society as an alternative to holding poorly designed systems accountable. It's so much easier to focus on an individual and deflect to. You know well these group of individuals have done this, therefore they are not deserving, as opposed to questioning, why it is that in certain communities, folks don't have access to a a you know, a a well paying job or you know, a a quality place to live or transportation, or why there are food deserts that exist in certain communities, or why there isn't adequate healthcare for people to be able to be whole and heal and support themselves. I I think the meritocracy is definitely an issue. But I think it's 1 that absolutely deflects from how systemic these problems are. And I feel like systemic problems need to have systemic solutions.

Tawnya: Would you consider houselessness a racial justice issue?

Mary Frances Kenion: Absolutely hands down. the data continue to show us, the disproportionate representation, particularly of people who identify as black as indigenous as native Hawaiian Pacific Islander. But we're also seeing, and some disproportionate representation in the last set of national level data that is a growing concern for Latino households, and also those households who identify as Asian or Asian American. there's always a challenge talking about racial justice because oftentimes the instinctive question is, Well, what about and what you know? What about this group? What about that group. But I think what's important to kind of keep front and center is that across every other marginalized group you will continue to see persistent racial disparities. So those racial and ethnic disparities across every minoritized group. Whether it's folks in a rural community, whether it's members of the 2 spirit, Lgbtq Ia plus population socio economic status. Whatever factor you're looking at, there's going to continue to be disparities. that impact those groups that I just mentioned. So this is absolutely a racial justice issue.

Tawnya:  Instead of putting resources into building deeply affordable public housing, many communities have increasingly criminalized homelessness through camp sweeps and making it illegal to sleep, sit, or even eat in public spaces despite the absence of adequate alternatives.  The Grants Pass vs.Gloria Johnson case decided by the Supreme Court in June 2023 reinforces the criminalization of homelessness.  Gloria Johnson faced citation for camping in a park and was prohibited from sleeping in her van.  She claimed that municipal codes such as these violate the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment since there were no low-barrier shelters she could access in Grants Pass. Sarah Saadian weighed in on this issue.

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Sarah Saadian: certainly, you know, as homelessness has increased, especially unsheltered homelessness, which is much more visible. You see, elected officials feeling enormous pressure to respond to homelessness in their communities. But too often they're turning to measures that aren't actually effective at solving homelessness that maybe moves people from one encampment to another encampment, but ultimately doesn't solve for their homelessness. And I feel like a lot of times elected officials want to pretend, or they wanna look like they're doing something on homelessness when, in fact, they're really only making the problem worse. Because if we're not giving people an exit out of homelessness, then the number of people who are experiencing homelessness continues to grow because more people are coming in and people aren't exiting right. And so what we really need is the political will to invest resources at the scale that's needed to ensure that everybody, but especially people with the lowest incomes. Those who are the most marginalized have an affordable accessible place to live. and that only happens if all advocates are working together to put pressure on elected officials to call for the resources to demand that we are finally investing at the scale that's needed.

Tawnya:  It became clear to me that federal disinvestment in public housing is the primary driver of homelessness.  The stigmatization of public housing as “monstrous, depressing places – run down, overcrowded and crime-ridden” as President Richard Nixon said in 1973, was intentional and racially motivated.  This stigmatization resulted in the passage of the Faircloth Amendment in 1998 which prevents the federal government from ever maintaining more public housing than was available in 1999. The United States has 63 million more people today than it did then. But repealing the Faircloth Amendment is only half the battle.  Any long term solution must involve a federal commitment to fully fund public housing authorities so they can maintain safe, accessible, and affordable public housing for the people who need it.  Sarah Saadian agrees.

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Sarah Saadian: for the lowest income households, the only way to really serve them is, if the Federal Government is stepping in to provide resources. And that's because it's a problem that can't be solved just through the private sector. You have to have public subsidies in order to serve those households. and the problem is national in scope. Every single community is dealing with a shortage of housing for extremely long time households. So national in scope means that we really have to have a national solution.

Tawnya:  Instead of a strong, coordinated national solution, we’ve treated a decades-old problem like a natural disaster, using FEMA funds and a patchwork of grants to build emergency shelters. But even as we see the increase in those beds in the last few years, people are not necessarily accessing them for a number of reasons: paternalistic attitudes of staff, separation from beloved pets and partners, and a cold, institutional feel.  But the main reason is that people want a home of their own.  I spoke with Amy Fraley, Senior Program Manager of Houselessness Solutions, to find out more about emergency shelters being built in Bend, Oregon. 

 Amy Fraley:  This feel fills a niche of keeping people safe and alive. It’s not a long term solution.  We’re trying to keep people alive overnight.

Tawnya: But a long term problem requires a long term solution.  That solution is deeply affordable public housing. This isn’t a crisis we can shelter our way out of.  We’ve got to permanent-housing our way out of it. Emergency shelters are the equivalent of putting a bandaid on someone with a chronic disease – it feels like care but it’s not really helping. 

Half of the beds at the new shelter in Madras are empty most nights.  For the folks who were camped at Willow Creek, their campsite is their home – be it ever so humble.  For all of us, home is where your stuff is, where you can let your guard down, and relax out of the public eye.  When asked what they would do with the 4.3 million dollars spent on the shelter on the hill, residents of the camp told me they would build a mansion, a house big enough for each of them  to have their own room.  What people want is a space and a place to call their own.  Kenion summarized the issue well.

Kenion: The lack of investment in deeply affordable housing for our extremely low income renters out there. It's that crisis proportions, it really is. And we've got to act swiftly. You know, if everyone had a safe, accessible, affordable home. We might not need to invest so much into our homeless response system. Because that would be sort of an upstream prevention strategy. If we can eliminate the people that are falling into homelessness just because they can't afford a place to live. That would. That would do our country a lot of justice. You know, it's cliche of me to say. But those that are closest to the problems are closest to the solutions which is a given but how do we return power to people that have been historically minoritized and excluded from every aspect of society, from policy making to decisions, to funding to even just being present for conversations and contributing to them. So we've got a whole lot of work to be done. But homelessness is absolutely a racial justice issue, and if we can figure out ways in which to solve for the racial justice issues we might be able to solve for homelessness, overall for everyone.

Tawnya: Less than six months after the opening of the emergency shelter nearby, Willow Creek is slated to become a city park next to a trail system. The bathrooms and garbage service would have made living there more tenable for the people who called it home. The sweep comes in the wake of a long history of displacing Black and brown people, of gentrifying neighborhoods, of taking power out of the hands of the poor.