Survival: Shae Hill and her three-month-old son live in Glendora, Mississippi, a city in the Lower Mississippi Delta with a median annual family income of $11,875. My home state of Mississippi, whose Republican governor recently turned down $56 million in federal stimulus funds in protest against the Obama administration, has a 21.3% poverty rate--the nation's highest. (Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images.)
"If you're lying on a sidewalk, whether you're homeless or a millionaire, you're in violation of the ordinance."
-- Joseph Patner, city attorney for St. Petersburg, Florida
"[T]he law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."
-- Anatole France
Barbara Ehrenreich compared these two quotes in her New York Times op-ed last week, in which she cited a report showing that as homelessness and poverty have increased in the economic downturn, laws against the poor and homeless have actually increased in number and in scope.
Take St. Petersburg, for example, where this YouTube video shows local police destroying tents donated for use by the homeless--and where homeless ministries have long been targeted by city officials and police, who are concerned that St. Petersburg might attract homeless people from other communities if it is perceived as too homeless-friendly.
One of those communities might have been Orlando, where 21-year-old Eric Montanez was arrested in 2007 for feeding homeless people in a public park. This was actually illegal in Orlando under a city anti-homeless ordinance overturned last October by a federal judge, though the city is in the process of appealing the ruling. Similar ordinances are on the books in Dallas and Las Vegas.
And if your family is poor but not homeless yet, local officials will be happy to help you make the transition. As Ehrenreich writes:
The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.
We're witnessing this in communities all over the nation. In Annapolis, Maryland, the local housing authority is creating room for an influx of the poor by banning "criminals" from Section 8 housing--even if their alleged offenses are ones for which they have not been prosecuted, or which comprise part of a sealed juvenile record. (Example: Delray Fowlkes was arrested five years ago on a spurious drug-related offense. Charges were dropped, but Fowlkes is still banned from public housing.)
The motivations behind these laws are fairly simple. Officials don't want to have to build more public housing, so they limit access. Then when people who don't have access to housing try to survive on the streets, they create the unmistakable image of poverty--which makes a city less tourism- and gentrification-friendly. Officials aren't trying to destroy the poor; that's just the side effect of constantly trying to push poor people out of the community's field of vision. It's the same impulse behind a recent plan to wall off the slums of Rio de Janeiro. If an official's campaign donors find the poor to be an impediment to development, tourism, or other financial interests, then it is in that official's best interests to make the poor invisible. We fight this by making the poor too visible to push away, and by building a mixed-income coalition of people who support the poor.
If you want to get involved in this effort, contact ACORN and the National Coalition for the Homeless.
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