Without a local, regional, or national program to develop truly affordable housing, what’s to be done about exploding numbers of homeless?
The front lines of the homeless crisis is a community — any community. Increasingly, it is every community. For the people who are homeless, life is principally a matter of survival. There is no option of camping beside a sylvan wilderness lake, out of sight and mind, while surviving on freshly-caught trout!
The resources in a community, however meagre, must serve to provide whatever food and shelter the homeless can scrape together. In many but not all communities, there are shelter resources available for some. As those resources are overwhelmed, communities are increasingly falling back on yesterday’s solutions, in particular, encampment clearances or sweeps.
Sweeps are a form of intermittent and illegal harassment — one that generally involves the deliberate theft of whatever a homeless person might possess.
If sweeps worked in the past, it’s because there were places somewhere at a convenient distance to absorb the responsibility of caring for those who were harassed into forced migration to somewhere, anywhere, else. At least temporarily.
In a world where homelessness has increased a thousandfold, encampment sweeps have been become absurd, akin to attacking autumn leaves with gas-powered blowers — all exhaust stench, noise, dust and swirl.
Is there some possible kernel of benefit that actually accrues to the people who are homeless?
A recent article in The Nation explores this trend of linking community benefit to the necessity of destroying frail shelters. Needless to say, there may be great benefit for the consciences of relieved citizens who live in houses. Sweeps can spare them embarrassment of too frequently witnessing those who don’t.
But rationalization of the need for encampment sweeps is also founded upon the supposed benefit for those who are being swept away. The article below unpacks some of these claims, finding evidence of disingenuous thinking at best, flat out dishonesty at worst.
Read more in The Nation: Sweeping Homeless Encampments Is Cruel and Unacceptable
