I remember a funny bumper sticker from above the chalkboard in one of my high school science classrooms in the 1970s. It said, “For every action there is an equal and opposite government program,” because the teacher was not a fan of Big Government. Forty-five years later, I think a more accurate version would be “For every action there is an equal and opposite rightwing think tank.” Sure, there are plenty of good things that government can do to help people, but it must be bad because why don’t those people just get rich by playing the markets and knowing the right people like the founders of rightwing think tanks did?
Here, go read this Washington Post story (gift link) by Kyle Swenson about the rightwing effort to eliminate one of the few strategies that seems to alleviate homelessness: “Housing First,” which posits that the best way to address the problems faced by unhoused people is to get them into a stable living situation, rather than trying to treat them for addiction or teach them to write a résumé on the curb. Swenson spent time in November with the workers and clients at a church-based social services hub, the Connecting Grounds in Springfield, Missouri, to get a sense of how Missouri’s year-old law that criminalizes being homeless has impacted the nonprofit and the people it tries to serve.
As Swenson notes, homelessness has increased since the pandemic, due to multiple factors:
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determined that 650,000 people were homeless on a single night in January 2023, a record-setting 12 percent increase over 2022.
Experts attribute the spike to the end of $5 trillion in pandemic relief spending colliding with historic inflation and an affordable housing shortage.
The equal and opposite reaction from reactionaries has been swift. After all, they‘re sure that helping people is bad for the economy, so obviously people who are hurting just need to hurt more so they’ll get their shit together.
As emergency assistance ended, Republican legislators across the country pushed to cut social safety net programs. Conservative think tanks have supplied them with model legislation to shrink social spending and protections. In Iowa last year, Florida-based Opportunity Solutions Project successfully lobbied for a bill to restrict eligibility for food stamps. The same group was behind a 2023 Arkansas law to weaken child labor protections. Now, at the start of a presidential election year, the appetite for harsher rollbacks has only intensified.
“Opportunity Solutions”! George Orwell would be so impressed!
Missouri’s anti-homeless law, which went into effect in July 2022, was based on model legislation promoted by Texas think tank the “Cicero Institute,” which pushed a similar law in Texas, then offered it to other red states. Not only does it criminalize the use of “state-owned lands for unauthorized sleeping, camping, or long-term shelters,” it also defunds towns and cities that don’t strictly enforce it, and puts sharp limits on using state funds to build permanent supportive housing, shifting the money instead to building tent cities and drug treatment.
Rightwing opponents of Housing First insist it’s simply too slow and expensive, especially because there’s not enough affordable housing which is probably poor people’s fault, too:
“The equation that Cicero and others are deliberately making is that housing first is failing to end homelessness,” said Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center. “But our housing system has failed to end homelessness. By misdirecting attention to housing first, it allows elected officials to shirk the blame for failing to actually fix this housing problem that they have been failing to fix for many years.”
There’s also the eternal rightwing opposition to “giving” poor people help that they don’t deserve, because obviously if they weren’t bad people they wouldn’t be addicted or even poor, so getting a roof over their heads and access to services that might help them become self sufficient isn’t nearly as good as telling them to become self-sufficient, and if they don’t do that, punishing them and/or rounding them up in tent cities where they won’t be seen. In Missouri, unhoused people guilty of “camping” in public places can be fined $5000 and up to a month in jail, which is surely less expensive than paying a month of rent.
The founder of Cicero, tech scum and Peter Thiel crony Joe Lonsdale, explained that the real problem is that nonprofits are bad and so are homeless people:
“States should not fund Housing First — the policy of giving ‘free’ and permanent homes to the homeless without any mandate for treatment or sobriety,” Lonsdale wrote in an opinion piece from May 2023 promoting Cicero’s legislation in Georgia.
Lonsdale, who declined an interview request, went on in the piece to say that nonprofits working with homeless people should have their government funding tied to results. “In many cases, homeless ‘charities’ are politically involved activist organizations that bully leaders so they can mop up money via contracts,” Cicero’s founder wrote.
As opposed to rightwing think tanks, which demand results, and unlike those do-gooder nonprofits, aren’t burdened by “ideology.”
And now there’s no homelessness in Missouri, right? The founder of the Connecting Grounds, Rev. Christie Love, says nah:
Soon after the Cicero law passed, law enforcement cleared large encampments around town. But Love and other area service providers say this did not push homelessness out of sight. Instead, the opposite occurred. […]
Many of the unhoused began walking the city at all hours — crowding public libraries, hanging around downtown’s public square, asking to use the restroom at gas stations. Their visibility increased.
The Post explains that Missouri’s state supreme court found the homeless law was passed using an unconstitutional legislative procedure, and it’s not clear whether the Lege will try to pass it again in the 2024 session. That certainly won’t stop people like Donald Trump from calling for big detention camps for the unhoused, or from the nation’s rightwing Christians to call for harsher penalties, because as Jesus said, the hungry and thirsty must be taught a lesson about personal responsibility, the naked must be jailed for indecent exposure, and the stranger must be put on a bus for a liberal city on the coast, Amen.
[WaPo gift link / National Alliance to End Homelessness]
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