Plight of the homeless

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Police evict residents in San Francisco's Filipino community. Scene from The Fall of the ! Hotel, a new documentary film by Curtis Chov.

"Oakland's homeless have little hope. Most seek shelter in vacant buildings, abandoned cars."

These were the headlines over a story on the homeless in the Oakland Tribune of Feb. 21. The essentials of this story have been repeated in dozens of articles in newspapers across the country. America's homeless have been discovered. There are 2 million of them by the government's own estimate, 500 of them only a mile from the White House.

These are not the traditional "winos" and "bowery bums" the establishment can ignore. These are laid-off workers who have taken the initiative to move elsewhere to find work and have failed to find it. They are workers and their families who may have jobs but cannot come up with the $1,000 advance rent and deposit money often demanded for even a sleazy apartment. They are the mentally impaired people who need institutional care but have been cast adrift because of budget cuts in mental health programs. Unable to work, they must subsist on California's general welfare grants of food stamps and $258 a month. Since the cheapest room may rent for $250 a month, simple arithmetic dictates that workers must live in the street if they are to eat. These are the new homeless who are overwhelming city and county facilities.

These facilities are mainly Salvation Army or Goodwill dormitories originally designed to shelter a few penniless travelers for a night or two. They are not intended to shelter hundreds of people for weeks or months. Even as temporary shelters they are totally inadequate. At least a hundred homeless are turned away in Oakland every night.

The overflow people must crawl into cardboard boxes, find a dry spot under freeways, and endure the winter night as best they can. Here the homeless enter a hopeless cycle. To get a home, they must get a job; to get a job, they need a permanent address and a telephone. How presentable does a jobseeker look after sleeping in his or her clothes all night!

The homeless of Oakland and San Francisco are not passively accepting their intolerable situation. They are organizing and fighting back. In San Francisco they have formed the Homeless Caucus to fight for decent shelter as the inalienable right of every human being. Recently they set up a tent city in front of the San Francisco City Hall to dramatize their demands.

Starting with the most basic and immediate needs, they demand provision of public toilets, showers, delousing facilities, and laundries. Among other demands they called for a meeting with Governor George Deukmejian to secure state resources for the homeless, increased grant levels of general assistance, beefed-up community health programs for those pushed out of the state hospitals, and involvement of the homeless at every level of decision making.

The response of the local authorities to the homeless is to treat them as a temporary problem to be met by stopgap measures. San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein provided several broken-down city buses last winter to get some of the homeless out of the rain. She also appropriated funds to rent hotel rooms for union members (some say tens of thouother of the homeless. Since the cost to the city of the cheapest room is $10 a night, the city's emergency fund was soon exhausted. The mayor was also embarassed to find that several of the hotels assigned to the homeless were in violation of the city's health and safety code.

In Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson set up a task force to deal with the problems of the homeless. Adding another layer to the bureaucracy has not helped. After two months the task force is still "assembling staff" preparatory to investigating the problem.

Cops evict squatters

Some of the homeless in Oakland have grown tired of official stalling and have taken direct action. Uhuru House, a unit of the African Peoples Socialist Party, has installed families in vacant houses, citing the people's right of eminent domain. The cops have not appreciated the legal subtleties of this threat to property rights and have expelled the squatters with force.

Other attempts of the homeless to set up tent cities have been met by eviction and demolition. Memories of the Hoovervilles of the thirties and the radicalism that accompanied them make the authorities very nervous. They look with favor on a proposal to house Oakland's homeless at Camp Parks, a disused army base far outside the city limits. This base was proposed as a prison for antinuclear protesters arrested at the Livermore Laboratory. Because the base had been found to be radioactive as a result of nuclear projects carried out there, a judge had banned its use as a prison. Now city and county authorities think it may be OK for housing the homeless!

The problem of the homeless is that they are fighting alone. They need the support of all the unemployed and welfare recipients, organized in unemployed leagues and councils.

Above all they need the support of organized labor. In their own interest the AFL-CIO must take the unemployed under its wing. When the power of organized labor is brought to bear, the crisis of the homeless will become the crisis of the ruling class.

issues than general questions of ideology