N.Y. homeless press city hall for solution

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Be $.97 for postage and tax. Order from Wal2 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1988 The Untold Story of the U.S. 'Secret War' Speeches by Daniel Sheehan and Price: $4.95. Inclus nut Publishing Co year-old Black woman who until the round-up had lived on a patch of sidewalk on Second Avenue. She had been living there for a year and a half.

Billie Boggs took the city's policy to court and won—at first. During her testimony, she was clear and lucid. When asked why she urinates and defecates on the street, she responded that there are no public bathrooms. This reply, far from testifying to Billie Boggs's insanity, raised a social problem that many of us in New York are well aware of.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Lippman stated, "Though homeless, she copes, she is fit, she survives... Whether Joyce Brown is or is not mentally ill...she is not unable to care for her essential needs."

Her refusal to live in shelters, Justice Lippman stated, "may reveal more about shelters than about Joyce Brown's mental state." Lippman ordered her freed.

But Koch and the city appealed. The next day, an appelate judge reversed Lippman's This book contains the facts ol the most audacious legal action ever undertaken: the Christic Institute lawsuit against the U.S.

government's 'Secret Team.' 'Assault on Nicaragua' incudes an introduction by editor Rod Holt; speeches by Daniel Sheehan, general counsel of the Christic Institute, and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega; as well as an essay by Socialist Action national secretaries Jeff Mackler and Nat Weinstein on the meaning of the revelations for the antiwar movement.

, 3435 Army St., Rm. 308, S.F., CA 94110. decision and ordered Billie Boggs to be sent back to Bellevue. She is still there, fighting to regain her freedom.

It is true that many of the homeless are also mentally ill. In fact, the numbers of disturbed and infirm people forced to sleep on the streets has been caused in large part by the lack of hospitals and out-patient facilities accessible to the poor.

In New York, for example, the number of psychiatric patients in state hospitals declined from 93,000 in 1955 to about 20,000 today. Many patients have been released to a life of misery-and to death— on the streets.

According to a report last spring in the Amsterdam News, the number of homeless sheltered by the city was 27,000, and the actual number of homeless people was rising rapidly.

A large proportion of the homeless are unemployed or low-paid workers and their dependents. The Amsterdam News points out that "the vast majority of homeless families are single-parent households headed by women...Over 94 percent of the families are Black or Hispanic."

The article goes on to say that a primary reason for homelessness "is the lack of a sufficient number of housing units in liveable condition which low-income people can afford."

Notice they do not say that there is not enough housing. There is not enough affordable housing. In fact, there are more than enough liveable units to house everybody!

There are vacant buildings, warehoused apartments (held empty by landlords in hopes of making bigger profits in the future), and luxury apartments and condos kept as second homes by the rich-just in case they need a place to stay when they pop into New York.

Overproduction of housing

Housing is a human right. But this basic right is denied to people not only in places like Brazil and India, but increasingly in the cities of this country.

If misery were the result,

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ASSAULT ON NICARAGUA:

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