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#housingisaright — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #housingisaright, aggregated by home.social.

  1. emeritrix @[email protected] ·

    Selections from a message from the director of Hygiene for All in Portland, Oregon
    h4apdx.org/

    The Supreme Court of the United States’ decision in favor of Grants Pass threatens whole community health and wellbeing across the United States.

    See below for What the case was about? How will it impact unsheltered Americans’ human rights & civil rights? Why it harms efforts to end skyrocketing rents, housing insecurity, & homelessness, and threatens our health & wellbeing and WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PROTECT OREGONIANS?

    What was the case about?

    Grants Pass faced a significant housing shortage leading to a high rate of homelessness among its residents. The city lacked affordable housing options, forcing hundreds of individuals into homelessness, who were previously homeowners and workers in Grants Pass.

    Grants Pass has nearly zero resources for homeless individuals, with only one private transitional housing program that did not accept people with physical or mental disabilities and required its clients to work for free and pray several times a day. This left a large portion of the homeless population no shelter alternative except staying on the streets.

    In response to these circumstances

    Grants Pass, first tried to get rid of homeless residents by buying them bus tickets to other jurisdictions. The other jurisdictions sent people back, asking Grants Pass to stop foisting Grants Pass’ policy failures onto their communities.

    Then Grants Pass tried extreme enforcement of existing laws to serially displace and harass houseless residents.

    Unsuccessful, the city passed stricter ordinances imposing a 24/7 city wide sleeping ban, stipulating homeless residents leave the city or face fines or jail … even if merely using a blanket, sleeping, or resting within City limits. Police told those with nowhere to sleep except on public property, or in a car on public property to relocate outside City limits to a place called Devil’s Spill or face criminal penalties.

    The ordinances targeted activities they creatively defined as “camping,” but in fact specifically prohibited and made even the use of a blanket a criminal offense- claiming using a blanket constituted making a temporary living arrangement/ or” camping.”

    The enforcement of these ordinances effectively criminalized the basic activities of sleeping/ staying warm with a blanket all people must exercise in order to avoid dying. Police and City Council members were clear, however, that the law should be enforced if and only if residents did not have an apartment or house. In essence this made the mere act of existing within the city limits of Grant’s Pass while homeless a criminal act, subject to fines, and jail time.

    Why H4A & Our Lawyers Argued Against Grants Pass

    Lawyers argued the case very narrowly - asserting that fining or jailing someone using a blanket to stay warm if (and only if) they were houseless, was cruel, unusual, and unequal punishment.

    Our lawyers argued against Grants Pass on the grounds

    That the punishments inflicted were grossly disproportionate to the “offense.”

    That for unhoused residents, such ‘offenses’ were utterly unavoidable for human survival

    That without a home, a person has literally no other choice than to meet their bodily human needs on public property.

    That the law was only applied to those without housing; with those internations openly described by those passing the ordinance and those enforcing it

    The Legal & Policy Implications

    The Supreme Court rejected the arguments outlined above, ruling instead that Grants Pass was within its rights to pass and enforce its ordinances. The SCOTUS’s misguided decision has ramifications for states, towns, and other localities across the nation, in that it:

    Gives our local governments carte blanche to enact laws that violate basic human rights to life,

    Permits our cities to violate our most vulnerable neighbors’ civil rights to equal protection and treatment under the law,

    Incentivizes towns to invest in practices proven to increase houselessness and steepen barriers to resecuring housing;

    Encourages our elected officials to divert and reduce the investments in housing and services we need to staunch and reverse the flow of people from the safety of housing to untold hardships on the streets.

    This decision allows localities to enact ordinances that make it illegal for houseless people to simply exist within their borders. It opens the way for cities to pass the buck on their housing failures to surrounding states, cities, towns, communities. It allows cities to abdicate actually solving growing homelessness through the proven homelessness reduction strategies of increased affordable housing, in favor of hiding homelessness from the public eye.

    With this ruling, more cities and states will adopt sundown laws. This will incentivize neighboring jurisdictions to do the same in cascading fashion. The end result could very well be that those without housing find themselves unable to legally sleep, rest, or keep warm anywhere in the United States if area shelter is full or unavailable; a situation which will condemn them to a life of endless incarceration and fines.

    WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PROTECT OREGONIANS?

    1. Write your elected representatives in Portland and the State Legislature asking them to protect HB 3115 - which mandates that local governments wishing to regulate encampments and prohibit people from sleeping or living in certain places at certain times ensure those restrictions are “objectively reasonable” taking into account the totality of the circumstances, including the impact on people who are experiencing homelessness.

    portland.gov/contact-elected-o

    gov.oregonlive.com/legislators

    -> Tell them you support HB 3115 which protects civil and human right

    -> Encourage elected officials to commit to the evidence backed solutions for ending homelessness - investing in truly affordable housing, purchasing apartments and units, long term rental assistance, and the services to help people get back on their feet and into housing.

    -> Urge them to reject wasting tax dollars on policies shown to prolong and increase homelessness . (docs.google.com/document/d/1G8)

    -> Ask them to invest public dollars in the rental assistance, apartment building purchases, and new unit construction that actually create the additional 68,317 units of extremely affordable housing that households making $23,700/year REQUIRE to remain housed and safe.
    docs.google.com/document/d/1Pu
    welcomehomecoalition.org/wp-co

    2. Write, talk to and vote for City, County, Metro, & State candidates/ elected officials championing affordable housing investments and services that will end houselessness.
    portland.gov/elections/city-of
    multco.us/elections/candidate-
    oregonmetro.gov/regional-leade
    ballotpedia.org/Oregon_State_S

    -> Urge them to pursue new revenue to continue the successes of Portland Housing & Metro Housing Bonds which have opened up 6,500 new low income housing units produced by the ( 1359 more units than promised, and still slated to create more) . These funds are set to run out of funds in the near future, leaving a still massive gap that must close if our most vulnerable households are to find relief from paying 50% and more of their earnings to keep a roof over their heads.
    welcomehomecoalition.org/wp-co

    3. Challenge and reject candidates who favor flushing money down the toilet punishing your homeless neighbors and keeping them unhoused.

    -> Ask them why they’re pursuing punishment shown to increase homelessness by over 2 -percent year upon year and fail to reduce the numbers ending up on the streets for the first time
    docs.google.com/document/d/1G8

    -> Tell them all evidence shows the only way to reduce homelessness is increasing housing.
    youtube.com/watch?v=0APR7dt-uZ

    Talk to your friends, neighbors and family & ask them to take action and vote in favor of candidates that want to end homelessness rather than pander to haters and conceal systemic inequities.

    For a deep dive: Here is an edited transcript of Q and A between Ryan Downer (Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs) and Kelsi Korkran (Co-counsel in Grants Pass V. Johnson) click HERE [docs.google.com/document/d/1wN]. For a video of the conversation click HERE [youtube.com/watch?v=wLZB_jF46d]

    #Portland #Oregon #PDX #PortlandOr #Housing #HousingIsARight #SCOTUS
    #HousekeysNotHandcuffs

    kolektiva.social/@anarchademic

    #portland #oregon #pdx #portlandor #housing #housingisaright
  2. emeritrix @[email protected] ·

    They have jobs, but no homes. Inside America’s unseen homelessness crisis. (WaPo Story, June 29, 2024)

    Homelessness, already at a record high last year, appears to be worsening among people with jobs.

    Homelessness at record highs--in some regions, up over 60% in the past year--also appears to be worsening among people with jobs, as housing becomes further out of reach for low-wage earners, according to shelter interviews and upticks in evictions and homelessness tallies around the country.

    A record 12.1 million Americans — or about 1 in 4 renters — are spending at least half of their incomes on rent and utilities, putting them at increased risk of eviction and homelessness, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Meanwhile, there is hardly anywhere in the country where a person working a full-time minimum-wage job can afford a one-bedroom rental, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

    Among those who are homeless, inflation continues to play a major role. In interviews with 30 people in 17 states who recently became homeless while employed, nearly all said exorbitant rents had not only tipped them into homelessness, but were preventing them from securing new housing.

    “I work 50 hours a week, and it’s still really hard to keep up,” said Aaron Reed, 22, who makes $21 an hour at an Amazon warehouse near Nashville, and returns to his mother’s Hyundai SUV to sleep. He shares the back seat with their black Lab, Stella, while his mom sleeps up front.

    The pair have been homeless since October, when Reed’s mother was hospitalized for covid and lost her job at a department store beauty counter, forcing them out of the extended-stay hotel where they’d been living for seven months.

    Plus, everything costs more when you’re homeless, said Reed . . . . He and his mother spend $50 a day to fill the gas tank, so they can leave the air conditioner running overnight in 99-degree weather. There’s no way to cook, so they eat prepackaged foods or takeout for every meal. And without access to running water, they spend about $80 a month on large jugs of bottled water they keep in the trunk.

    Deborah Bower, a dog groomer in San Ramon, Calif., has been homeless since October, after breast cancer treatments wiped out $100,000 of her savings. These days she either sleeps in her small SUV, which she parks in a movie theater parking lot, or in $95-a-night hotel rooms, where she often brings along her own dog, Bean, as well as others she’s watching overnight for clients.

    washingtonpost.com/business/20
    archive web.archive.org/web/2024072818

    #Housing #HousingIsARight #Houselessness

    #housing #housingisaright #houselessness
  3. emeritrix @[email protected] ·

    ProPublica is seeking people to interview about the experience of police sweeps of housless camps.

    #HousingIsARight
    #StopTheSweeps
    #HousekeysNotHandcuffs
    #Housing

    propublica.org/getinvolved/hel

    #housingisaright #stopthesweeps #housekeysnothandcuffs #housing
  4. anarchademic @[email protected] ·

    Sweeps of homeless people are in fact deadly, new medical study shows

    Displacing unhoused people leads to more deaths and serious health problems, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.

    #HousingIsARight
    #HousekeysNotHandcuffs
    #StopTheSweeps

    48hills.org/2023/04/sweeps-of-

    #housingisaright #housekeysnothandcuffs #stopthesweeps
  5. Will @StorieswithaWill ·

    The  Amazing team at Arcata's Playhouse Arts has opened their new space for Free classes and hanging out, less than a block off the plaza. The tentative name is "(y)Ourspace".

     

    #hashtagsattheend #arttherapy #humboldt #humboldtcounty #norcal #art