“We don\'t have a housing system, we have an unhousing system,” says Tracy Rosenthal.
“We don’t have a housing system, we have an unhousing system,” says author and organizer Tracy Rosenthal. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Rosenthal and host Kelly Hayes examine the impacts of the Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing municipalities to criminalize the act of sleeping outside.
And to make a long story short, we see this all the way into the policies that sped up the financialization of housing and end in a crisis that wipes out disproportionately Black wealth. And so thinking about all of these policies which established this bifurcated system of homeownership and tenancy where the government is actively subsidizing the private assets of predominantly white people and abandoning people of color to spend their lives as tenants in the predation of the private market.
And I think also the most literal connection to imprisonment in the shelter system is lockup. Each of these shelter sites have what they refer to as curfews, but are really lock-in hours. And they often begin as early as 7:00 pm or in some cases as early as four. So you can’t work or live life as an adult who stays out to before the sun even goes down. And your free time is basically constructed as yard time, as it would be in a prison.
The intervention, as some people call it, of removing someone from an encampment at gunpoint and placing them in this carceral shelter system often happens under the guise of care, under the ruse of housing. And I think we just need to track that process of how one kind of state capacity of punishment and incarceration is being reproduced in new terms and in new relationships here.
So these poor tenants are being evicted to make room for people who have been formerly unhoused people who are being placed into housing through Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. And that program is more profitable. The resources, the public resources that are delivered through that program are more profitable to the SRO Corporation than what a poor tenant can pay.
And so when we think about policy in the context of a history of class struggle, what we’re saying, what we’re asking for in terms of policy, to quote the National Union of the Homeless, “You only get what you’re organized to take.” And so I think it’s complicated to name both those dreams of policies that we’ve had in this country for a long time.
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