Housing justice

I'm getting ready to lead a workshop which I feel ill prepared to do. There are people who know far more about housing activism than me. So I began thinking about why the issue resonates with me and how we got where we are.

When I was a teenager, we lived in Miami. Since I’m old, this was in the seventies. My parents subscribed to the Miami Herald, which has a Sunday supplement called Tropic magazine. One Sunday, the cover showed a picture of a middle-aged woman reading a book under a tree in a park. There was nothing remarkable about her. She was wearing a striped polyester sleeveless dress, as people of the era were prone to do since the 70s had no fashion sense. A paper grocery sack sat nearby, as plastic grocery bags were at least five years away. In short, she looked like a woman spending her lunch break in a park.

The story was that she didn’t live anywhere.

Not homeless. The word hadn’t yet entered the American lexicon. She was an anomaly, not a vagrant. I don’t remember the whole order of events, but she was a nurse who left her job and her apartment to care for a sick relative out of state. She came back, came down with some kind of unexplained rash on her arms which kept her out of nursing, she lost her apartment, her nursing license expired and she couldn’t renew it without an address.

What amazes me now it that it was a story at all.

It didn’t take long after Reagan’s election and budgets which starved the programs meant to help those in need, for homelessness to become a problem in cities across the nation. Subsidized housing units have declined steadily since that time. Wages have not kept pace with rents. Gentrification programs of the 80s and 90s allowed cities to declare low-income downtown areas as blighted. Neighborhoods were condemned and incentives offered to developers to fill the areas with housing and shops aimed at young, urban professionals. And while many of the results were desirable, no thought was given to where the poor would go. They seemed to have become the enemy. If we just closed our eyes and pretended they weren’t there, they would disappear.

The foreclosure crisis moved people out of homes which now sit empty, further crowding the rental market. There are roughly 4,000 people living on the streets of Nashville, while 27,000 homes sit vacant.

Tired of being marginalized, their most basic needs placed second to the ideals of ownership, people are fighting back. Across the US and Europe, squatting has reawakened as Home Liberation. People are taking houses that sit empty, owned by banks and speculators, changing the locks and moving in.

We have the idea that we should play by the rules and pay for a house if we are going to live in it. I can respect this. After all, I’m not willing to give up my house. At the same time, rent is considered affordable if it takes no more than 30% of your income. In Nashville, a person working minimum wage would have to work 73 hours a week to afford an average 1 bedroom apartment and 89 hours a week for a two bedroom unit.  That’s not okay, not even close.

There is a whole society living furtively in our shadows, darting from campsite to illegal campsite while we try to pretend they don’t exist.

I don’t know what the solution is, but writing off a segment of society isn’t it. Neither is just giving to charity. There needs to be room for everyone in our society, even people we don’t like, even if it means some people may have a little less. As the wealth gap has grown, so have the housing problems.

When I meet an unhoused person or see what some people live in just to not be on the streets, I think about that article. The 60s and 70s were in no way perfect, but we’ve come to accept something we shouldn’t. Being unhoused should be an anomaly. Property laws are manmade. We’re all human beings. We can do better.