Homelessness Law Blog

When I first came to Washington DC to organize a campaign for a federal response to homelessness, I never dreamt that, decades later, I’d still be fighting to end homelessness.

In 1986, when I started going to Capitol Hill to persuade Congress to take action, the response was often: “we’d like to help – good for you for taking this on – but we have an election coming up and homeless people don’t vote. Sorry.” And these were our “friends.”

But we persisted, working with a coalition of organizations and many grassroots groups from across the country. And in July 1987, we had a big victory: the first major federal law addressing homelessness – now known as the McKinney-Vento Act – was passed.

Now, 25 years later, the Act has grown and it’s accomplished much good. But the job remains unfinished. McKinney-Vento was always intended to be just a first step (it was to be followed by additional federal aid, mainly funding for permanent housing) to really end and prevent homelessness.

Now the need is again growing exponentially, just as it was in the early and mid-1980s. That’s why we’ve launched a new campaign to end and prevent homelessness. The “All-In to End Homelessness” campaign reminds us that our goal is a home for all – and that it will take all of us to win it.

We’ll also be reminding political candidates this election season that homelessness remains a crisis in their communities and in America broadly, and calling on them to commit to actions to end and prevent it. We’ll be challenging laws that prevent homeless people from voting.  Stay tuned in the coming months, also, as we work with a coalition of national advocates to develop a framework local groups can use and adapt for their own advocacy.

Please join us by taking the All-in Pledge today!

- Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director

The Law Center and its local allies have won a big victory on behalf of homeless campers in Sacramento.  For well over a year, campers have been forced to transport bags full of waste on a bicycle to a public restroom miles away from their tent city.

In an unprecedented letter to Mayor Kevin Johnson, the United Nations has delivered a clear message: by not providing sanitation and safe drinking water, the city is violating the human rights of homeless persons.

The letter, sent by UN Special Rapporteur Catarina de Albuquerque, cites targeted closings of public restrooms, decommissioning of water fountains, and a lack of other clean water sources as blatant violations.

“The United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, must ensure that everyone [has access] to sanitation which is safe, hygienic, and secure […] and which provides privacy and ensures dignity,” Albuquerque wrote.

She notes that the short-term solution is to ensure access to clean restrooms and drinking water, including during the night, but that ensuring adequate housing for homeless persons must be the long-term goal.

“The UN has delivered a powerful message: the U.S. doesn’t get a free pass on its human rights violations.  Sacramento must take immediate steps to address the needs of its homeless population,” said Eric Tars, our human rights program director.  “Access to water and sanitary facilities is one of the most fundamental of human rights – essential to everyone’s health, dignity, and continued life.”

Albuquerque visited Sacramento in February 2011, as part of a fact-finding mission organized by the Law Center and Sacramento-based Safe Ground and Legal Services of Northern California.  She heard direct testimony from homeless campers, who are forced to rely on makeshift privy systems to deal with privacy and human waste issues.

“Nobody wants to have to go to the bathroom outdoors,” Safe Ground member and homeless camper Tim Buckley said.  “Imagine your mother in this situation.  Wouldn’t you want her to access water and sanitation?”

In a report issued to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Albuquerque states that failure to provide homeless persons access to water and sanitary facilities “could […] amount to cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.”

“No government should use access to life-sustaining services as a weapon to stigmatize and discourage the behavior of homeless people.  We intend to hold Sacramento accountable to human rights standards,” Tars said.

To read our press release, click here.

To read the full letter to Mayor Johnson, click here.

To read the UN’s report, click here.

“I’ll be around. Somehow. I used to fall asleep thinking I wouldn’t wake up. Now I know better. Now I know, honey – it goes on and on and on.”

Last February, I wrote about a woman named “V.” She’s a homeless person who sat outside our K Street office for the better part of a year. I visited with her daily, and bought her lunch from time to time. She talked about the pain she was in, her addiction to alcohol, and the vicious love of her dead father. In between, she’d point out young women on the street and insist they were looking at me.

My visits weren’t noble. I can shamefully recall a few days when I took a different path to work because I didn’t have money for her. In shielding myself from her disappointment, I denied her the human contact she so dearly coveted.

I wrote before about a man she met at church. He was kind and gentle, giving her a place to stay while she got back on her feet. Her voice swelled with pride as she described looking for a job and scented shampoo. She was sober; there was such clarity to her thoughts.

But as the weeks passed, that clarity faded. The spark of life vanished from her eyes. There were bruises on her. She wouldn’t say where they came from, but I already knew. I pressed her for information about the man she was staying with.

(more…)

Too often in our society, homeless persons are devalued, ignored, and treated with much less respect than they deserve. They become accustomed to people walking by with only a disgusted glance in their direction. This lack of acknowledgment is dehumanizing.

Earlier this week, advocates in Rhode Island gathered to acknowledge and memorialize the lives of over 35 individuals who died homeless in the state in 2011. We commend Beneficent Church in Providence for the service they held and the time they dedicated to honor those our society failed. At the memorial, names were read aloud and thirty-five candles were lit for each person, as well as an extra for those who may have been neglected. It can be very difficult to track homeless deaths and oftentimes they are left without any memorial to mark the lives they led. The service in Rhode Island is an important reminder that, like all human beings, each and every homeless person is valuable and unique.

This memorial comes while cities across the country are enacting criminalization laws that sweep homeless persons out of public view, making it difficult for them to consistently access services from community groups.

These laws, which range from prohibiting loitering, begging, or camping/sleeping in public, have proven to be very costly. Numerous studies show that supportive housing and emergency shelter cost a lot less money than putting homeless persons in jail. But beyond the practical financial considerations, it is important that we provide homeless persons the respect they deserve as individuals and do what we can to improve their situations.

The service in Rhode Island is important, but we must work to prevent unnecessary deaths from ever happening in the first place. More must be done to acknowledge homeless persons in our society and provide them with the services they require.

- Megan Huber, Development & Communications Intern

Dear Friends—

Thank you for your support and involvement over the past year—and best wishes for 2012.  At the Law Center, we’re diving into important 2012 priorities and, after a year of transition, we’re welcoming new members to our team.  Their fresh perspectives will be critical as we expand our pro bono collaborations to provide our legal expertise and support to more communities.

The year promises to be a critical one on several fronts.  We’ll be marking the 25^th anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act, drawing attention to its positive impact and pushing Congress to make good on its promise to end homelessness in America.  We’re also gearing up for the fall presidential election—challenging laws that keep homeless and poor people from voting, and working to ensure homelessness and poverty are treated seriously by the candidates.
(more…)

This week the New York Times caught on to a trend that’s sweeping the nation: as J.R. Fleming, co-founder of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign who spoke earlier this month at our National Forum on the Human Right to Housing put it, “we…put homeless people into people-less housing.”

The article starts off with the scene of the Biggs family moving into their home, as supporters surround them and chant “fight, fight, fight, ‘cause housing is a human right.” While most families move on their own, or with the help of a few friends, the Biggs need the support of a group, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, because their move is not a traditional one – they don’t have a legal right to move in.

This forceful re-examination of the laws by which certain people are left out on the street even when there are countless empty homes in their communities is central to the notion of housing as a human right. During the civil rights struggle, people confronted the long-accepted laws of segregation and discrimination by challenging them in direct actions like sit-ins at lunch counters, as well as working through the courts and the legislatures. We are now engaged in the continuation of that struggle, as the Biggs and the Anti-Eviction Campaign take the first steps to say just because it’s the law, doesn’t mean the law is just.

The idea of housing as a human right doesn’t necessarily mean that every homeless family should be allowed to move into a vacant house and take that property away from its legal owner. But it does challenge us to look at the injustice of homelessness, and the laws that perpetuate it, in a new way. And there may be new models of community homeownership and renting that can co-exist with our present private ownership model that will provide the bridge to a more just future.

The Times article concludes with Ms. Biggs “showing off the freshly painted rooms and the used dining room set given to her by a neighbor,” and tonight, the Biggs will be enjoying dinner around their dining room table. I hope we will soon look back on this struggle to ensure that every family can share a dinner table in their own home the way we look back on the civil rights struggle to share lunch counters: a lesson for the history books, but no longer appropriate in an America that recognizes all its residents’ basic human rights.

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

Photo credit: Khell Center, Cornell University

On June 1, three members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested for sharing food with hungry people in a park in downtown Orlando.  Such news is almost incomprehensible.  People arrested for helping out people in need. Unfortunately, as shocking as this news is, it is not unfamiliar. Cities around the country have used laws to target and move homeless people out of downtown areas for decades.

But, now our cities have stooped even lower, so that we can’t even allow members of our communities to help out one another. What kind of a message does this send to our community members?  What about our children?  Do we want them to grow up learning that serving those in need is not only not worthwhile, but something to be punished?

The ordinance that these three people violated is one that requires groups sharing food with 25 or more people in certain downtown parks to obtain a permit to do so. And groups are only allowed two  such permits per covered park per year. Given that certain central locations and regularly scheduled meals at those locations tend to reach the most people (due to visibility and predictability), these restrictions make it more likely that people in need will not be able to access safe, nutritious food.

The ordinance has been tested in court and the 11^th Circuit recently issued an opinion upholding the law – although the district court overturned the law.  Clearly, the City of Orlando is taking its cue from the court to recommence enforcement of the law, but to what end?

The penalties for violating this ordinance are 60 days in jail, a $500 fine, or both. In a time when budgets are strapped and human services are being cut, city resources should be going to helping homeless people move beyond homelessness, instead of incarcerating those who want to help.  Jail costs are extraordinarily high, especially in comparison to the cost of housing and shelter.  It does not make any fiscal or practical sense to use police, jail, and court resources to address this issue.

Putting aside the fiscal aspects of enforcement of this ordinance, it is clear our communities need to do some soul searching. We need to do better than this.  We need to show future generations that it is poverty, hunger, and homelessness that should not be tolerated, not the acts of compassion to address them.

For more information about the criminalization of homelessness, check out the report card we released today on housing rights in the United States.

-Tulin Ozdeger, Civil Rights Program Director

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon

Welcome to the 2012 election. In states across the country, Republican controlled legislatures are passing bills that would restrict the ability of homeless and low income Americans to vote. Rejecting an amendment to allow homeless persons to vote with an affidavit of identity from a service provider, Wisconsin will now require voters to provide ID in order to vote. And Florida’s new law will require anyone who has moved to update their address before going to the polls; if they seek to do so on election day they will be forced to vote by provisional ballot – a ballot unlikely to be counted.

Proponents of these laws assert that they will prevent voter fraud. However, they can hardly point to any actual examples. So why is this being done? Isn’t it obvious? No demographic group votes in a monolithic bloc. But we can make some generalizations – poor people tend to support candidates who promise to preserve the social safety net, who care about low wage workers, and who work to make sure that all Americans have safe, decent, affordable housing. The legislators passing these bills are not those candidates. We cannot allow these laws to stand or new laws to be passed. As we move closer to next year’s election, the Law Center will review and analyze these restrictions. We will challenge them when we can, and make policy arguments in opposition where that provides our best chance for success. And when new laws are enacted, we will make sure that homeless persons and service providers understand their rights.

Voting rights are fundamental civil and human rights – rights that people in this country died for not too many years ago. They should be continuously expanded, not eroded.

-Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director

Photo Credit: Vaguely Artistic

This week the Los Angeles Times published an article discussing the settlements of several hospitals that have dumped homeless patients at shelters or on the streets without following proper discharge procedures.  Other news articles in the past have explored the same topic, describing, for instance, how a homeless woman was once discharged to Los Angeles’ Skid Row with nothing but a hospital gown and slippers on.

Even under ordinary discharge situations, homeless individuals face a larger set of obstacles in post-hospital recovery than non-homeless individuals.  Homeless people are more likely to face difficulty in obtaining adequate food and rest, and in finding shelter in sanitary and unexposed environments.  These factors make it difficult for homeless individuals to maintain good health under average circumstances, even more so under improper discharge situations.

Several of the patient dumping situations cited in the article have led to costly settlements for hospital groups, such as $125,000 in penalties and charitable contributions paid by Centinela Freeman Holdings, and $1.6 million paid by College Hospital.  Settlements like these may lead hospital groups to think twice before engaging in improper discharge procedures, and could potentially help protect the interests of homeless individuals in the future.

In the long run however, punishing hospitals for homeless patient dumping will not address the underlying factors that create the problem.  Our nation was founded on the concept that all human beings are born equal and deserving of the same right to basic human dignity, yet these practices show how far we have strayed from that ideal. Our nation will need to confront the formidable healthcare and housing barriers that low-income and homeless individuals face daily before we will truly see the situation improve.

Articles such as Malcolm Gladwell’s “Million-Dollar Murray” show how costly it can be not to provide adequate housing and healthcare for homeless individuals.  Certainly, it is in our best interest economically to help homeless individuals attain a higher level of security and health. But equally as important, no human being deserves to be treated like trash, and we all need to take responsibility to re-humanize homeless persons so incidents like these never happen again.

-Stefani Cox, Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow

Photo credit: Jose Gulao

My father immigrated to this country as a refugee following World War II, believing, as many did, and continue to do, that the awful conditions he experienced in refugee camps would be left behind in the Old World. The poem on the Statue of Liberty that welcomed my father and countless others to the U.S. reads, “Give me your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

In last week’s posting, I talked about another international visitor to our shores, the UN Independent Expert on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, Ms. Catarina de Albuquerque, who was conducting a mission to the U.S., and going to visit a tent city in Sacramento, CA. The testimony she heard there, put together by our partners at Legal Services of Northern California and Safe Ground was compelling, and the Independent Expert was moved to strong words in discussing it in her preliminary report, issued on Friday:

As a part of the mission, I examined the situation of the homeless with regard to access to water and sanitation. Up to 3.5 million people experience homelessness in the United States every year. In some U.S. cities, homelessness is being increasingly criminalized. Local statutes prohibiting public urination and defecation, while facially constitutional are often discriminatory in their effects. Such discrimination often occurs because such statutes are enforced against homeless individuals, who often have no access to public restrooms and are given no alternatives.

In Sacramento, California I visited a community of homeless people. I met Tim, who called himself the “sanitation technician” for this community. He engineered a sanitation system that consists of a seat with a two-layered plastic bag underneath. Every week Tim collects the bags full of human waste, which vary in weight between 130 to 230 pounds, and hauls them on his bicycle a few miles to a local public restroom. Once a toilet becomes available, he empties the bags’ contents; packs the plastic bags with leftover residue inside a third plastic bag; ties it securely and disposes of them in the garbage; and then he sanitizes his hands with water and lemon. Tim has said that even though this job is difficult, he does it for the community, especially the women. The fact that Tim is left to do this is unacceptable, an affront to human dignity and a violation of human rights that may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. An immediate, interim solution is to ensure access to restrooms facilities in public places, including during the night.

That these conditions persist in 2011, right here in our backyard, in camps like those visited by the Independent Expert, belies our ideal of an America lying beyond that “golden door” and should shame us. Our governments not only condone the existence of these conditions but, rather than doing something constructive to alleviate the problem, criminalize those who have no choice but to live with their dignity impaired. This should move every American to demand better.

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

Photo credit: Ludovic Bertron