Homelessness Law Blog

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.
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Over the past decade and a half, the Law Center has been working hard to get the federal government to acknowledge housing as a basic human right and begin taking steps to implement its obligations.  As documented in our report, Simply Unacceptable: Homelessness and the Human Right to Housing in the U.S., for many years, the government was openly opposed to defining housing as a human right.  It came close in recent years, but didn’t quite get there.

Then, during last year’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), HUD stated for the first time the relevance of this human rights process to its domestic housing and homelessness policies.  Last week, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness issued its first-year assessment and update of Opening Doors: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.  Among other items, the report states:

HUD has been working on a number of other activities over the past year that helps further the housing objectives in Opening Doors[.] In March 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) conducted the first comprehensive review on human rights done in the United States.  For the first time, the United States acknowledged housing as a human rights issue on an international stage. The Department of State, with the support of representatives from HUD, noted its support of the recommendation by UNHRC, which stated “broad range of safeguards for the homeless people to allow them the full enjoyment of their rights and dignity” and supports reducing and ending homelessness as a human rights concern.

This reaffirmation of the importance of the UPR in HUD’s and the Interagency Council’s work on homelessness is another step toward making the human right to housing the framework to which our government holds itself accountable.  While these words on paper don’t put homeless families in homes today, they are an essential step toward making sure those homes are created tomorrow, and that homelessness is prevented for more families in the future.

From my personal perspective as the Law Center’s human rights program director, this reference is a gratifying acknowledgment of the work we – and many others across the country – have been doing.  For years, pushing the human right to housing felt like banging our heads against the wall, with seemingly little progress.  But without those years, we would not have reached this tipping point, where it appears these references are beginning to build on each other.

Small words, but they represent a fundamental shift in policy. And as momentum continues to build, these words and values will help create that future where no one in America spends a single night without a place to call home.

- Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

Each year, the Law Center recognizes outstanding contributions by individuals and organizations to the movement to end homelessness at its 13^th Annual McKinney-Vento Awards. This year’s event will be held tomorrow, Wednesday, Sept. 21 at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C.

For Rob Robinson, homelessness isn’t an abstraction; he’s lived it.  For almost three years, Robinson survived on the streets and in shelters in Miami and New York.  And since resolving his homelessness in 2007, he’s become a powerful voice for all those still suffering its indignities.  Working with Take Back the Land, Picture the Homeless, and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, Robinson has been a fierce advocate for the human right to housing. He has also been a leader in the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights.  G.W. Rolle, a former honoree and Law Center board member,  will present Robinson with this year’s Personal Achievement Award.

Robinson’s work has been made possible, in part, by the U.S. Human Rights Fund (USHRF), this year’s Stewart B. McKinney Award winner.  Since its founding in 2005, USHRF has provided more than $20 million to nonprofits fighting for human rights here at home.  Making the Law Center one of its core grantees right from the start, USHRF has helped us change the way policymakers view homelessness.  In March 2011, following years of advocacy by the Law Center, Robinson, and others, the U.S. acknowledged for the first time that homelessness implicates its human rights obligations. Human Rights expert Dorothy Q. Thomas, who helped start the fund, will present the award.

Congressman Barney Frank, this year’s Bruce F. Vento Award winner, has fought time and again for legislation addressing and preventing homelessness.  In 1987, he helped pass the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.  And in recent years, his leadership has been critical to helping enact the Homelessness Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act, Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP), and Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act (PTFA).  He was also a primary sponsor of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program and the Dodd-Frank Act. Susan Vento, the Congressman’s widow, will present Rep. Frank with this award.

This year’s Pro Bono Counsel Award will go to DLA Piper, which has provided thousands of hours of pro bono support to the Law Center across a range of issues, most prominently access to education for homeless children.  DLA Piper is taking a national leadership role on the Law Center’s new Project LEARN (Lawyers’ Education Access Resource Network) initiative.  The firm will provide training and technical assistance on homeless children’s education rights to families and school officials across the country. Suzanne Turner, pro bono partner at Dechert LLP, who received this honor last year, will present the award.

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, originally scheduled to provide the evening’s keynote address, is unexpectedly unable to join us. In her stead, Assistant Secretary for Policy William Spriggs will join us to honor the efforts of those working to end homelessness in America.  Laura Evans, of Washington’s Fox 5 News, will also join us as the event’s mistress of ceremonies.

Thank you to all who have helped make this event possible. We’re so excited for what is certain to be an inspirational evening.

As I graduated from law school back in 2004, my women’s rights classes were abuzz with the preparations for the upcoming Supreme Court hearing of the Castle Rock v. Gonzales case. Little did I suspect that the case, which had been in the courts for five years already, would take another six years for some body of law to actually recognize the injustice that had been done to Jessica Lenahan (then Gonzales) and her family.

The case had its origins in Castle Rock, Colorado, in 1999, when Jessica Lenahan’s ex-husband abducted the couple’s three daughters, Leslie, Katheryn, and Rebecca. Despite a domestic violence restraining order limiting her husband’s access to her and her daughters, when Lenahan called the police repeatedly over several hours and went down to the police station, the police made no effort to locate the children or enforce Colorado’s mandatory arrest law. Shortly after midnight, Lenahan’s ex-husband got into a shoot out with the police, and after he was shot and killed, they found the three girls had been shot dead in the bed of his pickup truck. To this day, Lenahan has not been told definitively if it was her ex-husband or the police officer’s shots that killed them.

Lenahan sued the Castle Rock Police Department for failing to protect her daughters, particularly since she had a restraining order against her ex-husband that mandated the police to arrest him if he violated the order.  However, in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Lenahan did not have a constitutional right to protection, and that the police’s failure to enforce her protection order was not unconstitutional. (more…)

Earlier this week, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the Conference) sent a letter to the House of Representatives expressing their opposition to H.R. 2441, a bill which would eliminate the National Housing Trust Fund, which funds affordable housing programs.

The Conference’s opposition to this bill comes as no surprise, given their longstanding support for the Trust Fund, which originally passed in 2008. What may surprise some, however, is that the Conference frames this strong support for affordable housing in their affirmation that “Catholic tradition teaches that affordable and decent housing is a human right.”

Indeed, since at least 1975, the USCCB has explicitly addressed housing as a human right.  In “The Right to a Decent Home: A Pastoral Response to the Crisis in Housing,” the USCCB sets out their position, which is sadly equally relevant today as it was over 30 years ago. There, they state, “Since decent housing is a human right, its provision involves a public responsibility. The magnitude of our housing crisis requires a massive commitment of resources and energy.” As they then stated in their February 2011 brief on the Trust Fund, “Unfortunately, such a ‘massive commitment’ has not been forthcoming.”

The human rights framework is based on the premise that every human being is entitled to basic treatment to ensure their dignity. Whether that premise is grounded in religious, moral, or ethical terms, hopefully we can all agree that every person should have a safe, decent, affordable place to call home, and that where the market fails, the government should provide a structure to ensure that no one is left on the streets.

Unfortunately, this week the House subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises voted to pass H.R. 2441 eliminating the Trust Fund. Worse, they have shown no indication of proposing any policies that would replace it with a better system of ensuring that every American can enjoy their right to housing.

While religion is sometimes a divisive issue, the human right to housing is one of those shared values that can unite us.  We welcome the Conference’s support, and hope that Americans of all faiths will stand together to tell their congressional representatives that housing is a basic human right, and they need to take the steps to make that right a reality.

- Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

Photo credit: Catholic Church

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

In a recent series of cover stories, the Washington Post reported that over $400 million in federal HUD HOME funds meant to help local communities build affordable housing for low-income people has gone missing.  This is a terrible thing.  It’s reprehensible that sketchy developers, property flippers, and other unsavory people are siphoning off money meant for poor people, just to line their own pockets.

And given that there is already far too little funding available to build new housing, we can’t afford to waste even a dollar of what we do receive.  Especially because stories like this only serve as fodder for politicians and other interest groups who argue that building affordable housing is an inefficient or ineffective use of tax dollars.  How do we ask Congress to give us more money for programs we know generally work well, when the front page of the Post shows them working poorly?

As advocates for affordable housing, and indeed taxpayers ourselves, we should be outraged by this story.  At the same time, we must undertake a sober evaluation of the facts.  The questionable expenditures occurred over a period of five years, and accounted for less than .2 percent of HUD’s budget each year.  HUD can and should exercise better control over the use of its funds, but make no mistake – this is no indictment of HUD as an agency or of the principle that all people have a human right to safe, decent, affordable housing.  That’s a principle no amount of money can impugn.

- Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director

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

For the past month, a spirit of revolution has gained force both abroad and at home.  Days after mounting popular protests culminated in the disintegration of authoritarian rule in the Middle East, a parallel uprising has emerged on our own shores, translating once distant demands for democracy and economic opportunity into a familiar tongue.  In Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, thousands of workers continue to rally in defense of the very protections that their parents and grandparents wrested from their own employers during similarly shaky economic times almost a century ago.

Historic times demand historic measures.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. cautioned, “one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands.”  Like Rip Van Winkle, “they end up sleeping through a revolution.”

While King issued this admonition over thirty years ago, his words reverberate with renewed urgency today.  Like FDR before him, he understood that even at moments of crisis, such long-cherished guarantees as free speech, free worship, and freedom from political tyranny are meaningless in the absence of economic security.  “If a man doesn’t have a job or an income,” King noted, “he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”

Amid growing state efforts to weaken employment protections, this vision of interlocking civil and economic rights is more relevant than ever.  If true liberty lies in freedom from want, then economic security can be no more negotiable than free speech or free worship, a concept embedded in the human rights principle of “progressive realization.”  In other words, once we’ve advanced along the path of economic justice, we can’t retreat in the face of an altered political landscape, however rocky it may be.

A hundred years ago, another gilded age came to an abrupt end as rich and poor together foundered on a vessel that symbolized the growing gulf between them.  As the winds of political and economic change continue to batter the employed and unemployed alike, policymakers can either doze at the helm of a similarly troubled ship or plunge into rough waters to stem the tide for those at greatest risk.  If history fails to guide them, perhaps the fictional fate of Rip Van Winkle will succeed.

- Rachel Natelson, Staff Attorney