Homelessness Law Blog

“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.

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This past summer I served as a human rights fellow at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. The policy work I engaged in there will help spur change for countless Americans, but my interactions with a man named Jim reminded me of the very individual reasons this work is so important.

Jim sits on a bench at 15^th and K streets in Washington, D.C., across from a Cosi and one block from the Law Center. During the morning rush hour, his well-worn voice pleads with pedestrians, “Spare a dollar?” “I need to eat!” “Can you help me today?”

We usually say good morning and not much more as I pass by. But last Friday was a beautiful morning, sunny and warm without being oppressively hot. When I said hello, Jim declared that he was having a great day. He had found housing!

Jim is a D.C. native, born and bred. Education was a challenge for him here. His first grade teacher would turn on the television instead of teaching, and Jim was promoted each year without ever learning to read or write.

Jim enjoyed working in construction, but fell on hard times. After a back injury he was unable to work. When his mother passed away, the sale of her house left him a little money so he could rent his own room, but that apartment turned out to be the worst place for Jim. First, sheetrock from the ceiling fell down on him as he slept, re-injuring his back. Next, the old wires sparked and started a fire, destroying most of his belongings, and the rest of his money. In November, 2010, as D.C. prepared for winter, Jim moved out to the streets.

Jim has gotten funding from the Red Cross to stay in a hotel a few times, but generally he sleeps outside. He has diabetes and checks his blood sugar twice a day, subsisting on the kindness of strangers. Even though many people ignore him, he still jumps up mid-story to open the Cosi door for a woman pushing a stroller and toting a suitcase. He uses a cell phone to keep in touch with his sisters, his caseworker, and a lawyer helping him with the injuries from the sheetrock. Despite his illiteracy, Jim easily recites phone numbers and addresses off the top of his head.

Last week, his caseworker called to say that Jim would soon have a place to live, news he joyously shared with me. We both had the happiest of days.

My last day at the Law Center was bittersweet. This summer, I learned to fight homelessness on a larger scale, drafting resolutions for housing as a human right and editing a petition to the U.N. But as he shared his story with me, Jim brought into focus the reason for this all – no one should ever be without a place to call home.

-Julie Butner, former Human Rights Fellow

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…)

I chose an interesting summer to intern at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Each morning on my way to work, I’d pick up a newspaper and read about the debt ceiling and deficit reduction and the need for an era of austerity. It was, without a doubt, a summer of cuts in Washington.

Then I’d arrive at the office, and I’d delve into material about a whole different set of problems. Nearly 2.9 million properties received foreclosure filings last year. Family homelessness increased by 20 percent between 2007 and 2010. On a given night 107,000 homeless veterans are homeless. And as anyone who was in the audience for the “Voices of the Streets” panel at June’s Human Right to Housing Forum can attest, behind each number is a real person with a real story.

Still, these facts and stories aren’t in the national discourse, despite the millions of Americans who suffer from homelessness each year. Updating the Law Center’s social media pages with links to stories about developments in homelessness policy and news could be difficult, and not because it’s tricky to condense swaths of information into 140 characters. News outlets don’t cover it like the human rights crisis it is.

The drive to reduce our debt isn’t an inherently negative development; although we may disagree strongly with how Congress and the administration have set about the task, $14.3 trillion is a lot of money.

But as my time at the Law Center has reinforced, it’s misguided to treat that debt as the country’s biggest concern (although if cynical politicians bring us to within days of a default, it unfortunately becomes so) when so many Americans face such real economic and personal hardship. Those afflicted by homelessness and poverty are part of this country; as such, homelessness and poverty deserve to be part of its policy debates.

-Alex Knobel, Development & Communications Intern

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty is grateful to all of its interns and fellows for their outstanding support this summer, including Heather Abraham, Julie Butner, Stefani Cox, Jeff Hill, Alex Knobel, and Kristen Tullos.

Photo credit: kbrookes

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

My first day at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty was 5 years ago last Sunday. At that point, in the middle of 2006, our housing market was being celebrated as a boom, making huge profits for some, though we know that even in those supposed times of plenty, millions of people experienced homelessness each year, and as real estate prices increased, gentrification was forcing more and more people out of their homes. 

But because the market was apparently making so many people winners, it was tough to make the case for those who were the victims of the market that the government needed to play a role in rebalancing the market or correcting for its failures. And at that point, the Bush Administration firmly denied that housing could be conceived of as a right, and was actively flaunting any notion that human rights standards should bind our behavior. 

5 years later, we’re in a very different place. On the negative side, our housing boom went bust, forcing millions more families and individuals to struggle with their housing costs, suffer through poor conditions, and at worst, sending them onto the streets. On the positive side, President Obama has committed his administration to ending – not just coping with – homelessness, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has stated that human rights norms have a role in shaping our housing policy, and the State Department has brought us back into the international fold by affirming housing and other economic and social rights as rights. 

While the reality for people on the ground remains grim, these are more than rhetorical changes. And they didn’t happen by accident. There has been a growing movement for the human right to housing over these past 5 years, and I believe that these initial changes are just the beginning for a new kind of housing policy, one that recognizes housing as a basic human right.  

This Tuesday and Wednesday, we held our 6^th National Forum on the Human Right to Housing, which was itself evidence of this change. 5 years ago, we would have been hard pressed to get a State Department official to talk about housing as a human right, let alone a domestic agency official. But this year, most of our panels had representatives from HUD, Justice, Veterans Affairs, and other domestic agencies, all of whom increasingly understand their roles not just as executors of policy, but as implementers of our human rights obligations. The more than 150 participants at the Forum from all across the country drew from a wide range of lawyers, advocates, and directly affected victims of the housing crisis, all ready to work together to promote housing as a human right. C-SPAN covered our closing plenary, moderated by author and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, in which 3 formerly homeless individuals shared their stories and explained why they believe calling housing a human right is essential. And the Forum concluded with a briefing at the Capitol on a human rights analysis of the Federal Plan to End Homelessness, attended by dozens of Congressional staffers and interns, as well as other advocates. 

In the next 5 years, I’ve got big dreams for implementing the human right to housing here in the U.S. Of course many of those dreams may not be realized, but if you had told me 5 years ago that we would have come this far already, I wouldn’t have believed it. So here’s hoping for the best, and looking forward to 5 more years of progress! 

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director/Children & Youth Attorney

The National Forum on the Human Right to Housing, to be held June 7-8 at the Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington, D.C., couldn’t come at a better time.

There’s an obvious disconnect between Washington rhetoric and the American story.  As Congress debates tax breaks for its wealthiest constituents and major cuts to the social safety net, more than 44 million homeless and poor people are waiting to learn their fate.  That’s 14 out of every 100 Americans.  Will they have a roof over the heads?  Food to feed their children?

With the gap between rich and poor growing exponentially, it’s only common sense for our policies to reflect the increasing need.  But there’s something lost in all of this, an inconvenient truth policymakers have been ignoring for decades: housing is a human right.

The United States is obligated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other international agreements, to ensure its every citizen has access to adequate housing and a basic standard of healthy living.  And across the country, Americans agree.  Recent polling shows that 75 percent believe housing is a human right.

At the National Forum on the Human Right to Housing, the Law Center will bring together homeless and poor people, federal policymakers, grassroots advocates, service providers, lawyers, journalists, and academics from across the country to share information and work collaboratively to reframe the public debate about homelessness, poverty, and access to justice.

This year’s speakers are leading experts on these issues. Here’s  a small sample:

• Carol Anderson, Assoc. Professor of African American Studies, Emory University, and author of Eyes Off the Prize
• Peter Edelman, Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy, Georgetown University School of Law
• Barbara Ehrenreich, best-selling author of Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
• Pam Fessler, poverty & philanthropy correspondent, National Public Radio
• Bryan Greene, General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing at HUD
• Jonathan Harwitz, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy & Programs at HUD
• Gail Laster, Deputy Chief Counsel for the House Financial Services Committee
• Barbara Poppe, Executive Director, U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness

Click here for a full schedule of events.

The Forum comes on the heels of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s recent review of U.S. human rights policy.  In its official response to the Council’s recommendations, the federal government acknowledged for the first time in history that homelessness implicates its human rights obligations.

Now is the time to mobilize communities across the country to fight for the dignity and basic quality of life of every American.  The Forum will include workshops on applying the human rights framework to advocacy on issues like: preventing homelessness, criminalization, children’s education, state and local budgets, domestic violence, and veteran homelessness.

Forum participants will even receive training on how to communicate with legislators on these issues, and have the opportunity to meet with their elected representatives.

We hope you’ll join us on June 7-8 at the Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington, D.C.  The Forum is a chance for the U.S. human rights movement to chart a course for the future – one, we hope, in which the American Dream more closely reflects our daily reality.

For more information, click here. Early registration is discounted, but ends May 15, so act fast!

-Andy Beres, Grant Writer & Communications Assistant

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