Politicians Selling Big Lies About Housing First

Reactionaries want you to accept something much worse

Like a plague spreading across the country, the far right has been building fear campaigns as an organizing tool. Books, healthcare for women, honest history, migrants, drag shows, and transgender humans are among the targets.  

You should know the drill by now; a dose of anecdotal horror, a claim of victimhood, local vigilantes, and the gamut of new legislative priorities aimed at suppressing and/or criminalizing this week’s target(s). The collateral damage coming out of these performative actions is inevitably some aspect of what once were considered freedoms.

The venom spewed by these anti empathetic groups inevitably encroaches on the liberties of those who are targeted. A first year fifth grade teacher in Florida had no choice but to quit in the face of condemnation by parent’s rights types upset over a PG movie shown in the classroom. Books are being banned. History is being sanitized. And, of course, there’s always some religious crackpot stirring the pot in the name of their lord.

Here in California, the unhoused have become pawns for crass politicos to stir up the uninformed. The rallying call for the righties is Housing First Doesn’t Work. 

Underneath this claim is the assumption that people are living on the streets due to some moral failing and “liberal” policies keeping police from enforcing the law. Variations on these themes include assuming substance abuse, coming from elsewhere for the easy life in sunny Southern California, and living on the street as a lifestyle.

Every day Republican politicians are up on this platform to gin up fear and disseminate misinformation about the ever-growing numbers of people living on the streets. Our unhoused citizens are low hanging fruit with high visibility being exploited to generate primal disgust followed by anger.   

Housing First isn’t working in California/San Diego, but not because of soft on crime approaches or moral failings. You can’t have Housing First if there isn’t adequate housing. 

Fact: Southern California is nearly 1 million homes short for low-income residents. 

The unhoused population locally is growing by three hundred people every month; it’s not your imagination, there really are more people living on the street.

There aren’t even enough shelter spaces to provide those who want a temporary location. Two out of three people asking for shelter accommodations are left on the street. There’s no room at the inn.

It doesn’t help matters that elected officials make claims about opening up more shelter spaces not bothering to mention all the facilities no longer in operation.

El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells took time out this week from denying that white supremacy is a problem to repeat the housing mantra. He’s running for Rep. Sara Jacobs' seat and doesn’t have much of a chance in a heavily Democratic district. But he’s singing with the choir, implying that increasing numbers of unhoused people stem from ‘failed’ policies.

Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey gets play on TV saying that Housing First has failed.  He doesn’t discuss how bussing ‘those types’ over to San Diego has solved a problem on the island that doesn’t exist in the first place. He’s claiming that “getting help” will solve the unhoused problem. Bailey thinks his tough talk qualifies him for Terra-Lawson Remer’s seat on the County Board of Supervisors. Left unsaid is the reality of a lack of facilities and professionals capable of handling those “getting help.”

Amy Reichert has run out of scare stories about COVID and is now repeating tales of disgusting people led astray by hapless liberals who refuse “treatment.” She’s running to fill Nathan Fletcher’s shoes in the upcoming (August 15) special election.

Because the unhoused population is becoming more visible, the public has become more increasingly demanding that ‘something’ be done. 

Gov. Newsom and local officials throughout the state are promising more focus on mental health problems, with a new CARE court pilot program starting in a handful of counties next fall. What this program will do  –besides maybe creating a path for involuntary confinement in health care settings– is unclear for the simple reason that the facilities and people who staff them don’t exist.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria headed up a delegation of mayors from the 13 largest California cities descended upon the Capitol this week to make their case for sending more money to local governments for housing and support systems. Cities and counties have long used one-time state grants to convert hotels and motels to shelters. Now, mayors are asking for a consistent $2 billion a year.

The governor is planning to put a proposal reworking the existing wealth tax on the 2024 ballot along with a measure to approve a general obligation bond that would bring in somewhere from $3 billion to $5 billion for residential treatment centers. 

Current estimates are that seven to twelve thousand people annually will require treatment under the CARE program. I’m guessing the newly unhoused will be shit out of luck in the meantime.

The destructive and false attacks on Housing First can only accomplish two things: increase the rates of arrests/imprisonment and get scared voters to vote for candidates they otherwise wouldn’t consider.

Advocacy for Housing First policies has been tarred with the scare words “radical agenda” by radio talk show hosts even though the policy has been adopted by governments of all political stripes over past decades. (Psst–Given the proper resources, it works, by the way.)

Bay Area activist Randy Shaw responded to misinformation-plagued accusations in a Invisible People 2021 article, giving a historical view:

• President Nixon’s ending of public housing and President Reagan’s slashing of HUD spending in his 1981 budget drove rising homelessness. So why do so many instead blame drug addiction rather than the inability to afford rent for rising homelessness?

• In The Activist’s Handbook. I explained how drug use skyrocketed in the 1960’s without an increase in homelessness. What did change in the 1980’s was a slashing of federal housing subsidies for the poor—just as they were most needed to meet the late 1970’s wave of urban gentrification.

• Although the reduction in rental housing assistance has not been restored to this day, opponents of such funding found in drug addiction a convenient excuse for homelessness. Suddenly, homelessness was due to individual failure, not the government’s elimination of federal housing subsidies. Blaming drug addiction for rising homelessness fit perfectly with those denying causation from the Nixon/Reagan budget cuts.

Here’s mental health reform activist Pete Early:

• An underlying belief being espoused by Hewitt, Shellenberger, and other Congressional critics is that individuals who are chronically homeless have ended up on the streets because of their own actions. The chronically homeless are choosing alcoholism and/or drugs, or have become mentally ill and don’t want to do anything about their psychosis. Housing First, the critics argue, rewards bad behavior. The philosophy underlying this thinking is that “no one has a right to a government benefit unless they have proved themselves to be deserving or worthy.”

• This thinking makes it easier to sleep at night because acknowledging that Americans who are chronically homeless are helpless in fighting their addictions and/or their mental illnesses pricks at the conscience and demands a helping hand rather than pious judgment.

•  “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus asked.

• According to Hewitt’s thinking, only those who are clean, sober, and not showing symptoms of their mental illnesses.  In short, he excludes those who need it most.

So as bad as our neo-liberal city hall leaders may be, the alternative is even worse. If you care for your fellow humans, you’re between a rock and a hard place. Just know that throwing people behind bars or barbed wire fences (which is the real goal here) has no chance of a good ending.

A long term solution rests with the public realization that our housing crisis is the direct result of commodifying a part of our existence. How we get there is a challenge I haven’t been able to solve.

Extra! Extra! News You Should Know!

Why The Pedophile Who Led The GOP Is Relevant Via Oliver Willis. Accusations as deflections go back (at least to House Speaker Dennis Hastert), and it’s high time we did something about it. 

• But being blunt with the truth, telling the public what the Republican Party and the conservative movement is and the kind of people it places in the highest levels of leadership, is not going “low.” In fact, if a Democrat were to point out that at the time Dennis Hastert and the GOP were busy lecturing America about marital infidelity by Bill Clinton, shaming single mothers, demonizing Muslims after 9/11 — that the man who led the party was a serial molester, this would be going “high.”

• It is going “high” to demand that our leaders be better than the kind of filth Dennis Hastert is, and that people who abuse others — like Donald Trump, like Ron DeSantis, like every other Republican demonizing transgender kids from coast to coast — should not be in public office.

• If your political opponents are in the mud and they live and breathe the mud and the mud has unfortunately been a valuable weapon in elevating them to positions of power, you cannot in good conscience simply pretend that the muck doesn’t exist.

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Ron DeSantis’s immigration law is already leading to worker shortages Via Vox.

• The law was already causing panic across Florida before DeSantis signed it. In South Florida, reporters with a local CBS News affiliate tracked empty construction sites across Miami-Dade County and spoke with construction workers who said that many of their coworkers were not showing up to work because they feared deportation. An NBC affiliate interviewed farmworkers in South Florida considering moves out of the state because of fear of persecution.

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Why we're not calling it "natural gas" anymore Via HEATED (It’s methane!)

• The fossil fuel industry’s growing campaign to brand gas as “clean energy” is no different from its old campaign to brand climate change as fake. Both were created to dampen public demand for effective climate policy, which would necessitate the phase-out of their highly profitable products.

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