Rising Waters Always Find an Opening

Part Two: Who Will Be Naming San Diego’s Homeless Concentration Camps?

All signs point to the same conclusion: round ‘em up and stick ‘em somewhere else.

As is true with immigration (Part One), we avoid the truth by saying a symptom is The Problem. People living on the streets of San Diego really aren’t there because they want to be. Let’s explore.

For starters– A growing collection of high profile California politicians have jumped on the bandwagon in support of Grant Pass, Oregon’s appeal to the US Supreme Court on the question of banning unhoused people sleeping on public property.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor Todd Gloria, District Attorney Summer Stephan, and the San Diego City Council have all submitted ‘friend of the court’ (amicus curiae) briefs siding with Grant Pass. They’d like to have their ‘hands untied’ so their ‘common sense’ approaches to ‘clean our streets.

Although the Supreme Court refused to hear a similar appeal in 2019, now that the pretense of fairness is out of the way (thanks to revelations about billionaire influence peddling), the hope is the justices will decide enforcement of anti-camping ordinances does not fall within the Eighth Amendment’s  definition of "cruel and unusual punishments."    

It’s one thing to discuss this approach in the abstract (as San Diego’s camping ban prohibits some enforcement provided shelter beds are available) and another to experience it (shelter beds are available in very limited numbers).

My bet is that the court will express concerns about crime, fires and "the reemergence of medieval diseases" and find a way for law enforcement to become the front line of governmental involvement with unhoused humans.

What’s already happened in San Diego since passage of the ‘camping ordinance’ is that clusters of people sleeping on the streets have declined in visibility in some areas. That does not mean they’ve gone away.

The number of people seeking shelter increases each month faster than the number who are no longer officially unhoused, and the underlying economic conditions driving homelessness are continuing. 

Even so-called liberal politicians are backed into a corner, where partial solutions do not have the effect of stemming the tide. 

Yes, we can build low-income housing. Yes, we can expand the shelter system. Yes, we can (and have) changed the bureaucratic obstacles limiting expansion of the housing market in general. And no, these steps aren’t and won’t effectively address the increasing numbers of people living on the street any time soon.

There exists a generalized perception that Mayors and Governors, etc aren’t doing ‘enough’ coming from two sides of the political spectrum. 

Elected official’s supporters are uneasy (some are righteously angry) as they’re constantly being reminded of the inhumanity occurring in plain sight. Opponents are angry (and inciting outrage) at the inability of the government to remove reminders of systemic failure. 

Deep down, much of the public feels disgust, one of what scientists call the seven universal emotions, evolved as a means of aiding survival. Blaming the victims has become a moral justification for those on the right for what is all-too-often a self-fulling prophecy.

The fastest growing part of the unhoused population are senior citizens. California’s overall senior population grew by 7% from 2017 to 2021, but the number of people 55 and over who sought homelessness services increased 84% —  more than any other age group —  according to the state’s Homeless Data Integration System. 

These seniors haven’t been lurking in the background, using drugs and experiencing psychosis, although both of those outcomes may be the result of living ‘rough.’ Social security, disability, and rapidly evaporating pensions aren’t enough to keep them housed as the cost of rent increases and unexpected life events occur.

Via CalMatters:

• Research has shown that living on the streets — eating and sleeping poorly, being exposed to the elements, not getting proper medical care and losing medication during encampment sweeps — will prematurely age, sicken and kill people. That is why when speaking about the homeless population, advocates and experts often refer to “seniors” as anyone 50 and above. 

Denial provides currency for the sense of helplessness felt on much of the left. It’s hard to believe things are so bad when your environment is viewed through the lens of privilege. Look around: the tide of inequality is rising.

Some history…  Our current dilemma can be traced back to the 1980s, with the large-scale withdrawal of federal funding from local governments, cuts to social welfare programs (like public housing) and mental health institutions. 

Reaganomics deemed this funding a form of welfare that, once cut, would incentivize local governments into finding their own sources of tax revenue. Public housing, which generally speaking suffered from chronic mismanagement, was at the front of the line of things localities could no longer afford.

This is when homelessness became linked to mental illness. Many of those previously residing in federally funded mental health institutions ended up on the streets. 

The neoliberal (let the market decide) era meant there was no incentive for the private housing market to invest in housing affordable to the lowest wage earners. It simply wasn’t profitable enough.

Older housing stock and hotels initially absorbed many low income individuals and families. But with market forces ruling the day, it was, however, profitable to tear those properties down to make way for upscale development. 

The relative success of social housing in Europe, where there are 28 million dwellings representing 6% of housing stock, is outside the range of what is possible politically.

These days, programs for publicly funded intervention (beyond token experiments) drive the citizens who believe they’d end up paying for it into hysterics. Words like socialism, falling property values, and crime waves are used as bludgeons on those who would dare propose notable public housing investment.  

Locking up groups of people not an outlier in American history. Most everybody knows about the Japanese internment camps, but there were also Native American Boarding Schools (Not to mention the reality of many ‘reservations’), and post-civil war internment camps for African Americans. 

New! Internment lite…Our nation’s lack of affordable housing (we’re 7.3 million units short already) puts governments between a rock and a hard place.

The solution being adopted by a growing number of localities is government sanctioned encampments. Portand’s doing it. So are Boulder, Austin, and Denver. Georgia’s looking to enable such efforts statewide.

There are 166,703 residents of San Diego County who live in deep poverty, which works out to annual incomes of roughly $7,500 for an individual, $15,000 for a family of four. They’re just one missed paycheck away from losing the roof over their heads.

San Diego has one of these sanctioned encampments in a parking lot in Balboa Park, and another one is on the way. They’ve both got a limited shelf life (ordinances), are generally incapable of admitting people with special needs, and there is no conceivable way a significant number of the denizens of these outdoor spaces will end up with a roof over their head. 

Or -if you’re into victim blaming- drug rehab or mental health facilities. San Diego lacks the capacity to handle those numbers. Even if we opened in-patient facilities, there are not enough people in the market to staff them.

Here’s the National Coalition for the Homeless take on encampments:

• “In the current environment in which municipal governments have largely given up on affordable housing solutions to homelessness and instead resorted to using law enforcement as the primary point of contact for those without housing, we see a broader trend in which the mere offer of any kind of assistance or social service is enough for local governments and law enforcement to justify penalty, arrest or a threat to withdraw a person’s liberty for those who reject the help. 

• We believe that sanctioned encampments will be used as permanent placements for local jurisdictions to avoid providing safe, affordable, accessible, and permanent housing.”

The sanctioned encampment idea will be part of the 2024 Mayoral campaign in San Diego. Todd Gloria challenger SDPD officer Larry Turner supports the controversial Sunbreak Ranch concept, placing unhoused people in a single camp on a piece of desert land.

I don’t necessarily think Turner can win (depending on just how much power the region’s law enforcement industrial complex actually wields), but the “camp” idea has been brought out of the shadows.

The way things work in San Diego currently is that police issue citations, which pile up long enough to result in arrests. City prosecutors won’t prosecute those arrests, giving those charged with no chance of a judicial review or opportunity to establish a legal defense…and they’re back out on the streets with nothing. 

As an especially cruel and unusual bonus, jailing an individual living on the streets results in their possessions being thrown away, including prescription drugs, identification, and/or cell phones. 

It’s hard for me to believe, given the level of animosity displayed toward unhoused humans in San Diego, that a more humane ethic will prevail in whatever form of internment camps end up existing. Some of the frontline workers in San Diego’s homeless industrial complex have their own issues with cruel and/or uncivil behavior toward their ‘clients.’

The bottom line: Were it not for the overall shortage of local housing, it would be cheaper to rent units at market rate than to use police and emergency services instead. 

Obviously we need to build housing and to build both temporary and permanent housing ASAP. The military (not suggesting necessarily for now) did it in San Diego in WWII; where there’s a will there’s a way.

In this case, the will has to do with a change in attitude that says “we” are more important than “I,” especially as it applies to the values baked-in to our economic and political systems.

One of the major candidates for president in 2024 is running with a pledge of establishing internment camps for unhoused people. (Guess who?). 

In an essay about the mounting threat of violence in this country at TruthOut, author Henry A. Giroux concludes:

• The dark side of history is with us once again, and with it comes a warning about the present — a warning captured by Primo Levi in his 2005 book The Reawakening. He writes:

• In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.… A new fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside our country, and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defences. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves, and one must find the strength to resist.

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Monday News Notes & Commentary

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A fruitless search for shelter | Woman says search for a shelter bed or tent is a dead end task Via CBS 8 News. (Say what?)

• Since April, Jennifer has stood in line at the Homelessness Response Center at 4:00 a.m. in hopes of getting a shelter bed. She makes sure she is at the front of the line in case one is available. She managed to get a bed once but another person at the shelter threatened her physically and she was forced to leave. Since then, those at the response center have given her the same response every time; no beds. 

• Jennifer's experience searching for shelter is in stark contrast to San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria's opinion on shelter bed availability. 

• During an August press conference, Mayor Gloria said the city has not experienced a time when there were no shelter beds available for people in need such as Jennifer. 

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Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco Via the Washington Post

• In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables.

• By the 2000s, the tobacco giants spun off their food companies and largely exited the food industry — but not before leaving a lasting legacy on the foods that we eat.

• The new research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. The Addiction study found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.

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US mother sentenced to two years in prison for giving daughter abortion pills Via The Guardian (So much for ‘it can’t happen here’)

• Although the case occurred before the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, it has been seen as a harbinger of how law enforcement may prosecute people for ending their own pregnancies in a post-Roe era – and how giant tech companies could go along with it.

• Court documents in the case revealed that Facebook’s parent company Meta supplied police with the private Facebook messages that Celeste and Jessica Burgess had sent one another. In one message, Celeste told Jessica: “Remember we burn the evidence.”

• Although most states do not ban people from inducing their own pregnancies – abortion bans typically penalize abortion providers, not patients – abortion rights advocates have long warned that if a prosecutor wants to target someone for a self-managed abortion, they will find a statute that is elastic enough to do so.

PS– Jessica Burgess was set to undergo a court-ordered psychological evaluation ahead of her sentencing. But the evaluation was canceled due to lack of funding, according to KTIV.