MLK Day Challenge to City Council to End Homeless Repression

Dear City Council,

On this Martin Luther King Jr holiday, I hope that we can all take some time to consider Dr. King, and to take inspiration from his life and his words. I imagine that here in Santa Cruz, there is no controversy in celebrating the Civil Rights movement and the end of Jim Crow. However King's vision grew to include much more than desegregation, and it is these broader visions of social and economic justice that I think are critical for us all to consider. With respect to our particular city and your particular roles as public servants, I would like us to hold King in our hearts and minds as we consider our relationships and policies towards the homeless people living in our community.

In his later years, King challenged inequality and poverty, calling for a “revolution of values” that would put human needs first. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society,” he said. As an example, he considered the issue of poverty and charitable giving:

“On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

I was thinking about this passage the other day when I heard that the Council unanimously voted for the City to collaborate with the Warming Center program. I think it's great that you made that vote, and I appreciate your concern that people should not freeze to death in our city. However when I considered the matter further, it struck me that this decision by the Council is really a very small offer: the use of a City building only if no church spaces are available, and only for a maximum of five nights this winter. The reason this strikes me as problematic is that the same Council also voted to increase punishments for sleeping in parks, as well as making it illegal to sleep in large vehicles. Therefore, while I think it's great to help a few dozen people keep warm on a few of the coldest nights of the year, ultimately that feels to me like a very small good, in comparison to far greater harms.

I appreciate that apart from the Warming Center, the City supports many programs that help meet people's basic needs, acting as the metaphorical Good Samaritan that Dr. King referred to. Yet the need for shelter, one of the most important needs of all, is not available to most homeless people, and in this respect the City's response is even worse than the priest on Jericho road, who walked by without stopping to help. Whereas the priest merely ignored the plight of his fellow, the City kicks them while they're down, sending police to raid their camps, increasing penalties for the “crime” of sleeping outside, and outlawing large vehicles that many people use for shelter. Even with respect to daytime, waking life, the City continually restricts the use of public space by homeless people downtown, and has even condoned brazen police violence against the homeless (i.e. the inaction by the City after a SCPD officer was caught on film slamming a hand-cuffed Richard Hardy face-first into the curb).

I understand and can sympathize with the reasons that people consider such laws. Having no private space available, homeless people spend a disproportionate amount of time in public places, and some of them can be difficult, disruptive, or scary. I know this from personal experience, and have my fair share of stories I could relate. And yet the solutions offered by the City make no sense either morally or in terms of practical public policy. Instead, they are based on the false notion that our generosity and social services act like a magnet pulling homeless people here, and so by cutting services and implementing harsh policies against the homeless, that will drive them away.

Although it seems feasible that homeless people could flock somewhere especially hospitable to them, the idea is simply not borne out by the facts. For starters, Santa Cruz is not particularly welcoming, having laws against sleeping in parks, and heavy restrictions on panhandling and even just sitting on the sidewalk downtown. But more importantly is the biannual ASR homeless survey, the best data we have about the homeless population. Their data show that while there is a trend of migration from elsewhere in Santa Cruz County into the city, the great majority of homeless people were already in the area when they lost housing, and no more homeless are coming here from elsewhere than to San Francisco, Monterey, or any number of other cities.

While poverty and homelessness are national problems beyond the scope of your power and responsibility as City Council to solve, at least we can avoid piling more abuses and indignities on a population that already is suffering enough. In addition to being indecent, it is ineffective and counterproductive, further alienating and embittering people who, like it or not, are part of our community, and not going away any time soon. I've watched many efforts over the past fifteen years to “clean up” certain areas and drive homeless people away, and it is clearly a failed policy, which simply pushes people from one spot to the next, like a giant game of whack-a-mole.

Therefore I want to suggest that in considering these issues of how to share public space, we try to avoid the stigmatizing of an entire class of people, and search instead for more constructive solutions. For example, if you don't want human waste on the sidewalk, how about opening more 24-hr public bathrooms? Or if you don't want people sleeping in parks, how about designating specific places where camping is permitted? Without such constructive alternatives, these crackdowns on homeless represent a cruelty and repression that is beneath the dignity of yourselves as Council members, and our community.

Best regards,

Steve Schnaar