Here is an update — a story from Think Progress on Louisiana’s anti-begging laws.
Here is the latest news in the war on homelessness:
A husband and wife who’ve been feeding the homeless and other needy people in a city park for a year are no longer allowed there after police cited them for illegally feeding a crowd.
The citations and trespass warnings against Chico and Debbie Jimenez and their volunteers are part of an increased effort by the police to discourage Good Samaritans from steering homeless people away from the agencies set up to provide the same services. It’s part of the city’s and county’s broader effort to eventually centralize homeless services.
The city, rightly, says that providing food does not aid the homeless in the long run or address the larger problem of homelessness more generally. The problem with its argument, however, is that asking people like the Jimenezes and their church to refrain from helping people on the streets is cruel. It has nothing to do with homelessness and everything to do with a larger attempt to keep public spaces free of capitalism’s inevitable waste product — human capital that the economic system has decided has no value. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating:
The homeless can be seen as the unfortunate by-product of a corporate capitalism that views workers as interchangeable cogs in a larger machine. For those with limited skill sets (and even for some with higher level or specific abilities), their compensation — as the lagging minimum wage shows — has been disconnected from what it takes to live an even modest existence in most areas, leaving them to fall behind and sometimes fall into homelessness.
For those without skills — or for those struggling with medical or mental illnesses and addiction — the system can be far more unforgiving. They have no value, no way — aside from an inadequate welfare system and patchy set of social services – to survive in a country that commodifies everything from housing to health care. So we consign them to the scrap heap – or the woods at the outskirts of a former seaside resort.
This is unsustainable. Housing and utility costs, food prices, health costs all continue to rise, but wages have stagnated. The minimum wage, which has not been increased nationally in six years, does not pay enough to keep a full-time worker out of poverty. And the companies that rely on these workers – and provide them with the health insurance, the food, the housing they need – are earning record profits.
Workers are nothing more than commodities and, as with every other commodity used by our corporate system, their cost to the business sector must be kept to a minimum and excess costs must be socialized.
The result, ultimately, is a group of human beings who find themselves priced out of housing or lacking value in the workforce. They end up on the streets. This puts them at odds with municipal governments and chambers of commerce who want to sell their cities as the perfect destination. Having someone sleeping in the park or on a sidewalk grate disturbs the optics and damages the brand, which triggers action.
Daytona Beach is one of dozens of cities across the country cracking down on mass-feeding of homeless people in public parks. Last month in Alabama, Rick Wood, a pastor who had been driving around Birmingham handing out hot dogs and water for six years, was told to stop because he didn’t have a city permit. In December, in St. Louis, Mo., a street church serving homemade meals was told to stop the day after their program was featured on the front page of the newspaper.
The paper continues that these battles “pits the case for charity against city governments that are trying to keep parks from becoming regular destinations for the homeless” that often are trying to take a more comprehensive approach to homelessness. Daytona Beach, to its credit, is attempting to address homelessness — by creating a single point of intake designed to allow every homeless person in the city to get the specific services he or she needs. (This will be helpful — see the Bergen County Housing, Health and Human Services Center — but it only goes so far. What’s needed is more housing and more decent-paying jobs, along with services for those who are not capable of working.)
Most cities, however, are not taking even this kind of approach. Most, if the news coverage I’ve seen over the last few years is accurate, are more concerned with sweeping the parks of bad visuals than with creating shelter or good jobs for the people on the streets.
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Hank Kalet 