As the crisis continues to grow and many cities criminalize homelessness, several groups are aligning to fight for the right of people who lack shelter
Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) Executive Director Paul Boden just wants people to get a chance to sit down, grab a bite, catch some z’s and not end up in court. The basics.
At least, such activities are basic if you look clean, smell sweet and don’t walk in the wrong parts of town. Buying and eating dinner, sleeping, using a restroom and relaxing are all legal if those activities take place indoors. But if you’re outside, they’re grounds to be asked to move along.
The standards for people experiencing homelessness are different than those for the housed, Boden knows. Activities that receive no comment when performed indoors become lawless behavior by dint of resources. That pisses him off.
“How many new inventive ways are we going to come up with to fuck with poor people to send them somewhere else?” Boden asked.
He’s looked for Somewhere Else, USA, this magical utopia for the dispossessed, the place where the unhoused lay claim to the same rights, freedoms and dignities afforded to their housed neighbors.
“I Googled it. It didn’t pop up,” Boden said. “Maybe Uber will take you there. I don’t know, but no one knows where the fuck Somewhere Else is.”
Like the “ugly laws” of the 1800s that banned “deformed” people from public view and “anti-Okie” laws of the 20th century that targeted poor people, modern camping bans, prohibitions on sitting in public and restrictions on survival activities serve to target those who can’t buy their privacy, advocates say. People have rights insofar as their physical existence does not impose on the public sphere.
Enforcement in the name of public health and safety ends in the displacement of vulnerable people and the loss of possessions both practical and precious.
Enforcement in the name of public health and safety ends in the displacement of vulnerable people and the loss of possessions both practical and precious.
The American system provides two avenues to change laws and policies that people feel are unjust — legislative and judicial. Boden’s primary focus is on the first, enshrining the rights of homeless people in law through a bill of rights that protects the basics. The second is the preserve of attorneys who have in recent years begun attempting to apply existing laws and constitutional protections to a class of people routinely denied what every citizen supposedly has: the rights to life, liberty and property.
Monopoly rules
As the crisis of homelessness grew undeniable on the West Coast, criminalization policies and their enforcement did as well. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty found that a third of cities prohibit camping on public property altogether, and 50 percent prohibited the practice in certain places.
Only five cities actively require that the government offer an alternative place to go if campers are swept.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, lawsuits targeting sweeps policies grounded in the Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments — search and seizure, cruel and unusual punishment and due process — began appearing in western states as well.
In 2016, a homeless advocacy organization called Denver Out Loud and private attorney Jason Flores-Williams filed against the city of Denver for its sweeps policies. And though Flores-Williams’ substantive arguments rest on the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, he and Denver Out Loud refuse to let the fundamentals of the case get lost in the minutiae.
“You have to go through these hoops that seemingly and in actuality have nothing to do with justice to get some justice.”
“You have to go through these hoops that seemingly and in actuality have nothing to do with justice to get some justice,” Flores-Williams said. “I determined that in this case I would never let the courts, opposing counsel or the city of Denver lose sight with regards to what this is about, which is the violations of the dignity of human beings. Straight up.
“Everything after that is a lawyer’s job to translate through the Monopoly rule book into something that a court can cognize and act upon,” he said.
Denver, like Seattle, experienced a boom in recent years fueled by tech as companies new and old begin looking outside of the traditional hubs of Silicon Valley and Boston for new opportunities and new geographies. In 2016, ChooseColorado.com crowed that Denver had the third-highest concentration of tech workers in the country.
And, as Seattleites know, with fast-paced growth in high-wage industries come rising property values, gentrification and new concerns about visible poverty.
In the same month that the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade touted Denver’s ascension and the state’s 300 days of sunshine a year, Denver Out Loud documented a 500 percent increase in the number of homeless sweeps, said Terese Howard, principal organizer for the group.
Denver has a camping ban on all public property, and enforcement of the policy drew national attention.
“There are 1,000 people a month coming to Denver,” Howard said. “They’re rich people in fancy apartments that don’t want to see poor people.”
Together, Flores-Williams, Howard and Denver Out Loud began to build the case. Denver Out Loud had laid some groundwork with its own advocacy, including a 2013 report analyzing hundreds of surveys of Denver’s homeless community about the impact of the camping ban. And though Flores-Williams knows that his arguments rely on essential constitutional protections of property, he and Howard have been fastidious in ensuring that the moral arguments against sweeps remain central to the work.
They pack hearings with people experiencing homelessness as a visible symbol of the impacted and Flores-Williams never misses a chance to assert his hold on higher ground in court filings. With dramatic flair, he grounds his arguments in the tradition of civil rights litigation, like that of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case about interracial marriage in the South.
"It is this dark sense of entitlement that lives at the twisted soul of almost all systemic civil rights violations.”
“Again and again, this class has heard one refrain from Defendants: ‘If you people would just leave, then all of this would stop,’” one filing from Flores-Williams reads. “They just wanted them to go away in Loving as well, saying that if ‘you people’ left the State, then they would not be incarcerated. It is this dark sense of entitlement that lives at the twisted soul of almost all systemic civil rights violations.”
The plaintiffs successfully won class-action status, and while Flores-Williams has some cynicism about the court system, he believes that his clients should prevail.
“We’re right, we told the truth and we’re the good guys,” Flores-Williams said.
Property or human rights?
While the plaintiffs wait to hear the decisions of the court, Boden and Denver Out Loud work to change the conversation entirely.
Homeless people shouldn’t have to watch the legislative docket to see if their city will be the next to prohibit overnight camping or enact a law against sitting on a public sidewalk. Their rights shouldn’t hinge on whether or not a city gives three days’ or two weeks’ notice to leave an encampment, or if there’s a delivery service to reunite people with what possessions were not summarily destroyed.
In Boden’s view, that’s the wrong conversation.
“Property rights are more protected than human rights."
“America has a really weird relationship with private property,” Boden said. “Property rights are more protected than human rights. So, the bottom line is in my experience in a lot of these cases it’s come down to forcing local government to be kinder and gentler when it comes to fucking over homeless people.”
WRAP is working in California, Colorado and Oregon to change the game. The organization is backing a “homeless bill of rights” in each state that memorialize life-sustaining activities such as the right to rest and take shelter in a “non-obstructive manner,” to share food and eat in public and to enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The end game: to arm attorneys like Flores-Williams with the tools they need to go into court and win, not based on the level of suffering imposed upon people or the callousness of interoffice emails, but because people experiencing homelessness will have the fundamental right to exist.
“Our attempt is to give the attorneys a hell of a lot more ammunition by changing the laws themselves,” Boden said.
So far, success has been elusive. WRAP has managed to get “right to rest” legislation introduced in the California Legislature nine time, Boden said, but the bills have never made it out of committee.
But Boden is confident that, eventually, California will protect the rights of homeless people akin to people who are housed.
“I don’t think any meaningful piece of civil rights legislation was easy,” he said.
Ashley Archibald is a Staff Reporter covering local government, policy and equity. Have a story idea? She can be can reached at ashleya (at) realchangenews (dot) org. Twitter @AshleyA_RC
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