Silicon Valley’s homeless: like the canary in the coal mine

 
SAN JOSE, CA. — It has been 18 months since America’s largest homeless encampment here, known as the “Jungle”, was destroyed by bulldozers.
Now the city is carrying out a relentless and escalating campaign of sweeps, arrests, destruction of personal property, and persecution to make sure that nothing like it ever comes back. As one park ranger told the homeless, “Our job is to make your lives so miserable, you leave town and never return.”
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo went to the Vatican last year and publicly admitted that, “We live in one Valley, but two worlds. Over 4000 residents find themselves homeless each night….only a 30-minute drive from the headquarters of Google, Facebook, Oracle, and their billionaire CEO’s homes.” But Liccardo’s incremental programs to address homelessness have been ineffective.
The homeless are just the tip of the iceberg. They are the visible sign of the failure of Silicon Valley’s (and America’s) vaunted “innovation economy”. The same technology that enriched these companies has created these homeless, by eliminating the jobs that used to sustain them. But it does not stop there.
The automation of the entire service industry is rendering millions of workers unnecessary and superfluous. In areas like Michigan it is impoverishing and destroying whole cities. In financial and tech centers like Silicon Valley, in addition to creating homelessness, it is driving hundreds of thousands of service workers out of cities altogether. Right now, some 672 residents of the rent controlled Reserve Apartments in San Jose are being evicted to replace their homes with market rate housing they will never be able to afford.
Real estate tycoon Ken DeLeon explained it in the recent YouTube video “Million Dollar Shack”:  “Silicon Valley is such a small little area, it’s inevitable that prices will rise . . .  I think the person who’s working hard at Google has more of a right to be here than somebody just because their parents were here, and they complain they can’t afford a home.”
Displacement is not a strong enough word for what is going on. As sociologist Ananya Roy has pointed out, it is more appropriate to call it “banishment” of an entire class of people.
But all is not lost, if we build a movement out of the resistance to these colossal injustices, and build a new society that puts the sanctity of human life before private profit. San Jose’s homeless are continuing their battle for permanent housing for all and for sanctioned encampments as organizing centers for building their movement.