PHOTO/JOHN STURROCK, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Every day, 4 year-old Austin Perrine, in a red satin superhero cape, hands out chicken sandwiches to homeless men and women outside a Birmingham, Alabama shelter. On his shirt are the words “Show Love.” His father, who goes out with him, explains that he’s “just a compassionate kid, and wants to see people happy.”
This young boy with his clear heart is demonstrating with loving action the basic human principles of sharing and consciousness. At the same time, few national candidates or politicians are speaking to the growing tragedy of homelessness, the national shame and failure it represents. Why is this not being declared a national emergency, as people freeze to death in the streets of this vicious winter all across the country?
There is a direct connection between the corporations, developers, rising rents and cost of housing everywhere and the rise of homelessness and people living in the streets, couch surfing, or in their cars. Central cities are being redeveloped around high tech and condo towers built with $10 million-dollar units, as affordable rents disappear and people are driven out of jobs, housing, and into homelessness. In cities such as San Francisco, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment tops $3,800 a month—people die in doorways or makeshift tents at the foot of luxury condos which often stand empty as tax shelters and investment for financial cartels.
People who move to more affordable cities and towns cause rents to go up there, as landlords and realtors gouge better-paid workers for all they can get, and the vicious cycle continues. Homelessness, whether in the street or its hidden forms, is just one face of this, the end result of housing as a profit-making commodity. This is the logic of capitalism’s “maximization of profit,” no matter how society is torn apart.
The leap in the number of homeless is occurring at the same time giant global corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are getting tax-free rides and destroying poor neighborhoods to build their “campuses.” This is simply one example of how corporations take public space free, while people can’t afford the very basics of survival. Justification for this plunder was offered by a wealthy New York developer who said, “We have to find a way to build modern buildings to compete with London, Singapore and Tokyo.”
We have the abundance needed to not only house every man, woman and child—and women and children are the fastest-growing part of the homeless population—but to guarantee stable lives for all, instead of death in the streets, suffering, and economic inequality.
The government should guarantee housing and stable lives for everyone.
We must continue to demand of our candidates a program to guarantee housing for all, including the homeless. If a child of four can understand that this is humanly right, surely those who govern should.
The battle for housing for all is in reality a fight for a transformed society where all have the absolute right to housing and everything we need for full, creative and abundant lives.
