Photo by Alicia Kuhl
SANTA CRUZ, CA — Bedding swirled into the San Lorenzo River as people in a panic dragged their soaked tents to higher ground. The shame of Santa Cruz officials’ indifference to the homeless for the world to see. Merry Christmas.
We all knew the flood was coming.
But city and county officials and their allies in local vigilante hate groups like Santa Cruz Neighbors and Take Back Santa Cruz have aggressively pushed the message that those who live outside are less than human, unwanted pests, making sure that solutions to housing our neighbors is so-far impossible.
For nearly a year the Santa Cruz Homeless Union and Food Not Bombs have been warning the city about the need to move the Benchlands Camp to higher ground. Eventually we argued this in Federal Court before Judge Susan van Keulen. The city gave her vague promises of finding a solution before the deluge. That didn’t happen.
Anyone who was found setting up a tent on higher ground was threatened with arrest, and told they wouldn’t be harassed if they moved to the Benchlands. That was city policy.
City policy also included forcing people into tents, adding to the numbers who had to locate in a flood plain. The police have been systematically forcing people from their vehicular homes by aggressively ticketing them until their housing is towed and scrapped. These older victims of a ‘bah-humbug’ city government find themselves at Food Not Bombs seeking a tent, a tarp and directions of where to set up.
But because city officials don’t seem to view the people living in the Benchlands as fully human, they didn’t make any plans. They didn’t announce a higher ground location the week before the catastrophe. They didn’t arrive with trucks and offer to move those who wanted to Harvey West or the garages, as bleak as that is.
They couldn’t because their campaign of hate towards the homeless, that they have generated during city council meetings and in the media, would mean immediate push- back from their allies.
The people on the Benchlands did what they could to prepare for the floods.
Benchland campers have been dragging palettes to their sites for weeks. Water diversion trenches have been excavated. Food Not Bombs has spent over $4,000 on cheap pup tents and tarps to aid in the effort.
Our contingency plan for the Benchland was a move back to the area of last year’s Holiday Evictions, at least during the flooding. Those plans were blocked by the police, even as the San Lorenzo River flowed across the camp.
California has a $30 billion surplus, and HUD claims they could end homelessness in all of America with less. Millions of dollars dedicated to solving the “homeless problem” pass through the hands of our local bureaucracies every year. This global spectacle of shame could have been averted.
A town named Santa Cruz would have found the homeless baby Jesus laying in a manger and told Mary and Joseph to go find a scrap of mud in a flood zone and pitch a cheap pup-tent.
Keith McHenry is co-founder of Food Not Bombs.
Like you say, Keith. Shame on them. The powers to be want the future protesters, usurpers of this dying, fascist capitalist system to disappear. The capitalist class and their elected government officials could solve the problem by housing the homeless. They don’t because they care more about profits than they do about the people they’re supposed to represent. We have to reach out to the middle class/ the working class and explain how it’s capitalist economic system that is at fault and the ones responsible for their own plight as well as the plight of the homeless.