The COVID-19 pandemic spurred lawmakers to order people to “shelter in place.” That assumes, wrongly, all have shelter for protection from the coronavirus. Meanwhile, folks with no or inadequate shelter have occupied vacant homes around California: in Sacramento, Oakland and Los Angeles. Is the Golden State a bellwether for the US?
Merika Reagan is a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. “As the housing crisis worsens and the COVID-19 pandemic drags out,” she told The Progressive Populist in an email, “families will be forced to do whatever they need to do to keep themselves safe, healthy and housed. If California and the rest of the nation fail to address the economic impact of this crisis, we anticipate more families will take bold action to protect themselves like we’ve already seen in Oakland, Los Angeles and Sacramento.”
The Golden State had 150,000 homeless people in December 2019, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. At press time, Californians were in week four of the stay-at-home order that Gov. Gavin Newsom issued on March 19 to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those infected with it can be asymptomatic, e.g., appear to be healthy. The risk of infection is huge.
“Thousands of people cannot ‘shelter in place,’” said Vanessa Bulness of the Oakland Black Housing Union in a statement. “If ever we needed to act, the time is now—right now—to save lives and stop the spread of COVID-19 in our most vulnerable populations.”
According to Oakland’s Black Housing Union and Moms4Housing, Gov. Newsom and other politicians have failed to shelter the homeless in part by allowing hotels with vacant rooms whose owners have received payment for full occupancy, yet do not allow homeless people to shelter in place.
“These hotel rooms are empty along with thousands of corporate condos and empty houses waiting to be flipped,” Dominique Walker of Moms4Housing said in a statement. More needs to be done to save lives.”
The pandemic requires new approaches to social ills such as inadequate shelter. Nell Myhand is with the Poor People’s Campaign (San Francisco) Bay Area Supporters Steering Committee.
“It may be so that unhoused people all across the country find the courage to take the shelter they have been denied and that their unhoused neighbors support them to keep and maintain housing,” she said via email, “secure food, health care and other essential needs. It would surprise me if there were not people everywhere claiming unoccupied homes. We just haven’t heard about them.”
Local reporting is part of this equation. The COVID-19 pandemic has struck as the ad-based model of journalism is on its deathbed. According to the South Bend Tribune, 1,400 communities lost their local newspapers in a 15-year-period ending in March 2019. Since then, other papers have folded. For instance, the Sacramento News & Review, an alternative weekly, ceased print publication after Gov. Newsom’s COVID-19 shelter-in-place order.
A pandemic creates openings for progressive activists around sheltering the homeless and ill housed. To put matters another way, the coronavirus economy is a new normal. It ends the old ways of how we lived and worked. Californians’ housing activism might be showing the rest of the US a way forward to a new and more humane day.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020
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