Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

In September, one of those FEMA trailer parks in Louisiana made the headlines for a few minutes. Several thousand poor people of color who fled New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina are now living in virtual detention there. They aren’t allowed to return to their homes, even in public projects and neighborhoods that were untouched by flooding. So they are now legally “homeless” and government doesn’t want them migrating elsewhere—hence the lockup. As per a 7/06 dictum from FEMA, they can’t talk to the media without a FEMA official present. When the trailer deadlines run out, FEMA plans to quietly relocate Katrina homeless to a vast zone in Arkansas where they will become permanent residents of future camps.
The camp made headlines when U.S. filmmaker/investigative journalist Greg Palast, reporting for Link TV and Democracy Now, ignored the media dictum and went in to interview people and film the stark conditions there. A warrant for his arrest was issued by Department of Homeland Security authorities who alleged that “national security” was involved (remember, FEMA is now part of DHS). It seems that an Exxon Mobil refinery next door might appear in Palast’s footage. In the legal flurry that followed, DHS evidently realized they looked like idiots, after Palast pointed out that images of the Exxon facilities could be viewed by anybody on Google Earth. In a couple of days, the arrest warrant was quickly downgraded to a mere “inquiry.”

Amid the free-speech flurry around Palast, another life-and-death point somehow got lost. American government is rumbling through an increasingly inhumane policy shift on its homeless people—and that includes an array of health issues facing indigents. For A&U readers, these include AIDS, as well as HVC, tuberculosis, nutrition, availability of treatment, etc. Government seems determined to pursue these antihomeless policies even in cases where its own idiotic policies caused people to go homeless in the first place (as in New Orleans).

The population of indigent American citizens is swelling alarmingly, with numbers spiking in the last year because of Katrina and other disasters, as well as the ongoing downsizing of our job force. Estimates vary, but it appears that, on any given night, as many as three and a half million Americans have nowhere to sleep except the streets. Of these, according to the Veterans Administration, around 200,000 are veterans, with growing numbers of American soldiers who have served in Iraq coming home to join the old-timers, i.e., Vietnam and post-Nam vets who have been homeless for many years. Many other homeless people are families, or single mothers with children. Most are people of color, but there are growing numbers of white people who fall like autumn leaves out of the bottom layer of “employable” middle-class citizens. Indeed, significant numbers of homeless people today—like many who wound up in hobo camps during the Great Depression—had jobs and comfortable lives at one point, and never dreamed they would ever wind up on the streets.

These totals don’t even include illegal immigrants. If you put together the homeless-citizen estimate with the total three million Americans behind bars in the U.S., you get an estimated six and a half million people—enough wasted human potential to populate an entire third-world nation. And that is exactly what the homeless are—a tragic loss of human resources for our society, as well as a third-world nation existing within our own borders, right under our noses, a Rio de Janeiro-type favela (hillside slum) that can be glimpsed from coast to coast.

The civil rights of homeless people are on a collision course with government that views itself as having the right to simply make homeless people disappear from sight. Few people in government want to deal with the homeless problem—it’s not something that gets you votes at election time. So the simple-minded political knee-jerk is to try and make homeless people disappear. Right now the ACLU is locked in litigation with a number of cities across the country—including Los Angeles, where I live—where city government aims to pass laws that will make it illegal to sleep on the streets. Cities are reacting to complaints by their better-heeled constituents over the disruptions and filth that result from so many homeless people on the streets, because they have little or no access to restrooms or laundries. A significant number are former mental patients who have been dumped on the streets by hospitals wanting to reduce their patient load. With numbers of indigents far exceeding the number of shelter beds available in most any city, these laws become a flimsy pretext to arrest “violators,” who then go to jail for the “crime” of being homeless and mentally disturbed—which, of course, swells the prison population and creates more jobs and more business for giant correctional-industry contractors.

But the trend goes way beyond just “getting homeless people off the streets.” Many cities—not just post-Katrina New Orleans, but Los Angeles and others—want to get rid of as many low-income residents as possible. They are moving into a mega-gentrification phase where low-income housing is deliberately phased out or not replaced, because it doesn’t generate enough tax revenue. California has had a chronic shortage of low-income housing for many years, but the trend is accelerating. This forces poor people to either “move somewhere else” or wind up on the streets—where it’s increasingly illegal for them to be. Just where they’re supposed to “go” is evidently not a concern for city governments who don’t want them. Gentrification is helped along by slashing services for low-income people—and that includes people with AIDS, HVC, etc. It’s not possible to understand the current Congressional wrangling over renewal of the Ryan White Act and whether its funds are being equitably distributed, or the controversies about the long HOPWA waiting lists and lack of affordable housing for indigent people with AIDS, without talking about this larger issue of tomorrow’s real-estate greed.

The FEMA trailer camps give us an eerie intimation that our government probably has in mind to create vast zones in remote areas where large numbers of poor and homeless people will be concentrated—forcibly, if necessary. Given present performance, it’s hard to imagine that medical and health services in these “gulags” will be anything to admire. Since these camps will be maintained at taxpayer cost, the question is whether taxpayers will be willing to foot the bill. And when taxpayers finally revolt on this issue, what does our government plan to do with homeless people then?

Americans used to like to quote that famous poem about the Statue of Liberty, which starts, “Give me your tired, your poor.” Those days are over, as the “land of liberty” moves into a time when a policy of “warring on poverty and homelessness” really means warring on the people themselves.

This article is part one of a series.

Author of fiction bestsellers and provocative commentary, Patricia Nell Warren has her writings archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at pnw@patricianellwarren.com.

Copyright (c) 2006 by Patricia Nell Warren

October 2006