affordable to low-income Americans.” The federal budget included no new housing subsidies that year, and the 1996 Republican platform sought to eliminate HUD.
Can Proactive Homeless Strategies Still Prevail?
Have activists missed their chance to mobilize the nation to finally end widespread visible homelessness? It is hard to see how this goal can be achieved if advocates continue to allow issues like panhandling and camping to frame the debate. For example, since 2010, voters in some of the nation’s most progressive cities, including San Francisco, have enacted laws banning lying and sitting on commercial sidewalks. Opponents decry such “sit and lie” laws for “criminalizing homelessness,” while proponents argue that they target behavior, not homelessness. An October 19, 2012, New York Times story about a sit-lie ballot measure on Berkeley’s November 2012 ballot (“Free Speech Is One Thing, Vagrants Another”) profiled Chris Escobar, age twenty-three, “who left Miami five weeks ago” and “hitched a ride west with only a backpack, a yellow dog named Marley and a tiger striped kitten on a leash.” Escobar resented the idea that he was not free to sit on the sidewalk with his pets, and said about the ballot measure, “This is not the Berkeley I came for.”19
Young, able-bodied people like Escobar who spend their days sitting in front of small businesses and public buildings are not the part of the homeless population that most taxpayers desire to assist. They are perceived as choosing to be homeless and as hurting local commercial districts in the process. Unfortunately, this small segment of the homeless population continues to get much of the public and media attention. It does not represent the most vulnerable among the homeless; to the contrary, the young and able-bodied are often among the most self-sufficient. Yet activists continue to fritter away public support for helping the vast majority of homeless people, those desperate to obtain permanent housing, by defending a small subgroup that prefers to live under the stars.
Homeless advocates do not have to prioritize sit-lie, panhandling, and other quality-of-life issues. They do not have to be sidetracked from their core housing funding demand. Such issues can be addressed by civil liberties groups and legal organizations not involved in direct political advocacy for increased low-cost housing funds.
Activists still have a compelling case for increasing federal funding to reduce homelessness. San Francisco and other cities have reduced homelessness through a combination of housing and on-site services known as “supportive housing.” This successful model shows that ending homelessness is entirely a question of spending priorities. Reviving campaigns to invest in ending homelessness won’t be easy, but continuing to accept widespread visible homelessness in the United States is unacceptable. Ending homelessness remains a winnable national fight, but only if activists frame the debate around the millions of ill-housed eager to have a home.
CRIME FIGHTING: DEFENSIVENESS AT ITS WORST
Activists have paid the biggest price for responding defensively on the issue of crime. Unlike homeless activists, whose strategic errors never involved abandoning principles, some “progressives” zealously embraced law-and-order solutions to crime out of calculation and expedience. Other residents of low-income communities embraced longer sentences and prison expansion as part of a broader anti-crime strategy whose other key components, such as job training, housing, and education, were never implemented. Fearing being labeled soft on crime, many progressive politicians have backed the conservative framing of crime as requiring a “war on drugs” and the multibillion-dollar creation of a “prison industrial complex.” From the 1980s, when Republicans first saw the political benefits of promoting and maintaining a “war on crime,” through at least 2010, increased spending on prisons has diverted desperately needed money from schools, housing, and health care without making low-income communities safer. In fact, while states spend billions housing inmates guilty of nonviolent crimes, local police departments struggle for money to reduce crime at the street level.20
Defensive Crime Fighting in the Tenderloin
I became aware of the inherent strategic shortcomings of progressive-led anti-crime efforts from my own experience in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The Tenderloin has long been considered a high-crime neighborhood. After the rezoning battles of the early 1980s, the focus shifted to crime. Although most of the neighborhood’s crime involved property break-ins and disputes between drug dealers, enough seniors had been mugged or rolled to motivate people to organize an anti-crime campaign.
Because of these residents’ concerns, I became involved in the development of neighborhood anti-crime efforts. The Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s street-level office had relocated to a high-crime corner, so I needed only to look out our window to see why residents felt threatened. The primarily elderly residents of the Cadillac Hotel, located right across the street from our office, were particularly upset about drug dealing close to their building; some had been robbed right outside the gates. The hotel’s nonprofit owner, Reality House West, was headed by Leroy Looper, a charismatic leader and savvy tactician who had risen from a life on the streets and in prison to transform the Cadillac from an eyesore to a neighborhood jewel. Looper responded to his tenants’ complaints about crime by forming the Tenderloin Crime Abatement Committee (CAC). The CAC met monthly at the Cadillac Hotel. When Looper asked me to participate, I readily agreed. At the time, I was almost alone among progressive social change activists in getting involved in anticrime efforts. Gradually, however, Looper brought in representatives of religious groups, refugee organizations, and other social service agencies.
In addition to my admiration for Looper and desire to support residents’ concerns, what attracted me to the campaign was the high percentage of African Americans participating in the CAC. The Tenderloin’s African American residents had participated little in the long-running land use battles, and I thought their involvement in anti-crime efforts might encourage community participation in other issues. The fact that Looper and key Cadillac Hotel management staff were African American contributed to the CAC’s high level of ethnic diversity.
During 1984 and 1985, I regularly attended CAC meetings and ended up presiding over many of the meetings, which were festive occasions. A Cadillac Hotel resident would prepare a buffet lunch. Everyone in the audience had the opportunity to comment on the issues being discussed, and the district police captain and beat officers would provide updates on crime statistics and respond to concerns raised at the meeting. The CAC reflected the type of ethnically diverse, broad-based community empowerment effort that social change activists in all fields aspire to create. The committee stressed the need for employment, training, and substance abuse programs and for other strategies that would address the underlying causes of crime.
There was a consensus, however, that until such systemic programs were in place, a stronger police presence was necessary. Many of us naively believed that the Tenderloin residents’ opposition to crime in their community would bring increased government funding for programs to ameliorate the preconditions causing high levels of crime. Looper, the community’s most revered leader, always saw economic development and increased local employment as key to reducing neighborhood crime. The CAC was not demanding more police simply as a tactic for obtaining economic development assistance; rather, we believed that expressing serious concern about crime would stimulate a broader influx of resources into the Tenderloin.
The committee decided to publicize the community’s resolve with a “March Against Crime.” Marches are now commonplace in low-income neighborhoods, but such events were somewhat rare in 1985, and we expected—and received—tremendous media coverage. One goal of the march was to demonstrate that the Tenderloin was a residential neighborhood whose residents and businesses deserved the same level of police services as inhabitants of other communities received. We also sought to show that the Tenderloin housed victims of crime, not simply perpetrators. As long as the public believed that Tenderloin residents were themselves to blame for crime, and thus tolerated thefts, drug deals, and muggings, there would be less support for anti-crime
