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Feels important to lift this up again: I try to speak with the experience of unhoused folks at the center, allowing what I know to be those experiences after many years of collaboration and action alongside those most harmed. I will never speak FOR unhoused friends but..[thread] https://twitter.com/kristylovich/status/1283905142538956800
will always integrate the perspectives I have come to know from folks that have actually/are actually experiencing the violence of houselessness. For many that are forced to confront the choice b/w the relative autonomy that comes with living outside and the option of shelter...
it simply isn't possible to maintain one's sense of personhood, critical social connections, and general well being while staying in a congregate shelter (not to mention staying healthy while sleeping next to 50-100 people during a pandemic).
In order to access these shelters a transaction occurs: Folks often have to give up the above mentioned basic human rights, pets, partners, the ability to move freely through the world in order to sleep inside- temporarily. Shelter is not housing. It is often framed as a "bridge"
to permanent housing but the rates at which people are actually housed permanently through the shelter system is shamefully low. There simply are not enough available units of housing and the units that are available require traversing a labyrinth of requirements, paperwork,
months or years waiting, depending on the follow-through of folks responsible for filing forms in time (or at all). I do not think that people like @MitchOFarrell would pay these prices to be inside.
The second perspective from the center I integrate into my words about this is that of the outreach worker. Most often these folks have experienced themselves the trauma of homelessness and other forms of systemic harm and they carry these experiences into the task of inviting...
our unhoused relatives into community. I respect this endeavor deeply. One of the most upsetting things about leading a team of outreach workers from within THE lead agency working on homelessness was that there is very little in concrete terms to actually offer. This idea that
a couple outreach workers approach an encampment and say to the folks living there "Hi - who wants to get housed today?" is a harmful mythology promoted by people that for the benefit of their own position as electeds, housed residents, business owners push in order to blame the
victims of the violence of poverty for their own suffering. "Well, they were service resistant. They didn't want help. We have to keep out streets clean. Its their own fault if they are still outside." When the reality is that the number of available shelter beds on any given day
in L.A. is probably within a dozen and accessing those beds is next to impossible. And again, shelter is not housing. The personal cost of going inside temporarily is too high. An outreach worker w/LAHSA recently told me that doing their job often feels impossible and that it
feels disingenuous to essentially walk up to an encampment and say: "Hey, I am here to help but I have nothing to offer you." It is very difficult coming into this job with the sincere desire to help and then to placed in the middle of this City's failure, to be the one to
constantly deliver bad news or to explain to folks that want to go inside that there are no units, it may take months/years, you do not have the right documentation and I can't get it for you, you have to give up your partner, your pet, your belongings. That sincere desire to
help quickly turns into frustration, exhaustion, injured morale. The turn over is rapid. Clients get lost as staff quits and new staff arrive w/o training. The person outside slips through the cracks and must start all over again - if at all. So, when I say...
"There is no housing or shelter. None. Zero." My hyperbole points to the fact that housing and shelter options are scarce and inaccessible, no where near the numbers required to house the many tens of thousands of residents/CONSTITUENTS of this city that it might as well be zero.
And that people in power like @Mitch_OFarrell have chosen to utilize systems of criminalization to attempt to disappear the people victimized by housing inequity, poverty, and systemic racism. And agencies like @LAHomeless enable this abuse by participating in these systems.
I suspect with significant evidence that my speaking out about these truths as someone that has been embedded in this system with firsthand knowledge is the reason for my termination from LAHSA. And however hard these institutions try to silence this speech by taking away
my income, health insurance, my "career", by attempting to reframe my critiques with assertions that I am misinformed or that "not all cops" are bad, that police/ing can be reformed, that LAHSA does not "partner" with law enforcement - I promise that I'll go even harder.
