The number of homeless people in the United States, either without shelter or in temporary housing, is steadily rising towards a million people. Faced with this crisis, municipalities, counties, and states across the country are responding by criminalizing those experiencing homelessness. Advocate and activist Jeff Singer joins Rattling the Bars to discuss the Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling, and what it means for America’s poor.
Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host Mansa Musa. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development report, 653,140 people are homeless. Bottom line, sleeping on the streets. Nearly 327,000 people in the United States live in transition housing. They live in situations where at any given moment, they’ll join the 653,140 without having a place to stay. What do this say about the United States of America? What do this say about the world when we have a situation where people don’t have a place to stay for no other reason then they can’t afford to live in certain environments because of the cost of living? Here joining me to talk about a recent Supreme Court decision, but more importantly, his work in trying to eradicate homelessness and trying to elevate people’s consciousness about the sense of humanity we should have about people that don’t have a place to stay. Joining me today is Jeff Singer. Welcome, Jeff.
Jeff Singer:
Thank you so much, Mansa.
Mansa Musa:
Hey, Jeff, tell our audience a little bit about yourself.
Jeff Singer:
I’ve been working on homelessness, poverty, racism for a very long time, since about 1965, and a lot of that time in Baltimore and some of that time in Washington DC and there’s a lot of work to do. I especially liked what you said about changing people’s consciousness because we certainly need to do that.
Mansa Musa:
Right. And we was talking off camera, I was talking about Ms. Schneider and for the benefit of our audience that don’t know, Ms. Schneider was also probably one of your compadres in this fight in terms of combating homelessness, but more importantly, raising people’s awareness and educating people on the need to have a sense of humanity about people that don’t have a place to stay. And I was telling, I was in a meeting where one is a guy that he mentored told a story and say that, “Well Ms. Schneider, because the population became so bad, people didn’t have a place to stay, that he was involved with all the homeless encampments.” And he just one day said, “Look, we got to find a place to stay.” And they went down there and took former Federal City College, which is UDC now, and took it and made that a place, what they call it 2nd & D now, and the Army is we talking about something that happened almost 40 years ago and 2nd & D hasn’t gotten better.
2nd D is just a transition place where people who don’t have no place to stay come. And that wasn’t the intent of Mitch or that’s never been your intent is the intent has, from my understanding, has always been to get people in permanent housing, to try and get people to get up and have that dignity to have their own. Okay. So let’s talk about the Supreme Court recently came out with a case that said, and I think it started in Oregon, and said basically that homeless organization or advocacy organization filed a suit saying it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which is cruel and unusual punishment for the benefit of our audience, there’s cruel and unusual punishment to have people living in the streets, to have people living in the streets during the winter, to have people living in the streets during 110 climate, to have people living in the street through all the elements.
It was a cruel and unusual punishment to have people not have food, not have adequate clothing as a result of living in the street. Walk us through this case and what this case means in terms of how this country has criminalized, started to criminalize, poverty.
Jeff Singer:
Well we hardly have time for a full exploration of that, but to be relatively brief, in 2018, there was a court case in the northwest, the Martin versus Boise case, which ruled that if people couldn’t find a place to sleep that wasn’t outside that it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment to criminalize them, to put them in jail and/or to fine them. And that case changed a lot of the policies that cities were using to punish people who had nowhere to live. Well the cities didn’t like that so they found other means to get people experiencing homelessness out of sight to hide them. And in this small place called Grants Pass, Oregon, the city was arresting people for sleeping outside and using a blanket or a pillow.
They made that illegal, for people who had nowhere to live and nowhere else to sleep. Well some of the folks who were arrested decided, they got some lawyers and they appealed that. It didn’t make sense to punish people who had nowhere to live for sleeping outside.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Jeff Singer:
Right? Well the federal district court agreed, oddly enough, with the folks who thought it was wrong for them to be arrested because they had nowhere to live. And the city of Grants Pass then appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court on April 22nd of 2024, this year. The Supreme Court heard the arguments about whether or not it is cruel and unusual punishment to jail or fine people who have nowhere to go because they’re sleeping on the street. And just a couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that arresting people who have nowhere to go is not cruel and unusual punishment.
Our common sense and even logical understanding surpasses that. It seems impossible, but the decision says that the Eighth Amendment, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, does not apply to what jurisdiction, city, state, the federal government, doesn’t apply to what they do. It just applies to the way that they do it. I don’t really understand that. I’ve read the decision. Twisting logic that way just eludes me, but the result of this is that now jurisdictions, cities in particular, have the right to put people in jail if those people have nowhere to live.
Mansa Musa:
And I won’t flush this out a little bit, right, because the lunacy in this whole thing with the Supreme Court. Sotomayor said that, “If you don’t have a place to sleep and you get caught sleeping on the street, you’re going to jail,” and she was saying this as a dissenting opinion saying that the court has to reduced itself to this type of lunacy where you criminalize a person. Now you criminalize a person for having a blanket and a pillow and sleeping on the street. Now you saying that to me in the United States of America, the land of plenty where we have unlimited, we have unlimited monies to send to countries to bomb people, we have unlimited money for people in countries where we don’t like the country that’s sending them, we have unlimited money to house them, clothe them, and give them tax breaks, but for the people that’s United States citizens, we don’t have no sympathy or money to house them.
Talk about the impact of this decision on, and I said 600,000, but we know the population is much larger than that and then I said that in regard to what HUD’s site, but when we look at city by city, I was in Las Vegas and I seen pockets of homeless people, people that didn’t have no place to stay, but I was seeing randomly and one day we turned around the corner and this overpass where, like large overpass, multiple highways coming and going. So it created a large shelter and it looked like a city of nothing but people that was unhoused. And we know, we see this in California and the District of Columbia, they had, we talk about 2nd D, but they had places where they just can’t have a canvas and you might look and see 10 tents, a week later you see 30 tents, a month later you see 150 tents.
And I think the District of Columbia got a number and when it reach that number, they come and round them up, take their property and destroy their property, and try to force them to go in a shelter or just flush them out, but talk about the impact that this going to have on that kind of, because that’s the reality. The reality is that no matter what, you don’t have enough prison cells because you got 2.5 million people right now or more in prison. So you don’t have enough prison cells for the 600 or 800,000 people that don’t have a place to stay and that’s their crime, “I don’t have a place to stay. My crime is I just fell asleep from exhaustion on the street and where you found me at, it was a matter of whether the car was going to run over me or you was going to pick me up and take me to jail or I was going to be dead. So that was my option. Somebody running over me, you taking me to jail, or I die right there.”
So talk about that. Talk about the impact that’s going to have on that because we need our audience to understand that this decision is not talking about rounding up wild animals or deer hunting season. This decision is saying that people, human beings, don’t have a right to fall asleep.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah. It’s really disturbing to think about it that way and that’s a correct way to think about it. I suppose if people want to invest money in the US, it might be wise to invest money in the people who build and operate prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America. That might be a good place to invest money. The fundamental problem of course is capitalism.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right.
Jeff Singer:
And until we start to have an economy that meets people’s needs rather than creates profits, we won’t be solving the homelessness problem, but it’s not new. People have been thinking about, talking about it, writing and acting on this problem for thousands of years in the United States, which isn’t thousands of years old of course. We’ve had waves of homelessness after every war. After the Civil War there were thousands and thousands of people who wandered around the country looking for a place to live because they couldn’t find one, thousands. After World War I, most people remember hearing about hobos.
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Jeff Singer:
Hobos were just people who had been displaced by the war and had nowhere to go. They rode railroad trains looking for a place to stay. They created encampments, hobo jungles they were called at the time. And then during the Great Depression, of course, millions of people were homeless, again because capitalism couldn’t work well at that point, and there was homelessness everywhere. In Baltimore, 20,000 people gathered in front of City Hall in 1933 during the Great Depression demanding a place to live. And there’s pictures of this. There’s good historical exploration of it. In fact at that time, two encampments were created in South Baltimore toward Glen Burnie.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Jeff Singer:
And why were there two? Well there was one for white people and one for African-American people. They were segregated.
Mansa Musa:
Segregated homeless camp.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah. And the white one, the people there were given places to live. In the African American one, they weren’t. They had to build their own shelter. They even built a little golf course. So that’s the Great Depression. That housing problem was solved, by the way, by the creation of public housing. Public housing began to be built in 1937 to give people a place to live because there were so many tens of thousands of people without a place to live. And of course, public housing was segregated in Baltimore and in many places. Well there’s more to the story of course, but today, public housing is in the process of being destroyed-
Mansa Musa:
That’s right.
Jeff Singer:
By both parties, Republicans and Democrats, and Baltimore had 18,000 public housing units 20 years ago and today Baltimore has about 5,000 public housing units. They’ve given them away to corporations and to some nonprofits. They’ve taken away the rights of the people who lived in public housing and until we restore public housing, Nixon administration created something called the Section 8 program.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Jeff Singer:
People have heard of that. Well it was the privatization of public housing and the creation of profits for the people who owned the buildings. Right?
Mansa Musa:
Right because in DC it called the voucher system.
Jeff Singer:
Yes. Yeah.
Mansa Musa:
Right. What your analysis is correct is to who profit from the voucher system.
Jeff Singer:
Right. Right. And then of course racism, which some have called the original sin of America, is so intertwined in housing policy, not just public housing and housing vouchers and Section 8, but also racism is deeply embedded in the larger, the market for housing so that we have had redlining, which was a denial of loans and mortgages to people of color and also to Jews and Syrians by the way who we were not permitted to get mortgages. We had restrictive covenants and I’ve seen some of these documents like I’ve seen the one from Northwood, which is part of Northeast Baltimore. And when you buy a house there, and it may still be in the mortgage, you have to agree not to sell that house to a person of color. This is true all around the country. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that that was illegal in the Kramer case, but in any event.
Mansa Musa:
We’re talking about, after every war, we’re talking about veterans, we’re talking about people that fought in the war. So we’re talking about, like right now, right today, a lot of the people that’s homeless, a lot of them are veterans and return to citizen, people that’s formerly incarcerated. But more importantly, I worked for an organization called Veterans on the Rise in DC and it was an organization primarily for a veteran, but it got created by a veteran that was homeless and start advocating that, “This ain’t right. We fought for this country. Why shouldn’t we have a place to stay when we come back to this country? We’re being treated like refugees when we return to this country.” So that’s not a farfetched analysis in that regard, but I want you to talk about going forward because now we have a situation where being poor get you locked up if you steal loaf of bread.
You stole the bread because you were hungry. That’s a crime because that’s theft. But now the crime that you’re guilty of now is you don’t have a place to stay and from exhaustion, if I walked around all day long I don’t care who you are, people, I don’t care who, this is only in the movies when somebody walk across the desert and fall out when they get to the town. No. This is real life where people be on their feet all day long and from exhaustion and 90 degree heat, 115 degree heat, fall out, that because you fell out, you’re considered a criminal.
So I want you to talk about going forward, where are we at now in terms of trying to reverse or trying to raise people’s awareness that your tax dollars should be being invested in housing people or holding the creed, the constitution. All men are created equal and have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is not my life worthy enough for me to have a place to stay? Is not my happiness worthy enough for me to pursue having a place to stay? Talk about that, Jeff.
Jeff Singer:
Well American law and jurisprudence doesn’t really provide solutions to these problems. As long as capitalism is the fundamental principle of American society and political economy, as long as that’s the case, we’re not going to solve these problems, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. It means we should try and we should understand how all of these issues are interrelated. There’s so much to do. Lately the Supreme Court has been an important force of making things worse and they use torture logic like, cruel and unusual punishment doesn’t mean getting sent to jail because you have nowhere to live. No. It just would mean that if they sent you to jail and purposefully embarrassed you while they did that, then that would be cruel and unusual punishment.
So this makes no sense. It also, the Supreme Court has ruled that the President can do anything that he wants to do. And if he’s the President, then it’s legal. There have been many sorts of rulings that are laughable from a logical perspective, but that’s not what all this is about. What it’s about is there’s a small group of people, we call them the ruling class, who make the rules and the laws are designed to uphold the rules that they make. So the Constitution be damned I suppose.
Mansa Musa:
And I like to echo this point. I think we speaking off camera and I was saying the crisis is not the lack of home. Unemployment is not the crisis. Poverty is not the crisis. The crisis is that we let 1% of the people control the country. The crisis is in the thinking of them, that it is a crisis in morality. It’s a crisis in humanity. That’s what the crisis. You got more than enough money, more than enough wealth. I remember I heard someone where they said like, “The $48 billion they gave to fund the wars abroad could end homelessness in the country.”
Jeff Singer:
Right.
Mansa Musa:
And we are in a political climate right now as we speak. The Republicans are having their convention today. Only their platform is not going to be make America great by giving people a place to live or something to eat, some shelter. Making America great is making corporate more wealthy. And the more wealthy corporation get, the more money they’re going to want to want. But at the end of the day, Jeff, what are you doing right now? What are some of the works that you’re doing right now in terms of working around with this population and helping people understand the needs to look at them with some dignity?
Jeff Singer:
Well that’s a wonderful question and the most important work that all of us can do now is to study and learn and teach and teach. My profession I guess, I’m a teacher. I’m a professor at the University of Maryland in the Graduate School of Social Work. So some of the work I do is trying to raise up new social workers to understand that social work isn’t just about helping individuals. It’s about a dialectic between service and advocacy. And all social workers should not only be provided services to people who are experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, child abuse, these are all important issues, but they don’t get solved one person at a time. They only get solved by people acting together, mobilizing and organizing.
So in fact, I’m teaching a class right now called Communities and Organizations. So that’s part of what I do. And then I do help a lot of people individually. I mean, it’s just something I’ve done for the last 50 years or so. And it’s important, but it doesn’t solve the problems in a structural way. So helping people gain a structural analysis of how capitalism actually works and how we can change it, that’s as important as anything we can do.
Mansa Musa:
Right because I think as it stand now at the rate that we’re going, you spoke on this, the Supreme Court has constantly coming out with rulings that solidify capitalist control, that solidify fascism, that solidifies the imperialist thinking. The courts is coming out on all levels, the lower courts and the high court is one bookend, locking it in. So when we’re confronted with that, we’re confronted with a situation where our only redress is to organize around the idea that we have a right to be treated human, we have a right. This is not something that’s given to us by a corporation. This is our human right to be treated as human beings. And with that, Jeff, you got the last word. What you want to tell our audience about and how they can get in touch with you?
Jeff Singer:
Oh, well, I will answer that, but after I answer that, I want to say something else.
Mansa Musa:
No, you can always say that and then answer that.
Jeff Singer:
Okay. Well just this morning I learned that one of the few heroes of the homelessness struggle in Baltimore died this morning because he was homeless. He’d had a place to live off and on.
Mansa Musa:
Right, right, no, that’s neither here nor there because conditions create the situation. It’s not, I told you earlier, people don’t wake up. People don’t wake up and say, “I want to live an impoverished life.”
Jeff Singer:
Right.
Mansa Musa:
It’s a certain social construction, certain things that go into that that create that situation and conditions that find a person, find themselves at the crossroad between not having a place to live and blowing their brains out or doing something more, committing a crime.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah.
Mansa Musa:
It’s this country. Yeah. And we want to send out our prayers and speak his name so we know who we’re talking about.
Jeff Singer:
I will. Damien Haussling was his name. And Damien was one of the founders of our street newspaper called Word on the Street. It’s not around anymore unfortunately. Damien was one of the founders of Housing Our Neighbors, which is an advocacy organization of people experiencing homelessness and their supporters. And Damien was also the founder of the Baltimore Furniture Bank, which provides free furniture to impoverished people who get a place to live. And he died in the Furniture Bank. He was working there last night and there was no air conditioning and I think he died from heat stroke.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Singer:
But he’s sort of a martyr to the notion that this country, in its documents, says, as you said earlier, that, “All men are created equal and that they have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And those are just words because they’re not concretized-
Mansa Musa:
Now come on. That’s right.
Jeff Singer:
In the actual life of people. There are hundreds of thousands of people just in Baltimore who don’t have enough food to eat.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right.
Jeff Singer:
And yet there’s food. There’s food everywhere. It rots off the farms and in warehouses. It rots, but people don’t have enough food to eat because of the distribution and the profits that are being made.
Mansa Musa:
It’s more important than feeding people. And I think that, on that note, I think that this is what this conversation should end on. This is about humanity and this is not about nothing other than that. This is about, if you say that you believe in humanity, if you say you believe in anything that has any semblance to a God, if you say you believe in anything to have any type of morality, then when you walk past a person that is sleeping on the street, you should at least stop and look at them, even if you’re not going to do nothing for them you should at least stop and act like they don’t exist because then you’re taking, to yourself, you’re taking in your mind suppressing a reality of this country.
You’re not suppressing the reality of this individual. You’re suppressing the reality of this country, this country that you hold up to be so great that has an attitude that, “No, it’s not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s money, money, money, and more money. With that being said, there you have it, the real news, Rattling the Bar. We wanted to remind all our listeners, as Jeff said earlier, that one of our heroes passed away doing this work around people that don’t have a place to stay. We want to remind our listeners that don’t change the term from unhoused to because it’s more a sanitized term than homelessness. The term is not indicated of the conditions that the people find themselves in. These are human beings that are in dire need and help and we as a nation should be thinking about where we stand at when it comes to our morality. Thank you, Jeff, for educating us today. Thank you for giving us this opportunity to educate our audience about the state of America as it relate to people that don’t have a place to stay. Bottom line, just homeless. Okay.
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