Recently our Board of Supervisors proclaimed Nov. 10-18 National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, to strengthen our resolve and resources to end hunger and homelessness in Humboldt. Affordable Homeless Housing Alternatives (AHHA) suggests that shelter include safe parking programs, legal campgrounds and tiny house villages with the homeless and local organizations.
AHHA believes housing is a human right!
• Everyone has the right to safe, legal shelter.
• Being “Safe, Warm and Dry First” is a required condition to achieving a healthy, productive life.
• The whole community benefits when everyone feels safe and respected.
• A healthy community provides opportunities for those less fortunate and shares its abundance of resources.
• The main cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing, wealth inequity, and poverty.
Humboldt County and municipalities have been resistant to implementing AHHA alternatives because they fear supporting “not habitable temporary housing” by old standards. The reality is that we will never catch up to the need for permanent housing without utilizing these alternatives for stabilizing the currently homeless in a dignified manner.
California recognizes the shelter crisis we are experiencing and is making funds available. Humboldt County is now ahead of the game, since it declared a shelter crisis in February. One-time only state funds coming to Humboldt — approximately $2.6 million — can now be used for AHHA’s affordable alternatives and appropriate bridging housing, until permanent housing is built.
Policies declaring “Housing is a Human Right” have been enacted since FDR’s State of the Union address in 1944, which included everyone having the right to a decent home.
The National Center on Homelessness and Poverty says “three-quarters of Americans believe that adequate housing is a human right, and two-thirds believe that government programs need to be expanded to ensure this right.”
High- profile visits by United Nations human rights monitors (UN-HABITAT Advisory Group and UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Adequate Housing in 2009, and Special Rapporteur on the Right to Water and Sanitation in 2011, Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in 2017), recommended replacement of sub-standard subsidized housing units and condemned criminalization of homelessness as cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment.
The U.S. ratified the Convention Against Torture (1994), protecting individuals from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including the criminalization of homelessness. Leaving people outside with no place to go and little food access is cruel and unusual punishment and is a lifelong sentence for most who are now chronically homeless.
“In practice, the United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that, while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable health care or growing up in a context of total deprivation.” (Philip Alston, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on His Mission to the United States of America,” 2018.)
The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and Federal Housing and Urban Development now address criminalization of homelessness as a Human Rights issue. In 2015 the U.S. was reviewed by the Human Rights Council specifically to inquire about the criminalization of homelessness in the U.S.—addressing it as cruel, inhumane, and degrading. The DOJ filed a brief arguing criminalization of homelessness violates the Eighth Amendment.
The recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision says prosecuting people for sleeping in public “violates their constitutional rights” and provides new alternatives to the excessive rise in anti-homeless ordinances, policies and tactics that have ramped up criminalization in recent years. Eureka for example has passed nine of these ordinances.
Attorneys in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division argued that “the conduct of sleeping in a public place is indistinguishable from the status of homelessness” and that it should be “uncontroversial that punishing conduct that is a universal and unavoidable consequence of being human” violates the Eighth Amendment. They noted that “finding a safe and legal place to sleep can be difficult or even impossible” for many homeless people.
Housing is a human right! Humboldt County and cities must create housing alternatives that get people safe, warm and dry first, on their way to permanent housing. It is the right thing for all of us to do, and it is the law!
Nezzie Wade is a founding member of AHHA and president of its board of directors.