Earlier this week, I interviewed the Rev. Steve Brigham in Lakewood, N.J., for a video project on homelessness. The video was shot and edited by photographer Sherry Rubel. Brigham, known as Minister Steve, sat under a tree in the 90-degree heat. Hanging from the tree were clothing, blankets, and a sleeping bag used by houseless transients who sleep on the grass in this open square.
We had made a similar video a decade ago, when Tent City was still in the news. Tent City was a tent encampment in the Lakewood woods overseen by Brigham that housed as many as 150 homeless men and women. It was demolished in about 2013-2014 after a settlement was reached to provide a year of housing to those living in the encampment. Many failed to take advantage or failed to meet the requirements of the settlement, and only a few managed to use the housing as a stepping stone out of chronic homelessness. (See “Human Stories of the Houseless” here. For paying subscribers only.)
Brigham’s argument is sound. There is a lack of affordable housing and a lack of will. Few people are willing to have housing for currently houseless constructed in their backyard, while they also complain about the persistence of the homelessness problem. The result is a nomadic population forced to find shelter where it can — under rail overpasses, tents in wooded areas, riverbanks.
The video and our visit were Rubel’s idea. We have worked together several times in the past, producing two books — my As An Alien in a Land of Promise and her photo book, Beggars Can Be Choosers, which includes my essay of the same name. I also reported and wrote text for her photos of the 2020 George Floyd protests across New Jersey, which were posted to Instagram.
Rubel, who has been advocating for a tiny home pilot program for almost a decade, thought an update would be appropriate. The tiny home bill had been introduced several times, but not during the current legislative session.
As Rubel was finishing her editing of the new video and posting it to YouTube, The New York Times released its The Morning newsletter. In today’s newsletter, German Lopez writes that the “problem has the makings of an acute crisis,” a comment I would describe as an understatement. We already are at crisis levels and have been for several decades. Today’s surge is exacerbating what has been capitalism’s dirty secret.
As Lopez writes:
Shelters across the U.S. are reporting a surge in people looking for help, with wait lists doubling or tripling in recent months. The number of homeless people outside of shelters is also probably rising, experts say. Some of them live in encampments, which have popped up in parks and other public spaces in major cities from Washington, D.C., to Seattle since the pandemic began.
And inflation is compounding the problem: Rent has increased at its fastest rate since 1986, putting houses and apartments out of reach for more Americans.
Lopez argues that this is a supply-and-demand issue.
Without enough housing, not everyone has a place to live. And the homes that do exist cost more as people compete for limited supply. So more people are priced out, and more end up homeless.
The answer, therefore, is to build more housing. But that ignores the deeper systemic issues at play. The need for housing that is affordable to the lowest-income Americans is not just about the housing, but about wages, as well. We lack the housing, but we also pay people too little for many jobs. We are happy to have a contingent work force of low-paid and easily replaceable employees to keep prices down and profits up.
We can build the housing but it won’t address the other elements of the crisis, which are a feature of capitalist economies. As I’ve written on more than one occasion (here, here, and here), capitalism is designed to generate profit. It does so both by generating more revenue and by cutting costs. American-style corporate capitalism has been especially adept at reducing costs by defining anything that does not aid the immediate bottom line as extraneous spending. The results: shortages of emergency supplies during pandemics, pollution and climate change, homelessness, excess policing. The reason is that the costs do not disappear; they get pushed onto the public accounting sheet in a kind of reverse socialism.
Backlash inevitably follows in the form of public revulsion of the homeless, which in turn leads to crackdowns that do little more than chase them from spot to spot in an endless game of whack-a-mole, while liberals and conservatives alike decry the cost in taxes of doing anything beyond police action.
You can see this in San Francisco, in New York, and here in New Jersey, where efforts to have rich towns contribute their fair share of money or space to solve the affordable housing problem were met with protest and ultimately killed. Even towns like South Brunswick, my hometown, with extremely good reputations for providing affordable housing pushed back against efforts to require that affordable housing be tied not just to construction of new housing but to construction of job-producing warehouses and retail space. New housing meant new people, an increase in population, more school kids and traffic — all legitimate concerns. But bringing in new commercial facilities, which generate tax revenue without increasing school populations, was fine. No thought was given to where these new workers, who often are paid low wages, would live — as long as it wasn’t here. (New Jersey’s fragmented political system, in which there are multiple layers of government and more than 500 municipalities with their own priorities and more than 600 school districts with their own needs only exacerbates the difficulties.)
In the short term, we need to build more housing that is affordable to low- and extremely low-income people. We need to provide wrap-around services — mental health, substance abuse, and job counseling, for instance — and more treatment beds, rather than warehousing people in jails.
We also need to pay people more for doing the work that needs to be done, like picking tomatoes and lettuce, cleaning toilets, flipping burgers, digging ditches, and stocking shelves.
Ultimately, though, we need to reimagine our economic system so that we no longer place dollar values on human beings.
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You can watch the earlier video here:
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