Chronicling homelessness: don't look to Ben Carson for help with the crisis

Alastair Gee
Updated

Action on homelessness is taking place outside Washington, as New York guarantees legal counsel to evicted tenants

ben carson
A senior official said she was demoted after rejecting a pricey redecorating plan for Ben Carson’s office. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Since taking over as housing secretary, the former neurosurgeon Ben Carson has defended drastic cuts to the budget of his own department and proclaimed to the New York Times that public housing shouldn’t be too comfortable lest its inhabitants get used to government largesse.

outside in america

Yet as the Guardian revealed last week, a senior department official alleged that she was demoted after balking at an expensive redecoration of Carson’s office, including $165,000 for “lounge furniture” at the agency HQ.

To see action on homelessness, you have to look outside Washington. In New York, for instance, it used to be the case that 99% of defendants in housing court did not have a lawyer, compared with 5% of landlords. We wrote about a new plan under which people are guaranteed legal counsel. A study of this kind of initiative in Massachusetts found that two-thirds of defendants were able to stay in their homes, compared with one-third of those lacking lawyers. The difference, one New York attorney told us, was “night and day”.

What we published

  • A dismayed UN investigator embarked on a tour of California

  • Disneyland employees are mostly not scraping by

  • New York adopts a bold new law that guarantees a lawyer to people being evicted

  • “A declaration of war”: California liberals are furious about a new housing push

  • Twelve are charged for defying a ban on feeding homeless people

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LAST BUT NOT LEAST

People in a homeless encampment in Portland were cleared after the mayor called it ‘unacceptable’.
People in a homeless encampment in Portland were cleared after the mayor called it ‘unacceptable’. Photograph: Beth Nakamura/AP

Thacher Schmid in Portland writes:

The life of a homeless encampment can be brief.

Consider Village of Hope, a fledgling homeless village that popped up in a remote, woodsy area of Portland in late January. It featured 10 tents on wooden platforms, a shared kitchen and “Chill Out Zone” for mental health decompression. There were even plans for a human-powered laundry trough. “I don’t look at it as primitive,” said an organizer, Lisa Lake. “We need to be innovative so people who have nothing can be self-sufficient.”

But the day after the camp appeared, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler called the self-governed encampment, on parks-owned wetlands near the Columbia river, “unacceptable”. On 2 February, police and rangers cleared the site without incident.

Officials evidently have few reservations about displacing people even in winter or amid a homelessness crisis of unprecedented scale across the west coast. Indeed, three days later, a San Jose camp dubbed “Googleville” was also swept.

One Village of Hope resident, Kerry Wheeler, asked: “Why can’t they let us have one little place?”

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