Goodbye, summer. Hello, rain and cold. The Farmer\u2019s Almanac forecasts this winter to be a brutal one. For most people, this is not a big deal. For the homeless, it could be lethal. And in Berkeley, there are dozens of seniors and seriously disabled individuals who are currently homeless. The city needs to be doing more to help its homeless population.<\/p>\n

In 2016, First They Came for the Homeless\u00a0 began<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cPoor Tour,\u201d a constant movement of protest encampments as each one was disbanded by the city of Berkeley. First They Came for the Homeless is a local homeless activist group. Over three months, our encampments were raided 17 times, but our commitment to relocating throughout the city remained in order to expose the reasons that these camps were disbanded. Throughout the whole protest, not once did I ever see human feces or needles that weren\u2019t properly disposed of by our diabetics. Furthermore, I never saw trash that was allowed to accumulate. Yet the city continued to\u00a0 disband<\/a>\u00a0our camps, and health and safety concerns were typically the reasons given. Not once during the protest were the homeless really treated as victims of health and safety concerns \u2014 just as the cause.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to get the public to understand homelessness. The common perception is that homeless individuals are on drugs, alcohol or are mentally disabled. The typical description of a homeless camp is that of feces, needles and trash accumulation.<\/p>\n

Is this accurate though? No \u2014 it\u2019s not even close. Homeless are just like every housed person, except their issues don\u2019t get hidden behind walls. The world can see the drug use, the drinking and the mental state. The perception that those are behaviors that lead to homelessness is easily promoted. What\u2019s hidden is the torture of being homeless and how escaping with drugs or into insanity is often the result.<\/p>\n

Constant exposure to the weather. Police waking you up. Police taking everything you own. People giving you bad looks, yelling \u201cget a job,\u201d quickly looking away or giving you a wide berth on the sidewalk. These gestures only add to the systemic torture. Criminalizing survival makes you a prisoner to nonexistent services. There is no stability. There is little hope. There is no other place to go.<\/p>\n

Today, First They Came for the Homeless has dozens of people living in tents. We have had hundreds come through our \u201cHere There\u201d encampment. We provided stability, storage, privacy, personal space and community. And many of these individuals have fixed their own lives. Some have secured jobs, saved money and improved their situation.<\/p>\n

Our fight\u00a0 continues<\/a>. The city of Berkeley is soon going to\u00a0 close<\/a>\u00a0the temporary homeless shelter right before winter. This is telling. The city is emphasizing the fact that it is\u00a0 restoring<\/a>\u00a0the lockers it removed a few years ago, instead of using the money to build housing \u2014 this, too, is telling. There is still no affordable housing being built, and our responsibly run, community-based tent city still has not been sanctioned. Homeless people across the city continue to be stepped around and ignored. All these things tell me that, under our current system, only the richest count. There will be no solution as long as profit is more important than people.<\/p>\n

Mike Zint is a co-founder of the homeless activist group First They Came for the Homeless<\/em><\/p>\n

Note from Mike Zint:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

They edited it some. They made me sound nicer than I was. They cut out the number of vacant affordable units because they could not verify that 950 are vacant. ( the mayor said it, I repeated it)<\/p>\n

All in all, not too bad. Thanks to the students at UC Berkeley. Each year, new kids work on the paper. Each year, we get to break some of them in.<\/p>\n

–Mike Zint<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"