The Activist's Handbook. Randy Shaw
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residents of Camp Agnos typically wore backpacks and had chosen to sleep outdoors rather than pay rent in residential hotels. The Clinic’s outreach staff surveyed most of the campers and found that the majority received enough public assistance to pay rent if they so chose. In the public mind, people should be homeless only if they could not afford housing. Now the city’s leading homeless advocacy group was arguing that people who could afford housing had the right to forgo this option and instead live under the stars outside City Hall until temporary shelter or permanent housing was available to everyone. The public and media rejected, even ridiculed, this notion; accustomed to viewing homeless people as victims of hard luck, they could not accept the idea that anyone should reject shelter.
Most believed that Agnos could fulfill his responsibility to the campers by ensuring that each received a shelter bed or hotel room. The Coalition countered by urging sympathizers to “storm the park” so there would be more park dwellers than Agnos could immediately shelter. This strategy, a sudden, defensive response, understandably backfired. The media, though long sympathetic to homeless activists, interpreted this move as a blatant attempt to inflate the number of homeless denizens of Camp Agnos. The activists were even seen as interfering with the government’s effort to put a roof over people’s heads.
Agnos’s park sweep brought national attention unprecedented for a city homeless policy. From the New York Times to the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, national observers were fascinated by this action, taken by a mayor viewed as one of the nation’s most progressive. The publicity transformed San Francisco’s public debate about homelessness and led to the emergence of an entirely new model in cities across the United States. The model, honed by ambitious politicians and their corporate and media allies, creates symmetry between repressive political agendas and homeless advocacy groups: a mayor calls for a crackdown on “aggressive panhandling” and public camping; homeless advocates object on civil-liberties grounds.
When Agnos sought reelection in 1991, he faced a runoff against a former police chief, Frank Jordan. Jordan attacked Agnos’s “social worker” approach to homelessness and highlighted his own ability to get tough on individual homeless people by suggesting they be sent to work camps outside the city. Agnos got little political credit for providing thousands of housing units to the formerly homeless, and was instead condemned for allegedly allowing the homeless problem to get out of control. His defeat sent a powerful message to future San Francisco mayors: it’s fine to house homeless people, but voters define success by stopping public camping and related “problem street behavior.” Agnos laid the groundwork for the “housing first” approach to homelessness, which remains a national model, but some in San Francisco still believe he was a disaster in dealing with homelessness.
A Lost Opportunity
The 1990s proved an enormous lost opportunity for addressing homelessness. Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 brought a Democrat to the White House for the first time since the homeless crisis had begun. The nation soon had a booming economy that could have built all the low-income housing needed, yet the public debate about homelessness had already shifted. Emotional battles were fought, not over the nation’s affordable-housing shortage, but over the right to camp in parks and panhandle on city sidewalks. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani won praise for reducing visible homelessness in his city, even though this “reduction” was achieved not by housing homeless people but by physically removing them from the areas of Manhattan frequented by tourists. San Francisco residents and politicians returned from Giuliani’s city marveling at the reduction in homeless people and wondering why they could not do the same. People compared San Francisco’s “failed” strategy with that of New York City’s “successful” one, as the criterion was not housing homeless people but getting them out of sight. Although Giuliani acknowledged upon leaving office in 2001 that New York City’s homeless numbers had risen during his eight-year tenure—despite great economic growth—his punitive methods became a “model” for other urban politicians.
By the 1990s, media sympathy for homeless persons had greatly declined. Media coverage of the homeless went from stories on recently unemployed middle-aged men to sound bites of long-haired, able-bodied young people confessing that they lie about being veterans so they can make more money panhandling. Panhandlers are no longer people trying to compensate for cuts in welfare checks; they are now drug addicts and alcoholics who use public charity to feed their habits. While positive stories are still reported about new housing and programs for homeless persons, stories connecting homelessness to the inability of millions of Americans to afford rent are eclipsed by those that separate the homeless problem from housing needs.
In “The Year That Housing Died,” the cover story of an October 1996 issue of the New York Times Magazine, author Jason DeParle claimed that “the Federal Government has essentially conceded defeat in its decades-long drive to make housing affordable to low-income Americans.” The federal budget included no new housing subsidies that year, and the 1996 Republican platform sought to eliminate HUD.
Can Proactive Homeless Strategies Still Prevail?
Have activists missed their chance to mobilize the nation to finally end widespread visible homelessness? It is hard to see how this goal can be achieved if advocates continue to allow issues like panhandling and camping to frame the debate. For example, since 2010, voters in some of the nation’s most progressive cities, including San Francisco, have enacted laws banning lying and sitting on commercial sidewalks. Opponents decry such “sit and lie” laws for “criminalizing homelessness,” while proponents argue that they target behavior, not homelessness. An October 19, 2012, New York Times story about a sit-lie ballot measure on Berkeley’s November 2012 ballot (“Free Speech Is One Thing, Vagrants Another”) profiled Chris Escobar, age twenty-three, “who left Miami five weeks ago” and “hitched a ride west with only a backpack, a yellow dog named Marley and a tiger striped kitten on a leash.” Escobar resented the idea that he was not free to sit on the sidewalk with his pets, and said about the ballot measure, “This is not the Berkeley I came for.”19
Young, able-bodied people like Escobar who spend their days sitting in front of small businesses and public buildings are not the part of the homeless population that most taxpayers desire to assist. They are perceived as choosing to be homeless and as hurting local commercial districts in the process. Unfortunately, this small segment of the homeless population continues to get much of the public and media attention. It does not represent the most vulnerable among the homeless; to the contrary, the young and able-bodied are often among the most self-sufficient. Yet activists continue to fritter away public support for helping the vast majority of homeless people, those desperate to obtain permanent housing, by defending a small subgroup that prefers to live under the stars.
Homeless advocates do not have to prioritize sit-lie, panhandling, and other quality-of-life issues. They do not have to be sidetracked from their core housing funding demand. Such issues can be addressed by civil liberties groups and legal organizations not involved in direct political advocacy for increased low-cost housing funds.
Activists still have a compelling case for increasing federal funding to reduce homelessness. San Francisco and other cities have reduced homelessness through a combination of housing and on-site services known as “supportive housing.” This successful model shows that ending homelessness is entirely a question of spending priorities. Reviving campaigns to invest in ending homelessness won’t be easy, but continuing to accept widespread visible homelessness in the United States is unacceptable. Ending homelessness remains a winnable national fight, but only if activists frame the debate around the millions of ill-housed eager to have a home.
CRIME FIGHTING: DEFENSIVENESS AT ITS WORST
Activists have paid the biggest price for responding defensively on the issue of crime. Unlike homeless activists, whose strategic errors never involved abandoning principles, some “progressives” zealously embraced law-and-order solutions to crime out of calculation and expedience. Other residents of low-income communities embraced longer sentences and prison expansion as part of a broader anti-crime strategy whose other key components, such as job training, housing, and education, were never implemented. Fearing being labeled soft on crime, many progressive politicians have backed the conservative framing of