The Activist's Handbook. Randy Shaw
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for those in need, Occupy Sandy showed that the inspiration that launched the Occupy movement remains strong and that its activists still aspire to make a difference in the world.
HOMELESSNESS: THE FAILURE OF DEFENSIVE ACTIVISM
In comparison to the Occupy movement’s far-reaching ambition to create a more just and equal society, the goal of ending homelessness in the United States would appear much easier to achieve. After all, the United States has sufficient wealth to provide housing for all who need it, and Congress even passed a law in 1949 pledging housing for all. But as anyone walking the nation’s streets knows, for more than two decades widespread visible homelessness has been a fact of life in the United States. Sadly, no presidential administration has called for allocating the money necessary to meaningfully reduce homelessness, even though its cause was the sharp decline in federal funding for affordable housing starting in the 1970s.
I was working in the Tenderloin when homelessness burst on to the local and national scene in 1982. I have spent three decades trying to reduce homelessness, and since 1988 my organization, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, has created and run housing programs for homeless persons. At first, homelessness was overwhelmingly framed as a lack of affordable housing. Since the 1990s, homelessness has been associated in the public mind primarily with panhandling, public urination, “bums” sleeping on park benches, and other conduct lumped together as “problem street behavior.” This reflects a tragic shift in perception. And its impact is stark: the United States has more homeless persons today than in 1982, the federal government has never tried to end the problem, and millions of Americans are no longer surprised to see homeless people in public plazas and other areas.
How did those unwilling to provide low-income people with a roof over their heads get so much of the public on their side? After the initial wave of sympathetic media stories, conservative think tanks, activists, and politicians got to work reframing homelessness as a problem of individual behavior rather than a social problem. Unfortunately, grassroots homeless activists accepted this reframing, zealously defending people’s right to camp in public parks or panhandle on neighborhood streets. While homeless activists also advocated for more affordable housing, conservatives made sure that the “debate” about homelessness focused on camping and panhandling. And considering the number of homeless encampments and panhandlers in major cities, these issues easily overwhelmed discussions about homelessness as a housing problem. The public supported people getting affordable housing, but opposed camping and begging. Homeless advocates accepted the conservatives’ redefinition of homelessness and fought the battle on their opponents’ terms. It was a struggle they could not win.
San Francisco’s Homeless Problem
San Francisco has been a national model for addressing homelessness, and its experiences from the 1980s through today both foreshadowed and mirrors that of other cities. San Francisco is the nation’s most politically progressive city, a place where longtime Congress member Nancy Pelosi is more likely to be criticized from the left than the right. The successful reframing of homelessness from a lack of housing to a problem of individual behavior in progressive San Francisco explains why this strategy also found success elsewhere.
I head an organization that is San Francisco’s leading provider of permanent housing for homeless single adults. I have crafted city homeless programs and believe San Francisco is the national leader in housing the population my organization serves. But I know that tourists view San Francisco as having the worst homeless problem they have ever seen. People feel this way not because they have any knowledge of the actual numbers of people who lack housing or shelter, but rather because of the visibility of panhandlers, people sleeping in doorways, and problem street behavior in Union Square, on Fisherman’s Wharf, in UN Plaza, and along Market Street. These activities have come to define the city’s homeless problem. And using that frame, many San Franciscans join tourists in equating “combating homelessness” not with getting people housed, but with pushing panhandlers and those involved in “problem street behavior” out of sight.
I saw this turn in the framing of homelessness firsthand after Art Agnos became mayor in 1988. Prior to his taking office, I was among a group of homeless advocates who created a consensus proposal for a new direction in city policy. Calling itself the Coalition on Homelessness, the group (which later became an independent nonprofit) offered a concrete and specific program to an incoming mayor who had vowed during his campaign to change how the city treated the homeless. The Coalition’s proactive approach put Agnos in the position of having either to adopt a “ready to go” program or explain why it was inadequate. The group’s tactical activism ensured that its consensus proposal would be the starting point for all future discussions about homeless policy.
Ultimately, the city adopted almost every component of the consensus proposal. Whereas homeless activists in most cities in 1988 were still fighting for more emergency shelters, the thrust of the Coalition’s agenda was to divert funds from such stopgap measures toward transitional and permanent housing programs. The group’s analysis was adopted in San Francisco’s nationally acclaimed 1989 homeless plan, “Beyond Shelter,” written by Robert Prentice (one of the formulators of the consensus proposal), who was hired by Mayor Agnos to serve as the city’s homeless coordinator. President Bill Clinton’s homeless plan, as set forth in 1994 by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) undersecretary and current New York governor Andrew Cuomo, was essentially a redrafting of “Beyond Shelter.”
The Coalition’s proactive approach proved so successful an example of tactical activism that many of the plan’s authors, including me, became its implementers. I met with Agnos’s new social services chief, Julia Lopez, to urge the adoption of a modified payment program that would enable General Assistance recipients to obtain permanent housing at below-market rates. Based on discussions with hotel operators, I believed they would agree to lower rents and allow welfare recipients to become permanent tenants if the risk of eviction for nonpayment of rent could be reduced. The modified payment plan lowered this risk by having tenants voluntarily agree to have their rent deducted from their welfare checks.
Lopez told me such a program sounded great but that it would succeed only if the Tenderloin Housing Clinic ran it. We had never sought to run homeless programs, but I had spent years fighting the city’s practice of transforming single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels into temporary lodging for poor people. We wanted to restore SROs to their historic status as homes for elderly, disabled, and low-income people and, not wanting to lose the opportunity to achieve this goal, we became a city-funded housing provider. As anticipated, landlords lowered rents so they could attract the formerly homeless tenants we could supply. The program was so successful that SRO rents fell significantly lower than they had been a decade earlier.
Agnos understood that homelessness was fundamentally a housing problem. But the city’s business and real estate community never liked Agnos, and storm clouds were brewing. On May 29, 1989, the San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page story in which business leaders denounced Mayor Agnos for allowing camping in the park outside City Hall. In what many believed was the greatest political error of his term, Agnos had decided to allow camping in this park until his programs creating alternative sources of housing were in place. As public anger over “Camp Agnos” grew, the mayor decided in July 1990 to cut his losses and sweep the park of campers. The purge became a national media story, as reporters found interest in a self-described “progressive” mayor’s cracking down on the homeless.
Because many of the campers had sought the now-independent Coalition on Homelessness’s assistance to prevent the sweep, Coalition staff workers entered the national debate in opposition to Agnos’s action, arguing that the mayor had caved in to political pressure and swept the park before his programs had become operational. The Coalition was correct about Agnos but failed to appreciate that his tolerance of camping had caused him serious political harm. The public never understood the rationale for allowing camping, and continuing the policy had become politically untenable. In their anger over Agnos’s betrayal, the activists rushed to defend the campers without appreciating the risk that their fight for more low-cost housing and mental health services would be reduced to a dispute over the right to camp in a public park.
The Coalition’s full-fledged attack on Agnos’s