From violent sweeps of our houseless bodies as though we are trash, to the vicious towing of our homes (aka cars/RV’s), these are not solutions.
This happens incessantly across occupied Turtle Island, from SF to NYC under the Mayoral administrations of London Breed (SF), Jesse Areguin (Berkeley), Erik Adams (NYC), Karen Bass (LA), and Sheng Tao (Oakland), which use money for “homeless services” to pay the exorbitant costs of encampment sweeps.
From Tiny home villages to navigation centers, to scarce and temporary shelter beds and jail-transformed motel rooms, which evict people out of their rooms after three days even if they are in the hospital, like in the case of Anjileen “Green Eyes” Swan from Tongva (LA) who struggled with the InsideSafe “solution”—aka what I re-named Inside NOTSAFE. From forced housing referrals/forced treatment—like Newsom passed into law—these are not solutions because they are not informed by the people impacted by them, aka us, the houseless people, or as we call ourselves at POOR Magazine, “povertyskolaz.”
These “solutions” to homelessness—created “about us but without us”—aka without the guidance, direction, or leadership of us poor and houseless people, or what we call Poverty Scholarship-informed—are not only bound to fail, but bound to harm, often leading to our deaths.
The tiny tomb (Tiny home) villages such as the ones in Oakland and projects like LA’s InsideSafe, which I re-named InsideNOTsafe are actually the opposite of safe or a village, and in fact are dangerous for houseless people.
These projects and solutions aren’t guided by spirit, love, healing, elders, or Poverty Scholarship like Homefulness*. Instead they are rooted in numbers, budgets, and scarcity models without any regard for our mental or spiritual health, but simply working on a quota and numbers system about “how many houseless people they can “serve” rather than listening to what we actually need. They breed calculated, institutional words and codes like “service-resistant” and “non-compliant” which are Anti-Social Worker* code for those of us who can’t abide by carceral non-solutions like these.
The framework of Poverty Scholarship is a theory developed and coined by me and my Mama Dee when we struggled with homelessness, poverty, evictions, and housing insecurity for most of my childhood and young adulthood, in tandem and collaboration with fellow houseless povertyskola co-founders of POOR Magazine, and became a textbook in 2019 entitled: Poverty Scholarship: Theory, Art, Words and Tears Across Mama Earth.
*Anti-Social Worker is a word I created to describe the often harmful, unhelpful aspects of the so-called “helpers” or caretakers who are mostly acting as agents of removal, and participants in the carceral state system for poor people.
Occupied Huchiun (West Oakland)
“Who are you?” the security guard asked us through three layers of chain link fencing material separating Oakland’s “cabin community”—the only referral given to about 50 of the hundreds of victims of the violent Wood Street Evictions earlier this year. “No visitors are allowed,” and then he proceeded to re-lock up the third fence between us.
After some wrangling by the head Anti-Social Worker in charge, the security guard reluctantly unlocked the gates. While a grueling process of ID checks and calls to supervisors ensued, I asked the member of Wood Street Commons who we had walked over there with what they thought of the “Cabin Community” set up by the politrickster class of Oakland.
“I don’t like it and probably won’t last here very long with the insane rules, but that’s all they are offering me and I have nowhere else to go,” said the sisterwarrior who asked to remain anonymous. She shook her head from side to side and fell quiet.
“The only reason this place is a little less evil is because of all the meetings we had with them and the ideas we homeless people gave them, which they sort of listened to,” John Janosko, houseless founding member of Wood Street Commons, said about the Tiny home cabins, “But they are still not welcoming or liveable for a lot of our folks.”
The euphemistically named “cabins” installed by the City of Oakland poltricksters and Anti-Social Workers enlist an admixture of fear, claustrophobia, and impending incarceration for every resident, a dangerous situation that has since led to the cycle of homelessness continuing for the Wood Street Commons eviction refugees.
These carceral communities specifically created for houseless residents are rife with violence, which makes sense as they are all rooted in historical hateful acts of legislative brutality, like the Ugly Laws, Pauper Laws, Settlement houses, Pauper prisons, sundown towns, and Jim Crow, to name a few. Multiple ways that being poor, houseless, or disabled in public, like an inability to afford food or rent, would be just cause for arrest or incarceration. These “laws,” or lies as I call them, enabled the profiting off of poverty and roots of the non-profiteer and carceral system we still deal with today.
One terrifying example was under previous Oakland mayor Libby Shaaf. We had the life-threatening insanity of the “tuff-shed”—a poison-leaking, flammable particle board box that literally was dangerous to sit in, much-less sleep in. The fact that these could even be created and taken seriously is an example of the way that our bodies are seen when we are not paying ground rent in a krapitalist system. These violent “solutions,” created about us without us poor people, are flawed on purpose because our houseless bodies are not seen as human.
“I am hiding out just so I can get my wallet and important belongings,” Freeway—another Sister, warrior, povertyskola resident leader with Wood Street Commons—texted to me while she was getting evicted from the cabin she and her partner were placed in after the violent Wood Street Commons evictions.
“They have no understanding or accommodations for people like me and my partner. We tried to be here, and now we are being evicted back to the street, again,” Freeway concluded breathless as she ran.
Occupied Yelamu (SF)
“Luis Temaj would still be here but this society thinks it’s okay to sweep humans like we are trash, like my mama always says,” said Youth Skola Tiburcio Garcia. They are sweeping people right now down the street while we are mourning Luis,” he concluded. Tiburcio spoke from a powerful ceremony POOR Magazine held last week for Luis Temaj, a humble loving houseless Mayan Sun, Brother, and friend, who was set on fire while sleeping on the streets of San Francisco on October 8, 2021. To this day his family has received no justice.
Occupied Huchiun (Berkeley)
“Your friend can’t come in.”
“This is my mama.”
“I don’t care if she is G-O-D herself, she’s not coming in. We have a no-visitors-in-room policy. Period.”
In one of the many iterations of me and Mama’s homelessness, we “lived” in several, cockroach- and bed bug-infested, box-size SRO’s (Single Room Occupancy Hotels), or in other words, poor people housing. I place quotation marks around “lived” because I’m not sure if living itself can be achieved in the jail-like conditions of most of these SRO’s we’re “placed” in to get us off the street.
If it wasn’t the insane litany of “rules” we had to live under, it was the ongoing policing we were subject to just being there.
“Who is in there?”
“My mama and me, like always.”
“Well we need to come in to inspect.”
The knocks and accusations were once or twice a week and eventually the management decided we weren’t a “good fit” because of my Mama’s trauma-fueled tendency to collect too many things, aka hoarding/cluttering (which I call having/keeping), and evicted us back to the street. This was just one of the many eviction wars we survived and one of the many murders of the soul that led us to dream/vision Homefulness.
*Homefulness
Homefulness, unlike these other projects, is a homeless peoples, self-determined, rent-free, healing, forever housing solution to homelessness, created with spiritual guidance and permission from 1st Nations peoples of these occupied lands and which has been built and is thriving in Deep East Oakland, which just welcomed in its 16th resident—a houseless, single mama—on December 1st.
We also are clear that any poor and houseless peoples-led land liberation movement must have spiritual guidance and permission from the 1st Nations relatives of that occupied land. Homefulness would not have happened without the spiritual guidance, prayer, and permission of the Ohlone/Lisjan leaders of this part of Turtle Island and rooted in LandBack and Black Land Return frameworks and actions. This is the work myself and Corrina Gould, Land protector and Ohlone/Lisjan co-founder of Sogorea Te Land Trust, call Decolonizing Homelessness.
Our funding sources are different as well. We povertyskolaz teach housed folks with race, class, and formal education privilege about the concept of Radical Redistribution and ComeUnity reparations in a poor people-led skool we call PeopleSkool. This is a solidarity economy in action. Self-determination means you are liberating your mind, actions, and consciousness away from harmful extractive krapitalism.
Other beautiful examples of solutions are Camp Resolution in Sacramento, a beautiful poor, houseless, disabled resident-run space; Nicklesville, which is a poor and houseless revolutionaries-run tiny home village in Seattle; Camp Integrity, which is a newly launched safe camping site in Marin County; and Wood Street Commons before the City of Oakland dismantled, destroyed, and evicted everyone from it.
Homefulness residents are all people called “service-resistant” and non-compliant. We are people who have struggled with having/collecting. We are revolutionaries. We are, like all people, outside.
All of us co-founders of Homefulness struggle with the multiple traumas from lives spent living outside, and lives spent living inside in a hurting krapitalist system. We know the violence of incarceration, racism, ableism, eviction, addiction. And the violence of isolation and the struggles of recovery.
We hold each other in accountability and it’s hard. We are constantly having to convene our internal restorative justice circles. We call family elders, elephant councils, and our HEAALZ groups to work toward healing and repair with ourselves and each other. We teach multimedia workshops and support micro-business enterprises and the communities we are in with whatever we are able to give and distribute, to name a few of our many projects.
But most of all, we all know—equally, importantly—that Homefulness doesn’t just mean a room or a roof. It means interdependence, love, and support.
Tiny is the daughter of Dee, povertyskola co-founder/visionary of POOR Magazine and Homefulness.