16,000,000 housing units sit vacant on Turtle Island with more than 650,000 people living on Turtle Island’s streets everyone could be housed with over 15,000,000 housing units to spare if slum lords and wealth hoarders actually cared in occupied Huichin so-called oakland more than 10,000 housing units sit empty and meek while more than 5,000 people are out on these streets more than enough to provide everyone a home in a matter of weeks but instead slum lords and wealth hoarders would rather spend blood money on sweeps ed's reiskin the biscuit when he says KOCB's homeless encampment crews: “annual personnel cost is… $2.9 million” desperately needed to respond to 311 callers “in addition staff estimates that O&M expenditures… is $3.5 million” crucial to keeping our offices neat and free of squalor “combined with personnel, these direct costs total to $6.4 million” annual funding they score for cops and bulldozers to play whack a mole with the poor 1 year of sweeps comes to: $6,400,000 EMP passed in 2020 to the sound of sobs and hollers 4 years of sweeps approximate coffers: $25,600,000 Temporary shelter annually slaughters: $28,355,999 Between shelters and sweeps that recycle us on, off, and back on these streets, in a fiscal year reap around: $35,000,000 that us poor people never see poor people prodded and ping ponged across a meager 2,300 lane miles of streets from sweeps to shelters and back from shelters to sweeps Just this year for $6,400,000 sweeps put over 3,000 of our unhoused loved ones 6 feet deep say what you will about our lives but our deaths ain't cheap costs less to put us in a house than to bury us in these streets in the last 5 years so-called california spent $24,000,000,000 on homelessness programs yet more people have found a home in the ground before they ever get to see a house 5 years $24,000,000,000 over 70,000 dead how many got housed? california says they, “don't have the numbers” settler pundits turn our erasure into a numbers game we're born with a number before anyone knows our name churning our lives and deaths into data as if those are the same lord knows they'd love to keep it that way cuz when it comes down to numbers and names a number's easy to forget at the end of the day
Jaz Colibri is a member of the Wood Street Community and a houseless trans organizer who provides mutual aid support to houseless communities experiencing evictions across occupied Huichin (oakland).