Supreme Court make homelessness a crime. The crime is an economy that hurts too many. | Opinion
It is done. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that it is legal to identify homelessness as a crime, carrying fines and possibly jail time in a for-profit prison.
Advocates of this law say that something had to be done to stop the onslaught of tent cities eating our metropolitan areas. I think we can all agree on that. Small businesses, big cities and quaint communities are being bankrupted and terrorized by the drug addicted and/or mentally ill roaming and dying on our streets.
Criminalizing homelessness however, is not the SOMETHING that needs to happen to halt the exponential growth of the homeless population or its impact on our communities. Why not? Because drug addiction and mental illness are often the results of homelessness, not the cause. Either way, the zombie-like street walkers are a small portion of the homeless population. They are just the most visible and disturbing.
High rents, low incomes and abusive employers are causing homelessness in record numbers, but that truth hasn’t overcome the thunder of the walking dead on the sidewalks. So I keep sharing my story in the hope that I can break through the noise and horror. You cannot fix a problem without correctly identifying what is causing it.
In 2005 I fled my home with my 10-month-old baby in my arms. The father of my child was threatening to murder me — better off taking our chances on the street. I was not a drug addict, mentally ill, lazy or an immigrant. Millions of Americans are facing domestic abuse each day. Many choose to hit the sidewalk and roll the dice.
In March of 2020, an international pandemic closed Las Vegas and the entire hospitality industry. My income as an entertainer was gone in a nanosecond. My teenage son and I had no savings or family and there were no jobs to be had in Las Vegas for the foreseeable future. We had to move into our car and leave town.
I had to re-enter the workforce after years of getting by doing my own thing so as to raise my son myself as a single mom with no family. Here’s a few of the corporate jobs I got chewed up by after Covid made us homeless.
Amazon: My job as a “Picker,” on an Amazon plantation was so brutal physically that it was damaging my wrist, which I had injured severely in college. I had a top pain doctor tell Amazon that the job was harming me, which was doubly bad as I am a professional harpist too. They left me living in my car in the parking lot, off the payroll for six weeks, without ever reassigning me. I could not reach a human to talk to.
Several moves cross country and we land in Lexington, Kentucky. I was focused on working in the restaurant, bar and banquet industry this time where I could find jobs quickly and pick up tips for instant survival cash. I have over 30 years in the industry.
I had one abusive job experience after another. For instance, I was working for a regional restaurant chain as a server. I was promised that they had enough hours for me to afford the $1600 a month I was paying to keep us in the cheapest motel in town. Then without warning, two weeks before Christmas they cut my hours in half because a former employee came back from college for the holiday break and demanded a full schedule. I flew out the door to snag a new job before we became homeless again.
The parade of heartless employers and abusive workplaces continued until I finally got a job at Red Lobster in the spring of 2023. I loved the job and made enough money to pay the steep motel bills and still have something left to get by on.
Fast forward a year. The very week I was eligible for benefits I opened my employment app and had half a job, for the good of the company I was told. Within weeks the company filed for bankruptcy. They have dumped 24,000 employees on the street in the last year. Many showed up to shuttered restaurants without so much as a text. More will be dumped out of their employment in the coming months.
Like me, many of those 24k workers did not have the savings or circumstances to take that financial hit. Some may not find work again for months and months. They have high rents, utilities, gas prices, food and no income. Yet if they slide into homelessness after having their job disappear they are now criminals and we should burden and punish them with fines and JAIL TIME? What about the corporate crooks that gutted Red Lobster for their own gain? They got richer.
Last week an apartment complex here in Lexington burned down displacing numerous families. The insurance company doesn’t back up a van full of money the night of the fire. These people may be on their own for years before they get a dime, yet they are subject to the same laws as the drug addicted and mentally ill camping on the sidewalks.
So instituting a bunch of drug programs and facilities for the mentally ill won’t solve the problem because drugs and mental illness are not what’s driving the most people into homelessness.
The entire population has to be willing to boycott abusive employers and not spend on companies that put revenues over the well being of their low income employees.
Denise Martin is the creator of Domes4Homes and an advocate for the poor.
