Luís Millan, staff writer

Homelessness has been a growing problem within the United States, miraculously when we have higher rates of cities being gentrified and the price of living sky-rocketing after the pandemic. Instead of city officials acting like normal people — and maybe, I don’t know, subsidizing housing or providing funds to help people get housed — many believe that they should target and criminalize houseless people while funding genocidal campaigns. This is cruel and unusual punishment in every sense of the word. 

Many states are starting to implement this demonic campaign. Others, such as Texas, have already written this law into their constitution. The most recent addition to this onslaught of horrible laws is Kentucky. Their recently introduced HB 5 makes sleeping on public property illegal, which makes me question the point of public property. To make it even worse, these lawmakers had a meal with these people that they are now persecuting. These laws aren’t targeted towards any person for sleeping in public, it’s any person who looks homeless and happens to be sleeping in public. 

How else can you interpret this besides the US waging a war against the houseless? Kentucky already has “stand-your-ground” laws and not criminalizing people for being on public property lets people harm, fight and even kill homeless people on baseless claims. Police can lock up people for being houseless in public, knowing they don’t have money to pay bail and then throw them in prison where they are forced to work for pennies. Then after they are forever barred from voting, they have a criminal record and can never attain a job. This is intentional, this is murder. 

Homelessness is often believed to be the fault of the individual within the United States, the whole “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative that we’ve been force-fed all our lives. This narrative is just completely false: many people — about 40-50% who live in encampments — are often employed, sometimes even having two to three jobs at a time according to Invisible People. The cost of living is so impossibly high, especially for disenfranchised people that they simply cannot afford to live in the city that many of them were born in. How ironic is it that you are forced out of the place where you once called home? 

Many more people are seeking a job, but not having stable housing makes an income impossible when there is no address for a check to be mailed to. Narratives about homeless criminals paired with the fact that a lot of our houseless neighbors are BIPOC all but completely stops them from being able to work. 

Shelters are always overwhelmed and underfunded. In New York, people are ticketed for providing meals. This bottleneck of resources kills. Encampment sweeps kill, they destroy communities and they traumatize people over and over again. Minnesota alone has no obligation to send social workers to encampment evictions and police have no obligation to share where shelters or other resources are. Where else can they go? What else can they do when everything has been made impossible to afford on purpose?  

Punishing those who fell upon unfortunate circumstances is the last thing our legislators, our governors and our mayors should be doing. You can’t claim to be for the people when you only care about those who can afford to fund your campaigns and feed your businesses every dollar you have. This is a war that will not end, not unless we stand with our houseless neighbors and demand to tear down these absolutely deplorable laws.