Hurt the helpers
What hope do the rest of us have?
Apparently the pope is on his deathbed and asking for our prayers but if he can’t get his calls picked up then what hope do the rest of us have?
Today Rick Paulas writes about a spate of new bills being passed in California and around the country meant to criminalize “aiding or abetting” homeless individuals. Does that mean you'll be fined for giving someone on the street a few bucks? Tossed in jail for setting up food and water stands? I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Previously Paulas interviewed the folks behind Street Spirit – a Bay Area street newspaper written by and for the unhoused.
Luke O’Neil
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Hurt the helpers
by Rick Paulas
When I lived in Oakland there was this guy I used to see under the MacArthur Maze overpass near the on-ramp to the 24.
He’d stand there on the median with a cardboard sign and a plastic cup, and whenever I found myself waiting at the red light, I’d search for any quarters and dimes jangling in my cup holders and hand it over. The first time I did this with him I happened to be on the way to a softball game, which we ended up winning, so I started treating seeing him as a stroke of good luck. He’d maybe get a few dollars total from me a month for awhile there, until he ended up moving, or dying, or maybe my regular route or time of passage just shifted slightly enough. It’s tough to tell exactly when those kinds of relationships end.
A few weeks back, the City Council of Fremont, California passed a law that may make such simple acts of giving a misdemeanor crime, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
The newly-passed law bans camping on public property, a tactic on the upswing since last June when the Supreme Court ruled on Grants Pass v. Johnson, which overturned Martin v. Boise, a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court that said cities couldn’t enforce camping bans if they didn’t have any available shelter beds. Forcibly moving unhoused people and trashing their belongings (known as “sweeps”) without being able to offer another option where they can legally go amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” the Ninth Circuit said in 2018. The Supreme Court said nah, it’s fine.
Since Grants Pass, the National Homelessness Law Center has counted 150 cities across 32 states with new camping bans on the books. According to people on the ground, the sweeps have become more violent, less constrained.
“They don’t care what they look like anymore,” said Tiny Gray-Garcia, co-founder of POOR Magazine, a poor people-led publication, and Homefulness, a Bay Area project that gets people into housing. “There used to be a pretense of trying to save your belongings, but nothing anymore. It’s very intense. It’s amped up with steroids.”
In January in Atlanta, Cornelius Taylor was sleeping in his tent when he was run over and killed by a public works truck performing a sweep. In Los Angeles, the city has continued performing sweeps in the middle of wildfires and, later, in the middle of heavy rains. The gloves have come off.
But what’s unique about the Fremont law, and what legal advocates and unhoused folks are worried about, is the addition of language that makes “permitting, aiding, or abetting” any encampments within city limits illegal.
“This is the first [law] of this type using the aiding and abetting language we’ve seen,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director for the NHLC.
“People are stepping up to fill a void that the government has created, and now the government is going to punish them for it.”
The “aiding and abetting” wording feels vague, maybe intentionally so, as if meant to be a catch-all to give police more leeway when they’re clearing encampments. Will housed people in Fremont be allowed to let others camp on their property? Can activists help unhoused neighbors save their valuables before they get thrown into trash compactors? Is handing out food or water to encampments considered “aiding”? Is this a further extension of the border law that makes leaving out water and food for migrants crossing the Sonoran desert a felony?
“To me, it’s actually a direct attack on mutual aid,” said Gray-Garcia.
This isn’t the first time this tactic of attacking mutual aid has been used. Back in 2014, Fort Lauderdale, Florida passed a city ordinance that ostensibly made it a crime to feed unhoused folks, on the heels of at least 10 other cities passing similar legislation. A few people from Food Not Bombs were cited and arrested, and the ordinance was put on pause as it went through appeals, until the ban was ruled unconstitutional in 2018 by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on First Amendment grounds. But there is no settled law when it comes to finding new ways to criminalize poverty in America.
Much of this new barrage feels downstream of tech conservative think tanks like The Cicero Institute, which was created in 2016 by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Their policy page has a four-point plan to solve homelessness that includes banning camping, gutting funding for housing services, and otherwise making it easier for law enforcement to get involved. Eradicating homelessness by eradicating homeless people. Trump has already talked about a nationwide camping ban and rounding up unhoused folks to put in tent cities, even though his mass layoffs of government workers seem to only be adding to the record 770,000 people in America experiencing homelessness.
But attempts to solve homelessness through sustained, brutal punishment rather than providing assistance to lift people up is not a concept owned entirely by the right.
The Fremont camping ban, along with nearly 45 of the aforementioned 150 post-Grants Pass laws, have taken place within the solidly blue confines of California. The California that overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, including 75 percent of the vote in Alameda County, where Fremont is located. Gavin Newsom’s California. Newsom, the slick-haired governor whose latest photo-op showed him doing the grunt work of throwing out unhoused person’s belongings. Newsom, who was one of the top voices in support of the Supreme Court overturning Boise.
“There are probably ‘liberals’ who were involved with writing that [Fremont] law, who are at the same time horrified by several aspects of these atrocious ICE raids that have been happening all over the country,” Amber Whitson, who lives in an RV in Berkeley told me. “And, I bet most of them still wouldn't see the irony in their actions and their words if you were to tattoo a detailed explanation on the insides of their eyelids.”
Such is the epic Predator handshake between conservatives and liberals. The core issue of homelessness is not the rising price of housing or the misallocation of affordable places to live, but personal failings by those on the streets. The idea is that their drug problem has led them there, never mind the housed multitudes with similar addictions; or that it's a result of bad investment decisions, never mind the many examples of well-to-do Americans falling into bankruptcy multiple times but never finding themselves in a tent on the side of the highway; or that they’re too lazy to work, never mind how many unhoused folks I’ve interviewed over the years who work one or more jobs.
The truth is one reason the encampments are often preferred places of refuge for unhoused people is because somebody will watch your stuff for you when you're on the clock somewhere else.
When I emailed the late urban theorist Mike Davis for background on a piece I was pitching around in 2018 about hostile architecture, he advised me to contact CalTrans, as a large portion of unhoused folks “live in the landscaping of the freeway system.” He mentioned a few people in San Diego had recently been killed crossing freeways to their campsites, and that there was now evidence CalTrans was starting to use “an aggressive program to fence or otherwise deny access” to these areas. I was always struck by the implications of what this meant. How there were so few other spaces for unhoused folks that the only ones left were dangerously jammed up next to speeding cars. And how even those were going away.
Nobody likes seeing tents on the sides of the road, nobody likes the guilt of seeing someone near the on-ramp holding out a cup while they’re on their way indoors somewhere. One pathway to a solution is creating a route to find these people long-term housing, and to get them settled in with services to help along the way. This costs money.
But the other path to solving homelessness costs us much more than that.
Rick Paulas is a bartender and writer based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He's sold 240 of 1,000 copies of MALINKO, a thriller about a newlywed couple on a Route 66 honeymoon who stumble onto a mysterious radio show. One can be yours for $25.
A few other recent pieces on states like California and Massachusetts cruelly mishandling the housing crisis:
Luke O’Neil
Jose’s tragic death is not an individual aberration, it’s the natural culmination of the well-funded campaign of dehumanization supported and exalted by the aforementioned California Progressive™ government, a complicit media, and the supposed liberal voters of the state (who among other things just rejected a measure that would have banned forced prison labor, aka slavery). It’s a campaign to redirect fault from where it belongs, the real estate investors dripping in blood money, to people that for a million common reasons cannot keep up with their sky high rents.
Luke O’Neil
Reduced to its essence, Healey has imposed a set of austerities, for the benefit of the “taxpayer,” and advertised them as efficiencies. She has presented a narrative in which incoming migrants are the chaos agent. She doesn’t call them rapists and murderers like Trump, doesn’t say they’re eating dogs and cats, but she still calls them the problem.
In doing so she’s allowed a pernicious myth to propagate: that immigrants are taking the services intended for our native residents. That they are to blame for the tents people see in the woods here in Worcester and elsewhere. She has not offered a meaningful alternative to this line of thought.
Read this very good piece in Bolts. It's about how Dauphin County, PA voted a few months back "to forgive the nearly $66 million in pay-to-stay debt looming over formerly incarcerated people and their families."
It's kind of the ideal Hell World story in that it sounds like good news when you hear it but then you think about it for a second and go wait they're forgiving jail debt? There's such a thing as jail debt?
It's like when you first heard about the concept of school lunch debt which we of course also have in this country.
Luke O’Neil
The Bolts piece opens with a story about a man who was released after a year of pre-trial detention (bad enough already) with a total of $17,000 in debt. And the real kick in the fucking balls is that it was for a crime for which he was eventually found not guilty.
On July 7, 2022, days after Chad LaVia was freed from a year of incarceration at the jail in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, the county sent him a bill for $14,320 in “room and board” fees—$40 for each of the 358 days he’d spent inside. The invoice also reminded LaVia that he owed another $2,751.46 in fees from previous jail stints there, which brought his total debt to just over $17,000.
LaVia had only two months to pay off the debt, the invoice warned, until it would be turned over to a collection agency.
He didn’t have anything close to that amount of money, and even if he did, he was disinclined to pay because the demand seemed ridiculous; a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal.
You may remember me writing about these so-called "pay to stay" policies back in May. On top of all the many other ways incarcerated people are more routinely nickel and dimed in 43 states they can be also charged a per diem cost for "room and board." Fees that range between tens to hundreds of dollars a day. And in some states you can end up owing for every day of your original sentence even if you are released early.
Luke O’Neil
In some cases this can add up to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, as it did for a woman named Shelby Hoffman. Originally sentenced to seven years, she served only ten months before being released. A couple years later while applying for a job and jumping through the typical hoops that a formerly incarcerated person has to do as a matter of course, she found out she still owed $127,750.
"I felt so tricked and so fooled," Hoffman said.
"There is no ladder with them. There is nothing that you can do. Apparently. That will ever truly allow you to be a second chance anything. There isn’t. And they make sure of it.”
Obviously this is not really about reimbursing the state for your stay in Hotel Hell, it's also, as so many things in this country are, about creating and entrapping people in a permanent underclass from which there is little hope of escape. Saddling people, and yes usually a certain kind of people, who have served their time, with crippling debt so that they'll be forced into accepting worse working conditions forever. Or end up back in prison again where the state can further profit off of their bodies.
As an added bonus, those that cannot pay the fees have also not technically completed the terms of their sentence and therefore cannot have their voting rights restored.
I write further in that piece:
The government very routinely steals from people who are never charged with any crime in the first place in a process known as civil asset forfeiture (which I've previously covered here or here or here.)
In short it means that when cops have reason to believe you used a car, for example, in the commission of a crime – or just lie about thinking that you did – they can seize it and hold onto it and oftentimes sell it later for their own benefit. It's how very many police departments around the country fund themselves. With your shit. In fact between 2000 and 2019 state and federal governments took in almost $70 billion dollars through forfeiture according to the Institute for Justice's Policing for Profit report. Most of the cash amounts seized are relatively small they found, meaning this isn't taking down "drug kingpins" or whatever like it's supposed to be for. It's just nickel-and-diming average schmucks who are too poor to be a pain in the ass to the state about getting their property back.
In theory you are allowed to petition a court to have your stuff returned after they take it, but that often comes with the great expense of hiring lawyers and filing fees and so on, and it can take months or years to even be addressed. In the meantime people are often left without their car or their money which obviously impacts their ability to get to work or take care of their families, and then, you guessed it, helps entrap them in a permanent underclass!
Both of those things were sitting like poison in my belly the other night and I posted "Obviously I'm stressed out and frantic about what's happening right now, but it's shit like this, and civil asset forfeiture, which make me think... fuck it, it was already over. It has long been over. It was always over. What are we even losing?"
I can be a little dramatic sometimes.
Whenever I say some something like that there are always people who reply something to the effect of "we have so much more to lose" and "things can get so much worse" and yes I agree. I believe we are witnessing how much worse things can get under Trump and Musk right now as we speak. But unfortunately I am very Catholic and I can't shake this feeling that we are getting the punishment that we deserve. I know individually most of us do not but collectively as a country I mean.
Obviously I did not just learn the truth about this country a year or two ago and I was alive for Iraq but watching a genocide on my phone every day has altered me. It has utterly changed the way I see the world and the United States in particular.
Who are we to have the balls to cry about our own lives being made worse? Those of us whose lives are made possible by the destruction of so many others.
No innocent people here do not deserve any of this but innocent people anywhere by definition have never deserved any of it and yet here we are.
When I say that I am Catholic I do not mean that I attend mass anymore or have any attachment to the church itself by the way. I mean that I was steeped in all manner of indoctrination about sin and forgiveness and damnation that is baked into how I will see the world forever.
Not to mention all of the self-loathing and guilt.
I suppose it also means that I really hope Jesus Christ is real but I don't think so. And that I think you can be forgiven for most things but you have to repent.
So when I say shit like "we had it coming" while gesturing to the state of the country I mean that we have rarely acknowledged never mind even begun to atone for our centuries of evil.
I don't know.
I only think all of that some of the time. The rest is spent thinking what we have left that is good is worth saving. Worth fighting for. But like I said I am very Catholic. I didn't just get the individual guilt I got the expansion pack for collective guilt loaded in too. I don't know how to turn it off.
I guess it all comes down to something I've written in here before and think about constantly:
Is it devastating to you how many evil people there are in the world or instead is it heartening how many good people there are in spite of that?
I suppose another way of putting it is the opening to this brand new George Saunders story that someone just sent me and that I have not read yet.
It's still pretty funny to see all these elected Republicans getting yelled at by their own constituents though. Voters who unlike me did not think we have it coming but that they had it coming. The other people who are supposed to be hurt.
Kyle Stewart
What was it again I said in here the other day?
"Please also remember that this cult of destruction is the minority in this country. And while many of them did sign up for this and are delighting in it I don't think it will be long before even a lot of Trump voters stop liking the taste of billionaire piss being sprayed all over their face."
Now let's check in real quick on the Democrats' plan to fight back.
Doing nothing as usual but branding it as tactical nothing. Now that's Democrats baby!
Listen – Elon makes some very good points. I just disagree with his tactics.
Alright let's take a real quick turn to Luke's TV Corner.
The Pitt (on Max) is a TV show-ass TV show. It's "real television" in the way people say something is "real rock and roll." It's also only like a C+/B- show. But goddamn if my man isn't carrying the thing on his fucking back.
Zero Day (on Netflix) on the other hand is a fucking turd. It is so bad. Not even in a fun way. No fun being had at all. What a cast though!
I've been listening to Diamond Jubilee a lot again lately – one of my best of 2024 – and reading the comments on YouTube and they have been reminding me that you can either be the kind of person that is told something is special and real by a lot of people and go in open to that or go in ready to be pissed off and contrary. It doesn't mean people are always right but you gotta do the first. You gotta believe in the potential for something to be beautiful.
Not this though. I take that all back. My word. That has to be the worst album cover and title I've ever seen.
Maybe we do have it coming after all.