The flames of intense heat dehydrate
The water from floods drown our outside spaces
The Cold seeps into our torn clothes
Way down deep to our tired bones
The tornado winds
The sun beats in
The smoke will choke
But none so hard as the
Cop Cars
The park rangers and the DPW pickup
Yards
Who take it all
No matter who you call
—excerpt from The Emergency Called Sweeps, by Tiny
“The roof (umbrella) blew off my home and the tarp blew away like a sail…” said Ruth Roofless, a houseless resident of Tovaangar (Los Angeles).
“They took our last tarp and all of our blankets. I have frostbite in my hands now and I can’t go to work,” said Sidney, a houseless resident, recycler and RoofLESS radio reporter in Yelamu (San Francisco) who had just suffered a sweep of all his warm clothes and sleeping bag.
Across the US the people impacted first and worst by climate change, or what Dine brother Klee Benally called Climate Terrorism, are houseless people, living, hiding, surviving on Mama Earth while unhoused.
Right now, Los Angeles fires have consumed miles and miles of the county, have displaced at least 200,000 people and destroyed more than 12,000 homes and businesses including entire residential neighborhoods and so far have caused16 fatalities.
The Veterans Affairs Medical Center “relocated” already houseless, disabled veteran residents from its community-living facility on the north campus to homelessness again.
Aetna street houseless community is facing a threat of evacuation from their humble outside area in Van Nuys that they have already been violently removed and evicted from multiple times.
On September 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene swept over Western North Carolina, bringing record levels of rainfall. Rainfall totals reached 12 to 16 inches in some areas, leading to what is now referred to as one of the most severe floods in the state’s recent history.
Entire streets where houseless elders would sit or stand in that state were flooded and the few homeless shelters spaces were closed. Houseless peoples were pushed into more unsafe homelessness.
It’s rarely mentioned when these increasingly common disasters occur how they impact houseless residents.
In fact, houseless peoples are never mentioned or discussed except in some vague amorphous way as though we are all a monolith called the “homeless people” with no face or name or identity except our lack of secure housing.
Whether it’s fires or floods, hurricanes or tornadoes, we are dangerously impacted by these severe weather changes. As I often repeated in the Covid pandemic, and some of our California wildfire emergencies, “How do we shelter in place when we don’t have a place?”
From the air we can’t breathe to the heat or water we can’t escape from, our lean-to’s, tarps, tents and/or cardboard motels are destroyed, blown-off, lost or crushed in torrential rains. Our lungs get no rest from smoke or soot. We have no windows to close, no air conditioners or purifiers to turn on or outlets to plug them into and rarely any covered areas or trees to shade under to get cool in extreme and dangerous heat.
And when there are violent hurricanes like in Western North Carolina or never-ending fires like the reality of LA right now and much of California these days, where can we, who are already evacuated, removed, swept, and evicted people, go?
The other terrorism we face is the terrorism of criminalization. Since June of last year after the Grants Pass versus Johnson Supreme Court ruling, every city in the US has waged an un-ending and deadly war on houseless peoples bodies.
No matter where we sit, stand, walk or god forbid, try to sleep, we are forcibly evacuated, removed—only we have nowhere to go.
In California Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened cities to remove and sweep or lose their state funding. Local mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, Fresno, Sacramento, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, to name a few, have implemented their own endless attacks on houseless peoples bodies as well as new laws on top of the old laws that criminalize our existence, and the result is houseless peoples don’t dare to rest for fear of removal. From everywhere.
“The city of Oakland is towing houseless peoples RV’s in Estuary Park, they are not giving them any referrals to safe parking places, even though they have nowhere else to go,” Oakland Revealed reported out from a highway in East Oakland this week.
Across the City of Oakland every single day under the guise of “encampment management” hundreds of houseless Oakland residents are subjected to violent sweeps with subsequent arrests if they don’t comply, resulting in the loss of most if not all of their belongings, no matter how important or necessary they are.
In San Francisco, you can’t even sit down or put up a tent without facing forced removal, meaning that when the rain and cold comes you have no protection.
“I almost died in a fire (2018) and I have lasting breathing issues and can’t run for my life like I was able to then, I know the evacuation warnings are for people with phones and power and cars who can stay in hotels…they’re not for we the unhoused (who they then arrest under curfew orders)” concluded Ruth RoofLess.
In this terrifying and dangerous time poor and houseless peoples have proposed actual solutions. Solutions rooted in right relationship with Mama Earth, Solutions created by the people impacted first and worst by climate terrorism and the violent criminalization of our bodies. Solutions that actually house and heal, not harm and hurt.
On December 17th, several houseless peoples -led movements across California launched a state-wide sanctuary movement to respond to violence of sweeping peoples like we are trash. For five days we held sweeps free sanctuary spaces in all of the impacted cities to lift up these actual solutions.
Homefulness is poverty scholarship informed, rent-free forever healing housing. But it is also informed by ancient teachings and spiritual traditions of First Nations people. It is not rooted in more extraction like buildings made of wood and concrete, deep and violent cutting down of Mama Trees that we need to provide us all with urgently needed shade and coolness.
Homefulness Projects launch with community gardens where there used to be asphalt. The planting of Ancestor forests where there used to be parking lots. Sliding scale cafes with free food and diapers and produce for the whole community for free and Humetkas (Ohlone concept of emergency preparedness) to provide water and emergency support to the whole neighborhood when, not if, emergencies like the LA and Oakland Hills fires happen .
Solar and wind power so we don’t have to continue to steal from and poison Mama Earth and babies in the Congo just to have energy.
Fire and Water and MamaEarth solutions based on Indigenous peoples’ ancient teachings (which should have been followed in Tovaangar and must be implemented across Turtle Island.)
In addition HOMEfulness and Wood Street commons models include Liberation education for houseless youth and adults so we can all learn how to take care of mama Earth with humility and love for the next seven generations of fires and climate terrorism caused disasters that so many of us are complicit in enabling.
Homefulness is actively working to take parcels of MamaEarth off the extractive real estate speculative market by working with conscious lawyers at Sustainable Economies Law Center to create a liberation easement that ensures that land will only be used for rent-free forever housing and gardens and radical sharing and therefore humbly saving more mamatrees and safe spaces for all of us humans to benefit from.
Solutions like Homefulness are the answer with or without the compounded emergency of fires or tornadoes, because it’s an emergency every day when you are houseless. Every day we have no home, no roof, no medicine, no toilets, no beds or safe places to sleep. Every day we have the emergency of PTSD from our trauma filled lives that is only compounded and made worse by just trying to stay alive everyday outside in the ongoing emergency called homelessness
Every day we are scared for our lives and subject to cold so intense we almost die. Every day we find ourselves outside, roofless without a dry blanket or a warm plate of food or a heater to stand next to or a swamp cooler to cool down next to.
Every day mutual aid warriors like Wood Street Commons, POOR Magazine, Aetna Street Solidarity, Punks With Lunch and JtownAction, Love and Justice in the Streets and so many more show up with love, resources, tents, sleeping bags, food and justice to radically share to houseless relatives. Oftentimes these beautiful love-workers (as we call them at POOR Magazine) are replacing what is procedurally stolen from houseless peoples daily. Without this support people would die at greater rates than they already do. It’s up to six people dying on the streets in LA every day from the fire called homelessness.
In the end we must stop “responding” to emergencies as though they just started. We are living an emergency every day when we live outside.
Thanks to Ry and Ruth Roofless from Tovaangar and Oakland Revealed for contributions to this story.
To learn more about Homefulness and Poor and houseless peoples solutions to homelessness thru radical Redistribution come to PeopleSkool Degentrification /Decolonization two-day Seminar on zoom which happens twice a year- the next session is Jan 25/26 for more information go to www.poormagazine.org/education. To redistribute now to Homefulness in Huchiun ( Oakland, SF or LA ) go to poormagazine.org/donate to support Wood Street Commons project go to www.woodstreetcommons.org
