by Zvi Baranoff
Another homeless encampment is wiped away by police intervention and bulldozers. The problems resulting from unauthorized camping are solved by elimination of the camp but the underlining issue of the unsheltered living amongst us is not resolved. Some say that the unsheltered should plan better to avoid finding themselves in such a predicament and surely those that say so are right.
I appreciate the importance of planning. Planning, of course, is a matter of individual, family and collective decisions. By collective, in this context, I mean both voluntary social and political groups and governmental.
Absolutely when “bad luck” falls upon us it is at least in part due to bad decisions and not preparing for possible downturns always makes matters worse.
From personal experience, I can certainly offer some observations. I have had some real significant bumps in my life and planning better or making different choices would likely have led to other results or smoother recovery.
We live in a highly stratified society. We each are better off in many ways than others. There almost always is someone further down the social ladder. We can all determine that we have done better for ourselves than someone else within our sight. We can all say that but for grace, our personal situation would be far worse. It could be worse is a true and stoic and honest and real assessment. Of course, it could be better too.
I have some clear advantages when it comes to this whole surviving thing. I was raised in a stable working class family. I received a pretty decent education at a basic level and am a High School graduate. I am of somewhat above average intelligence. I have been of relatively good health, so far, knock wood. My skin tone is on the lighter end of the spectrum.
When I was barely twenty I got a girl pregnant. In hindsight (40 plus years later) I will quite readily agree that I never should have been up in there. In hindsight, I should have worn a condom every time if I lacked the will power to simply leave that girl alone. In regards to the planning thing, she was using a diaphragm for birth control.
We were both very young but we tried to do the right thing and maybe it was right for a while. I do have a very nice, all grown up and self sufficient daughter.
Somewhere along that same time I discovered the value of cannabis on a personal level. Unfortunately, governmental planning had determined that cannabis was a social danger and possession and use was clearly against the law, even when the use may be quite beneficial. I used cannabis in spite of the prohibition but did not like the idea of supporting the criminal elements of the underground markets, so I planted a couple of seeds in my backyard garden. Clearly poor planning on my part. In retrospect, the criminalization of cannabis and cannabis users was also poor social planning.
In the 1980s I lived in Philadelphia. At the time, Philly had the dual problems of abandoned buildings in blighted neighborhoods and a growing population of unsheltered people. We believed that a logical solution to these interlocking problems was to bring the abandoned properties under a common or collective use. We chose crowbars as the primary tool to solve the housing problem and very publicly occupied buildings that became known as Squat Central. The systematic response involved battering rams and jackboots.
Politically speaking, it certainly would have been wise to have better planning. Better dynamics with community, a broad coalition, financial planning, lawyers… Yep, should have planned better.
Wiser social planning by those that had more political and economic clout, in retrospect, could have resulted in avoiding the conditions that led young utopians to step forward. We were trying to solve a problem that never needed to be in the first place. Philadelphia still has more empty houses than unsheltered citizens.
Anyway, my personal list of poor decisions or poor planning is somewhat extensive. At each of those junctions, those with less relative advantages would have had a much harder time, as difficult of a time that I was having. Each of those bumps that seem to happen in cycles of roughly a decade were horrendous for me, but I ain't dead yet. They say that what does not kill you will make you stronger and that is a very optimistic and uplifting thing to say but sometimes what does not kill you just grinds you down.
How far we might fall and if there is a pathway back up is a matter of choices but an awful lot of those choices happen in some other realm, above our pay level. The choices we individually can make are often a matter of bad or worse.
Becoming an alcoholic, for instance, is a really poor social choice but I certainly know how one may at times feel that whiskey is their only friend. Heroin is a terrible choice but for some it may be the best way they have found to limit or avoid pain. Crime or hunger certainly should not be the only options but for some it may seem that way.
To return from the abstract to the more concrete, I agree that we should all plan better. As individuals and as social activists, we need to be better organized. The problems of extreme inequality require collective action and strategic thinking. I believe that better collective decisions can be made that could resolve many of the worse aspects of extreme inequality through voluntary cooperative actions.
Absolutely, we should seek legal solutions. We should buy property and own it through land banks. We should work with government agencies to obtain proper permits, zoning, hygiene, safety, etc. We should help funnel those with needs such as drug withdrawal and treatment into agencies that can help with such problems. We should have facilities that can actually provide such help.
No one deserves a free ride is true enough. Neither should anyone be driven down so low that they feel that they have nowhere to go. Those are two sides of the same coin. We all need to plan better and in the ultimate sense, we are all in this together.
Personally, I have been a terrible planner and I certainly appreciate that some are better at that than others. I am all in favor of working with those that are good at planning and hope they will take on leadership roles. I recognize both my own strengths and weaknesses. I do what I can within the limits of my personal nature, the limits of the economic system, as well as my relative physical, mental and emotional well being. Of course, some days I am more capable and accomplish more. Some days I am just a mess.
Extreme poverty, the lack of shelter and social services, the existence of hunger and suffering, are complicated interwoven issues that need to be addressed through better planning. We have to start somewhere, and do something and we have to work with what is actually available and possible. Tents and blankets are better then nothing. Shacks are better then tents. Villages with sanitation and social services would serve community needs much more efficiently than haphazard temporary shelter.
We each have to make better choices. We all have to make better choices. That sounds like a plan.
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