“If You Don’t Have Empathy, You Just Don’t See Homeless People As Human”
All across the country, conservative think tank Cicero Institute is funding policies that criminalize homelessness. Here’s how we push back.
O n any given night, nearly 600,000 people in America are homeless, but there are fewer than 400,000 beds. That means if every single bed was occupied, 180,000 humans — would still sleep on the streets.
And while our nation reels from a housing crisis — keenly exacerbated by the pandemic — laws criminalizing homelessness are on the rise, fueled by a Texas-based conservative think tank, the Cicero Institute.
“The Cicero Institute has published a model state bill that would deprive cities and nonprofits of funds to support many interim shelter and housing initiatives while forcing cities to criminalize homelessness during a nationwide shelter shortage,” writes Marissa Roy, staff attorney for PRP, in a recent research whitepaper for Local Solutions Service Center, a organization working to strengthen the power of local governments.
Founded in 2016 by Joe Lonsdale, the libertarian billionaire behind Palantir — a tech company with dubious connections to government surveillance of immigrants, Muslim communities, and communities of color — the Cicero Institute has developed model language for criminalizing homelessness that has now appeared in ten different bills in seven different states in the past two years.
Cicero is currently wielding an abusive form of preemption — meaning their bill enables state governments to invalidate local government laws — preventing legislation that would protect the nation’s most underserved and at-risk communities.
“The model bill would make camping or sleeping in public outside of a state designated camping site a Class C misdemeanor, subject to a potential $5000 fine, one month incarceration, or involuntary commitment to local drug or mental health courts,” writes Roy.
Such a conviction also comes with a life-long criminal record. And those municipalities that refuse to enforce the criminalization stand to lose access to all state public safety funds — not those solely related to addressing homelessness.
Localities would also be required to dedicate significant resources to law enforcement criminalizing homelessness — regardless of whether they believe this is the best use of their police force or budget — and place the police in a position of first responder, even when myriad studies show that law enforcement is ill-equipped to respond to people experiencing homelessness.
Pacific Islanders experience homelessness at nearly ten times the rate of white people
African-Americans experience homelessness at nearly five times the rate of white people
Latinx individuals experience homelessness at nearly double the rate of white people
— Nat’l Alliance to End Homelessness, State of Homelessness: 2021 Edition
While Cicero bills itself as a “nonpartisan group of policy innovators addressing broken public systems,” their homelessness policy rejects the huge body of research that “housing first” (prioritizing a permanent home before other assistance) best combats homelessness, and argues instead that the push for permanent housing as a solution “ignor[es] the real prevalence of mental health and substance abuse among those on the streets.”
But ongoing and recent papers validate that housing unaffordability — not mental health or substance abuse — is at the root of our homelessness crisis.
Cicero has now placed ten preemption bills in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin — over the past two legislative sessions.
Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri have followed in 2022.
“Their end game is to get people away so they don’t have to see the poor people,” said Elizabeth Venable, founder of Fund for Empowerment, a direct services, community-based org working hand in hand with the homeless population in Arizona. “They want to put them on lots where they might die — it’s much worse than jail.”
Venable tells me that in 2020, the City of Phoenix forced homeless people onto lots that were run by Maricopa County, whose homeless population has leapt up by 36% in the past two years. In those lots and across the city, 500 people died and nearly all their deaths were preventable.
“There was no shade structure — they were on asphalt with rocks and ants, and the asphalt would radiate up to 160 degrees, which explains all the fatalities,” says Venable. “There were guards, not social workers, who were abusive and didn’t really regulate anybody or do anything besides sit in front of the fans and let people in and out.”
Venable says that while Arizona is suffering at the hands of increased homelessness, insufficient resources, and enduring conservatism that continues to codify classism and racism, the state is also uniquely protected by the power and historic liberalism of the 9th Circuit.
Several courts — including in the landmark case of Martin v. Boise — have found that bans on public camping without any meaningful offer of shelter is tantamount to simply criminalizing the state of homelessness, thus violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
“People I’ve talked to had their relatives’ ashes thrown away, their medications, their paperwork, every bit of private property they have in the world — they’re told to stand down while it’s all thrown away in a white van,” Venable says.
“I’ve had people be afraid of going to the city council on the basis that they’ll have warrant checks, and I’m like, ‘no, it’s your right to be there. You can speak.’”
Some of the most vital work that Fund for Empowerment does is to reinforce the fact that everyone — even if you are on the street — has inalienable rights.
“The homeless folks I work with can read these rulings if I give them to them and it changes their mind and makes them feel more powerful, but it’s hard to find them if you don’t know where to look, you know?”
Venable recognizes that fighting the system or actualizing one’s rights is easier said than done — a lack of education and resources coupled with legal bureaucracy can make the pursuit of justice a near impossibility for most.
“It would only take somebody focusing on these violations to make for a really good lawsuit,” says Venable. “But you have to live in two worlds. You not only have to be able to identify the various violations of human rights according to the rulings, but you also have to be comfortable interacting with and having friendships with people who are living on the street.”
Venable occupies this unique Venn diagram; her father was a civil rights lawyer, her mother was a school psychologist, and Venable lives with schizoaffective disorder, which she describes as “a mix of bipolar and schizophrenia.” She believes her background and condition have granted her the necessary foundation it takes to foster trust and exact change in this community.
“If you don’t have empathy, you just don’t see homeless people as human,” Venable explains. And part of fostering empathy is engaging with the homeless populations as a shared community, instead of sequestering them, silenced and stigmatized, to the sidelines of our society.
“I believe it has to do with who you interact with at a young age and how exposed you are to different types of people. Because it’s very difficult to go back and retrain yourself to not be exclusionary when you’ve grown up your whole life thinking that wealth and privilege are the ways to be.”
Venable reminds us that outside activists can’t get this job done. The power must come from the people most affected. “You need to be ready to work with people who are directly impacted by the struggles and make them leaders.” Government officials need to center the communities they’re serving.
Roy says we should expect state bills criminalizing homelessness to continue to spread, and unless local governments are prepared to fight back, municipalities will be forced to “spend stretched resources on criminalization rather than creating viable shelter and housing options.”
Read LSSC’s full study to understand the dangerous role of preemption and what homeless folks up against in this new wave of conservative policymaking surging out of Cicero.
