This is a blog ostensibly written for homeless people for other homeless people, but really it was written for people like me, who really have no understanding of what it means to be homeless. The author is anonymous, but articulate. His advice ranges from the practical (how to shave without water) to the profound (examine how close you or ones you care about may be to becoming homeless.) The result for me was to humanize the entire experience of being homeless. Here’s an excerpt:
I spent nearly five years, from mid-1996 to the beginning of 2001, homeless, or as I liked to call it with a distributed household. I had storage, shelter, mailbox, telephone, shower, bathroom facilities, cooking equipment, and transportation, even access to television, radio, computer equipment, and ac power. I had the essence of a home. It was simply more geographically scattered than is traditional in our culture.We recently studies some of these laws in my Property course. We think of these laws as public nuisance laws, but they infringe on an act that is physiologically mandated like no other. Such laws are inhuman, in a very fundamental sense of that word.I’m not the first to do what I did, to live homeless well. I’m not the first to find advantage in homelessness. It is a well kept secret that homelessness can be freedom and comfort can attend it. The secret is well kept because revealing that you are homeless in this society is dangerous. There is stigma. There are even laws prohibiting it. Imagine that. There are laws against being homeless. Let me say that one more time. There are laws against being homeless.
There are laws against sleeping in public, in your car, on the beach, anywhere in the public view. It is the only law that I know that prohibits a behavior that is involuntary. You must sleep. There is no choice. You must do it. If you do not sleep for approximately one third of your life, you will suffer. The less sleep you get, the more physical and psychological symptoms you will suffer, until your mental faculties break down, your grasp of reality disintegrates, your self-control disappears. Your body will make you sleep, and if you use stimulants to avoid it, you will rapidly begin to become psychotic, with unpredictable mood swings, displays of aggression, and hallucinations. Nevertheless, the law in nearly every municipality forbids sleeping unless you are rich enough to afford a house or hotel to do it in.
November 10th, 2004 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for writing this. It is good to know that even people who have never been homeless are willing to see that these laws are inhuman, a violation of basic rights.
Michael
author of the Survival Guide to Homelessness
November 10th, 2004 at 6:40 pm
I’m happy you found my post, Michael. It was a subject of heated debate for two days of class. We have a vocal minority of real Republicans here at the law school.
November 11th, 2004 at 6:45 pm
Conservatism is one thing, but when property rights are held above human rights priorities should be reexamined. At the heart of our legal philosophy is this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…
Despite the fact that the Declaration of Independence has never been formally made a legal document, these inalienable rights are acknowledged philosophically by the Constitution. We have the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. That means all of us, property owners and non-owners alike. It cannot be acknowledged that I have the right to live, and yet have not the right to perform the functions necessary to live.
Rights have a hierarchy of defensibility. The right to property cannot be said to have greater value than the right to life. Fortunately these rights are not mutually exclusive. There are public spaces, paid for by taxes by the community as a whole. It is not possible to say that one individual or corporate entity has a greater claim to a public space than any other. I have as much a right to be in the public space as anyone else, and if I am unpropertied it is inappropriate to demand that I leave this space before I can perform life sustaining activities.
I’ve never heard an argument against this that amounted to more than the idea that certain people are a nuisance and drive down property values. The lack of compassion and dreadful absence of morality that argument betrays turns my stomach. The only thing I can say to people so conservative is, “Shame on you.”
Michael