USA-Canada Alliance of Inhabitants

Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project—one of USACAI’s member organisations—recently posted a great article on Broken Windows policing and business improvement districts (BIDs) to his Huffington Post blog. You can check it out there, or read the content here.

James Q. Wilson, the person credited with coining the theory of broken-windows policing, died last month and people are starting to ask what “Broken Windows” is all about. Those of us who have been identified as no more than a broken window are sick of it.

The broken-windows theory holds that one poor person in a neighborhood (or, using Wilson’s words, “a single drunk or a single vagrant”) is like a first unrepaired broken window. If the window is not immediately fixed, if the vagrant is not immediately removed, it is a signal that no one cares, disorder will flourish, and the community will go to hell in a handbasket.

For this theory to make sense, you first have to step far far away from thinking of people, or at least poor people, as human beings. You need to objectify them. You need to see them as dusty broken windows in a vacant building. Continue reading →

In working up to the 1 April National Day of Action, a particular focus among many people has been the private security who are being called in to keep poor people and protesters out of the US and Canada’s once- still-public spaces. Last fall, organizers and civil rights advocates in Regina, Saskatchewan, had some real success in fighting for poor people’s rights to exist in public. We’ve attached two documents to illustrate portions of how they got there.

The first of these is a letter from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association to the mayor of Regina. The second is a paper by Garson Hunter on the criminalization of poor people and the commercialization of public spaces.

“They want us out of our community!”
“We’re always told to move on, but to where? There are no places for us to be.” — Survey Respondents

USACAI and the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) are calling on our members and allies throughout the United States and Canada to join us on 1 April for a bi-national day of action to protest the ongoing criminalization of poor and homeless people in our communities.

We are building a movement to reclaim our communities for all members: not just those who set the rents. In order to build this movement and assert our human rights, we must make clear the myriad of ways in which our community members are treated as though they are less than human. We must “connect the dots.”

Over the past 30 years, neo-liberal policy-makers have substituted private gain for public good; they have abandoned economic and social policies that supported housing, education, healthcare, labor, and immigration programs. WRAP and USACAI are at work identifying and tracking such policy, legal, and funding trends in order to publicize their spread and their effects. This is not a matter of theoretical analysis: this is an investigation of the policies and tools by which more and more people have been made to suffer. Continue reading →

Our partners at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty have been working with Safe Ground in Sacramento, California to defend homeless people’s fundamental right to exist. On NLCHP’s Homelessness Law Blog, they’ve got an excellent round-up of recent stories on the issue. Take a look!

In recent years, there has been an unprecedented attack on homeless and poor persons’ right to vote, including the passage of state laws adding barriers to voter registration, cutting early voting, requiring photo IDs at the polls, and disenfranchising those with felony records. In particular, photo ID laws create obstacles to voting for individuals who do not possess the correct type of identification or the needed documentation and money to procure identification. These laws disproportionately impact homeless, poor, minority, elderly, and student voters.

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP) fights to protect the rights of homeless voters. This week, NLCHP, together with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Wisconsin, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s restrictive new photo ID law. Under the law, Wisconsin voters will need to present a certain type of photo ID, which many eligible voters do not have, in order to cast a ballot. The law will have a severe impact on homeless voters, many of whom will be unable to meet the state’s complicated requirements for getting an ID. “By limiting participation to Wisconsin residents with photo identification, this law effectively silences homeless persons’ voices,” said Heather Johnson, NLCHP’s civil rights attorney. “With homelessness rising by 12 percent in Wisconsin since the recession began, we cannot allow the state to set this dangerous and unconscionable precedent.”

NLCHP also partnered with six other national organizations in 2007 to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court challenging Indiana’s photo ID law as creating unconstitutional obstacles to the right to vote.

In addition to litigation, NLCHP provides technical assistance to advocates and publishes a Voting Rights Report before every presidential election cycle. This publication offers specific information on state and federal laws that affect homeless individuals’ voting rights, such as residency and mailing address requirements and provisions designed to help homeless voters register.

As part of this ongoing advocacy to protect the rights of homeless voters, NLCHP is conducting its 2011 Barriers to Voting Survey for services providers, advocates, and persons who are currently or formerly homeless.  The results of the survey will be published in NLCHP’s forthcoming Voting Rights Report.  The survey, which will take approximately 15 minutes to complete, can be found here.  Please feel free to invite others to participate by forwarding the link. NLCHP will be raffling off several $25 Amazon gift cards among participants who complete the entire survey by December 31st.

If you have any questions, please contact NLCHP’s civil rights attorney Heather Johnson at hjohnson@nlchp.org or (202) 638-2535.

This 40-minute documentary—co-produced by the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, and Housing is a Human Right—follows the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing in her first visit to the United States in 2009, and speaks directly with the people most affected by our country’s housing crisis.

It’s now on-line for free for the first time. Watch it here!

For December 6, we’ve got a great presentation on eviction defense from our members in Take Back the Land.

Continue reading →

USACAI is very pleased to share an announcement from several of our members and allies:

Communities across America will take direct action on Tuesday, Dec. 6, to challenge Wall Street profiteering that has created a housing crisis for millions of families.

Actions will include “reclaiming” houses that banks are leaving vacant and “home defense” to stop banks from foreclosing and profiting further from the economic crash they created.

Cities where direct action will be taken include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland (OR), and many more.

Homeowners and renters facing foreclosure-related evictions will be backed by thousands of local supporters and a national network of organizations such as The New Bottom Line and its local affiliates; ReFund California; New York Communities for Change; Occupy Wall Street; Take Back the Land; and SOUL (Chicago).

Continue reading →

The Web-based Urban Popular University (UPU) is the educational arm of the International Alliance of Inhabitants. This web-based international university has built a creditable knowledge base grounded in people’s lived experience in our movement. Until now, USACAI has not had the capacity to have our own “branch campus.”

But today we announce that an experienced popular educator has stepped forward to help us create and catalog the knowledge we have and need to achieve our goal—to claim the universal right to housing and land. Continue reading →

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty is conducting its 2011 Barriers to Voting Survey between now and 15 December. If you’re a person who is or has been homeless, a community advocate, or a service provider, please take fifteen minutes to visit this link and fill the survey out. The results will be published in NLCHP’s upcoming voting rights report.