Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The homeless are a class apart, out American untouchables. It goes without saying that in America the homeless have no right to shelter. They also have no right to sleep, be seen in public, go to the bathroom or keep their jobs. In short, the gradual deprivation of rights for unhoused people, sped by iniquitous supreme court decisions, is leading inexorably to the homeless lacking the right to exist.

This is awful in itself and more so since even our phony statistics admit that there are more homeless people than ever. That’s because 22 percent of renters pay ALL their income on rent, according to Redfin, which means of the remaining 78 percent, millions and millions pay a humongous percentage of their money on rent. Indeed, 12.1 million Americans spend more than half their income thus, says the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The report also mentions that 22.4 million tenants spend over 30 percent of their wages on their leases, the amount commonly recommended as the highest decent limit for rent percentage of income.

The cause of this economic catastrophe is greed. Indeed, during the recent Los Angeles fires, the L.A. Tenants Union reported that “landlords........

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