CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Whether Mentally Ill or Merely Penniless, the Homeless Get Zip from Washington

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

With official numbers of U.S. unhoused hovering around 700,000 and the reality being much, much more, former president Genocide Joe Biden got one thing right by stressing shelter for the destitute. Current president, Donald “Blockade Everybody” Trump gained nothing but censure for his plan to shift that emphasis to mandatory mental health care, when the truth is our vast pool of vagrants indisputably needs much more than just meds or shelter. A roof over one’s head is critical, indeed existential in winter. But those who hallucinate angels telling them to sleep outdoors or to jump off a high bridge – they need anti-psychotic medication and anyone who denies that is sticking his/her head in the sand.

Of course, public sympathy has always gone foremost to law-abiding, well-meaning, working-poor families who couldn’t make rent and wound up on the street. It has even been argued that this cohort constitutes the lion’s share of our nation’s homeless, and I, for one, believe it, given the rapacity of the landlord class under decaying, financialized, very late capitalism. The National Institutes of Health in October 2020 backed this up, noting that only 25 to 30 percent of homeless people suffer afflictions like schizophrenia. On the other hand, the insane lack the appeal of unjustly evicted families, while these days fewer of them may well sleep on sidewalk grates or in sewers. But when homelessness really surged in this country back in the mid-1970s, the transparent cause was the idiotic new policy of ejecting patients from asylums with nothing but bus fare and 30-days-worth of meds. Well do I recall the small corner park in my Manhattan neighborhood, which went from being always empty at twilight one evening to being permanently packed with vagabonds literally the next. The new, cheapskate policy for those in mental agony had taken root.

This is not to say that the other leg of Trump’s policy for the unhoused, namely enforcement, is anything but sickening. That’s exactly what it is. “Enforcement,”........

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