A few years ago, I was staying at a motel in Arlington, Virginia, beside the Robert E. Lee highway, one of the principal roads leading into our nation’s capital. The motel had government approval to serve as a way station for homeless families, and to collect their rent from municipal authorities. Every night a local church sent around a van loaded with hot meals in Styrofoam cartons. The van parked in the motel’s parking lot and people came out from their rooms to collect supper for themselves and their children.
On one side of the motel was a little slope of woods, running down to a small creek that flowed, a little further on, under a bridge across the highway. When that van parked, people materialized from out of those trees, climbing the slope in considerable numbers. A few were holding the hands of their children. Old and young, down on their luck, living by that creek as best they could. Most of them looked like they could really use that hot meal.
I thought of them following the Trump Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision empowering municipalities to make sleeping outdoors, including in encampments, illegal. It provides a taste of what a Trump era’s social policy toward the unhoused would look like. Over the past fifty years, the number of families without stable housing on any given night has skyrocketed. People living in harsh conditions of extreme poverty have been a feature of our national landscape ever since the beginning of European colonization, but rarely have so many been shown such little care.
In today’s almshouses — called shelters — it is not unusual to find children thrown together with mentally ill adults, just like in an eighteenth-century almshouse.
In the early European colonies, families in extreme poverty were a fact of life. The New World was fraught with dangers: disease, accident, or death left some families unable to care for themselves. The community assisted these families one by one. As the…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Richard Schweid
