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February at HANC: Homeless Bill of Rights
HANC’s February general meeting included presentations on the Homeless Bill of Rights and a discussion of how homelessness affects our neighborhood. We also received two emails expressing both support for homeless rights, but frustration with conditions the senders believe to be related to the homeless population. We have posted these emails and our response to them in the article below.
At the meeting, Paul Boden from the Western Regional Advocacy Project explained how discrimination against the homeless stemmed from a long history of mean-spirited laws to keep “certain people” out of public spaces. These included Jim Crow laws, Anti-Okie laws, Sundown towns, and Ugly Laws. Descriptions of each of these can be found at www.wraphome.org/images/stories/ab5documents/HistoricalCriminalizationFactSheet.pdf. Each of these laws was eventually found to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. When the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development was established in 1965 its mission was to ensure that decent and sanitary housing would be made available to all. By the 1980’s, this was no longer HUD’s policy.