Several Obama-era housing reforms were intended to address discrimination and segregation, like the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provision, but did little to address the inequities in federally funded homelessness programs. “You have to address structural racism, economic inequality, and housing supply together.”įor decades, homelessness solutions were “color blind” and did not address growing racial disparities. “You can’t just fix housing supply without fixing structural racism,” says Rysman. Simply building more housing won’t prevent that racial banishment if local and federal government still perpetuate racist policies - and might end up exacerbating the problem. It’s not a theoretical or an economic process - those things play into it - but it’s something that happens where people are physically not allowed to be in particular spaces.” “Words like ‘gentrification’ have become meaningless because they apply to so many different things, but there is a lot of racial banishment that occurs in Los Angeles and other cities as well,” she says. Rysman prefers “racial banishment,” which she says more accurately conveys what is happening. Using terms like “gentrification” and “displacement” has, over time, made the process of erasing Black communities seem less threatening, for example, even as cities have seen precipitous drops in the number of Black residents. “One of the ways white supremacy works is that we have these very sanitized conversations,” she says. Monique King-Viehland gives her presentation “ There Can Be No Housing Justice, Without Reparations” at the 2020 Housing Justice summit. history, from exclusionary zoning policies like redlining to predatory lending practices that prevent the accumulation of generational wealth. The topic of white supremacy comes up often for homeless advocates, says Rysman, but most white people don’t see the connection between their own actions and homelessness because it’s so deeply ingrained in U.S. Rising housing costs, the reduction of social services, and a growing wage gap are among the causes of homelessness, says Rysman, but all those factors can be traced back to one root cause: white supremacy. The two launched initiatives including the Housing Justice summit and Housing Justice Los Angeles podcast, which work to reframe homelessness solutions through a racial-justice lens. has also surged.Ĭantley’s frustration with the city’s housing system spurred her to join forces with Molly Rysman, another homeless advocate, who is white, in 2016. County homeless residents who are dying each year has increased - last year, three people died per day - the number of black homeless residents who have died in L.A. African-Americans make up 8 percent of the county’s population but 42 percent of the homeless population. In Los Angeles, which has the largest unsheltered population in the country, the disparity is even greater. That number has increased in recent years, even as the rate of homelessness for other ethnicities has gone down. homeless population despite only representing 13 percent of the general population. crisis pervading nearly every aspect of daily life that disproportionately affects black Americans, and it’s one that must confront racism in order to solve it.Īccording to a report this month by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, African-Americans make up 40 percent of the U.S. Like Cantley realized early on, homelessness is another U.S. Now, mass protests over the killing of George Floyd and other unarmed Black Americans at the hands of police have drawn hundreds of thousands of people into city streets, leading to reckonings across society, including calls for housing reforms. “You start to see that this was strategic - that you would not be welcome in certain neighborhoods, or that you would not be comfortable in certain places.” In fact, she says, the systems that were created to help people secure housing were not designed for Black families like hers. “There’s this idea that if you get a great job or you go to a great school, you won’t be homeless, which is bullcrap,” she says. But Cantley, who is Black, knows now: She was locked out of the process because of racism. She never seemed to have all the information on how the system worked, or access to the right resources, or the correct number to call. During the 15 years in which LaRae Cantley was homeless, she remembers feeling perplexed about what was preventing her from being able to find safe, affordable housing for her family.
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