As an intro to some of the important conversations we have with people in our community, here’s a Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills / Talk of the Bay episode (on KSQD) we did earlier this year with Annie Powers.
Annie Powers on the history of political action of the unhoused and the impact of Grants Pass v Johnson. Annie Powers is a PhD candidate in the Luskin Department of History at UCLA. Annie is a historian of homeless people’s organized political movements in the United States. Annie’s dissertation focuses on the National Union of the Homeless, 1984-1995. Annie is also an organizer with Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.
A complete bonus interview with PhD candidate, educator, and community activist Annie Powers, as a part of the series of talks and interviews conducted for “Criminalizing Survival: How the Grants Pass Ruling Impacts Your Hometown.“ that aired from 5PM to 7PM October 7th, 2024, as a joint feature between Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills and Talk of the Bay. Only on K-Squid. 90.7, 89.7, 89.5FM
Annie on Instagram: @Anniebpowers https://www.instagram.com/anniebpowers/
History of Union de Vecinos, Eastside Local of LA Tenants Union: https://knock-la.com/union-de-vecinos-25-years-los-angeles-tenants-movement/
Op ed co-wrote with fellow organizer/scholar on the history & power of tenant unions: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-04-10/los-angeles-housing-crisis-tenants-unions-evictions-city-council
Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union: https://la2050.org/organizations/union-de-vecinos
National Union of the Homeless: https://nationalunionofthehomeless.org
KSQD – Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills RSS Feed: https://ksqd.org/feed/podcast/momentoftruth/
KSQD – Talk of the Bay RSS Feed: https://ksqd.org/feed/podcast/talk-of-the-bay/
KSQD – Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills Website: https://ksqd.org/series/momentoftruth/
KSQD – Talk of the Bay Website: https://ksqd.org/talk-of-the-bay/
KSQD – Two Week Archive: https://ksqd.org/two-week-archive/
YouTube – Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1Yp3n40JOrY43bohQM7e0ls90wjT0HbC
** This interview was conducted, edited, and produced by Todd Zimmerman of Nativerse Studios and Meilin Obinata for Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills and Talk of the Bay on KSQD and KSQT, 90.7, 89.7, 89.5FM on the Central California Coast.
History of Political Action of the Unhoused w/ Annie Powers Transcript
The following was co-produced with Meilin Obinata for the series Criminalizing Survival, How the Grants Pass Ruling Impacts Your Hometown, for Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills and Talk of the Bay on KSQD 90.7, 89.7, and 89.5 FM on the Central California Coast.
Welcome to Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills.
And Talk of the Bay on KSQD and KSQT FM in Santa Cruz, California.
I am Meilin Obinata.
And I am Todd Zimmerman.
The following is our full interview with Annie Powers, a PhD candidate in the Luskin Department of History at UCLA.
Her dissertation focuses on the National Union of the Homeless, 1984 to 1995.
Annie is also an organizer with Unión de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.
Annie is a historian of Homeless People’s organized political movements in the United States.
Let’s get to it.
My name is Annie Powers.
I am really excited to be here.
I’m an organizer with Unión de Vecinos, which is the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.
That means Boyle Heights and East LA.
It’s the neighborhood just east of downtown.
I am also a historian.
I study Homeless People’s organized political movements.
That interest comes out of organizing that I did at Echo Park Lake, which was an encampment of Homeless People in a heavily gentrified neighborhood of Los Angeles, that existed between 2019 and 2021.
So that’s a little bit about me.
Something you’re working on is a genealogy of homeless sweeps.
Can you tell us a bit about that?
Yeah, definitely.
So in the wake of this Grants Pass decision, I wanted to look into the ways in which this decision was a product of a very long set of both logics in the way that the political economy around homelessness works, but also around resistance to that same system.
So I looked all the way back in United States history, starting at like the early 1800s and tracing all the way forward to now, essentially.
And what you find in US history is that this pattern of criminalizing people for behaviors that they’re required to do, because of living outside, sit, sleep, lie laws, also laws criminalizing things like public urination or drinking in public that target specific things that are only a crime if you do them outside.
These laws go back a very, very long time, and they’re also very deeply connected to persecuting homeless people for organizing together, empowering themselves, and attempting to change the cities and the places they live in so that they can get housing.
So this has been going on since the late 1800s, and is very related to a lot of parts of US history, like the development of immigration systems and the development of prison systems that we live with today.
And I think that we see all coming together in Grants Pass.
So at the top of our conversation, you’re talking about how your scholarly work is informed by the work you were doing in terms of organizing.
Could you let us know, like, how did you become an organizer?
So I used to live in Echo Park.
I lived there for almost 10 years.
And I actually became an organizer because I saw homeless people in my neighborhood.
And I started talking to them.
And I learned about what they were going through.
And I learned that they were fighting a recurring eviction that was happening, essentially a sweep.
At this park that looks like Park Rangers in Los Angeles, the Park Rangers are always retired police.
So we have a very specific image of Park Rangers.
Like, you know, that’s kind of sweet.
But Park Rangers, I think, in places like LA and many cities are an extension of the police.
So the Park Ranger who is in charge of these sweeps is actually someone who was retired from the LAPD and was a part of the very famous Ramparts corruption scandal in the 90s.
So these same kind of people keep circulating.
This is all to say they were facing eviction by Park Rangers and police many times a week.
And I just started showing up essentially every day.
And then when COVID happened, all of a sudden, I lost my job.
Many of the people around me lost my job.
I too was facing eviction from a landlord who wasn’t following the law and the struggles to fight with that unhoused community and then what I myself had to go through all of a sudden became the same struggle.
So that convinced me a lot in my direct experience about the interconnection of these issues.
And yeah, from there, it was kind of off to the races.
Also, you’re saying it led into your academic work.
Do a lot of academics have experience of being evicted and having, is that when you look around your discipline, is that a lived experience that other people have as well?
Yeah, I would say not really, not often.
And I think even more significantly, it’s very unusual, I think, for people to be both involved in direct organization, in political struggle, in an actual material way, and also doing academic work.
I think there’s a lot of writing in solidarity with movements.
I think there’s a lot of research in solidarity with movements.
But I think there’s much less direct organizing.
There’s less going to the meetings.
There’s less building the relationships and building that base of people.
There’s no door knocking, that kind of thing.
And for me, my scholarship is kind of directly a product of my organizing.
When I was at Echo Park Lake, one of my main questions as we faced eviction in 2021 was what has happened before?
There’s no chance that this is the first time in all of United States history that this has happened.
So what can we learn from the times that this has happened in the past?
I just wanted to read the book, right?
And then I discovered that not only is there no book, there’s like no real understanding of homeless people’s organizing over time, which a lot of historians kind of ascribe to, oh, homeless people just don’t organize.
They’re too busy surviving to be able to come together collectively.
And I thought in my own experience that defies that description, that analysis.
So I started digging and I’m writing my dissertation on this formation called the National Union of the Homeless, the NUH, who were around originally in the 1980s and 1990s.
They’ve reformed now with some of the same people and drawing on some of those lessons.
But my dissertation is focusing on the 80s and 90s and widespread organization.
They were in 15 cities really strongly and then many more participated in actions along with them at their height.
Over 73 cities were involved and their primary practice was occupying vacant federally owned lands.
There’s a lot of that in many, many places in the United States.
And doing that, they won a lot in three different cities, Philadelphia, Oakland, and Minneapolis.
Specifically, they actually won housing and they won control of that housing.
And then in other places where they didn’t win specific concessions around land, they did succeed in shifting policy and empower in shifting rules in shelters and building sort of muscle for the organizations that exist today.
I think a lot of the organizing we see today is kind of a direct descendant of the Homeless Union and the organizing kind of around it and preceding it that happens in each of those cities.
The evidence that you’re looking at your scholarly work, what kinds of information are you analyzing as you study these movements?
Yeah, it’s two observations on this.
I think one is definitely as an organizer made me also an archivist of our own movements happening now because you really realize like even in the 80s, which is not, I mean, is just on the cusp, I think, of being considered historical era.
It’s like very recent.
I was born in the 80s.
It’s so easy to lose documentation, especially of people and movements who are not typically documented in a historical archive in the way that you might expect, even of like a labor union.
So it’s required a lot of real creative use of sources.
One of the main key sources is people who are involved.
There’s not very many still living, but the people who are, are this like incredibly rich library of information and also are infinitely pointing to new places to look.
So the oral histories are a key component.
The oral histories, I pair with looking at newspaper records, which kind of helped me develop just a raw timeline of like what is happening and that’s showing up in the media.
Unlike today, the media was deeply, deeply sympathetic with the plight of the homelessness in the 80s.
There was sort of a very universal understanding that this was a human rights catastrophe, that this is like a new arising phenomenon that needs to be dealt with as a society.
By the 90s, this song is completely different.
But in the 80s, there’s this window, I think that these organizations are really able to use.
And so the Homeless Union shows up constantly in the mainstream media.
Often, you know, it’s not necessarily, you know, the coverage shifts in perspective over time.
And they’re described often as being very militant.
But they’re there, they’re present.
So this allows me to develop a timeline that also helps me find other records, especially federal government, state level government, local level government, records that I can pull and kind of like read them for some of the history on the Union.
So that looks like court records when people get arrested and prosecuted, that looks like any time that the Union was negotiating with a politician, a mayor, a city council member, a state representative, any of these folks will leave a record in their papers of dealing with the Homeless Union.
And so in many of the cities that I’ve gone to, it’s also about looking at like the mayor’s papers, the local records of HUD, the Housing and Urban Administration Department, and seeing the traces of the Homeless Union that show up in those records.
Almost every mayor from these cities has at least a folder that’s just like on the Homeless Union, because they were writing into them and they were protesting them so often that they just show up.
So it’s kind of cobbling together all of these different things.
And then I would say the fourth piece, which is very related to the oral histories, is that in addition to the memories of people being in archive, also those people are the ones who actually have the archive, like the flyers, the Constitution, the photographs, the stuff of an organization, it’s with the organizers.
So those people are, I think, so key to this project and I think really demonstrate too, the way that I use the word genealogy a lot, but the genealogy of this movement is something that’s very like person to person, like it’s not historically recognized yet, but looking at it, you can see there’s a straight line between like the civil rights movement to the Homeless Union to the organizing around housing today.
Records are just very interesting to me because, like, who has the best records?
Like, sometimes if you have a lot of privilege, you can generate a lot of records, and right, if you don’t have that privilege, you might not have the records to reflect, say, your history or your activities.
So that’s kind of the reason I was asking, and going back to my question about your lived experience.
So the way you’re looking at evidence is that, have you seen other academics use those methodologies?
Like, looking at the types of evidence you’re looking at.
Yeah, I definitely think there’s a precedent for this type of thing.
But I also think that if you are involved in organizing, and there’s, you know, many academics over the years who have done this type of work, and I think there’s, like, a growing group of us who are trying to do this, especially in the LA Tenants Union.
But this is all to say, I think if you are an organizer, you see what is happening at a very material level that demonstrates something about the reality of the eras in which you’re living, that academics are slower to take up.
You’re just seeing it right at the level that it’s most raw and visible, I think.
So for housing, I think organizing around eviction, homelessness, the sort of conjoined struggle between especially very low income tenants and folks living on the street, it just enables you to see what’s happening, even in the past, in a very different way because it just, I mean, I’m involved in the same stuff today, so I can read the sources, I think, in a different way.
And then also on a quite brass tacks level, my organizing connections are the only way that I think I’ve actually gotten in touch with people.
Like it wasn’t through like, hi, I’m a PhD student.
It was like, you know, talking to people in my union who knew folks who were involved in this from their own development as leaders in the struggle.
So it’s all been sort of connected to participation in those movements today that I think has enabled me to like, look at them in the past and see them where, you know, I think as I was mentioning, no one’s written about this ever, which seems wild.
Given our current political climate, it just seems like incredibly important and significant to what we’re all experiencing now around housing.
Yeah, I think Robert Caro said when he was trying to study Lyndon Johnson, that he wanted to go where Johnson was active.
And he knew that the role of women changed because of, let’s say, electricity, but none of the women would talk to him.
So it was his wife who made like a fake jam or some kind of jam.
And it was after he, you know, he went with her around.
Then the women started talking to the wife, and then they started talking to Robert Caro.
But I think they moved to Texas for like multiple years because you have to actually like build trust with people if you’re going to receive information.
That’s probably time that a lot of academics might not have the bandwidth to provide.
I have more questions, but Todd, you probably have questions too.
I wanted to jump back to the late 1800s.
And also I wanted to have you speak on the 2008 housing crash and the ripple effects from that.
But first, on my way back from the Folsom Street Fair, I was coming back to Oregon.
I was listening to this podcast called Empire City, which is hosted by Chenjirai Kumanika, which is one of my favorite podcasters.
And his Empire City is about the origins of the New York Police Department.
And in the late 1800s, there was the New York Police and the Metro Police Department.
One of them was no longer officially the Police Department.
And they were essentially two rival gangs trying to justify themselves in order to receive funding.
Metro Police Department was winning out at the time.
But in the middle of all of this was Seneca Village, which technically at the time was not a homeless encampment.
But by today’s standards, it would probably be regarded as such.
This is where there was a lot of community organizing.
This is where most of the black and brown people in New York lived.
And I’m wondering in your research, did that bring you to Seneca Village and how the community at large and the police responded to them trying to exist, and the fact that they are organizing politically?
I’m actually jotting that down because I haven’t encountered Seneca Village.
And I think actually this is one of the things that I’ve realized as I continue to do this research, is I’m just starting to scratch the surface.
And I truly think this is going to be my life’s work and the life’s work of many people to kind of crack open what is going on with these histories.
In New York, Tompkins Square Park is a site that I think shows up over and over and over again.
Similarly, like there are many issues with defining homelessness over time.
Homelessness is like a very modern term.
In the 80s, homeless union members remember the term beginning to be deployed increasingly in the media.
In the 1930s, communists use it as a way to offer some kind of like class character to this group of people who are not only unemployed but also have been evicted.
It’s sort of malleable over time.
It sometimes means good things, bad things, depending on who’s using it.
It also, when we talk about the 19th century, the late 1800s, there’s what were often described as slums in many cities, which are like informal neighborhoods where shacks are built of material.
We would describe this as probably a homeless encampment today, but such formalized or informalized living was not as uncommon.
And a huge story in American urban history is slum clearance, where people are pushed out systematically of these spaces in order to, what middle-class reformers say at the time, in order to make them clean and healthy.
But it’s about removing the people to create that clean and healthy environment, avoid of the actual people.
So Tompkins Square Park sometimes takes on the character of an encampment, sometimes takes on the character of like a mass protest that also becomes an encampment in different ways.
So also it’s really difficult and important when reading the history to figure out the way that people are even being referred to and the sites themselves, because it’s often like I talk about Echo Park Lake, like you’re saying about Seneca Village.
When people talk about the places, they’re not saying be homeless encampment at whatever.
They’re often just referring to the site as a shorthand.
So yeah, I’m really excited to dig more into this.
Also, one more thing, the point on the development of the police, I think is super important.
There’s a long documented history of how the police are developed in conjunction with regulating the movement of non-white people, especially formerly enslaved people and indigenous people in the United States, immigration policy, and also the development of suppression of labor and that sort of logic.
So all of those things are very intertwined.
I think a piece that connects all of them together is the criminalization of homelessness and the criminalization of people named as vagrants, which can mean anything from being non-white on the lands and being in public, to being unemployed, to reading as poor, any of those things.
Yeah.
The shorthand that’s used is usually a cover for these other more pressing issues like labor organizing, trying to exist, trying to not be kidnapped by the police and sent to the south.
I mean, the history of the NYPD is very, very dark, and I definitely recommend checking out that podcast.
Also, when people talk about homelessness and unsightliness of homeless people existing in major cities, they often talk about, oh, it’s a blue state or it’s a blue city, and it’s this or that policy is the reason why there’s a homelessness problem.
When in reality, this is just an escalation of the fallout from the 2008 housing crisis.
That’s when a lot of us saw numbers rise significantly.
Of course, the economy isn’t really getting any better, and we’re not providing resources for these people.
In your research, I’m wondering, like, what changed in and around 2008, never mind the fact that people try to ignore 2008 as a catalyst?
This is a huge issue.
I think there’s a huge tendency to attempt to ascribe homelessness to all of these random kind of disparate causes, like a specific blue state policy or deinstitutionalization, which is certainly something that contributes but does not produce homelessness by any stretch of the imagination.
That is to say mental illness, drug use.
These are kind of the things that are used to say, this is why homelessness exists.
But the reality, and you can see this historically, is that capitalism produces necessarily a group of unemployed homeless people in order to suppress wages, in order to dismantle organizing, in order to create a separation in this class of people who are all marginalized.
It functions in all of these different ways.
But when you also actually look at, when we’re talking about policies that do produce homelessness, it’s less these like blue states or whatever these so-called progressive policies.
What it actually is, is a bipartisan consensus around the demolition of public housing and the dismantling of any protection for low-income people and low-income tenants.
That is what produces homelessness fundamentally and has produced it in an escalating way.
So when you look at the policies actually, it is democratic policies often in many cases that produce these things, but not in the way that I would say the right wing is saying it.
They’re saying these democratic regimes are allowing, these capital D democratic regimes are allowing drug use to proliferate on our streets and it’s this public health crisis.
But actually, the way that the Democrats have produced this, and the Republicans, is by systematically disinvesting from the only thing preventing an enormous deluge of homelessness, which is public housing, which is federal and state level subsidies for low-income people to be able to survive.
That happened in the 80s, that happened in the 90s, and I think very significantly, there’s things around 2008 that happened that have never, you know, we sort of never recovered.
Again, it’s like recovery is sort of a, it’s much more like cycles, I think, of this type of thing happening in like increasingly intense waves over time.
But very much, I think whenever we see those changes around eviction policy, around tenant protections, around demolition, that’s a sign that homelessness is about to spike.
Another policy signal, I think, is things like Grants Pass and what they reflect, in that one of the things I found, and this was to, I think, a point both of you made earlier, is that criminalization policies can be read as an index of how threatening it is when homeless people get together, figure out how to survive collectively on the land, and organize, and get power, and push that power, and in some cases, take housing, and do it publicly, and get that housing.
That’s such a deep threat to the way that our entire society is structured around private property, that it just has to be met with these, like, incredibly punitive rules.
And so when things like Grants Pass arise, we, you know, it’s very, I think, for those of us in these movements, and for those of us on the left, it’s, like, very hard and very depressing to see this stuff happen.
And it’s really, I mean, I sometimes hear people describe it like the Dred Scott decision of our time, and in many different ways.
But nevertheless, I think we can also see it and understand it as the way that the state responds to poor people getting together and demanding more, and that necessarily the state is always going to respond to that.
We can’t avoid them responding.
They will.
And they respond in two ways.
One is criminalization laws and violence and prisons and police.
And the other is usually some kind of concession that probably looks like a concession, but is also like a backdoor manipulation to kind of give a little something to make people feel like, okay, the struggle is over.
We see that right now in Los Angeles, I think, with the way that, you know, and in many of these cities, actually, the forms that criminalization takes is often this like very soft, like, we need to get people inside.
It’s for their own good.
This is like, you know, something we are morally obligated to do.
But beneath that is just turning, those very same policies are just turning the cycle of homelessness and exacerbating it.
But even, you know, the fact that there has to be also this, like, soft kind of language paired with the outright violence of things like Grants Pass, I think that is what tells us that the movements of the past 20 years have been very successful.
And so it’s important for those movements to understand how to escalate the struggle now that the state has responded in the way that they respond.
Absolutely.
I’ve heard of the term care washing to refer to some kind of that pairing of that soft language with really draconian policy.
Is that is there a term for that like in LA?
Care washing I think is perfect.
I mean, there’s there’s quite literally a program here called CARE is an acronym for Cleaning and Rapid Engagement.
And that is a sweep.
Like the so the program there’s two parts of it cares like a spot clean what they say not a sweep, but sanitation coming and whatever providing sanitation services what they should be doing anyway.
And then a CARE plus is a full on sweep with police, et cetera.
So it’s those the language is like right there.
Prior to that, there was the HOPE program, H-O-P-E.
And there’s also currently the Insight Safe program, which is the sweep program right now.
So yes, 100% agree with CARE Washing.
That’s really prevalent here.
I also wanted to ask when you’re thinking about Grants Pass, where do we place this in these like cycles?
A, like within the US context, and B, if we look at parallels around the world.
I read that you look at landless struggle also around the world.
So how should we contextualize?
Because you’re saying you can kind of look at signals like criminalization and also concession.
But where do you put this in the US context and overseas?
I think that’s a really good question and it’s really key to this research, I think.
International consciousness, first of all, has been a huge part of the Homeless People’s Union, of Homeless People’s Unions and organization, but also specifically the Homeless Union in the 80s, you know, across the time they existed, across the time that Homeless People have organized.
In fact, in the Boston Union of the Homeless Constitution, there is a resolution against apartheid in South Africa, this is in 1985, and it’s not only saying we are in solidarity in a theoretical way, it’s saying we too are experiencing apartheid as Homeless People in the United States, and thus our struggle is not parallel to, it is identical to your struggle.
And so in that way, like tying these different fights together, I think the Tenants Union now in Los Angeles, Union de Vecinos in particular, has a very long history of kind of international and transnational solidarities, and again, a very practical way.
Summer of 2023, a group of us, a brigade of us went to Venezuela to learn about the housing movements in Venezuela.
And what we saw is essentially the same process that we are in now in housing and homeless people’s movements.
I mean, in Venezuela, in many different ways, people have occupied the land.
And the key difference between here and there is that when they fight their state, for their state to give them access to that land, there is a law that says you can have it.
That is like truly the only difference.
And in that way, what we’re fighting, I think, when we’re talking about these like constitutional battles, it’s actually key that we think about the way that we are like, on a national level, like, approaching a constitutional crisis, and what we, in organizing, should be prepared to do.
I think Venezuela is a really good example, because what they do is on a block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood level, they organize around what it is to have to live a life in your neighborhood.
These are people who are often marginalized from the formal economy, just like homeless, unemployed folks here, and they work together on like projects of production, that’s like taking over a bakery and providing food to the neighborhood, that’s planting, doing a farm or like an urban garden, but that’s also not just food, but things like textiles and producing education spaces.
It’s like all of these different things that each of these communes takes up.
It’s really just about starting by organizing at the level of where you live, and getting more and more practice at controlling in a very practical way where you live and what your life looks like, what your streets look like, are they clean, what your apartment looks like, is the management decided by you, like how much do you pay rent, all of this different stuff.
And that builds the muscle for the capacity to do much larger things and have much larger projects of transformation.
And so I think it’s really important to situate the struggle of poor people in the United States with the struggle of poor people across the world, but especially in our hemisphere, like across South Latin America and the Caribbean, there’s so many examples of land struggle that I think we can think about the struggle of poor people much more directly in conversation with than actually some of the whatever, like European examples of housing struggle, that kind of thing.
Because a hemispheric condition of the Americas is that colonization and slavery happened here in these places, and it happened in a lot of different forms.
But that condition has produced a poor people struggle across the Americas that I think people in Venezuela are super conscious of and see themselves in struggle with poor people in the United States.
So I think it’s very important also to develop that consciousness amongst the people we’re working with, like, this is doable, you know, there is like a horizon that actually exists in the world.
There are several of them that we can look at, but we do have to keep going and we do have to be brave in the face of these escalating laws.
One last thing I’ll say is in the 1930s here in the US, and this is also true of struggles in Venezuela across, you know, the Americas, across the world.
Violence is a very predictable part of a state’s response.
Every time that people get together and organize, the state will murder and incarcerate people.
And so we have to build up the ability to deal with that as movements, knowing that it will happen.
We can’t be surprised by it and we can’t sort of like look at it as a defeat, because it will happen as we succeed.
In the 1930s, for example, they demonstrate that a lot of what that takes is just sheer numbers.
There are so many examples, literally hundreds of examples, in like Chicago alone during the Great Depression, of organized what they’re called unemployed councils that often organized on the neighborhood level because no one had a job, so they were all just hanging out around home and on the block.
And when an eviction happened, thousands of people would show up and make the police stop what they were doing.
They would bring, if they found a family already on the street, they would bring all the furniture in, change the locks, get the heat, and the water turned back on.
Call it a day.
If police showed up, there’s an anecdote of police showing up with a sawed-off shotgun, threatening these unemployed council members like, I’m going to shoot you.
And just four people stand up and say like, no, you’re not going to do that.
And those four people was enough in that moment.
It overwhelms the cop.
He takes off his hat and he’s like, okay, passes it around to the other police there, takes up a little collection, gives it to the landlord.
It’s like a small fraction of what rent is supposed to be and says, this is all I can do.
Do not ask me for more.
We’re leaving.
We can’t handle this many people.
So there are these examples in our recent history where this stuff happened.
So I think I would say looking at our own history and around the world, it’s like, don’t give up because this will happen.
We just need to keep going.
I also wanted to ask you about the monumental nature of this decision.
Most people don’t just like, they don’t just hang out and talk to their friends about what the Supreme Court is doing, like some people do.
I thought this was-
Nurtures like us.
I think this was a case that just sort of went under the radar, and for people who, for the uninitiated, I would say, what would you tell them?
What is this case about?
It’s about the persecution of all people being in public, I would say, on a very basic level.
On a specific level, it’s about the criminalization of poor people because they are poor.
It is about making it illegal to be poor in this country.
But it also does something a lot bigger, which is that makes all public space subject to this surveillance, and recurring eviction process that sweeps everyone into it, that is in public and does not appear in a certain way.
It also, in that way, gives license to police and cities who are instituting these criminalization laws.
It gives license to the people executing the laws to just decide who should or should not be in public.
That is sort of, it’s contrary to a lot of what we believe about what I think the United States is, what we’re taught that it is.
And I think one of the key reasons it flew under the radar is because it is actually, again, a bipartisan consensus that this is what should be happening.
This is not a Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris easily, like, you know, split down the middle.
It’s in fact, they both agree that poor people should be banished from public space and that all people should be regulated in public space.
So, in many ways, it’s like a declaration of war on the poor.
And I think we see the ramifications immediately.
We see it in San Francisco.
We see it at the state of California level.
I think honestly, just on a very anecdotal level, I was on a road trip through West Virginia a couple of weeks ago, and I saw, you know, things in like diner windows about criminalization ordinances that were popping up.
It is like a truly crisscrossing the nation in this way.
And we should be very alarmed by the precedent that it sets for people who are poor in this country, and increasingly for everyone else, too.
I’m concerned that our blind spot, the way society tends to put these concerns out of their head, they don’t want to think about it, they don’t want to see it, and they just let the system do what it’s going to do to deal with it.
But I’m hoping that our work, your work, and the work of many others helps to shine a light on these things, because those that aren’t rich are at risk of experiencing these terrible things.
And I have to thank you for the work that you do, and we definitely need to stay in touch.
Do you have social media accounts?
I do.
I do not have a Twitter.
I don’t know how that happened, but I’m grateful for it now.
But you can follow me on Instagram at AnnieBee, as in boy, Powers.
I do post a lot about my research as I find it, so feel free to follow me there.
Yeah, we should let you go.
Thank you so much for being on.
Of course.
We just might check back in with you here in a couple months and see how the work’s going.
Yeah, that sounds great.
It was so fun to chat about this for an hour.
Happy to do it anytime.
Thank you so much, Annie.
Join us on the first and third Mondays of each month for a moment of truth with Ami Chen Mills at 6 PM.
Talk of the Bay every Monday through Thursday at 5 PM Pacific Standard Time on KSQD and KSQT FM.
The moment of truth with Ami Chen Mills team includes Ami Chen Mills, Nyanko Nyassu, Vara Ramakrishnan, Meilin Obinata, Joy Schendeldecker, along with Todd Zimmerman of Nativerse Studios.
Thanks for joining us.
