Guest opinion: Why Elk Grove needs a homeless shelter; how affordable housing eludes us

Ed. note. This is a follow-up to Mr. Monasky's story published on Friday, September 13 recapping the city of Elk Grove's homeless shelter presentation. This follow-up is an opinion piece. |

There is a real shortage of affordable housing in Elk Grove, in the region, in the state, and in the nation. It was Ronald Reagan as president in 1982 who gutted the federal funding to his cabinet level post, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Slashed to within an inch of its life, it has never been revived by any president since. 

And for good reason; affordable housing, like education, healthcare, transit, water, soil, air, and all other basic human needs are nothing but commodities in this system of political economy we gladly call capitalism. Human beings are commodities, too, as our labor is reduced to an exchangeable thing we must trade for wages. 

That’s how we can warehouse poor, homeless people; or grandma in a locked care home. Our lives and theirs are unimportant in this system of competitive, dog-eat-dog commercial enterprise.

We think we’ve come a long way in becoming free. The Thirteenth Amendment to our constitution forbids slavery...but...wait for it...EXCEPT when used to punish incarcerated people; then slavery is OK. We need only be in fear enough to accede to such authority inasmuch as it threatens to imprison us, confiscate our personal property (and here include home, etc.) Then we are homeless when perceived to be legal outliers by the authorities; so much for moral relativism.

The appropriate human response to such harsh public policies is first to refuse to incarcerate homeless people, then to help them with a leg up to come into a home of their own so they can live as a free person. Elk Grove's homeless program has so many harsh rules that it’s no wonder more than two thirds of participants fail to obtain housing. It is set up for failure because it is discompassionate.

The programs' its administrators are not evil fools, but they have not walked a mile with the feet of a dispossessed and homeless person.It is not a good look for the city of Elk Grove to have an entire community, especially its predominantly (80 percent) white Old Town sector, reject placement of this homeless shelter in one of its own neighborhoods. 

It has taken a mostly black, African American congregation to find the wherewithal to accommodate this project on a particularly fast and blind-cornered section of East Stockton Boulevard. There is no safe ingress and egress to the property for a pedestrian or cyclist. The bus system only runs on the east-west corridors of Bond Road and Elk Grove Boulevard. 

According to Elk Grove city manager Jason Behrmann, other commercial sites have the space, but since they can still legally recite and enforce codes, covenants, and restrictions...well, well...we just cannot have a homeless shelter near our business tenants.

City housing manager Bontrager repeated that participants would arrive “by referral only, no people from Sacramento; with lots of rules, and no sex offenders; security cameras to deter and record nuisances and crimes.”

It’s high time the police be stripped of powers to engage in social services better executed by the highly educated workers who specialize in such duties. Individuals with credentials and advanced degrees such as Masters in Social Work possess greater understanding and could effect real, substantial and meaningful change in the lives of our fellow human beings who suffer from drug addiction, domestic violence, and those who are the terrible fruit of the tree of War. 

The latest point in time count (which is usually an underestimation) of homeless persons in Sacramento County revealed that 600 are war veterans. 

Homelessness is not the problem; lack of affordable housing is. Imagine what would have happened had President Obama paid delinquent housing costs for poor people to stay in their homes in 2009 instead of bailing out the morally depraved financial sector and allowed them to jack up adjustable rate mortgages...how much farther tens of trillions would have gone. 

Unless and until the United States, California, Sacramento County, and the city of Elk Grove can come from under the rock that was the punitive legacy of Ronald Reagan (and every subsequent president) to engage in imperial wars, to deny social services, and to gut housing programs, we will have even more people dispossessed and on the streets.

Those in power beware; these are the symptoms and conditions of violent revolution that our people and our country do not deserve.

Photo by Chris John.