Is there a solution to this growing housing squeeze? America's most conservative legislators have it. Let's just do our best to keep our nation's homeless out of sight, lawmakers suggest.
In Florida, that approach actually became law. Gov. Ron DeSantis, fresh off a campaign that went nowhere for the Republican presidential candidate, has made it illegal for local governments to allow homeless people to camp or sleep on public land starting Oct. 1 of this year. We just signed a bill that says.
“Florida will not allow homeless encampments to infiltrate our people and undermine our quality of life, as we have seen in states like New York and California,” DeSantis said upon signing the bill. declared.
A new Florida law requires local governments that don't have enough bed capacity for unhoused families to set up homeless camps far from parks and other public facilities. The law also penalizes communities for sleeping rough outside these new hidden camps.
Diana Stanley, a top executive at Palm Beach Philanthropies, believes Florida's new approach is “a declaration that we have stopped caring about our brothers and sisters.” The main message Stanley takes away from the state's new homeless law is: “If you can't see them, you don't need to help them.”
Stanley emphasized that Florida's latest homelessness law “does nothing to address the root cause of homelessness: the lack of affordable housing.” Amy Donley, a sociologist at the University of Central Florida, agrees that the state's focus should be on “helping people get into housing rather than into camps.”
Meanwhile, measures that would help make that happen have come under fire from right-wing lawmakers in other states. These lawmakers specifically aim to ignite state and local experiments in providing guaranteed, no-strings-attached basic income to low-income households.
In Iowa, one Republican state lawmaker calls these basic income efforts “socialism on steroids.” John Wick of South Dakota, a proponent of another movement to ban basic income, decries basic income plans as tantamount to a “one-way ticket to government dependency.” Lawmakers in Arizona, which has the fourth-highest homelessness rate in the nation, passed a bill in February that would ban “periodic, periodic cash disbursement programs” that could be used “for any purpose.”
As of late February, lawmakers in four other states had introduced bills with similar bans.
Who is driving this nationally coordinated movement to end the basic income experiment? Some of America's most secretive wealthy people are the founders of the Income to Support All Foundation indicted a recent analysis by Chairman Scott Santens.
Santens points out that these wealthy people fund an organization calling itself the Government Accountability Foundation. The group is a “billionaire-fueled lobbying group with a record of junk science that every American should know.”
Among the foundation's major donors are far-right billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, who are the fourth-largest donors to political campaigns in the United States. The Uihleins poured about $18 million into the Government Accountability Foundation conspiracy. Almost that amount comes from the Donors Trust Network, which is now a major force. mother jones It is called the “Yamikin ATM on the right”.
Other major funders of the Government Accountability Foundation include: “They hate regulation and seek to stop all progress because they hate regulation and see advances like climate change as almost a step toward communism.” It includes a variety of well-heeled organizations with a history of ”
Scott Santens of the Income to Support All Foundation believes the billionaires taking on all these entities share a common fundamental outlook. They fear a world in which things are a little less unequal, a world in which there are not too many average people who can only say yes.
May a new world emerge that the wealthy fear. soon.
Sam Pizzigati, an associate research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, is co-editor of Inequality.org. His latest book includes maximum wage claim and The rich don't always win: The forgotten victory over plutocracy that created America's middle class, 1900-1970..