According to historians of antiquity (trigger warning here!), Emperor Nero was known to use and abuse many people, especially women, allegedly murdering two of his wives and his aunt while sleeping with a Vestal Virgin and — yes! — his mother before he killed her. Roman politicians and historians held back remarkably little when considering Nero’s excesses.

Perhaps the most famous of those writers, , shared how Nero “polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence.” , author of 80 volumes of Roman history, describes Nero skulking around Rome at night “insulting women,” “practicing lewdness on boys,” and “beating, wounding, and murdering” others. And , the most famous biographer of the Caesars, claimed that Nero had invented a perversion all his own. At public games he was hosting, he would put on an animal skin and “assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes.”

While such vivid horrors may be particular to Nero (and his own sense of depravity), Donald Trump’s posture on gender and sexuality does all too grimly echo that of many powerful men throughout history, including those Roman emperors. His sense of comfort in objectifying and demeaning women, whether through his from the 2016 election or his comments about his friendship with , who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” is definitely well-documented.

As Soraya Chemaly, feminist writer and All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, pointed out at :Ěý

Right after the grab ’em by the pussy tape, we should have [had accountability] … and that’s not what happened. And then, after the more than two dozen women came forward with detailed stories that were similar, we should have seen it grind to a halt. But the fact is we don’t care about that kind of predation… we just don’t care. And that’s a function of sexualized violence as a tool of male supremacist oppression in the home, in the street, in politics.

Sex and authoritarianism

The behavior of Emperor Nero and President Trump may be reminiscent of each other (and, for that matter, of so many other kings and tyrants throughout history) because using and abusing sex by those in power has been a pillar of past authoritarian systems. Full stop.

Bring up the way sexual predators tend to act with impunity, and you don’t have to go far to find examples. In recent years in the US, there was the genesis of the movement — the sexual harassment perpetrated by those in the industry, higher education, and by and . And such leaders have learned from the best of them. Scratch under the surface of any authoritarian ruler, in fact, and you’re likely to find cases of harassment and abuse.

For Rome, those in power dominated the people and nations they subjugated, not just economically, militarily and politically, but sexually, too. Rape and prostitution were central aspects of what it meant to be conquered by Rome. And just as that empire used sexuality (depicting in public art and monuments, distinctly gendered conquered nations) to expand its control and territory, the Caesars themselves regulated the sexual behavior of those they had already conquered as a way to further consolidate power. They passed or upheld marriage laws, naming and regulating who could (and could not) marry whom in an effort to promote what they considered proper social order.

Although Nero himself broke some of those laws (especially when he castrated someone enslaved to him and proceeded to marry that person, and when he dressed as a woman and married a freedman, violating laws against men marrying men and anyone marrying someone of lower status), it was clear that such laws were easily circumventable by those in power, even while still being fiercely enforced for Roman subjects. (Doesn’t such a still hold true?)

Indeed, in the ways that an emphasis on morality and family values as an ideology helped establish and maintain the social climate and political and economic order of the Roman Empire (while those in power often acted so differently), there are uncanny parallels to the United States today.

Fiddling while America burns

Sex and sexuality are important ways to understand both Nero’s and Trump’s uses and abuses of power, but the parallels (and the abuses) don’t stop there. Nero is infamous for burning Rome to make way for new building projects and blaming the fires on a marginalized population of his time (Christians) in what may be one of the earliest recorded forms of scapegoating. In Trump’s case, you hardly need to look far to find poor and marginalized communities he’s scapegoating: immigrants, trans youth, the unhoused and the list goes on (and on and on).

Back to Rome, though. Accounts tell us that, while the city burned, Nero sang. (From that, of course, came the phrase that classically describes people in power abdicating all responsibility for helping others in the midst of a crisis: “fiddling while Rome burns.”) While I haven’t heard of Donald Trump singing or playing an instrument recently, certainly destroying the East Wing of the White House to build a “presidential ballroom” while cutting tens of millions of people from food assistance could be considered a .

And a charge against that particularly corrupt emperor that has stood the test of time is that the reference to 666 (sometimes known as the devil or the anti-Christ) from the Book of Revelation is actually a code for Nero, indicating that in biblical lore, he was a central adversary of the Jesus movement.

Therefore, when President Trump or any of the Christian nationalists in power today try to liken themselves to the protagonists in biblical stories, we should stop in our tracks and remember that, if there are such parallels, it’s certainly between the Caesars and Trump, the emperors and tyrants of thousands of years ago and today’s all too rich and ever more authoritarian ruler.

After all, rather than condoning the actions of any tyrants, including the man who today is eager to be one in Washington, DC, the Bible talks about pulling them down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. Have you seen the at some of the Chicago immigrant-justice protests in recent weeks with quotes from Mary’s Magnificat, that hymn of praise from the gospel of Luke? They’re amazing! (And their quotes from sacred texts and traditions to call out the powerful and defend the immigrant, heal the sick and feed the hungry are historically and contextually aligned with the arc of the Bible.)

What the Bible says about sexuality

Bishop William J. Barber II this powerful question about the use and abuse of religion in our day: “Why is it that some who call themselves Christians are so loud about things that the Bible says so little about and so quiet about the things the Bible says so much about, like justice and kindness?” Indeed, Jesus and the Bible really had very little (in some cases nothing) to say about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. It is a fact, however, that when there is a message in the Bible’s text about sex and sexuality or gender expression and moral values, that message is always about justice, inclusion and love.

For instance, the Apostle Paul’s letters are often used these days to prop up homophobia and misogyny — messages like good Christians aren’t LGBTQIA or don’t enjoy sex, or that people are all too often poor because they’ve had too many babies, or that they’re lazy or drug-addicted, and so are sinners.

As it happens, though, what’s truly sinful, according to such Biblical passages, is not homosexuality, or being transgender, or having consensual sex, but greed and exploitation, the unholy alliance between the wealthy and those who make laws to deny people their rights. Yes, Paul’s letters are indeed among a few biblical texts often quoted to condemn abortion or deny the rights and bodily autonomy of people. So, consider it a distinct irony that, at the core of Paul’s writings aren’t the behaviors of the poor or women or LGBTQ people, but the vices of empire.

One Greek word the Apostle Paul is concerned with is sarkas, usually translated as “works of flesh.” Paul defines such fleshy “works,” however, as: sexual immorality, lewdness, idolatry, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, envy, gluttony and the like. At first, it may indeed sound like a list of personal behaviors and characteristics. But notice that idolatry, hatred, discord and gluttony are not just individual behaviors, especially not those of the poor and powerless. Instead, they are acts of an unequal and exploitative world that actually uses and abuses the poor and marginalized.

Indeed, if there is a biblical critique of sex and sexuality, it’s one to be levied against the wealthy and powerful, the Trumps and Epsteins of this world, not teenagers and their families seeking gender-affirming care, women seeking abortions or transgender people seeking a place in sports or the military. And it’s surely not a polemic with same-gender loving couples or poor trans love.

Trump’s distorted morality

Since taking office (and as part of what catapulted him into the White House in the first place), President Trump has been continually about the supposed moral crises besetting this country and the need for a strong man to resolve them. In this, he’s been following in the path laid out by the Nero-like authoritarians and tyrants of history. He’s been issuing regular executive orders aimed at doing everything from banning transgender women in and transgender troops in the to punishing the and , while in need off from life-saving food.

And his executive actions are only the tip of the spear of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat others (while distracting attention from the Epstein files and other controversies surrounding him). This year, 1,012 have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut millions of dollars in food and health care, but $45 billion to detain adult immigrants and their families, as well as an additional $32 billion for immigration agents to pursue enforcement and deportation policies.

Trump’s attacks on abortion, same-sex marriage and trans youth in the name of family values and “morality,” his efforts to cut welfare, healthcare, wages and other life-sustaining programs, and his emphasis on policing and militarizing communities (allowing guns to proliferate) while talking about peace and security, may be covered by Christian nationalism but they are not in any sense biblical.

After all, the Bible’s authors, living through the world of imperial Rome, agreed that there was a moral crisis occurring. People were losing their land, had turned away from the God of liberation and justice, and were generally complying with a system of subjugation and oppression. Meanwhile, the emperors were trampling on all too many of their hopes and values, including sexually exploiting them. And none of that was to be tolerated.

There is a similar moral crisis occurring today, and Donald Trump is at its very heart. Jackson Katz, creator of the 2024 The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power, and the American Presidency, raises the ultimate “moral” question about Trump’s complicity in sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses and what will come of his own sexual predations, then and now. He :

It’s still far from clear whether Trump ultimately will be held accountable for his actions — or inactions — over the course of his long friendship with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, our era’s most notorious and prolific sexual abuser of girls. Will this finally be the moment when Trump pays a real price for his misogyny?

If we are to channel the Apostle Paul and the message of Jesus, time’s up. As the gospel tradition makes all too clear for Emperor Nero (aka the anti-Christ or Satan), President Trump, “Your kingdom must come down!”

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With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-black and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this, especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.

The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks and environmental protection measures have all been in the name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” and other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever more intensely and Housing First policies vilified. The of Education, which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions in immigrant detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in for mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet, these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could leave both the lives of the poor and the global economy in shambles.

This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy. But it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than people living in poverty or one crisis away — one job loss, eviction, medical issue or debt collection — from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience and food insecurity, while more than 80 million are or underinsured. Ten million without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity. The American education system has frequently scored compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of democratic awakening.

Homeless, not helpless

In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient — single moms who had been living in their cars, veterans, students and low-wage or recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without healthcare. They were black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous and white. Although they came from radically different slices of society, one simple fact bound them together: They were poor, in need of housing and fed up.

That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (), one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was not a charity, a service provider or a professional advocacy group but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement and never left.

NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and dispossessed people.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories, including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to public showers and the right of the unhoused to vote without a permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective political power.

At the heart of the NUH were three principles: First, poor people can be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second, the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their differences and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty. Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the political and moral agency of the impoverished — that there will be no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.

Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because it expresses our crucial argument: that poverty and economic inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.

Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.

Projects of survival

In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into “projects of survival.”

That phrase was borrowed from the Black Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful “survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front doors and ignited a highly publicized that lasted through that winter.

On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and whose oldest was in his 90s. That occupation ultimately pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had normally been swept under the rug.

Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington, while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins. While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy, dangerous or too over-burdened with their own problems to think about others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements emerge.

A survival revival for these times

Today, amid the rising tide of Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, while kairos is the qualitative time during which old and often oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be born.

In kairos moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life or death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.

Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion trying to defend their communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental and political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, transgender children and other fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public ; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in increasing danger.

Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual and political agency of those under attack. Food pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch protests, campaigns and organizing drives. Ever more devastating superstorms, floods and forest fires could become moments not just for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that worsen extreme weather events.

Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where we both work, published a new on the theory and practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how — beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing today — dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists and others have been building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.

Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing, pray and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once it, can be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.

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The post You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: The Power of the Poor in Trump’s America appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the US Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace. 

Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around , including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city’s case. The for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious denominations, historic houses of worship and interfaith networks. The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused. 

One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised, very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom who that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly 800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous, “Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing the dwellings and communities of the unhoused. 

Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the homeless from encampments. In , for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In the state capital of Sacramento, of mostly disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington, Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing against the erasure of their lives.

Cruel but not unusual

However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of 17th-century English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have realized. After all, in the 16th and 17th centuries, peasants in England lost their rights to the land they had lived on and farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often under the supervision of the church.

To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the in the Grants Pass case, seemed incredulous that the lower court ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or gay people and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered. In addition to such insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since 600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission only had 138 beds.

Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a review of Martin v. Boise. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, revealed in her : the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down, attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they will want to move on down the road.”

The United States of Dispossession

This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very founding of the United States, as the government encountered Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial, they forced them off those very lands. They also of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, of the American population now owns two-thirds of the private land in the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!

In (a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for the crime of sleeping outdoors.

The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the French poet and novelist, long ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from occupying space they don’t own.

After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. Even though there are than homeless people ( for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have been bad for all too many of us. 

In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed. While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place. The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that people will just go down the road and essentially disappear — ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.

The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts (required for county funding for homeless services) that identified more than homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is, however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved to be 184,865, or the number used for funding services.

A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this country is closer to nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the subsequent loss of Covid era benefits and crippling inflation and housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable possibility.

Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land ownership. were given the right to own land for the first time, although many barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and natural owners of the land” were , although they continue to find themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those . And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to fulfill a social function, be productive and respect labor and environmental rights. The state has the right to landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must compensate the owner,” to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute for Social Research. 

That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements of landless peasants that had formed an organization called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could even sue for legal tenure. To date, have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics. 

If not here, where?

Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking: “Where do we go?” In , Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30 days to leave or face fines and arrests. 

Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and tribal nations and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find justice sooner or later.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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