These articles are reporting on realities that have a multi-year lineage – go back to any past issue of Street Sense DC (and editions of Street Sense in other cities across the country) and similar themes of officially sanctioned police repression and unsanctioned landlord profiteering recur with depressing regularity. Criminalization of homelessness is simply the reverse side of the gentrification coin. Unstated is that the poor are unwanted in neighborhoods in which they once lived because, much like unkempt lawns, they might lower the value of overvalued properties. So it is that the rich become richer, no matter what the law says. Sleeping outside should not be a crime.”Īlso in the issue, in an article headlined “Watchdog group finds profits soaring for real estate company facing several lawsuits,” Holly Rusch touches on the reason behind the cruelty in police destruction of encampments: realtors profit by raising rents to a level that few can afford, facing no accountability for legal violations they commit enroute to making even more money. Washington makes the simple point that those in power choose to evade: “It is unfair to target homeless people and jail them for trying to survive. In the aptly titled article “Breaking up encampments is worse in the summer heat,” writer Amina Washington, herself homeless, details the DC government’s practice of destroying shelters set up by those without other housing. Glancing through the July issue of Street Sense – a newspaper of, by and for the unhoused – one can read multiple reflections on the reality of powerlessness in the face of official hostility. Withdrawing from electoral activity is no answer but if we fail to understand why so many feel ready to do just that, if we fail to understand that such attitudes are rooted in experience, we will be unable to preserve existing rights – let alone build a transformative politics rooted in alternative power. In both cases, such attitudes reflect an eroding of political democracy that lies in the background of our eroding rights. And this is true on the local level where even office holders who live within shouting distance too often seem uninformed regarding intimate questions of food, transportation, school, jobs, health, public safety, and prices. That is true of federal races, even in today’s polarized political climate, where candidates spew promises unlikely to be fulfilled, appearing, and disappearing like actors on a stage. Nonetheless, for many people in and around our nation’s capital and for millions across the country, elections don’t seem to carry much meaning. Co-governance, a form of collaborative engagement in which elected officials meet and work with community groups before and after an election campaign, offers one possible way to overcome that reality. Moreover, more than a few of those elected are content to let business as usual remain unchanged - for even in relatively liberal communities, in which public officials say all the right things, the gap between words and deeds is enormous and too many people go tumbling down that gap. Yet institutional barriers blocking those who would challenge existing power remain high. Some genuinely committed activists for social justice, including DSA members, were elected, and there is now a possibility that some too long-delayed social reforms and protections may be enacted in suburban Maryland. At the time of writing, the results are a mixed bag. For many of the down ballot local races in the District, and neighboring Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, that means the outcome is known, given the predominance of one-party rule in much of our area. The primary elections in Washington, DC and Maryland are over.
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