WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM NO MORE from MIM Notes #60, January 1992 by MC86 & MC/ Homelessness in Amerika is necessarily built into the very structure of the Amerikan Way. But, as if poverty were a new phenomenon, each year the media runs feature stories profiling the poor as a suddenly urgent problem. These articles ignore the real cause: capitalism. Yes, even in this decadent country, where the economy is drunk on the blood of superprofits from the Third World, people die outside, cold and hungry. The system demands their deaths. The key to full rights as an Amerikan citizen is home-ownership. You canUt be a settler without a house. Settler Amerikans stand in line at the banks pleading for mortgage loans, since it is cheaper to own a house than to rent oneQif youUve got the credit. Not only does real estate ownership mean the opportunity to resell the property for a profit, but owning it provides a tremendous tax-break. The group benefitting the most from government housing subsidies are not Rwelfare-mothers,S but home-owners! Tax write-offs for propertied citizens amount to more than $54 billion dollars a year in uncollected taxes.(1) Compare that to the total housing subsidy for the poor of $9.2 billion in 1988 (a 72.6% drop from 1981).(2) Home on the range Homelessness is not a new phenomenon in Amerika. When the first European settlers arrived, the RNew WorldS supported 100 million indigenous people: who are now homeless. The Founding Fathers imported 100 million former home-owners from Africa.(3) Most of the 25 million survivors of slavery have never owned a home in Amerika. As home-ownership opportunities grew for the Euro-Amerikan settlers, landlords charged the indigenous, Black, Latino, and non-Anglo immigrant nationalities exorbitant rents to live in tenement ghettos. Over the years, banks and speculators moved entire slums from one area of a city to another, as neighborhoods built by the people were gentrified. Fear of homelessness or unemployment helps keep proletarians working within U.S. bordersQworking for less and less pay in a country that saw the number of millionaires double from 475,000 in 1982 to 941,000 in 1986.(4) In 1990, Congress passed the mis-named Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act, which subsidizes banks and slippery Rnon-profitS developers as they buy up decrepit housing projects, fore-closed properties, and entire blocks burned by landlord-arsonists. The buildings are remodeled and sold to the wealthy, as well as to managers and labor-aristocrats who can afford to purchase cooperatives and condominiums. As the inner-city communities are destroyed by gentrification and people flee to suburban territories in search of work and housing, some people become homeless for a few months, others for years. WhoUs homeless? A 1987 study of interviews with 1,846 homeless peopleQmost of whom were found in soup kitchens or sheltersQfound that 54% were members of oppressed nationalities. Almost one out of four had done time in a state or federal prison.(5) This points toward overall poverty rates, which show that 30% of all people officially under the Rpoverty lineS are Black.(6) 41% of Black households have incomes of less than $15,000 per year, compared to 17% of white households.(7) Homelessness involves two key factors in America: First, some unemployment is structurally built into the system, as it is with any capitalist economy. Second, when the economy suffers internationally, more people become homeless and the bourgeoisie is less able and willing to ensure even their allies the basic necessities. In the United States both of these categoriesQstructural homelessness and the increases in homelessness with economic downturnsQare made up predominantly of the oppressed nations. So it is no surprise that the homeless are mostly Blacks, Latinos, and indigenous peoples. Liberals, social democrats and Trotskyists love to point to the figures showing the growing numbers of homeless and unemployed and suggest that things are going bad for the white working class. Knight-Ridder recently did a study on the demise of Rthe middle classS (namely white wage-workers) and how this class now has less money and privileges than it did 20 years ago. But when push comes to shove, the white nation in the United States fairs very well compared to the oppressed nations inside Amerika and throughout the Third World.(8) DonUt gimme shelter Homeless people stay with relatives, with friends, in cars, in parks, in subways, in squats, in empty lots. The places that most people do not want to stay are in the concentration campsQcalled Rshelters,S Rwelfare hotels,S Rsanctuaries,S Rwork-farms.S Municipalities receive Federal monies for warehousing people in city-owned, uninhabitable slum apartments in cities where there are thousands of vacant, Rmarket-rateS units and a surplus of new, unused office space built with government funds.(9) For people denied real shelter, just staying alive on a hand-to-mouth basis is a full time job. Homelessness is also a profitable industry for various reformists, religious institutions, and poverty pimps who have a financial stake in the continuation of the peopleUs misery.(10) Solving the problem After World War II, Amerika stayed drunk on the blood, sweat and tears of the 70% of the worldUs population who earn in one year what many Amerikan workers make in a week. As 40,000 children die of starvation every day in the nations bled by imperialism, Euro-Amerikan owners and workers (including industrial white workers) dance in their graveyard. Even during a recession, they receive high salaries, wages and a standard of living that dwarfs the below-subsistence pittances that keeps most of the world under-fed, under-employed, and under-housed by any contemporary standards of technologically-possible decency. The not-so-Big Secret of capitalism is that those who do the least work get the most money. ItUs all about ownership. Amerikan home-ownership has always rested on the destruction of other peoplesU homes. Just ask the Iraqi people. Ask the Panamanian people. Ask the Korean, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Cambodian, the Salvadoran people. The list is as long as Amerika is old. MC12 and MC42 contributed to this report. Notes: 1. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, RThe Crisis in Housing for the Poor,S 7/89, pp. 26-27. 2. United Church Board for Homeless Ministries, RHomelessness and Affordable Housing,S 1989, p. 52. 3. J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, Morningstar Press, 1983. 4. Institute for Policy Studies, RThe Right To Housing,S 1989, pp.17-18. 5. Urban Institute Project Report, in Population Today 2/89. (This study is probably not reliable overall, since it mostly counted people Rreceiving services.S) 6. 1991 Statistical Abstract of the United States, p. 462. 7. Ibid, p. 456. 8. Detroit News 11/5/91, p.1. Detroit Free Press 11/26/91, p. 1A. 9. NYT 11/6/91, p. A1. 10. MIM Notes 53, p. 9.