Rookie Pittsburgh Steelers running back Najee Harris, who was born in Martinez and attended high school in the East Bay town of Antioch, came home last week to join Gov. Newsom in Santa Clara as he announced his efforts to address the state’s ongoing homelessness crisis and a new COVID-19-related rental relief program.
Although the month of April is annually observed as Fair Housing Month, the reality for Black America and other people of color is that housing has not significantly changed since the 1968 federal enactment of the Fair Housing Act.
While some might debate if shelter is a basic human right, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would argue that it isn’t essential to an individual’s quality of life. And in California, where just about every aspect of the nation’s housing crisis is on full display, housing laws become all the more consequential. Especially during a global pandemic.
The plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit seeking to force the city and county of Los Angeles to effectively deal with the homelessness crisis filed a motion for a preliminary injunction today that would require housing to be offered to thousands of indigent people in downtown’s skid row area by August.
A senior citizen living alone in a hotel room he can barely afford. Families staring down eviction because a parent is one of the millions of Californians to lose their job this year. More than 269,000 K-12 students currently experiencing, or on the brink of homelessness across California, enough to fill Dodger Stadium five times over. This is the picture of homelessness in Los Angeles today — a crisis that has been allowed to fester for decades, and has greatly worsened due to COVID-19.
With the federal COVID-19 rent protections provided in the CARES Act about to expire, any plan to assist tenants who have fallen behind on their payments due the COVID-19 pandemic would have to be drawn up by state or local governments.
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 the city began receiving necessary aid and grants to house people who were experiencing homelessness. The formula that left so many people unsheltered is when trauma meets unmanageable living costs. Over 20,000 Angelenos were housed last year, nearly 430-million dollars of the city budget will focus on the needs of the unsheltered.
There are half a million people, mostly men, mostly white, but way too many African Americans. African Americans are 13 percent of the population and 40 percent of the homeless. The homeless are primarily concentrated in California, New York, Florida, and Texas, but you can find them in almost any community. Two-thirds of the homeless are sheltered on a given night, but a third are sleeping on the streets, on park benches, in alleys, under awnings. To quote the late great Congressman Elijah Cummings, “we are better than this.”
Steve Lopez, award-winning Los Angeles Times columnist and author of The Soloist, provided the keynote address at a panel discussion Homelessness and the Public’s Health: A National Crisis and a Local Emergency at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science’s (CDU) fifth annual President’s Breakfast on Thursday, February 13, at the Marina Del Rey Marriott. The panel was moderated by CDU President/CEO Dr. David M. Carlisle and featured leaders in politics and public health who are noted champions of health equity and solving the rising issue of homelessness.