Land for the Landless, Houses for the Unhoused

I read two front-page newspaper articles this Sunday morning -- one in the San Francisco Chronicle, the other in the New York Times -- that got me thinking (again) about the outrageous disconnect between the wealthy elite and the poor. In Brazil, the surging Landless Workers Movement -- an organization closely aligned with the leftist president Lula -- has spearheaded the occupation of unused land owned by the rich. Poor farmworkers led by the group plow the land and grow organic produce -- most of Brazil's rice is now grown by such squatters. The landless movement in Brazil has become a beacon to the world's poor and dispossessed.

Meanwhile, here in SF, the Chronicle reports that nearly 1,000 supportive housing units sat empty last year while homeless people were forced to live on the streets. I'll give you another statistic recently cited in Harpers magazine -- there are over 4,000 people without shelter each day in SF, while there are over 60,000 empty housing units in the city. (This does not include all the empty office space in downtown SF.) These empty housing units are owned by wealthy speculators and government agencies.

It's time for the unhoused in San Francisco to rise up like the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil and occupy this unused property. The Moms 4 Housing activist group in Oakland, which has met with some success, has led the way. Housing occupation campaigns have also sprung up in cities like Philadelphia, challenging local governments' sell-off of dilapidated housing property to private developers.

Shelter is a fundamental right, like decent food, healthcare and education. It's a scandal that San Francisco -- a city with more billionaires per capita than any other city in the world -- allows thousands of its citizens to sleep on the streets when they could be housed. Meanwhile, the local media targets the poor and defenseless -- even when recent sensational crimes have turned out to be committed by the privileged, even when the homeless are victims.

It's time for the unhoused in the U.S. to take direct action.

Rising up in Oakland, CA.