🚨 @hrw urges US to end efforts to arrest & deport int'l students & scholars over political views & activism on #Palestine.
@JRaphling: “The #Trump administration’s actions are an attack on free speech and threaten the very foundations of a free society.” hrw.org/news/2025/04/03/us-e…
ALT In this image taken from security camera video, Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student at Tufts University, is detained by Department of Homeland Security agents on a street in Sommerville, Mass., Tuesday, March 25, 2025. -- Associated Press
That's led to a situation where we have plenty of, perhaps even too much housing at the high end of the market, and then for regular working people, there's a huge shortage. @JRaphling from @hrw.
What's next? Listen to think it through.
I know its really scary for people to face the truth: A lot of the people on the street didn't make "bad" choices. Normal life things happened to them: Layoffs, death of a loved one, illness. That's all it takes and you're on the street.
ALT Large majority of homeless people in CA are not illicit drug users, study finds
Housing in LA is musical chairs.
1 in 2 people struggle to sit down. 50% of households cannot afford their housing costs.
500,000 people lack access to affordable housing.
People are left out.
Sweeps of unhoused encampments are harmful and bad policy. @GavinNewsom should know better. End criminalization; support a right to housing. @hrw, @LACANetwork, @withouthousing
Destroying Encampments Isn’t a Solution to Houselessness - Progressive.org
cant get enough 🔥🔥 @JRaphlinghrw.org/sites/default/files/…
The criminalization of houselessness means treating people who live on the streets as criminals and directing resources towards arresting and citing them, institutionalizing them, removing them from visible public spaces, denying them basic services and sanitation, confiscating and destroying their property, and pressuring them into substandard shelter situations that share some characteristics with jails. Criminalization is expensive, but temporarily removes signs of houselessness and extreme poverty from the view of the housed public. Criminalization is ineffective because it punishes people for living in poverty while ignoring and even reaffirming the causes of that poverty embedded in the economic system and the incentives that drive housing development and underdevelopment. Criminalization is cruel.
"Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making," warns @antonioguterres. Our responsibility now is to ensure equitable responses, including centering disability rights in planned relocation.
hrw.org/news/2024/09/03/incl…
Permanent housing, with supportive services if needed, (not temporary shelter) solves houselessness. Great examples exist. As California Clears Homeless Camps, Two Projects Point a Way Forward - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The @HRW report recommends investing in permanent housing, ending criminalization, shelter those with greatest immediate need and provide services for encampments to help people survive.
The results of the program continue along at about the same rate: 17.8% get “permanent housing”; 24% return to the streets; most of the rest stay in the hotel rooms. 40 have died. The average stay is 238 days. (Permanent housing may just mean a longer temporary subsidy)
The rooms alone cost $115-125 per night per person ($3450-3750/mo). There isn’t enough permanent housing, so most people are either stuck in the rooms or return to the streets.
The @HRW report looked at the IS sweep of Venice ABH (by Rose Avenue) in early January 2023. By May 2024, of 106 people moved, 24 had “permanent housing,” 47 back to the streets, 26 still in the hotels, 5 dead
The new report by @HRW on criminalization of unhoused people provides analysis of @MayorOfLA Inside Safe program looking at data through March 2024 hrw.org/report/2024/08/14/yo…