Hey People,

Welcome to the WRAP California newsletter! Thank you for fighting against criminalization of poor and homeless people with us!

Check out our BAMBOOZLED video: What (L.A.) Mayor Garcetti Doesn't Want You to Know About Skid Row and His 'Homeless Plan Scam'

Los Angeles Community Action Network

Last November, LA CAN released All Show and No Substance, a one-year report card highly critical of Proposition HHH implementation, which concluded that City Hall was not delivering on the measures promise to provide safe, clean, affordable housing for houseless people and those in danger of becoming homeless specifically citing the dysfunction of the homeless policy establishment and the LAPDs continuous criminalization of houseless people.

Shortly thereafter two U.N. Special Rapporteurs held town halls at LA CAN and Skid Row walkabouts, witnessing first-hand the conditions described in the study. In a report on his U.S. tour, Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Phillip Alston, criticized Los Angeles for trying to arrest its way out of homelessness, calling the practice particularly callous.

Now, more than 18 months after passage of Proposition HHH, the estimated number of permanent supportive housing units it will finance has dropped from 10,000 to 6,000. With one third of the $1.2 bond issue already committed, and the estimated number of units having dropped by 4,000, the public deserves to know how their tax dollars are being spent to address the citys homeless crisis. Under these circumstances we call on Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Controller Ronald Galperin, and Housing and Community Investment Department General Manager Rushmore D. Cervantes to immediately conduct a financial audit of Proposition HHH spending, including funds for permanent supportive housing and related services as well as any other expenditures of bond issue funds.

LA CAN created the community-based study All Show and No Substance in the interest of getting homes and services for houseless people built at a much faster pace, and we strongly encourage you to give serious consideration to its seven recommendations for accomplishing this goal. You can find a copy of the report at: http://cangress.org/publications/comm...

Join us in the fight to guarantee justice, equity, dignity and respect for all Angelenos. #LetsGetFree

Using Media to Stir up Hate and Fear in San Francisco is this happening in your town too?

An anonymous San Franciscan bought a full page newspaper ad claiming residents need to 'watch your backs' because the city can't do anything about the homelessness crisis

An anonymous resident of San Francisco placed a full-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle Friday to draw attention to the city's homelessness crisis after an alleged experience with a scissors-wielding homeless man in a downtown cafe left her feeling "horrified."

The woman detailed her account in the ad, titled "Watch your backs-nobody else is." You can read the entire ad above. "The San Francisco city fathers and those who should be held accountable for our public safety have for years let us down by catering to the lowest common denominator," the ad says. "We, the tax paying, responsible contributing members of society have had our quality of life as San Franciscans seriously compromised, dangerously so."

In the ad, she says that she was trying to enjoy her lunch at a Neiman Marcus cafe in San Francisco's downtown, when she had a run-in with a homeless person wielding scissors. She says that this "psychotic homeless person" was opening and closing the scissors "erratically," making her fear for her safety. We've reached out to the Neiman Marcus in San Francisco for comment.

Viral Video Shows Another #PermitBetty Calling Cops On Street Vendor - San Francisco Business Improvement District's Yerba Buena Community Benefit District (YBCBD)

Play Video

It looks like white folks are slowly learning that there are consequences for unnecessarily calling the police on people of color living their lives.

Our latest example? #PermitBetty who attempted to call the cops on a San Francisco street vendor, but realized it might not be the move to make when someone started filming her

Didn't Work Then, Won't Work Now

Western Regional Advocacy Project

Not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did Jim Crow laws finally become part of history. Not until 1974 did Chicago take off the books the last Ugly Law that penalized and fined "any person on the streets... who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object." And Anti-Okie laws were constitutional until the California Supreme Court decision of 1941.

None of these discriminatory laws would have been overturned without deep community organizing to get the power structure of the time to pay attention. (HBR Fact-sheet) On December 3, 2012, a Homeless Person's Bill of Rights and Fairness Act was introduced in California to strike down our current version of discriminatory laws that oust people from local communities or criminalize their presence by forbidding them to sit or lie on public sidewalks or distribute free food in public parks. Rhode Island has already passed a Homeless Bill of Rights, Oregon is planning to do the same and other communities are interested in following. These bills are written to protect the rights of extremely poor or homeless people, rights that most of us take for granted - the right to equal treatment from state and local government agencies, or the right to use public spaces as everyone else, or the right to engage in basic life sustaining activities.

Better laws and passage of good bills don't just happen. They need public awareness and widespread support. The California Homeless Bill of Rights is cosponsored by East Bay Community Law Center, Western Center on Law and Poverty, Jericho: a voice for Justice, an interfaith community, and by WRAP, whose members include long-time community organizations spanning from Los Angeles to Portland Oregon.

Steady and strong community organizing is leading more and more groups and people to join hands across the boundaries of their particular race, class, work or interests - religious workers, mental health and housing advocates, political activists, neighbors and friends. We can finally break into the "appalling silence of the good people," which is how Martin Luther King put it in 1963 when he wrote his letter from Birmingham Jail.

But our challenge is now. Any time government tells a person, your presence is unacceptable in our community, it is a civil rights issue. Any time local governments demonize one segment of society in order to control their movements and justify their removal from public spaces, it is a civil rights issue. Local "anti-homeless" police enforcement campaigns, separate court systems, property confiscations and the closing of public spaces-these are in the forefront of today's civil rights battles. Homelessness has become a civil rights issue.

A Homeless Bill of Rights lifts and deepens the debates about "what to do" when we have over 3 million people a year without housing on any given day. The obvious answer, of course, is affordable housing. Homelessness exists primarily because we have cut back affordable housing and therefore, forced people onto the street from where we then try to banish them. WRAP has documented and said this before.

But we add: A Homeless Bill of Rights is more than a response to an isolated set of discriminatory policies against those who are economically disenfranchised. It underscores our desperate need in this country to once and for all create a society where all people are valued and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. It speaks against our age-old pattern of laws that are used to coerce, to humiliate or dehumanize. A Homeless Bill of Rights reconfirms rights that we all know intuitively exist, and at the same time it allows those who are experiencing homelessness to stand against the structural violence that they are experiencing.

The legislative mandate in the California bill includes prevention of any discrimination because of housing status. Once police are no longer given the power to remove homeless people from visibility we may be able to make more progress in the larger national conversation around federal housing priorities, social justice, and equality.