In my upcoming book, I show that, beginning in the 1980s, attributing homelessness to mental illness and addiction was politically engineered to obscure the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and to justify the removal of homeless people from public space.

https://x.com/brian_goldstone/status/1843720999298314489

People like Musk love linking homelessness to addiction & mental illness because it allows them to divert focus from the true causes of this crisis—soaring rents, low wages, a lack of tenant rights—while shifting blame onto individuals instead of the systems that brutalize them.

A thread about our depraved healthcare system, and a plea.

In 2021, my friend Carole was diagnosed with terminal stage four cancer. A single parent with two kids, she had just turned 43. In 2017, she had watched her brother Chris die of the same cancer. He too was in his 40s. Carole, a teacher in Nashville, tried to absorb this shattering news. The five-year survival rate for small cell lung cancer is 5%. She began chemo, but her oncologist warned that it was only a matter of time before this extremely aggressive form of cancer spread to other organs.

A staggering statistic: By 2030, institutional investors are forecast to own or control more than *40 percent* of all single-family rental units in the U.S.

(they currently own about 5 percent) source: prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

Just found this brilliant article from 1993, which shows that linking homelessness to mental illness was not only politically engineered but was “used to divert attention from the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and to justify the removal of homeless people from public spaces." More relevant than ever: "Although politicans and the press linked homelessness with mental illness, most homeless people were not mentally ill and had become homeless due to decreased low-income housing, declining real wages & cuts in government benefits" anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.15…

Two weeks ago I got a frantic call from a 58-year-old woman in Atlanta. She and her husband, who had just been discharged from the hospital, were being forced out of the apartment where they’d lived since 2011. The couple had nowhere to go and were terrified of becoming homeless. When Veronica and Ulysses first moved into their apartment, the rent was $550/month and had gone up slowly over the years. But a new mgt company, TriShip Partners LLC, had just taken over, and the first thing they did was raise the rent. That same unit would now cost $1100/month.

Went apartment hunting yesterday with a 27-year-old desperate to find a home for her and her kids, after being unhoused for the last year. Each landlord charged a fee to apply. One required a $60 app fee AND a $150 admin fee, up front, both nonrefundable. The extortion is unreal. This was in Atlanta, where the rental market is so tight that tenants have no choice but to pay these fees, even when they have little chance of being approved—as is the case with this woman, who has an eviction on her record from 2014. Landlords, meanwhile, are making a killing.

Truly insane that the two largest cities in this country have declared open war on unhoused people at precisely the moment when three million Americans are at risk of being forced out of their homes. Our cities will do *literally anything*—warehouse homeless people in jails and unsafe shelters, design public spaces where it's impossible (if not illegal) to sleep or use the bathroom—to avoid doing the one thing that actually prevents and ends homelessness: giving people homes.

This week in US housing policy:

LA makes it illegal to be unhoused in practically every area of the city.

NYC forcibly moves thousands of homeless people from hotels to unsafe barracks-like shelters.

@POTUS and Congress allow millions to be evicted during a deadly Covid surge. @POTUS This spectacular disdain for homeless & precariously housed tenants is really the outcome of policies and attitudes normalized long before the pandemic: a rapacious, dehumanizing housing market, a view of unhoused people as disposable and unworthy of even the most basic rights...

We need a history of homelessness in the US that begins not—as in most textbook versions—with destitute white men (Riis’s “great army of tramps”) but with the 1 to 4 million formerly enslaved people deprived of housing and forced into a labor economy of low wages, rent, and debt. This alternative account would also include the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly displaced tens of thousands of Native people.

That our histories of the subject are silent on these moments of dispossession has distorted our perception of homelessness in profound ways.

An Amazon worker in Missouri fell sick with Covid and had an eviction filed against her. When she went to the courthouse to fight it, security wouldn’t let her in...BECAUSE SHE HAD COVID.

The judge allowed the case to proceed without her. She was evicted. ksdk.com/article/news/i… This is so unbelievably vile.

For @Harpers, I wrote about the collateral damage of America’s war on opioids: chronic pain sufferers who are being cut off from their medication. It’s a story of bad drug policy, medical abandonment, and the nightmare of living with undertreated pain harpers.org/archive/2018/0… I reported the piece from Great Falls, MT, where one of the area’s only pain clinics had forcibly reduced (or cut entirely) the dosages of hundreds of patients—even if they’d been stable on opioids for years, with no signs of misuse or violations of the clinic’s “pain contract”