By Charles Springer Santa Monica
I am writing this letter in response to those who do not like the fact that H.U.D. is giving $700,000 to get people off the streets. Your arguments that because people are impoverished they cannot live in your neighborhood is the same reason many people become homeless these days. Even Alan Greenspan echoed the cry to stop pushing the real estate prices up, or suffer dire consequences within the economy. You scream about being able to afford a place to live, scream about how you pay taxes and that gives you the right to dictate where people can and cannot live. But you seem to forget the main reason why you have the right to live where you live. It is called the Constitution. It was created to give all men and women freedom and was put there because of the taxation without representation and the religious persecutions of the settlers from England and then the rest Europe. The Constitution, which allows you the right to own property and basically do what you want with it, is the same Constitution which allows me the right to live where I please. Being able to “afford” property right now has become a tool to create economic discrimination by further eroding the middle class and creating a huge divide between the rich and the poor.
I recently spoke to someone from Italy, and she told me a few of her observations about America. First off, we are not free here as they are in Europe, that our society is, in many ways, repressed. Her second observation was the huge divide between the rich and the poor and the fact that there are so many homeless here. She told me that in most of Europe there are not that many homeless, that each country takes care of its poor and homeless population and the only ones who are homeless are the ones who choose to be. This is what the tourists see when they come here. And the comments I hear are the same: “Why doesn’t the government take care of its own people?”
This is what stops the tourists from coming here. Not the homeless community as a whole, but the fact that America boasts of being the richest, most powerful country in the world, yet it cannot take care of its own people. This is what angers other countries about our government telling them how to run their affairs and meddling. And now that this is beginning to happen, some of you want to complain about any of us not being able to “afford” it. You should really think long and hard about this, it is something you complain loudly about and when a solution begins to present itself that is totally outside of the “norm,” you complain. It is something which would work, and I feel it is about time for this. I also feel the warning from Mr. Greenspan is a very real one which should be heeded, unless you would like to join us on the streets.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 31, 2005. Read the original PDF.