(NEW YORK) MintPress – It may be the smallest of the 50 states, but Rhode Island is proving it has one of the nation’s biggest hearts when it comes to handling the homeless.
While many municipalities are trying to eradicate homelessness by trying to crackdown on transients, Governor Lincoln Chaffee has just signed into law the country’s first Homeless Bill of Rights, which prohibits governments, police, health care workers, landlords and employers from treating homeless people unfairly because of their housing status.
At a celebration on Wednesday, advocates for the homeless praised Rhode Island’s leadership on the issue.
“In Rhode Island, hatred, bigotry and discrimination is not accepted,” said John Joyce, co-founder of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP) and one of the authors of the new law.
State Rep. Christopher Blazejewski, who sponsored the House version of the bill, asserted, “Any society should pride itself in how it treats the least well-off. We should ensure they don’t face discrimination on top of everything else that comes with being homeless.”
Bucking the trend
Unfortunately, not only is ill treatment of the homeless increasingly accepted in many other states, but homelessness is also being criminalized.
“We’ve seen a lot of egregious examples lately,” said Heather Johnson, a civil rights attorney with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “People are having their civil rights violated every day in cities across the country.”
In Colorado, the Denver City Council voted last month to ban eating or sleeping on public or private property without permission. While Denver’s homeless population is lower than other major cities, homeless residents have suffered during Denver’s notoriously cold winters, and officials acknowledge this number has increased over the past few years.
In Dallas, local officials have prohibited people from offering food to the homeless unless they register with the city first.
And authorities in San Francisco, often considered the homelessness capital of the United States, along with Los Angeles, passed a city ordinance in 2010 that disallowed sitting and lying down on public sidewalks for most of the day, from 7am until 11pm.
A recent report by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness blasted such moves, saying, “Criminalization policies further marginalize men and women who are experiencing homelessness, fuel inflammatory attitudes, and may even unduly restrict constitutionally protected liberties.”
Nationwide problem
Not surprisingly, since the onset of the housing crisis in 2008, which left many unable to pay mortgages or rent, the number of homeless in America has been on the rise.
While the very nature of homelessness makes it hard to know the full extent of the problem, perhaps the most accurate, comprehensive and current data is reported every year by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.
According to the 2010 report, in a single night in January 2010, there were 649,917 people experiencing homelessness, up from January 2009’s 643,067.
And more than 1.59 million people spent at least one night in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program at some point during the 2010 reporting period, which was a 2.2 percent increase from 2009.
Rhode Island hit hard
While the recession has affected people everywhere, Rhode Island has the second-highest unemployment rate in the country and is one of the few states without consistent yearly funding for homeless prevention and affordable housing, according to Jim Ryczek, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless.
Some 4,140 of the state’s residents passed through the shelter system last year.
That led the Coalition and other advocates, along with churches and Brown University students, to launch a campaign to get an equal rights law passed. Among their tactics was holding a weekly soup kitchen inside the Statehouse in Providence.
“The whole idea was to put it in their face: this is homelessness,” explained the Coalition’s associate director, Karen Jeffreys.
Sending a message
Rhode Island’s bill of rights was designed not only to be enforceable — homeless people who believe they have faced discrimination can sue — but also to let the public know that the homeless have the same rights as anyone else.
Indeed, the bill also guarantees confidentiality of personal records, the right to receive voting materials and the right to privacy of personal property.
Said state Senator John Tassoni (D-Smithfield), “Now we’re a leader in something. Hopefully other states will now pick up the slack and move this all the way across the country to California.”
Closer to home, meanwhile, the new legislation is welcome news to 46-year-old Michele St. Pierre of Providence.
She became homeless after being evicted from her apartment because she couldn’t pay the rent and now stays with friends or on the street if she can’t find anywhere else to go.
St. Pierre said a police officer recently threatened to detain her if she didn’t leave a bus stop in the center of the city. “He said, ‘I’ll give you five minutes to get out of here and then I’m going to arrest you,’” she recalled.
Joyce of RIHAP said this campaign was like other civil rights movements. “Hopefully people will realize that people without homes are just like anybody else. I hope things change.”