Personal possessions, including medicines and necessary medical devices, are routinely thrown away. It’s a quotidian event that Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, described as a “cruelty” that she hasn’t seen in other impoverished corners of the world.
“'The idea that a government would deny people those services … when they have nowhere else to go suggests a kind of cruelty that is unsurpassed,” Farha told Business Insider. “It’s an attempt to erase people. Worse than erase — I can only use the word annihilate. It is a denial of someone’s humanity.'”
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Under international human rights law, governments are required “to apply the maximum of available resources to upgrading informal settlements” like slums, shanty towns, and homeless encampments.
“The struggle in the south is to legalize and regularize encampments,” she said. “Here, the struggle is simply to be able to create an encampment. In the south, there’s sort of a blind eye that has turned. Once an informal settlement is created, it’s established. Whereas here, they can’t create them.”
In the Bay Area, Farha talked to many people who were temporarily living in an encampment before they were ordered to move by city officials during a “tent sweep.”
“It’s damaging because they always have to move,” she says. “They’re treated like nonentities. Sometimes they say (belongings are) put in storage, but more often they’ll dump everyone’s possessions into one Dumpster. It’s horrible. It’s not dignified. The people have nowhere to go. It’s illogical. It’s tragic.”
Nice words don’t change the fact that we’re violating international law and abusing vulnerable people, they actually make it a lot worse because a lot more people would recognize what we’re doing and be horrified if moderate Dems didn’t do this propagandizing bullshit.