The homeless people camping on the Common are drawing our attention to an urgent housing crisis in our community. As landlords continue raising rents with impunity and buying up downtown buildings, we see a contradiction in the glorified rhetoric about how businesses and real estate investment “benefit the community.”
Who, exactly, benefits from the higher housing prices our “up and coming” town can now demand? Who counts as being part of “our” community? Obviously not our neighbors who have been rendered homeless, and who are now being treated more as eyesores than as human beings. Those who lack empathy and imagination, like Councilman Isaac Mass, don’t view these people as being part of our community; they want simply to shoo them away, shunting them onto ever-more distant chunks of unprofitable land so that more affluent residents won’t have to be made uncomfortable by the visible evidence of how profits for some mean the impoverishment of others.
A humane, community-oriented approach to the homeless encampment would not entail further criminalizing poverty and enclosing the Common with laws, as Mass suggests. Instead, we could impose limits on rents and housing prices as well as on how many buildings a single landlord can buy downtown; we could increase the amount of available affordable housing; we could establish a livable minimum wage, etc.
Pro-business politicians like Mass will never approve such solutions, though, because although they would greatly improve the lives of actual human beings and vastly strengthen our community by lowering rates of crime and drug addiction, they would mean lower profits for the rich, and as we can see, it is only the rich who count as citizens.
Marianna Ritchey
Greenfield