LA Skid Row anchors Catholic Worker 'to the suffering world'

[shrike3]

https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/la-skid-row-anchors-catholic-worker-suffering-world?fbclid=IwAR05yO3e4IO-Zj8zOXMo_dzBst-2nPq3_fPuuh0GsPJwyYDgACk4KIlZ20Y

THIS IS A SAFE HAVEN GROUP. NON-MEMBERS ARE WELCOME TO COMMENT SO LONG AS THEY FOLLOW OUR RULES (PINNED ABOVE)

The only people we knew who would be crazy enough to buy shopping carts for homeless people was us, the Catholic Workers. Since that first distribution of shopping carts in front of the police department we have given more than 100,000 shopping carts to homeless people on Skid Row.

One could easily dismiss our project as insane, but it meets the needs of homeless people where they are actually situated in real life. I have seen people turn our carts over, put a tarp on top and sleep inside. The homeless are daily harassed and told to "move on." To do so, they need to be able to move their meager possessions to the next location. They also use our carts for recycling, to earn essential income.

As Skid Row continued to evolve from one homeless encampment into the squalid Beirut and Baghdad refugee encampments of today, we took our fight to the courts. Along with help from civil rights attorney Carol Sobel, we won the constitutional right of homeless people to "security in their property and possessions." We also won the constitutional right of homeless people to be free from the "cruel and unusual punishment" of police harassment and jail time for the "crime" of sleeping on the sidewalks until such time as the city provides additional low cost shelter or housing for them.

As more and more areas of our city — indeed our entire country — begins to look like the tent cities of Skid Row, we must realize that the expanding American economy has left behind and abandoned a significant population to the status of homeless refugees.