The Mayor of Illusions and False Hopes
By KEITH MCHENRY
On July 10th, Santa Cruz Mayor Justin Cummings asked people to widely share the city’s joint partnership with the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County, Inc. (CAB) announcement of an Emergency Eviction Prevention Program. “Emergency housing assistance will be provided for payment of past due rent incurred on or after April 1st, 2020. A maximum of two month’s assistance is available for eligible applicants with a monthly limit not to exceed $2,500 and a maximum limit of $5,000 total per household. Payments will be made directly to the landlord on behalf of the household.”
Over 20,000 people filed for unemployment in Santa Cruz County since the
pandemic closed down California. Through Food Not Bombs, I feed the evicted and can tell you the crisis is already extreme even under the city and state's temporary eviction moratoriums. I don’t believe one landlord has been prosecuted for violating this moratorium even though I meet freshly evicted tenants at our meals several times a week.
Like nearly every city announcement, the Emergency Eviction Prevention
Program will be an illusion to most of those facing an end to their housing. If you want to see how successful the city's claims of doing a great job addressing Covid-19 are, I suggest you try to get a hotel room voucher for a compromised elderly or homeless. Remember the announcement of the city’s “Triage Centers” that turned out to be short term fenced in parking lots erected across the city.
Headlines blared, “Santa Cruz coronavirus ‘triage centers’ in the works for city’s unsheltered population.” Assistant City Manager Susie O’Hara tells the Sentinel, “Direct folks to a place where there is adequate spacing, per the CDC guidelines for social distancing, hygiene and sanitation resources and medical assessment to evaluate what should be the next step for that individual.”
That same week, Police Chief Mills stood outside the post office for three hours watching his officers violate the CDC guidelines against sweeping homeless camps. That evening 60 unhoused people would be struggling to sleep on a gym mat eight inches from their neighbor at the Laurel Street Shelter. It took another month before conditions there would change.
It is mid-July and cases of Covid-19 are spiking across the country. Santa Cruz has not been spared. Businesses are failing. The Poet and the Patriot is one of the latest casualties of government incompetence, yet the city still has no plan to respond to the crisis.
Emily Benfer, director of the Health Justice Advocacy Clinic at Columbia
Law School, writes that between 20 million and 28 million American renters are "perilously close to eviction.” Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies states that only one in four eligible renter households have received financial assistance.
The city was already unable to address the crisis of those who had been forced out of their housing when it voted to evict over 200 people from Ross Camp into the doorways and parks of the surrounding area. It took a pandemic to place portable toilets around town. They are still not willing to provide
drinking water to those who live outside.
Justin Cummings is the Mayor of illusions. Takes a knee and takes what is left of the possessions of those already evicted out into our streets.
