May Newsletter – Housing is a Human Right

Hey neighbor,

I hope this message finds you well on this lovely, cool late spring evening. My name is Kasey Haxton and I’m the chair of the Housing is a Human Right campaign committee. I’m writing this newsletter today with the help of my fellow committee members. Thank you for showing your support for a better, more humane Corvallis, and for signing up to our mailing list. If you would like to stop receiving these newsletters at any time, please reply or send an email to [this email address] with the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line. This is our first ever newsletter for the campaign! We are still setting up our website. Future newsletters (though not necessarily next month’s newsletter) will be sent from an email address ending with @humanright.house.

First, we want to give you an update on what our campaign is doing and how you can engage with it more if you would like. Then, we’ll give a brief explanation of our campaign’s origins, and what we aim to accomplish. Lastly, we’ll cover decriminalizing homelessness, one of our three policy demands, in detail, in the second part of this newsletter. The other two policy demands will be covered in detail in the next two newsletters. This will likely be our longest newsletter ever, as we have a lot to cover. We hope you find it all useful!

Our campaign volunteers have been petitioning since April and we’ve collected more than 100 signatures so far. That’s probably how you first met us and where you signed up for this newsletter. Starting in mid-June, we will be increasing our petitioning to two days a week. We’ll be tabling at the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays and the First Alternative Co-op (North Store) on Sundays. Our goal with this petition is to collect at least 1000 signatures before the end of summer, and then give the petition to the City Council along with some public testimony. If you’re interested in helping to collect signatures or volunteering with the Housing is a Human Right campaign in any capacity, feel free to let us know by replying to this or future newsletters.

The origin of our campaign lies in the brutal contradiction that housing is a human right, and this right is regularly violated for our city’s poorest residents. This right is violated every time our city government performs a so-called sweep. If you’re unfamiliar, a sweep is a euphemism for the forced removal of people from their only home because their housing is deemed illegal for some reason or another. Many of us in this campaign have witnessed these sweeps take place in Corvallis over the last year. As far as we have seen, no realistic alternative for housing was offered when those folks only shelter was destroyed.

I saw people being forced out of their housing by Corvallis Police and then nearly all of that housing and their belongings within it, cleared and dropped into a dumpster by a bulldozer. I helped people take what they could as Corvallis Police were threatening them with arrest. I watched with them and other brave volunteers as their tents, shacks partially built with pallet wood, and tarps that they had just moments earlier called home, were swept into the trash. Most of those folks started rebuilding their housing again later that same day, just a little further away from the town’s core, further from any social service providers, just outside of city limits. Some moved only a few feet away from the park, just far enough to avoid their belongings being taken in the sweep. Some I never saw again.

The right to housing is affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 17 and 25) which the USA helped to create and of which the USA was an original signatory in 1948. But more importantly, housing is a fundamental human right as much as is the right to life, because housing is necessary for humans to live and the right to live is the most essential of all human rights. Depriving someone of their housing is tantamount to depriving that person of food or water. Oregonians experiencing homelessness die at a rate three times higher than Oregonians with legal housing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Housing is a Human Right is the name of our campaign, it is our slogan, and it is what we believe in. We will not stop our campaign until housing is respected as a human right in Corvallis. We can protect this vital human right with public policy; not merely ending the cruel and inhuman sweeps that only make people more homeless, but also by significantly investing in public housing and enacting real rent control. 

Stopping the sweeps is the easiest of our three policy prescriptions for the city to achieve, as it costs nothing and could be adopted at any City Council meeting. As far as we know, there is no policy nor directive from Council mandating that sweeps be carried out. If that is indeed the case, a policy announcing an end to sweeps could be adopted and announced by the City Manager at any time. It only requires the city stop proactively ordering its police and parks departments to disregard the human rights of its most vulnerable residents in destroying their homes. These sweeps are the primary punishment for the crime of being homeless. Our campaign’s demand for decriminalizing homelessness means first and foremost an end to the sweeps.

Rather than an essential human right, in Corvallis housing is primarily treated as a profitable commodity. Moreover, Corvallis housing is mostly rented rather than sold. A majority of our city’s more than 60,000 residents are renters, with about 59% of all occupied housing units being rentals. In next month’s newsletter we will cover rent control in detail, including how it can be implemented in our city. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this wonderful day in the neighborhood.