Care Not Cash: “Pervasive Discrimination”
Mr. Jackson, a homeless Viet Nam War veteran, suffers from a severe physical disability that he procured during the war. His two legs are paralyzed, leaving him to get around in a wheelchair, wheeling his way from shelter to shelter, where he is occasionally fortunate enough to find a bed. Tragically, because Mr. Jackson is disabled and receives Veterans Benefits, he is excluded from receiving any benefits from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s pet project, Care Not Cash, and is left to fend for himself in San Francisco’s increasingly bureaucratic shelter system. Fortunately for veterans like Jackson, some folks are taking action to remedy and combat their predicament.
The Berkeley-based Disability Rights Advocates has filed a monumental lawsuit in San Francisco’s Federal court against Care Not Cash, claiming that the controversial shelter program practices “pervasive discrimination” against homeless people with disabilities. The lawsuit contends that excluding disabled homeless people from participating in Care Not Cash if they receive Supplemental Security Income, Social Security Disability Insurance, Veterans Benefits, or Disability Benefits violates civil rights laws designed to protect the disabled population.
Although statistics vary, it is estimated that more than 50% of San Francisco’s homeless population is disabled. According to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Care Not Cash illegally prevents people with disabilities from receiving such benefits of the program as the ability to make advance reservations for one of the few remaining shelter beds.
The current system allows Care Not Cash participants to make an advance reservation for 45 days, which is contingent upon their using the bed each night. The beds are held for three days; oftentimes, Care Not Cash enrollees do not show up to claim these beds. Consequently, every single night after 10:00 p.m., 60-80 shelter beds are released for that night only. Shelters turn down homeless people in quest of shelter because they are not Care Not Cash participants, even when in the past empty beds have existed within the shelter. So, because a person has a disability, and is thus unable to participate in Care Not Cash, they are refused shelter on the basis of this disability and left to fend for themselves.
For many people coping with a disability, traveling from shelter to shelter, and waiting in long lines only to be rejected, is a defeating and exhausting process, which oftentimes results in rejection from the ever-dwindling number of available and accessible beds in San Francisco.
The lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Advocates states, “The San Francisco homeless shelter system and the Care Not Cash program discriminate against disadvantaged homeless people with disabilities. The shelter system and the Care Not Cash program both fail to serve a large number of the most vulnerable homeless people with disabilities and inflict, often irreparably, damage to this large and fragile population.”
The current system functions as a cycle that leaves our most marginalized and at-risk population to sleep in the streets, only to be further persecuted via “quality of life” infractions, which often result in incarceration. Ironically, jail seems to be the place that the City prefers to offer as shelter to someone in need of help these days.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a nonprofit coalition working across the West Coast to uphold the rights of homeless people. The founder, Paul Boden, is irate about how the system treats homeless people in a sub-human and demeaning manner that lacks the compassion and humanity once present in the system:
“The City is treating shelter like it is a commodity and it isn’t right. Getting through the system is brutal. Shelter should never be where you set up your bureaucracy: It should be where you provide respite from the street so you can breathe and chill. What is happening is the City is turning emergency shelters into a fucking welfare program. The end result is that those who are the most severely disabled with the least ability to manage the beaurocracy because they are in crisis and they are mentally ill have the least chance of finding respite… The sense of community and the community being a compassionate body is gone.”
The lawsuit against Care Not Cash is an opportunity for everyone to take a long look at the current system, which clearly fails the people who need the most help. The shelter system is in peril, and it is simply inexcusable that the City excludes—due to their disabilities—deserving veterans like Jackson from receiving the little and ever-diminishing assistance.
MeganMercurio