The Crisis Governor McKee Won't Declare

Drumming Up Support for the People

The following excerpt is from a press release issued by the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP):

Providence, November 13, 2024 — Individuals with lived experience of homelessness and their allies will beat the drum to demand an end to unsheltered homelessness in Rhode Island. At the end of September of this year, Rhode Island had 1,260 unhoused people in emergency shelters and 625 living outside without shelter for a total of 1,885 people. This represents a near doubling of homelessness and an increase of 880 percent in unsheltered homelessness since 2019.

Hundreds of evictions every month have fueled these increases. According to the Rhode Island Housing dashboard, 6,929 households have been evicted in the state in 2024, overwhelmingly due to the tenant’s inability to pay skyrocketing rents. If you lack family or friends to stay with, individuals and families wind up on the street. Then, instead of meeting the needs of those living outside, municipalities and police in the state continually harass people experiencing homelessness and raid their homeless encampments.

Efforts by the Department of Housing to add emergency shelter beds and permanent housing for those living outside have been met with regulatory, zoning, and Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) barriers. The Pallet emergency shelter ECHO Village with 45 individual shelters has been fully built since April of this year but is not occupied due to state regulatory delays. This is unacceptable and could have been avoided if a state of emergency had been declared.

Therefore the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project and our allies including Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE), the Rhode Island Poor People’s Campaign, Better Lives Rhode Island (BLRI), and the Mathewson Church Housing Justice Committee call on Governor McKee and municipal leaders to:

1. Governor McKee — Declare a State of Emergency so that we treat this human crisis with the urgency it deserves!

2. Add additional shelter beds with paths to permanent housing now to provide a roof over the head of every Rhode Islander!

3. Mayor Smiley and other municipal leaders, stop police raids of encampments until residents have acceptable shelter or housing alternatives!

Right behind Karen Kiley, as she begins speaking at 46 seconds into the video, Sister Mary Pendergast appears holding a Poor People’s Campaign sign that reads:

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"Everybody’s got a right to live."

What a concept! As Terri Wright rightly emphasizes at 54 seconds, as she addresses unsheltered homelessness:

"This falls on the shoulders of the governor."

Indeed, the botched rollout of the rapidly deployable—everywhere but in Rhode Island!—Pallet shelters could have been avoided if Governor McKee had cut through the red tape and addressed regulatory issues, as Professor Eric Hirsch of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project pointed out. This failure stands in stark contrast to Governor McKee’s non-committal remark:

"So, the Pallet shelters will be up and running."

Former Rhode Island Senator Kendra Anderson, speaking at the protest and quoted in Steve Ahlquist’s comprehensive report, Beating the Drum to end unsheltered homelessness in Rhode Island, had this to say:

I used to work in the State House. This is a failure of leadership from the top down. Leadership in our State is preventing the legislators who want to make a difference. They are stunted every time they try to pass bills because the leadership—from McKee to the Speaker of the House to the Senate President—don’t let them pass legislation.

We’ve got a real problem with leadership, and I hope to see many people up at the State House this year addressing this. Some of the partners are not here because they fear they will not pass their legislation—that’s how it works. You have to kiss the ring.

The systemic problem, reflected in the disastrous rollout of the Pallet shelters, was identified long ago by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967—exactly a year before his assassination:

We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

"Rapidly"—you can say that again. Year after year, more than 50 percent of the federal discretionary budget is funneled into the war economy. Clearly, in the U.S., so-called "national security" does not prioritize the security of the people. There is only one jobs program that garners overwhelming bipartisan support: weapons production. The U.S. power elite recognize only one solution to all problems—spreading violence, death, and destruction across the globe.

The idea of taxing the rich in any meaningful way never seems to enter the minds of our so-called leaders. Maybe once in a while, a courageous legislator will propose a one percent increase here or there, while forgetting that the top bracket was taxed at above 90 percent in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the heightening homelessness crisis continues to be ignored across the state. Our healthcare system grows ever more profit-driven—a reality that medical professionals universally condemn as incompatible with meeting the needs of the people. South County Hospital in Wakefield is just one of the latest casualties of this relentless trend.

The “dependent,” as opposed to the independent, media are controlled by kleptocrats—let’s call them what they are: thieves. The same applies to social media platforms and their owners. Similarly, pharmacies and healthcare insurance companies are dominated by serial violators of antitrust laws, with Rhode Island’s own CVS leading the pack.

Retirement income independent of work history, free public education, and Medicare for All are dismissed as “socialism” by those who wouldn’t recognize such features as essential to a developed society, even as they help build their roads, teach their children, and heal their wounds.