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Hospitality to the Homeless ˜ 121
is still a feeling around the city that, if we do anything to help the homeless poor,
there will automatically be more of them. So rather than risk that happening, we
make our public spaces inhospitable to everyone. It is a big problem for the elderly,
for people with small children, for those with kidney and bladder problems,
and, at one time or another, for everybody.
But the city’s approach is also a way to make certain groups continually experience
indignity. Our friend Tirso Moreno, who organizes farmworkers in
central Florida, has told us of the ongoing struggle to have the growers provide
portable toilets near the fields. A law finally passed requiring growers to provide
toilets; but without constant enforcement, the growers often let it slide. The
workers must take care of their personal needs in the fields. Is this humiliation
really unintended
Mr. W. W. Law, one of the heroic figures in the civil rights struggle in Savannah,
Georgia, has often told of his work as a mail carrier. He walked all day,
but he never had easy access to a bathroom. Did white people know the real effect
of reserving bathrooms for Whites Only Was the indignity forced on Mr.
Law’s daily life an unintended consequence of the white supremacist structure
of Savannah in the 1940s I doubt it. These days, privileged people often talk
about how homeless people are dirty and smell bad, and how disgusting that is.
But what would any of us do if we got up in the morning and had no access to
a toilet, toilet paper, running water, soap, and a towel What if we didn’t have a
shower and a sink and a mirror To condemn people for a condition about which
they can do little or nothing is mean and pointless.
The real problem for homeless people, of course, is that they don’t have
homes. Affordable housing is what homeless people need more than anything.
In all but the very worst housing, people have access to their own bathrooms—
at least when they are at home. In the meantime, it is punitive, mean-spirited
public policy to punish the poor for what every human body must do. Public
toilets would provide a modicum of relief from the indignity of homelessness.
As our friends Alice Callahan and the Los Angeles Catholic Workers said in their
(successful) campaign for toilets on Skid Row, “We need outhouses for people
without houses.”
It is way past time to have public toilets in Atlanta, Georgia. We could do
the right thing to alleviate some of the misery of homelessness, or we could do
it because we want to be a decent city that provides hospitable space for all its
citizens. Either way will do. Let’s just do it.