Down and out and on the move
Leading a feisty army of homeless people, fiery activist Cheri Honkala is about to descend on the Republican Convention.
By Michelle Goldberg
Aug. 5, 2004 | On Aug. 30, the first day of the Republican National Convention in New York, Cheri Honkala is going to march from the United Nations to Madison Square Garden with or without a protest permit. Behind her will be homeless women and their children, men furloughed from rehab centers, public housing tenants, wheelchair-bound people without healthcare and poor people hanging on to life by their fingernails. Arrayed against them will be walls of police in riot gear, armed with the latest in high-tech crowd-control devices and ready for mass arrests. For the past two weeks, Honkala and her followers have been marching across New Jersey, and undercover police have been videotaping and photographing them. Fearing violence, Honkala has put out a call for international human rights observers to watch over her group during the RNC.
Most of Honkala's group can't afford legal trouble or physical confrontations. Yesenia Cruz, a 24-year-old mother of five, is more than eight months pregnant. Elizabeth Ortiz, a fiery, stick-thin mother of three, has a weak heart -- she had a triple bypass before she turned 40. Craig Tann is a drug addict and former dealer who once served three years in prison and doesn't want to go back. But they're going to march anyway, partly out of determination and partly out of dedication to Honkala. She's helped some off the streets. She's helped others find jobs or get disability payments. She's given all of them the dignity of belonging to a cause larger than themselves. Many of them seem like they would follow her anywhere.
This is the germ of the movement that many activists have long dreamed of building. Endless words have been spilled bemoaning the lack of diversity on the left, the devolution of protest into a subculture for the disaffected children of the middle class. Attend any organizing meeting for protests against the Republican National Convention and you're bound to hear someone remark, wryly or sadly, on the crowd's whiteness. Honkala, though, has managed to organize and radicalize people who never before contemplated any kind of political action, people who regard McDonald's as a delicious treat rather than a corporate abomination. They are people who've already suffered a lot and are choosing to suffer a little more in the service of her vision.
The movement, as everyone who marches with Honkala calls it, is built around the conviction that homelessness is a societal failing, not a personal one. When most people think of homelessness, they imagine the ragged, disoriented people who sleep on the streets of most cities. Many of those people need treatment for drug problems or mental illness, and when such people come to Honkala, she refers them to rehab programs. But as she emphasizes, there's another side to homelessness, one that's invisible to most Americans. It's made up of people who've slipped off the last rung of the economic ladder and can't get a leg back up. Many of them are single mothers with children. People like her.
According to a 2003 survey of 25 American cities commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, families make up 40 percent of the homeless population -- a number that's increased since the previous year. Worse, that figure may understate the problem. A national study by the Urban Institute found that children alone make up 39 percent of the homeless population.
These people frequently try to maintain the façade of normality, sleeping on friends' floors for as long as their kindness holds out, then in shelters or cars. But funding for the social programs and the subsidized housing that such families need to escape homelessness has dried up under the Bush administration, meaning that parents and children are remaining homeless for longer, making it ever harder to hold on to ordinary life. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, a decade ago the average length of time that New York families stayed in shelters before finding permanent housing was five months. Now it's almost a year.
Honkala sees the fallout from this backlog. "There have been massive cutbacks across the country in Section 8," she says, referring to the federal subsidized-housing program. "Right now, you can go all across the country and the shelters are full. The battered women's shelters are full. There isn't any affordable housing and there's no plans for it. People have been gentrified off the face of the earth."
The march through New Jersey and to Madison Square Garden is intended to force these people into view. "The media is not talking about the real stories happening to people every day in this country," she says. "We're going to fight to reach someone. Why? Because we have to. With 1,400 reporters coming into the city, it's a real opportunity. We've got one shot to talk about the hidden war in this country."
Next page: Yesterday, Hooverville; today, Bushville
