What is a Home?

by IntiGonzalez.com

The reality of the war in Gaza was such a shock to me, especially since my country is an equal contributor to the violence unfolding there. It made me go out and protest, learn and get involved like never before. It was hard, even scary, to make that initial step to help carry such immense pain, but doing so allowed me to learn more than I ever thought I would about myself.

These people who had homes that were made up of communities, cultures and personal spaces are having everything taken away from them through racist colonization at its worst. I felt this pain and realized that it was familiar to what I felt in my own struggles with homelessness.

America has been at war for nearly its entire existence. As a country our history is riddled with colonizing behavior within and outside of our borders. America itself was born from the colonization of this land from the Native Americans. According to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, Native Americans are the second most likely to experience homelessness, behind Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and ahead of Black Americans.

In my home, the Bay Area, many can no longer stay without struggle, homelessness or prison. Wealth and stability is made difficult to reach; therefore segregation and colonization by richer, mostly caucasian people seeps in and destroys lives. If you have no money, you have no value. It doesn’t matter if your community has lived here for generations.

I left my family home in 2021 to be a caretaker in exchange for housing in Richmond. I knew the housing was unstable because any day the woman I was caring for could pass from old age. After one year, I started having confrontations with the woman’s daughter. Returning to a toxic home life with my family simply wasn’t an option. I’d rather live on the streets.

I needed more time to find affordable housing. So I ended up moving to a cold garage on the secluded hills of El Sobrante. I spent six months there. Six months as legally homeless. What a stressful time that was. To this day it still amazes me that I wasn’t even experiencing close to the worst of it like many people on the streets who are struggling with mental and physical disabilities. Some people on the streets are literally dying. Like people in war, or a genocide, where terror is their daily reality until a bomb or a bullet full of hatred takes their lives, homes and people.

Currently, I live in a warehouse in Oakland that is housing 200 artists, musicians and circus performers. I see art along every hallway. I feel the culture of the East Bay in my home and the people who live in it. It reminds me of the stories I would hear about what the Bay used to be like. The music and creativity, the community and culture. My home is one of the last affordable housing communities in the area. There were many more just a few years ago, but they got shut down.

I love my home and my community. I love this city. Sadly, Oakland often feels like a forgotten place, which segregation has greatly assisted with. Like the war on Gaza, It’s easier to colonize and abuse and pretend a problem doesn’t exist when borders of any kind, invisible or otherwise, exist. I see the corruption and hardship every day but I can tell that the beautiful people of Oakland are what keep the city alive. But they are leaving too, the great majority of them not by choice. Lack of affordable housing continues to be the leading cause of homelessness. If they don’t leave then they will be forced to the streets, an extremely stressful and dangerous environment that leads many to drugs and crime, which in turn leads them to death or imprisonment.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the U.S. accounts for 20% of the world’s total prison population. We have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, currently detaining more than 2 million people. African Americans and Native Americans lead all other racial and ethnic groups in incarceration rates. Even in what many would call a stable home, I still feel the instability. Every time a unit empties—which usually houses three to six people—the landlords are allowed to renovate it and bring the rent up to unaffordable value. COVID-19 job loss managed to wipe out a lot of my building neighbors, and it still continues to do so today. A big reason is because of the overwhelming rent debts.

I went to the moving sale of one of my neighbors, a very nice and creative person. Being the only one in a four-room unit he owed $30,000. Like many, he had trouble with his work and finding tenants to help him pay the rent. Difficulty sustaining units financially when multiple people move out is a very real threat.

Two women came in and bought a table saw for their woodworking projects. They told us how they were also moving out since they had a rent debt of $80,000.

Keep in mind that this is just one of a variety of tools being used to drive us out. These situations make me fear that my home may soon be next.

My homeless neighbor has been trying with no success to find affordable housing for him and his son.

I had walked past a trailer with a mother of three kids, the youngest one had got to be around 4.

I had visited my other homeless neighbor and saw her with a pained look on her face. She had just lost another relative to drugs.

I gave a hug to a man who wept because he had just gotten out of prison and had nowhere to go, no money for food, and had been previously dealing with family and drug issues.

What I’m talking about is really just a small fraction of the injustice that happens at America’s hands, in our country and in all the counties we have affected and continue to affect.

So I genuinely ask, what are we doing wrong? Why can all the world’s biggest “criminals” do literally whatever they want because of their wealth? Why can they rob us of all that we have, including our lives? And been allowed to do so since our country began? How can this happen when the great majority of us do not want this?

We need to question the core issue of this problem to help not just eliminate homelessness but all other legally supported human injustices, because really it’s all coming from the same place: A broken system where it’s easy for billionaires to exist while the poor lay on the streets, where racism is systemic and war—another form of racism—is more funded than basic education and health care.

A system run by corrupt people who are also governing a nation that has given up its power to the corrupt.

If we want to change things, we must realize that we should take responsibility to effect change. Telling a small percent of millionaires and billionaires to change will never work. We ourselves must change.

Only together can we solve any and every world problem. I want to see a real change in my lifetime, and I believe it will happen, and I will fight till it does—for all our fellow human brothers and sisters, no matter the gender, pigment of skin, or culture. No matter the distance and borders that seem to separate us.