Disease does not care about class divisions or housing status. If you leave anybody vulnerable to COVID-19, you increase your whole city’s vulnerability to COVID-19. When you increase access to stable, humane housing, you increase the health of your city. When you support and prioritize the health of your friends and community members who are experiencing homelessness, you support and prioritize the health of your healers in the hospitals and the health of those organizing in the community.
Op-ed: Homeless people should get vaxxed
This is the most difficult piece I have ever had to write on the issue of homelessness and supportive housing. Like all of you, I tend to be very hesitant about bureaucratic hurdles that keep people from being able to access housing from homelessness, and through this, I still will be in the vast majority of circumstances.
However, the resurgence of COVID-19 due to the delta variant and widespread vaccine refusal has forced my hand,
Tariq’s Narrative on Living and Surviving Homelessness
Editor’s note — we ran the first part of this piece in March of 2020, with the intention of running Part 2 in April. By April we were temporarily out of print as we grappled with how to continue the Street Sheet program safely while COVID raged in our communities. We’re so happy to be back in print twice a month, and to finally share Tariq’s story with our readers. Here is the full story:
I’m not sure where to begin and end this short tale about my homelessness.
Op-Ed: Global Warming is Real
Developing nations could go solar in fighting climate change
We all know that fossil fuels cause the greenhouse effect and global warming. The question is how to stop it. For decades, activists protested against nuclear power. Germany closed many nuclear power plants. To generate electricity they are now burning dirty coal. Green energy—wind and solar—is still a very small part of the energy mix worldwide. Meanwhile, the greenhouse effect is becoming stronger and more deadly.
A Light In The Dark
In the winter of 2013, I started working at a small Italian restaurant. It was close to where I lived in the Upstate NY town that I had moved to in 2012. My husband and I had left NYC after Hurricane Sandy destroyed our home and everything in it. I was lucky to escape with just the clothes on my back and my little blind cat, Grumbles. Grumbles was a ginger cat that I had rescued when I found him on a Brooklyn street,
