6.5 Structural Issues of Houselessness
Nora Karena
Let’s consider how, for many communities, housing insecurity is a legacy of historic patterns of removal, exclusion and discrimination that have specifically targeted Native Americans, African Americans, and LGBTQIA+ families.
Structural Causes of Indigenous Houselessness
In Multnomah County, Oregon, Indigenous people make up 2.5 % of the population, but 10% of people who are unhoused (Schmid 2017). Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any racial-ethnic group. As of 2021, 25.9% of Native Americans experienced poverty, according to the US Census (KFF 2022).
The government’s control over Indigenous people’s living conditions contributes to this circumstance. When the US government forcibly removed Native Americans to reservation lands, it also retained ownership of that land. The government holds reservation lands “in trust” for the tribal nations. Trusts are financial arrangements that allow a third-party trustee to hold and control assets on behalf of a beneficiary. The underlying justification for most trusts is that the beneficiaries can not be trusted to properly manage their assets. While this might be acceptable for minor children who inherit large sums of money, this paternalistic oversight of Native American people perpetuates systems of displacement and genocide that have been visited upon Indigenous people in the Americas for 600 years.
We hear about tribal rights and casinos, and debate using harmful stereotypical images for sports teams. However, most non-tribal members don’t recognize how the US government limits homeownership for Native Americans (Schaefer Riley 2016). For example, Native Americans who fought alongside White GIs in World War II have been denied the opportunity to create the same generational wealth as other American veterans. Because reservation land is held in trust, the returning Native American veterans were excluded from the GI Bill home loans for homes on reservation land. Although not all Indigenous people agree that private land ownership is the right goal today, the lack of access to home ownership via the GI Bill is one of several discriminatory policies that racialized home ownership in the mid-20th Century. Let’s look at the discriminatory lending and zoning practices to learn more.
Creating Under-resourced Communities: Racism, Segregation, Redlining
In this section, we talk about residential segregation, the physical separation of two or more groups into different neighborhoods. To understand the roots of racially segregated housing policies, we need to start with enslavement and the racist ideas that justified it. You might remember that Ibram X. Kendi asserts that any policies that result in racial inequity and ideas that justify or excuse racial inequity are racist. Racist ideas about the supposed inferiority of people who are Black include ideas about “degeneracy,” cleanliness, laziness, sexual habits, drug use, and dishonesty. Even thoug