SALINAS, CA – The Monterey County/Salinas Homeless Union formed “out of a battle” in 2016, nine years ago today, on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday to defend the residents from an intense encampment, stated IndyBay.
IndyBay reports show this movement has expanded to organize California’s unhoused with around 24 locals and hundreds of union organized and led camps—there has also been a resurgence of thousands of members in the “camps, streets, shelters, boats and cars.”
The fight for “Housing NOW! No more death in the streets! “grows as the California Homeless Union Statewide Organizing Council said it has initiated ‘projects of survival’ during the pandemic and extreme weather conditions that have been met with ‘unprecedented records’” in courts, relays IndyBay.
Wes White, founder and co-president of Monterey County/Salinas Homeless Union, reiterates his stance on unifying the poor residents and most vulnerable in Monterey that experience homelessness, who are “day laborers sleeping in their cars…disabled…doubling and tripling up in substandard housing…can’t make rent or…lost their jobs.”
IndyBay shares the story of Rita Acosta, founder/co-president of Salinas Homeless Union and lead plaintiff of Acosta v. City of Salinas, who questions what dictates homelessness in the eyes of the disconnected.
She said she’s been living on the streets, has experienced “serious domestic violence in the past” where she was “beaten until (she) could not see straight,” reported IndyBay.
On January 20, 2016, the Salinas Homeless Union saved the city’s “largest homeless encampment from destruction,” reports IndyBay, and, since then, more than 25 Homeless Unions in California have grown and supported residents in RV parks, homeless shelters, motels and street encampments.
The union, reports IndyBay, has grown by thousands and expanded across California to “Marysville, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Fresno, El Centro, Sausalito, Oakland, Berkeley, Gilroy, San Luis Obispo, Vallejo, Novato, Pajaro/Watsonville, Ventura County, Venice Beach, Chico/Paradise and San Jose/Santa Clara County.”
IndyBay reports that three months before Jan. 20, 2016, Salinas had proposed and passed the ordinance on the Storage of Personal Property on City Property, which authorized police to “subjectively deem and immediately seize and destroy personal property items found in ‘public areas’ if such items were ‘broken, dirty or in disrepair.’”
According to IndyBay, Wes White was approached by Willie Baptist and Anthony Prince in regard to the re-establishment of the National Union of the Homeless, which previously had over 30,000 members across 30 states in the 1980-90s.
This initiative taken in Salinas inspired dozens of local unions, which led to the re-establishment of the National Union of the Homeless and the California Homeless Union/Statewide Organizing Council, reports IndyBay.
