Morgantown City Councilor Brian Butcher: Housing is a human right

Brian Butcher is a Morgantown City Councilor representing the seventh ward and is a co-founder of West Virginia Housing Justice. Recently, Brian was one of three city councilors to vote against Morgantown’s public camping ban targeting people experiencing homelessness, which ultimately passed by a vote of 4-3. Following are selected highlights of a recent discussion between Brian and Mustard Seed Mountain’s editorial team:

MSM: Firstly, please just introduce yourself however you’d like, and tell us a little bit about the work you do and why you do it!

BRIAN: My name is Brian Butcher. I am the seventh ward city councilor for Morgantown, West Virginia, honored boy dad, and community organizer and advocate. Most of my work is centered around housing. I see housing as the primary fault line that we as community organizers can push for material benefits for those we are in the community with and as a universal path to class consciousness for a majority of individuals, because most of us have experienced some form of housing insecurity. I have run an emergency sheltering program based on giving people low-barrier short-term access to hotel rooms for the past three years along with dozens of mutual aid campaigns, including a recently started mutual aid fair akin to what SOAR does in Charleston. I have participated in and led many community actions around various issues in town, most notably building the housing justice movement here in North Central West Virginia pushing for reforms and pushing back against the fascist initiatives against the poor. 

MSM: As you know, both Wheeling and Morgantown City Councils have now passed what are being called “urban camping bans,” which basically make it illegal to exist in public as a person experiencing homelessness. As someone with perspective from both sides of this struggle—having once been homeless and now serving on Morgantown City Council—what are your thoughts on these “camping bans,” and what do they say about the priorities of the city councilors supporting them? Why are they doing things like this instead of focusing on helping people who are clearly struggling?

BRIAN: To be frank, I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is that this city council thought this camping ban was a good idea. In the lead up to this ban, community advocates were turning out every single meeting to ask the council to do something to alleviate the dire situation that unhoused people in our city face daily. Any number of these policies would also have had the supposed intended effect of this ordinance as well: allowing people better access to services and helping to alleviate some of the complaints we hear from property owners who do not want to see poor people. Instead, as soon as Grants Pass was decided by the Supreme Court, this council took up the one initiative no one was asking for, at least not in public… After hearing hours of testimony, first-hand accounts, local state politicians, advocates and alternatives, why they prioritized this ban likely comes down to a lack of will and imagination. So many cities are struggling with the crippling externalities of capitalism and the use of housing as an investment tool rather than what it really represents in our society: a basic human need that should be guaranteed. Instead of working through these problems from a holistic perspective and treating homelessness for what it is—a community problem—cities instead rely on the only tool they have ever been reliably able to marshal: that of the police state. I often say when referring to the dug-in nature of our council that they see every problem as a nail that can only be remedied by the hammer of state violence. This council has ordinances that are fully formed—some of them completely vetted by city administration—that could have been considered. We could have built community resources before doing this, but, instead, we reached for the easy tool and seemingly wiped our hands of the problem in service of rich, out-of-state and Charleston elite interests. 

MSM: Instead of trying to criminalize homelessness and over-police people dealing with poverty in our communities, what sort of initiatives and policies should our city councils be working on implementing toward the goals of ending homelessness and alleviating extreme poverty?

BRIAN: There are dozens of resources one could tap into that are readily available for policymakers. These policies often have long track records of over-performing in terms of effectiveness in solving community problems. One problem we face in Morgantown which is not unique to us but is quite unique in West Virginia is that we often have a great deal of vacant rental property. While at the same time I can tell you from first-hand experience, it is quite difficult to get individuals into housing when they have finally attained a housing choice voucher—HUD no longer builds public housing in any meaningful way—and this is often folks’ only option for long-term housing: a voucher that pays their rent. There are a few ways I have proposed to address this problem. First is a ban on source-of-income discrimination. I have a bill for this written, and council has seen it. But they have not moved it to an agenda. What this would do is stop landlords from explicitly not renting to an individual based on where their income comes from, be that a voucher, social security, veterans pension, Instacart or Twitch. I have personally been to apartment showings with people who are ready to sign a lease, and, as the landlord realizes the individual will be using a voucher to pay rent—which is guaranteed, by the way, no chasing down a tenant for rent anymore—the landlord denies the tenant. Another reform that could help in this regard would be to incentivize landlords to keep apartments up to HUD standards or to rehabilitate apartments to bring them up to those standards as long as they are rented on vouchers. We often have apartments that fall out of compliance with a HUD inspection, and, therefore, an individual has to move out or is discharged altogether and is back on street level because they cannot find another apartment. In Pittsburgh, the housing authority allows for landlords who have brought apartments up to standard and are made voucher-eligible to charge a percentage over what the voucher would cover and the city covers the rest of the rent for the individual. This would increase the amount of units available for the voucher program and raise overall habitability for those who are on voucher programs. 

These are two of many reforms that could be introduced, but the sad truth is that many of the things we can realistically push for in city and state government are nowhere near sufficient—and even these don't get done. What we need are massive projects by the state to decommodify housing. Shelter should be viewed by the state as basic infrastructure just like roads and mail delivery. In order to do that, we need massive public housing programs that allow for someone to live in a home regardless of income, without paying for it, or if we must, paying very little for it. You can't do that overnight in a city in West Virginia, but you can invest in actual low-income housing that is built by and managed by the city with proper long-term rent controls at deeply affordable cost with absolutely no profit motive as part of the inbuilt structure of that project. This project should eventually be owned by a land trust formed by the tenants of those buildings. You therefore empower those tenants to then expand and create more social housing projects across the city and incubate those programs everywhere they can exist. This is how you can decommodify housing through gradual reform.

MSM: You have stated in the past that “Data has consistently proven that housing-first is the single most effective way of affording people with housing stability, retaining people with substance use disorders in recovery, and increasing housing stability amongst those who are homeless and have mental illness.” Can you explain for folks who may be unaware: What exactly do we mean when we say “Housing First,” and what makes it more effective than other approaches?

BRIAN: Housing First is HUD's approved programmatic approach, and programs that aren't practicing this approach are not likely to be sustainable through HUD funding in the long term. I say that only to allow people to realize that housing first is not some radical idea akin to housing decommodification, but simply the single best programmatic approach to addressing the homelessness crisis if we are working within the framework of the capitalist non-profit industrial complex. Housing First is a practice that essentially means we do not have prerequisites to get you into housing. We do not require you to be sober, or a well-adjusted member of society, or a tax payer. Through years of extensive research, we as a society have found that addressing all of the other problems that one might be facing is infinitely harder if one does not have access to housing. Often, one's lack of housing is a contributing factor to these co-occurring problems. I can say from experience that my time being unhoused was the time when I was also the most mentally unwell. It was the time when I was least likely to be sober. What we don't mean when we say housing first is "housing by itself." It should be no secret that the unending cycles of trauma that poverty lays on a person would disallow them from adjusting to the new rigors of the meat grinder of capitalism without significant hurdles to be jumped first. Housing First is always accompanied by intensive case management, which often simply looks like a community of peers looking out for someone. The most successful folks I know going into housing had what I can only describe as a team of people behind them rooting for their success and making sure that there was something other than a soul-crushing job to look forward to when they moved into their new home. 

MSM: Wheeling and Morgantown are not the only cities in West Virginia to criminalize or attempt to criminalize homelessness. Both locally and across the country, more and more city councils have started to work on passing their own versions of these bans. Following the Supreme Court’s recent disappointing decision on Johnson v. Grants Pass—determining that people experiencing homelessness can be arrested and fined for sleeping outside even when there are no safe alternatives—do you expect many of these attempted camping bans across the country will now be successful? What are your general thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision and, moving forward, what it will mean for people experiencing homelessness and people working to support homeless populations?

BRIAN: I think there will be an initial rush to get bans like this passed in many cities across the country—most of which we will not hear about because there is not a dedicated team of advocates there to push back—and then it will level off significantly, especially as many of the cities are sued for other rights violations that are inbuilt when enforcing these bans. To be clear, I do not accept the framing that these bans are "camping bans.” No one can pitch a tent in the middle of the sidewalk and completely block public rights of way. These are sleeping-in-public bans. The effect of these laws and the Supreme Court decision is to bring state violence upon individuals with nowhere to sleep for the crime of sleeping in the last place they can sleep. While many of these bans will pass, they will not be successful in addressing the problem. They will exasperate the problem as people will now have a harder time accessing housing. Morgantown is a microcosm and a case study of what happens when you try to sweep the problem of homelessness under the rug. Powerful people complained about having to see poor people, so our town destroyed all accessible services. Then when the problem got worse, they doubled down on their plans and again passed policies to try to erase poor people from the face of the city. The fact is that capitalism creates these problems and we can address them head-on as a society by giving people the tools they need to escape poverty, or we can act like the only future possible is that of a police state that punishes people for the crime of being poor, as we have for generations. 

MSM: According to the U.S. Census, there are approximately 17 million vacant houses across the country and somewhere around 600,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given day. That means there are about 28 vacant homes per homeless person in America. I imagine many folks will read these statistics and wonder how we as a country have allowed this to happen. We have millions more empty homes than we have people in need of homes. How did we get to this point, and what is stopping us, collectively, from simply ensuring that every person in our communities has a safe place to sleep at night, essentially guaranteeing housing as a human right for all people?

BRIAN: I may have jumped the gun on this answer, but to reiterate, the base reality of what has caused this problem is that we, as a society, have allowed housing to be traded as a commodity. We have allowed for housing scarcity to be the primary mode of wealth creation. While I have outlined social housing programs as the slow reform needed to solve this problem, our governments are almost certainly not going to support this radical change. We must do it ourselves. I have a sticker on the back of my laptop that is often the topic of discussion in certain local circles. It says "Homes for people, not profits" and was given to me at a housing fellowship by an organizer with Jane's Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative. This organization in New Orleans runs a community land trust. They own property that is kept permanently affordable and democratically controlled by those living in the building that the land trust has purchased. This is a vision of social housing that the people of New Orleans built because they knew for damn sure that nobody else was coming to save them. That should be painfully obvious to many of us now, and I might point out: There is some land in some parts of West Virginia that is pretty cheap right now. 

MSM: A recent Harvard University report found that housing was unaffordable for more than half of all renters in America. Anecdotally, we know that things like rent, utility bills and grocery prices are constantly rising as our wages remain mostly stagnant. Many people may not realize that they themselves are likely only one missed paycheck or medical emergency away from becoming homeless. As someone who has experienced homelessness in West Virginia, can you talk about the process of how one becomes homeless and then the challenges of climbing your way back out of that situation?

BRIAN: For me, I lost my job. It wasn't much more complicated than that. I lost my job, and I couldn't find another one. I fell behind in rent, and I was homeless living out of my Jeep. I was lucky to have a car. That’s how it is for so many in our state. I have worked with dozens of people who lost a job for a couple of months, many who have already found work again, but find it so impossible to catch up. I'm sure folks have heard it before, but the idiom that “being poor is expensive” is so absolutely true. Staring at your gas tank, a leaking roof, or a broken foot is devastating when you already have nothing. You have no idea how you are going to pay for this disaster in front of you, and, even if you do, how are you then going to pay for gas to get to work tomorrow? What happens when you bike to work the next day but then realize you are out of food, and you somehow have to figure out how you are ever going to muster the energy to get back and forth when you have nothing to eat for days? Maybe you take a payday loan but then paying it back just means less food next week, or you can't afford to fix the flat on your bike. You don't climb back on your own. You don't survive on your own. You have to have community. Thousands of people love you—You just haven't met them yet. Especially here, I found such a beautiful community with so many others who are here to love you and make sure you thrive. It is incumbent on those of us with privilege to make sure that folks who are experiencing extreme poverty know that we love them and want them to succeed. 

MSM: Aside from the various ins and outs of the work of our city councils, there seems to be a certain disconnect between the way much of the public views issues surrounding homelessness and how folks like ourselves—who have worked with and spent time with and personally know impacted people—view the homeless populations in our cities. I think some folks see a person experiencing homelessness and instantly sort of “otherize” or alienate that person, thinking they must be “crazy” or particularly troubled in a way that makes them unreceptive to assistance or unable to be helped. What can you say about this way of thinking and how people arrive to those conclusions? How can we, as helpers, connect with the public in a way that humanizes people experiencing homelessness with the overall goal of creating more avenues of assistance and less stigmatization of suffering people?

BRIAN: I believe that the stigmatization and placing of those who experience extreme poverty into categories of otherness is a necessary process that capitalism must undergo to maintain its grip on society. I believe that part of the pursuit of endless profits necessitates the creation of a permanent underclass. This manifests itself often in racialized ways to explain to the white working class why they are not receiving the benefits of capitalism, but also, the fetishization of commodities has a massive role to play in the way that we as a society process extreme poverty. Those who exist within our society who have no "worth" to the production of profit cannot be seen as whole human beings in a society that no longer holds value in how we relate to one another, but only ascribes social capital to the relation between things. In our society, there is no inherent worth to an individual for what they might contribute socially, because we have constructed our society to only value an individual's productive output. People who cannot or will not participate in producing profit have no use in our society. Therefore, the state must produce and reify narratives that cast "unproductive" members of society as being completely without worth, often actively harming the fabric of our existence, when, in reality, they have just as much to contribute to our shared existence and the furthering of our society as anyone else. Whilst the answer to ending this stigma comes back again to the decommodification of housing, in the meantime, I think it is important that we as organizers shape our programs and our reforms to involve the voices and actions of those experiencing extreme poverty to overcome stigma. We must be constantly telling the stories of those we love and are in community with to advance everyone's understanding of this problem as one that the community must bear—and not a failing of any particular individual. 

MSM: In our state, many average folks who work regular 9-to-5 jobs read or hear about these camping bans in passing and understand them to be cruel, unusual and unjust forms of oppression against the most vulnerable amongst us. What are some things those folks can do to help in our struggle against this unjust oppression coming to our communities?

BRIAN: Get involved. If you live close to Morgantown, I have work for you, whether that is a couple of hours a month from your bedroom or a few hours a week out in the community. Hit me up. If you don't [live close to Morgantown], then there still are people around you who care. If there isn't someone to lead them to take action, then consider that person might be you. If you've never led people before or never organized your community, I want to help you feel like you are ready to do that. Do you have an idea for your community that you think is crazy and could never happen? It probably can. We built West Virginia's first LGBTQ-affirming shelter from an idea on an oversized Post-it note in a room full of unhoused people. Get your community together and advocate for the things you see people who are struggling need right now, and bring more people on as you go. If you want to work on housing, my organization West Virginia Housing Justice is here to build your capacity. If there is something else you are passionate about, I will get you linked with the right folks. 

MSM: Lastly, what are some other misconceptions or misunderstandings you think people may have regarding local homeless populations and homelessness in general? What are some misconceptions or misunderstandings you think people may have regarding local city councils and the work they do or could be doing? If there’s anything else you’d like us to know about yourself or the work you do, or anything else really, please let us know!

BRIAN: The biggest misconceptions folks have are centered around their view of criminality with unhoused folks, along with the myth of bussing. While it’s true that when you are poor, there are many different ways in which your existence is criminalized—and often the only modes of survival you have at your disposal are considered criminal—it is absolutely the case that those experiencing homelessness are not somehow born criminals or have some predilection to be in poverty. The causes of homelessness are systemic and say nothing of one's intrinsic character. Bussing is just an insidious and strange fabrication that absolutely every community across the country hears frequently. Certain people in Fairmont will tell you that Morgantown is bussing unhoused people there. Certain people in Bridgeport will tell you that folks from Fairmont are being bussed there. Certain people in Morgantown will tell you that folks from Pittsburgh are being bussed here. While it's true that to be unhoused often includes a fair amount of shuffling around from place to place, that is often just the nature of being unhoused. It seemed like we understood that at one time 40 years ago, when people often would talk of individuals hopping trains from place to place to try to scrounge up whatever work or resources they could. But that has since devolved along with the further atomization of our social relations to conspiracy theories of people being moved into towns so comfortable rich people can excuse their dehumanization on the basis that these folks "aren't ours."

I think people often think that what city administrations do is "not political" when the simple fact of the matter is that every decision made by the state—no matter how small—has some political implication. How we design the code, who we award contracts to, and the ways and areas in which we develop infrastructure have political outcomes. Our cities have massive limitations on what they can and cannot do because the state government disallows so much, but, in truth, the large city centers of West Virginia could be throwing their weight around quite a bit more to get more reasonable outcomes. Instead of being leaders and pushing back against the state’s archaic policies, our cities are often found cowering, afraid of retribution from state politicians. Instead, we should be burning our political capital and embarrassing the state with effective progressive initiatives to bully them into action.