Trump’s Homelessness Director Robert Marbut and Master HUD Budget Cutter Ben Carson, in Denver, believed to be Meeting with Mayor Hancock

Protest: Friday February 21st 2020 12noon at City Hall (14th and Bannock)

Denver, CO — Last month Trump fired the old head of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USIACH) and appointed Robert Marbut – a long time advocate of homeless concentration camps, criminalization, and housing only for “deserving” individuals. 

Marbut does not believe in Housing First but instead believes all homeless individuals have to be “fixed” before they deserve housing. The “Velvet Hammer, approach” Marbut offers the same basic advice to most cities: Cut the goodies and build shelter-like jail facilities. He believes food sharing, public sleeping, and other survival activities should be criminalized so as to push people into facilities where they have to “behave.” 

Sound familiar? Marbut and Hancock’s approach to homelessness is uncannily similar when you boil it down. Both believe in using police as a “stick” to push people into warehouses. Both perpetuate the narrative that homeless people are homeless due to personal faults and need to deal with their “behavior” more than they need housing. Both believe warehousing people through force, not choice, is the way to deal with homelessness. 

Furthermore, this week Trump and Carson, director of Department of Housing and Urban Development  (HUD), proposed cuts to the 2020 HUD budget amounting over 4.2billion from 2019 levels. Instead of investing in more low income public housing, this budget cuts funding for low income housing and invests in turning public housing into private housing that can quickly shift to market increases. Since 2013, this process – called Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) – has converted 130,035 units of public housing to private ownership, with another 99,019 units in the process of conversion. Under Trump and Carson’s plans there will be thousands more people losing their housing every week.

In place of these proposed housing cuts, these men are likely going to be dangling money in front of Denver IF they agree to use it on things like “transformational campuses” (aka concentration camps), policing, or other types of individual behavior focused facilities.

This is what happened in LA. In LA not long after Marbut and Carson’s visit, steps are being taken to create “involuntary concentration camp style” facilities far out of LA to “put” homeless people, and massive sweeps have just been waged on Skid Row. We cannot let the same thing happen here in Denver!@# 

Warehousing human’s through various forms of force has been unequivocally deemed WRONG in the past and that has not changed.

We cannot sit back silently as these tyrants meet to plan furthering the war on our housing, survival, and freedom.

Join us in the following actions:

• Contact Mayor Hancock and tell him you will not stand for him meeting Marbut or Carson!  Tell him human beings cannot be forced into warehouse-like concentration camps. Tell him public low-income housing is a right not a luxury and he must fight Carson’s proposed public housing cuts. Tell him not to take money with unjust strings attached. Call 720-865-9000 
• Protest this Meeting in person on February 21st 12noon at City Hall. Stay tuned for details on place and time. 

Read three attachments on Robert Marbut and on Ben Carson’s HUD Cuts.  

Contact:

info@denverhomelessoutloud.org

720-940-5291