My name is Alison Alkon and I’m a professor in the community studies program at UCSC.
I do research and write and teach about food justice, meaning the ways that inequalities like race, class and gender affect who gets access to healthy food, so clearly an organization like the Homeless Garden Project, that helps folks who are struggling to both meet their basic needs and transform their lives, is close to my heart.
Community studies is a 50 year old major at UCSC where students explore the theory and practice of making social change. They take courses in things like social movements and community organizing, and then go out and do 6-month internships with social change organizations. In each of the two years I’ve been at UCSC, I’ve had a student work here, one doing social work and case management and the other at the CSA. And through the notes they turn in to me and the papers they write about their experience, I’ve gotten to know and appreciate just how lucky we all are to have the homeless garden project as part of our community.
In the gardens, with our hands in the soil, volunteers, staff and trainees get to develop close bonds with each other across all the differences that divide us, building what Dr. King often called the “beloved community.”
On this day when national politics take a hard right turn, the importance of building this community couldn’t be greater. The need to care for one another. The way we get through this is together.
Every year on MLK day I see posts online from Black activists, including Dr. King’s daughter Bernice, annoyed that white folks like me take her father’s words out of context. That we emphasize his words about love and belonging and nonviolence over his radically transformative vision of peace and equality. Dr. King’s last speech was supporting Memphis garbage workers, who wanted better pay and safer conditions.
Dr. King taught us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but also that “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability but comes through continuous struggle.”
So with both community and struggle in mind, let me tell you two things about the research on homelessness that you might find surprising. The first is that the number one cause of homelessness isn’t the failings of unhoused people. It’s not addiction or mental illness or even poverty. The number one cause of homelessness is the cost of housing, and especially the cost of housing when compared with average wages.
The second is that the overwhelming majority of folks who are unhoused in any given place used to be housed there, until they couldn’t afford it anymore.
Santa Cruz has the largest disparity between wages and housing costs in the country. College students are doubled and tripled up in bedrooms, are renting garages and pool sheds, and are living in tents in the woods. Families, especially Latinx people in South County are struggling to find rents they can afford, and experience discrimination based on race, language and citizenship status. Folks are pushed out of the cities and towards the rural parts of the county, where they’re vulnerable to the fires and floods brought by climate change, that are only getting worse. They’re sleeping on couches and in vehicles, and when all of that fails, onto the streets.
Helping people who are unhoused transform their lives and get back on their feet is important work, and we are all so grateful that the homeless garden project brings us together in community to support them as they are doing so.
But preventing people from becoming unhoused means joining the “continuous struggle” through what my colleagues at UCSC call the 4Ps.
It means getting involved in politics, especially at the city and county level, even though that’s a messy and time-consuming endeavor.
It means preserving the little affordable housing that we do have, and keeping it affordable.
It means protecting tenants through rent control and eviction protection, and supporting organizations that provide legal aid.
And it means producing new housing, not just at the market rate, but pressuring the city council to make sure there are significant set-asides for low-income people. There are lots of policy mechanisms that can help us do this- housing trust funds, building on city-owned land, disincentivizing speculation through real estate transfer and vacancy taxes, and so many more.
And, of course, UCSC has an important role in building more housing on campus, where there is both ample space and overwheliming demand.
Now I’m not saying we should do these things instead of coming to volunteer at the Homeless Garden Project, not at all. My hope here is that the beloved community we form in these beautiful gardens, and at these events, where we see the individual struggles of unhoused people and the remarkable work this organization does to help them transform their lives, and we say, no more.
That the dirt under our nails from digging in this soil inspires us to get dirty in a different way, to enter the messy fray of politics and create policies that help more people stay housed. That remarkable as the Homeless Garden Project is, we dream of a day when we’ve ended homelessness, and it becomes a different kind of garden.
On that day, these gardens can become a celebration of all the good work we’ve been called to do.
Professor Alkon delivered this talk at HGP’s annual MLK Jr. Day of Service on January 20th, 2025 at Natural Bridges Farm in Santa Cruz.
