Two consistent issues of concern among city officials, residents and business owners in Albuquerque are crime and homelessness. But conflating the two is a mistake and leads to the baseless stigmatization and criminalization of the unhoused, say advocates for those living on the streets and in shelters.
Dozens of advocates and activists gathered at Robinson Park in Downtown on Wednesday to decry high incarceration rates of those experiencing homelessness and to call out city officials for aggressive encampment sweeps and a proposed “no-obstruction zone” that would prohibit anyone from sitting or lying down on Downtown sidewalks.
“I know a lot of us were at City Council on Monday trying to resist this new ordinance that’s going to criminalize people for basically being homeless in public,” Daniel Williams said at the “Right to Rest” event. “I was struck by the lies that we heard. We keep hearing leaders blame valid concerns about community safety on our unhoused neighbors.”
Williams is the policing policy advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.
“We know that the problems with community safety in Albuquerque are not because we have people living outside,” he said. “More cops, more people in prison, more people being trapped in the cruelty of the criminal legal system does not make us safer. Criminalization will never solve our problems.”
Anami Dass, chair of the city’s Human Rights Board, said more than half of Black people, Native Americans and women who are incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) are classified as transient. She and the board have investigated a variety of issues this year faced by those experiencing homelessness.
Dass said more than half of those arrested by the Albuquerque Police Department are unhoused and that 46% of the total population at MDC are transient — about 843 people.
“I’ve been thoughtful about how I present things, but I’m really tired and I’m really angry,” she said. “But I’ve also never been more motivated to keep going.”
Many at the event also expressed frustration and said there were solutions.
“I am also angry and I am tired, [but] we have to keep fighting,” Rachel Biggs, the chief strategy officer for Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless, said. “To have policymakers tell us that we are not coming with solutions is shameful, because we have been coming with solutions for decades.”
Biggs said homeless services providers across the city have long agreed about what is most important to help fix the problem.
“We have to start with housing and stop talking about temporary solutions,” she said. “We know we can get someone from the street into housing.”
James Freeman, who serves on the board of directors at HopeWorks, a homeless services provider, said more affordable housing needs to be the primary goal of city leaders.
“The administration continues to strive for this goal, 50 and 100 units at a time — but this is the equivalent of removing water from a boat with your hands,” he said. “The administration must start striving for projects with over 1,000 housing units.”
Freeman, who previously lived for two years on Albuquerque’s streets, successfully secured housing through the city’s voucher program and subsequently received two college degrees. He said the city needs tens of thousands of new affordable housing units to stymie the increase in homelessness and historically high rent prices.
The “Right to Rest” event was organized by Ilse Biel, a longtime community organizer and advocate for the city’s unhoused.