DES MOINES MUTUAL AID EVICTION INFO - updated Sept. 2024

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DES MOINES MUTUAL AID EVICTION INFO - SEPTEMBER 2024

The City Council has passed two ordinances which criminalize homelessness and make it easier for them to evict you from your camp. The council says this is part of an effort to help you. This is a lie. The government is helping capitalists in the real estate and land development business - their rich friends. Below is a brief summary of how these ordinances will affect you, and what our response is.

City Code 102-8 shortens the eviction appeal window from 10 days to 3 days. When you see an eviction notice at your camp, you must appeal it within 72 hours of the posting time or you will be evicted any time after the 3 day period.

City Code 102-4 makes it a misdemeanor to camp or sleep on public property anywhere in Des Moines. Cops can show up to your camp or where you are sleeping and demand you come with them to a shelter. If you refuse, you may be arrested. The charge carries a $15 dollar fine and no jail time as punishment. You may still be taken to jail until you see a judge the next morning. This ordinance also allows them to evict your camp with only 24 hours notice and no chance to appeal. It may be more likely that a 24-hour eviction happens if you are sleeping on a city bench, sidewalk, or under a bridge.

There is still a lot we don't know about how the city will enforce these new laws. We will try our best to help you fight them.

We have set up a text line to respond to camp evictions. We will respond to messages as quickly as we can. If your camp receives a 3-day eviction notice, you should fill out and sign an appeal form and text or email the form, along with a photo of the eviction notice, to 515.519.2226 or DMMA.campers@gmail.com. 

Note that this line is ONLY for evictions and arrests. Do NOT message it about receiving other forms of aid.

If you don’t have an eviction appeal form, you can download one at the top of this page or you can write your own appeal and send us a photo. You must include the date, location, your name, and signature, write neatly, and include a photo of the original eviction notice. We will submit the appeal to the city for you, which should buy you a few extra weeks.

If you are arrested for camping, let us know by leaving a message at 515.519.2226. We do not yet know what the legal process for this will look like, but we will do our best to help people charged under the new ordinance. According to the ordinance, you should be able to tell the court that you don't have money to pay their fines and not be forced to pay them.

These are not complete solutions. Hundreds of people protested the city’s new laws, but the government passed them anyway, because this is a government of, by, and for the rich. The only solution to these laws and to homelessness in general is making housing freely available to all. This is not possible until the current ruling class is overthrown by force. This will not happen tomorrow, and so until the revolution is achieved, we will fight to help you survive today.

DSM Mutual Aid Statement on Criminalization of Homelessness 2 - August 28 2024

The City of Des Moines plans to further criminalize houselessness. The details of this can be read about elsewhere. This statement lays out our perspective on the issue as an organization.

DMMA stands with the houseless community against this proposal and any enforcement once adopted. These attacks by the city are assaults on the basic, fundamental, and natural ability of human beings to survive: to scavenge for what they need, to get a decent rest, to move freely.

We will resist the city’s criminalization with every means we possess. A separate statement to be released after the new ordinance is passed will describe this response in more detail.

We will not be mobilizing people to attend city council meetings as an organization as a part of our response. The council, and the imperatives of capital which drive it, will not be swayed by public pressure. We believe the council is not an effective political body, except when it comes to worsening the conditions of life for ordinary people. This incapacity on the part of the council is not the result of "simple hatred" of houseless and other working people. It is instead a function of their role within the capitalist order.

Capitalism needs houselessness because denial of housing is the most fundamental threat issued at workers to ensure that they work. The first and most basic expense workers are trying to cover by working for money is rent, it is the cost which consumes the majority of working class paychecks, and the threat of eviction is an effective lash to keep workers in line. It is because capital must threaten workers with sleeping in a tent that houselessness can never be solved within capitalism. Given all the stipulations, conditions, and impermanence of existing "solutions" to houselessness - shelters, charities, and that classic, fleeting good will - these solutions cannot be called 'ineffective'. It is not the intention of government and nonprofit interventions to be effective at solving houselessness. Rather, it is their intention to convince us that they are “trying” so that you and I don’t try something new and better.

Our role as an organization is to help those in need, but it is also to lead by example politically. We do not condone entertaining charlatans like those in city councils, nor we do not support giving them attention to further cement the false impression that they are useful for solving any problem. We hope to make the way for revolutionary change - and the road to revolution does not run through city council chambers. It takes a long march over rougher terrain, one which begins with the direct intervention of ordinary people in the lives of our houseless neighbors - which is exactly what our mutual aid programs are designed to do.Through our programs and political education, we will build the power necessary to put the city council and the capitalist order it represents where it belongs - into the dustbin of history.

All power to the people!

DSM MUTUAL AID STATEMENT ON CRIMINALIZATION OF HOMELESSNESS - July 21, 2024

Des Moines Mutual Aid stands against the attempt to criminalize the lives of the houseless. We denounce the Des Moines City Council as a mere committee to enact the will of local landowners and developers, and Chris Coleman as their simpering agent. We believe housing is a human right which can and should be provided by expropriating these same local elites, whose wealth is built on theft and exploitation. To the scaffold with the cops, city, and developers, solidarity with the houseless.

Last month, the Des Moines City Council announced its plans to step up its war on working people. As previously reported by the Mutual Aid Monthly, the city will now clear out the camps of houseless people much more quickly, razing the homes of the working poor within 72 hours instead of the previous 3-5 week period. They have now added that they will clear out certain camps in areas particularly useful to the capitalist class in just one day, with no option to appeal. Most egregious, this pack of hyenas masquerading as a democratic government will consider the act of living outside a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by a $50 fine. Unspoken in their announcement is the fact that police can arrest people under this statute and hold them in jail until they see a judge, since it is a criminal offense, despite the fact that it carries no potential for a jail sentence. People who cannot afford housing will now be fined and jailed for this ‘crime’.

These new affronts to human dignity in Des Moines put lie to any notion that people in this city live as equals in a democracy. No one asked for this brutality to be enacted. Aware that the move will be unpopular with all decent people, the government has worked in secret to implement this policy. The City Council will push this new policy through an ‘emergency session’ which will not be accessible to the public and whose outcome has been decided long in advance. They have worked behind locked doors to make criminals of the city’s poorest while it offers every tax advantage imaginable to spur luxury condo development for yuppies downtown. The city shows its face here more clearly than ever: it is not a body of the people, but a tool of capital for class oppression.

This new artifact of state violence builds upon decades of slower-moving camp evictions, stolen belongings, trashed tents, and bodies frozen in the woods. For years, the local government has attacked unhoused people who are not middle-class consumers and have thus, in the city’s eyes, forfeited their right to exist in public. Police and municipal workers push them from public view and deeper from the urban center, bulldoze their belongings into dumpsters, and have now stepped further, abandoning all pretense of a real appeals process. The ostensibly ‘liberal’ Council has taken the opportunity presented by a recent decision of the reactionary US Supreme Court to respond to last year’s 11 percent local increase in homelessness the way they like the best: with handcuffs and excavators.

Considering the current judicial environment and the city’s apparent intransigence to public pressure of any kind, it is unlikely that typical forms of legal redress or protest will reverse these policies. We do not have the ability now to stop this atrocity now. 

But our day will come. We will remember the compassion of the capitalist government, whose representative Coleman remarked, “I know it’s hard to live on the streets”. What charity! When we have our turn and the houseless occupy the mansions of South Grand and red banners cover City Hall, we will recall this ‘decency’ and meet it with an equivalent decency of our own.